Freedom Collaborative partners with Freedom United to better serve the anti-trafficking community
We announce an exciting new community partnership, the UN human rights commissioner condemns China’s treatment of the Uyghur people, and southeast Asian workers face trafficking and exploitation in Cambodia’s casinos.
We are pleased to announce that we have teamed up with Freedom United to work together on joint content initiatives and create synergies between the two platforms. This should further improve the services we provide for our community and strengthen our commitment to partnership and collaboration.
Freedom Collaborative is committed to bringing the global anti-trafficking community together to learn, share and drive forward the most important ideas for shaping effective action – and a systems-level response to exploitation and abuse around the world. In line with our mission, we provide services for leaders and practitioners to help them stay up-to-date on critical issues in our sector.
As our first joint action with Freedom United, we have added a shared global events calendar to our respective websites to provide an overview of relevant webinars and other events happening across the global community, and to promote useful discussions organized by community members and partners. This directory of past and upcoming opportunities to discuss and learn about modern slavery and human trafficking is intended to help us all manage our professional schedules and to provide a convenient tool with which we can stay informed about events on critical issues and successful initiatives.
For example, later this week, the UK BME Anti-Slavery Network (BASNET) Survivor Panel will lead a conversation with CEOs, senior managers and other professionals working in the anti-trafficking/modern slavery field to explore the issues of cultural competence, survivor engagement, policy making, service design and delivery, as well as racial discrimination. The aim is to help change the narratives around modern slavery and to begin a conversation about the power dynamics between survivors and CEOs, senior managers and professionals in the anti-trafficking movement – particularly why CEOs and other professionals need to be culturally informed and aware of cultural diversity.
We invite you to submit your events to be listed in the calendar, using this form.
We will include events that follow the My Story, My Dignity guidelines, which have been developed to ensure we are representing modern slavery and people’s experiences of it in a respectful, dignified, accurate and empowering way. All too often, disempowering language and images are used to drive the narratives around modern slavery and extreme exploitation; this must change so we are all better informed about the realities of modern slavery and better equipped to end it. These guidelines set out practical steps that will better prepare us to play our role in disrupting unhelpful narratives and provide a blueprint for other organizations to follow.
To complement the guidelines, there is also a workshop pack which you can use with your team in order to gain an understanding of the four main principles of the My Story, My Dignity pledge and the opportunity to reflect on our content guidelines, approved by survivor-led organization Survivor Alliance, and the ways in which these principles can be practically implemented into your organization’s work.
We invite feedback, and if you have any comments or questions regarding the event calendar and/or guidelines, please get in touch. We are also always happy to team up with others to host expert discussions and webinars on industry topics and practical issues for our global community – we look forward to hearing from you!
Here’s a round-up of other noteworthy news and initiatives:
A long-awaited report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) into what China refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has concluded that “serious human rights violations” against the Uyghur and “other predominantly Muslim communities” have been committed. Some activists remain critical of the OHCHR, saying it did not go far enough in pushing China for accountability, while China denounced the report as invalid and a political tool serving the U.S. and other Western forces to contain China.
Media reports have drawn attention to exploitation and extreme abuses taking place in casinos in Cambodia’s special economic zones and, as detailed in our latest Asia newsletter, collaboration on targeted regional or international rescue operations currently offers the best hope for assisting victims. Ongoing revelations about Taiwanese people who are trafficked into Cambodia to work on the casinos’ illegal scam sites have become a significant political issue in Taiwan, and Vietnamese media has also reported that families are forced to buy back their children in order to bring them home.
Earlier this week, IJM, in partnership with international NGOs A21, ECPAT International and AIM, launched Break Free to Fly – Meta’s global campaign to raise awareness and share resources on all forms of child sex trafficking.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Fair Food Program are joining forces with the International Transport Workers Federation and the University of Nottingham Rights Lab to bring the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model to the UK fishing industry, with the aim of ending abuse and exploitation on the high seas.
A new guide by PILnet provides quality standards, core principles, and a Step-by-step Guide with precise instructions for lawyers on how to provide legal assistance to children.
This blog post discusses the endemic challenges in developing shared measurement systems in the anti-trafficking sector, as outlined in our data report on Malawi’s trafficking routes, and identifies learnings for progress.
On 15 September, join a discussion on the new report from the International Labour Organization (ILO), International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Walk Free Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, hosted by the CSIS Human Rights Initiative.
Survivor Alliance invites survivor leaders to participate in the process of building its Action Plan for Survivor Leadership for the next decade. The sign-up deadline is 25 September and survivors will receive a stipend of US$50 per hour for their time and contributions.
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