Who fished the prawns for tonight’s youth group curry? Or, for that matter, who harvested the rice? When it comes to our food shop, we’re increasingly used to checking that the chicken is free range, but when the prawn label says “responsibly sourced” it’s not the welfare of the prawn that we’re talking about. It’s whether people have been violently assaulted, starved - and sometimes even murdered - to put those prawns onto our plate.
Slavery still exists. In fact, there are more people in slavery today than at any other point in history. And it’s not a distant problem that doesn’t affect us and our young people. Most of us are unwittingly loading products into our shopping trolleys that have been produced by people in slavery.
Last week was Anti-Slavery day and International Justice Mission (IJM), the largest international anti-slavery organisation, challenged us to look around the kitchen in this image and find nine everyday products that often have slavery in their supply chains.
We can help our children and young people be part of creating a slave free world.
Did you spot all items in the picture?
1. Roses
Nothing says “I love you” more than roses (except maybe chocolate). But of the 40 million slaves today, as many as one in four are children - many of them forced to work on rose farms, picking thorny flowers until their fingers bleed.
2. Prawns
In the UK, we consume around 85,000 tonnes of prawns each year - many of them from Thailand. Forced labour slavery is widespread in Thailand’s seafood industry.
Traffickers force labourers work up to 20 hours a day, underpaid, and often subject to extreme violence.
IJM is backing the Thai government’s work to stamp out slavery in its fishing industry by launching a new programme to rescue people out of slavery and hold the traffickers accountable under local Thai laws.
3. Jewellery
Was the price of your necklace the price of someone’s freedom? Slave owners in the global mining industry trap entire families in slavery for generations. Conditions are so dangerous that the use of children in gold and diamond mining officially falls under the worst forms of child labour. Sadly that doesn’t stop it from happening.
4. Carpet
Not an item we often associate with slavery but thousands of children work in India’s carpet industry. Some have even been sold to traffickers by their own parents. The
Indian government is cracking down on slavery across the country with the support of organisations like International Justice Mission - in fact, they’ are aiming to end slavery by 2030.
5. Wood
Slavery is a global industry generating an estimated $150bn a year. Slaves trapped in wood cutting facilities around the world can be forced to produce one tonne of wood a day.
Kalpanna and her family spent four painful years enslaved in a tree cutting unit. She remembers their hunger, as the owner left them without food for days. She had to watch her young son fall sick and pass away due to lack of medical care. There was nothing she could do to save him.
6. Chocolate
Life for those who farm chocolate is often anything but sweet. Many cocoa farmers and workers live below the poverty line, earning less than $2 a day. Young children have been found working as slaves after being abducted or sold into slavery. Beatings are common and many will never see their families again. That’s enough to make us all think twice next time we pick up a chocolatey treat at the checkout.
7. Clothing
What’s the true cost of my new pair of shoes? The International Labour Organisation estimates that 152 million children - more than twice the population of the UK – are engaged in child labour. In the worst cases, these children are slaves living in desperate conditions. Many child labourers are making textiles, shoes and garments to satisfy the demand for cheap, fast fashion in the west. Corners are cut, making serious injuries and fires commonplace.
Ajay was enslaved in a factory making high heels along with ten other teenage boys and young men. They lived, slept and worked in one room. When IJM and local police rescued them, he said: “I thought of running away, but others who had run away were brought back and beaten with iron rods, tortured with long needles and locked in a room for several days.”
8. Coffee
We drink around 70 million cups of coffee in the UK every day. The unpalatable truth is that some of that coffee has been produced by people in forced labour slavery, many are children who are being denied access to education and basic human rights.
9. Rice
Was the rice in your cupboard produced by sleep-deprived, starving families like Gopi’s working 15 hour days in paddy fields? IJM’s undercover investigators around the world are on the ground every day helping find slaves like Gopi and partnering with local police to rescue them so that they get their freedom back. And we don’t stop there - our teams of lawyers help convict slave owners and put them into prison where they can’t enslave anyone else.
What’s the solution?
At IJM we’ve found that slave-owners and traffickers aren’t especially courageous when they’re faced with the prospect of lengthy prison-sentences. In fact, we’ve seen levels of slavery drop dramatically when we’ve helped equip local police and courts to enforce laws.
Slavery is illegal pretty much everywhere and increasingly global governments are starting to tackle it. So here’s the good news: it is possible to end slavery in a generation.
But ending slavery needs each of us to be part of the solution and that includes the children, young people and students who will shape the future.
As the consumers, activists, government leaders, and entrepreneurs of tomorrow, it’s our young people who need to decide now whether they will stand against slavery and stop it for good.
Here are a few ways that you can mobilise the passion and creativity of the children you lead to stamp out slavery:
- Encourage young people to tweet their favourite clothing company to ask if they know who made their clothing. Challenge them to see whether they can find any clothing brands that are slave free.
- Challenge them to go ‘slave free’ in one area of their life for a week. They can do this by choosing to only drink fair trade coffee or chocolate, or by only wearing clothing where they can trace the source or that’s second-hand
- Host a film night and show a film like Nefarious: Merchant of Souls, that shows the reality of sex trafficking (it’s worth watching this yourself first as the content is pretty hard-hitting). Then pray together for people who have been trafficked.
- Brainstorm with your young people to come up with a creative fundraiser to support organisations like IJM as they fight the evils of slavery. What’s the most innovative idea they can think of?
- Check out IJM’s Justice Sessions study together—this is a resource that is designed to teach students about the magnitude of human trafficking, as well as understand that God cares about injustice.
Let’s give our young people the chance to be part of stopping slavery, for good.
Find out more: www.ijmuk.org
