Showing posts with label Contemporary Slavery. Show all posts

Friday, 17 April 2015

16 April, International Day against Child Slavery. No Longer Slaves, but Brothers and Sisters

What is there behind a label that says "dress for 9€" or "unbeatable prices"? What is there behind a toy, or a pair of shoes, or a mobile phone, or an ad for cosmetics, or behind certain brands…? Let’s have a look behind these labels, these prices, this publicity... They hide the sweat and blood of the slaves of the 21st century. Child slaves are present in every sector of the economy, where the human being itself is regarded as a throw-away commodity.

Murdered on 16th April 1995, in Pakistan,

when he was 12. [1983-1995]

Testimony of true activist and solidarity trade-unionism.

On 16 April, it was the anniversary of IQBAL MASIH’s murder (1995-2015), a Christian non-violent militant for Justice in the fight against Child Slavery in the world.

In commemoration of his death, the 16th April is the INTERNATIONAL DAY AGAINST CHILD SLAVERY, and rallies, different events, street actions and solidarity marches against child slavery were held in Spain and Latin America

On 16 April 1995, a child slave, Iqbal Masih, was murdered in Pakistan because he fought against child slavery.

Every day we can find products made by enslaved children, in our homes, in our streets, in shopping malls, in our consumption. At present, millions of children breath the smoke of rubbish landfills, they risk their lives as pearl divers, they work in the mines to get the minerals for our cosmetics or for new technologies, they are kidnapped to become child soldiers, they live amidst bullets and rapes in the streets, they are used for the trade in human organs, in brothels, in sweatshop... Children who have been deprived of their childhood and education. Children who are subjugated, enslaved, humiliated.

Sold to the Sea

Human Trafficking at Sea

ETCHINGS ON THE WALL IN THE ROOM WHERE TRAFFICKING VICTIMS WERE HELD:
“Don’t think too much about life. It cannot be destroyed so easily.”
“Let’s fight together.”
“No matter the rain is heavy; even it may dissolve a mountain; my love will survive.”
“Let’s pass through the difficult journey.”
“You are on your own in Thailand.”

See video:

Click on this link to read and download the Complete PDF Report

Friday, 16 January 2015

Nobel Lecture by Kailash Satyarthi.

Nobel Lecture by Kailash Satyarthi

Nobel Lecture by Kailash Satyarthi

Some outstanding extract:

"We have utterly failed in imparting an education to our children. An education that gives the meaning and objective of life and a secure future. An education that builds a sense of global citizenship among the young people."

"Solutions are not found only in the deliberations in conferences and prescriptions from a distance. They lie in small groups and local organisations and individuals, who confront the problem every day, even if they remain unrecognised and unknown to the world."

"You may ask: what can one person do? Let me tell you a story I remember from my childhood: A terrible fire had broken out in the forest. All the animals were running away, including the lion, king of the forest. Suddenly, the lion saw a tiny bird rushing towards the fire. He asked the bird, "what are you doing?” To the lion's surprise, the bird replied "I am on my way to extinguish the fire.” He laughed and said, "how can you kill the fire with just one drop of water, in your beak?” The bird was adamant, and said, "But I am doing my bit.”

Malala Yousafzai Nobel Peace Prize Speech

Nobel Lecture

Bismillah hir rahman ir rahim. In the name of God, the most merciful, the most beneficent.

Your Majesties, Your royal highnesses, distinguished members of the Norweigan Nobel Committee,

Dear sisters and brothers, today is a day of great happiness for me. I am humbled that the Nobel Committee has selected me for this precious award.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and love. Thank you for the letters and cards that I still receive from all around the world. Your kind and encouraging words strengthens and inspires me.

I would like to thank my parents for their unconditional love. Thank you to my father for not clipping my wings and for letting me fly. Thank you to my mother for inspiring me to be patient and to always speak the truth- which we strongly believe is the true message of Islam. And also thank you to all my wonderful teachers, who inspired me to believe in myself and be brave.

