Thursday, November 22, 2012

NaBloPoMo 22 - what do you know about human trafficking?


This evening, whilst we had our bible study on human trafficking, I was able to draw on experiences from my time at SCM to provide a small group in Southampton on human trafficking contacts at the University, and see spaces where I could alert friends and family to the signs of human trafficking. I'm thinking of my mum at playschool, where she might come across trafficked parents, or my mother in law who is a farmer who might encounter trafficked farm workers in her rural location.
You can't be alert to what you don't know about. People can be trafficked to work as sex workers, to work as slave labour, for organs, for benefit fraud, to run cannabis farms amongst other things.

70% of people trafficked to Britain are women, and 50% are children. I can't imagine being a child, away from home, in a strange place, being forced to work against my will. All to satisfy someone's greed.

If you work in a hotel, as a taxi driver or in the fast food industry, you're likely to see instances of trafficked people too.

This useful flyer from Stop the Traffik outlines what to look out for and gives numbers you can use to report incidences:

http://www.stopthetraffik.org/download.php?type=resource&id=111

I might not realise I'm seeing a trafficked person. We can't necessarily directly help trafficked people. Knowing how to respond as a Christian is hard. So I'm going to go with prayer, and education. If I can talk openly and honesty about what I learn, I never know who will be listening. I never know when I will be in the right place at the right time.

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