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Activists
Friday April 6, 2018

Freedom Fortnight: How It All Started

Tate Johnston

“The director’s been selling the orphans for sex.” Stunned silence. “Wait. What?!” Head shaking like I hadn’t heard right. Or out of disbelief. That was it. That was when my eyes were opened to the reality of sex trafficking. I literally had no idea. I was completely shocked. Heartbroken. Outraged. Here I was leading a youth service trip to an orphanage in Eastern Europe to help with some of the obvious needs, like tables for the dining area and unclogging the sewer. I wasn’t looking for it. Didn’t even know it was something to be looking for. People more

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Other slavery
Thursday January 18, 2018

Five Areas to Watch in 2018

Joanna Ewart-James

As we look forward to the year ahead, our Executive Director takes a moment to reflect on some key focus areas in the fight to end modern slavery in 2018, and considers where some of our greatest challenges lie. Rising Discrimination against Migrants Growing anti-migrant rhetoric leaves those who are poorly resourced, and have been unable to access increasingly restrictive legal migration routes, systematically discriminated against and so particularly vulnerable to exploitation. In the latter part of 2017 the world became aware of the existence of slave markets selling people

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Domestic Slavery
Friday October 13, 2017

Beyond Parachutes and Self-appointed Saviors: Grounding Campaigns in Lived Experiences

Jamison Liang

Originally published on Open Democracy, March 13, 2017. Anyone who works as an activist knows that campaigning is a messy job. That is the nature of our work. Are there human trafficking awareness campaigns that perpetuate harmful misinformation and stereotypes? Absolutely. But there are also campaigns grounded in the lived experiences of those directly affected, tied to tangible advocacy, and effective in changing public perception. The issue is not with campaigning as a medium for meaningful change, but instead with problematic representation, assumptions, and processes behind

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Survivor Stories
Tuesday April 25, 2017

My Story, My Dignity – How representing modern slavery is crucial to success

Joanna Ewart-James

The power of shock value can be impressive. Slavery still exists? There are how many you say? But not here! Although the conversation moves on quickly from that opener, the techniques used to keep people informed and engaged on the subject, particularly in the public domain, continue to rely heavily on generating disbelief, outrage, shock or a similar psychological impact. Whilst organisations working in the fields of anti-trafficking and anti-slavery have not questioned whether generating such negative emotion is in fact most effective in securing action and building support, they have begun

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Activists
Wednesday September 6, 2017

Fighting Modern Slavery – ‘Ordinary People’ to the rescue

Joanna Ewart-James

It’s a fact. We do not know precisely how many people are held in modern slavery today. We do know that the number reaches into many millions - the newly released 2016 Global Slavery Index estimates a total of 45.8million. The term modern slavery has never been more frequently used by the media and within legislative and corporate spheres. Despite this, the pervasive low awareness within our largely globalised, modern society, allows this pernicious crime to thrive. Ten thousand new laws and audits will not make great change; we need society

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