Lesson Plan for The Help (2011) "Criadas y Señoras" -in Spanish-

Told through the point of view of three different women living in Jackson, Mississippi, The Help chronicles events from late summer of 1962 through 1964. Skeeter Phelan, who has just graduated from Ole Miss, returns home to the family plantation, ambitious to become a writer.

Taking the advice of a New York editor to hone her skills, Skeeter begins to write a column for the local newspaper while searching for a topic that she truly cares about.

Missing her beloved childhood family maid and confronted by the overt racism of her friend Hilly Holbrook’s campaign to require a separate bathroom for the black help, Skeeter proposes to write about the lives of the black maids in Jackson. Knowing she will need to interview black maids to tell their stories but without realizing the danger of what she is asking, Skeeter approaches Aibileen, the maid of one of her close friends.

With an increasing sense of bitterness at the injustice of her situation, Aibileen agrees to help, and later recruits Minny and eventually other maids. As they work on this project to tell their true stories, including stories of the prejudice and injustice that the maids experience in their everyday lives, a close relationship develops between Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny. The three women come to confront and resist the intimidation experienced daily by the black maids. Woven throughout the stories are the key events of these seminal years of the civil rights movement.

Click to see futher information on the film

ACTIVITIES

Before watching the film

For an overview of the Civil Right Movement and the conditions of black people living in America, students can visit the following pages:

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/civilrightstimeline1.html#events-1960

http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/index.html

https://hunniebrown.wordpress.com/lynching-in-america/

Address the following topics to help students add to their background knowledge:

1. Where did most Afroamericans live?

2. What was the Second Great Migration that occurred between 1940-1970?

3. Why did coloured people move to the North in such numbers?

4. What kinds of work were typical for coloured people in the South? Why?

5. What were the Jim Crow laws?

6. How did this affect the daily lives of coloured people, especially in the South?

7. What violence or threat of violence affected them?

8. What was their response? How did they resist the violence of racism?

While watching the film

"The Help" - Criadas y Señoras (in Spanish) (2011) 146 mins.

Drama

An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African-American maids' point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.

Director: Tate Taylor
Writers: Tate Taylor (screenplay),

Kathryn Stockett (novel)

Stars: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer

The Help received four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Actress for Davis, Best Supporting Actress for Chastain, and a win for Best Supporting Actress for Spencer. On January 29, 2012, the film won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.

Follow this link to see Lesson Plan on the film

See the Trailer

Friday, 17 October 2014

Kailash Satyarthi’s Nobel Peace Prize: Decades of Fighting Child Slavery in India

Kailash Satyarthi: “The people from everywhere in the world should feel, number one, that slavery’s bad, that exploitation of children is bad, it has to go, and, secondly, they should have a belief that it is possible, it is happening, it is not that it is very pessimistic and say: oh they are poor, they are poor countries and that thing could happen. It is not true. Poor people, poor countries can bring about change, and it is happening here. So, they should have a belief that the change is possible, that we can make a better world to live in, and that will happen.”

Article from The New York Times

Oct. 10, 2014

NEW DELHI — Many years have passed, but a police chief named Amitabh Thakur can remember the precise moment when he first set eyes on Kailash Satyarthi, who won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

Mr. Satyarthi was lying on the ground, bleeding profusely from the head, while a group of men converged on him with bats and iron rods. They worked for the Great Roman Circus, which was illegally employing teenagers trafficked from Nepal as dancing girls. Mr. Satyarthi, a Gandhian activist in a simple white cotton tunic, had come to free them.

As he approached the scene, the chief realized he was interrupting a savage beating.

“I remember that when I reached this man, he was rather composed,” Mr. Thakur said. “I was very impressed, for the simple reason that a man was putting his life in danger for a noble cause.”

Mr. Satyarthi is not an international celebrity like 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, with whom he is sharing the prize. Instead, he has labored for three decades to shave away at the numbingly huge problem of child slavery in India, using undercover operatives and camera crews to find the airless workrooms and mine shafts where children were being kept.

The circus raid was a reminder of the factors that converge in favor of employers using bonded labor in India: caste differences, religious differences, political and economic leverage. About 28 million children ages 6 to 14 are working in India, according to Unicef. Mr. Satyarthi’s organization, called Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or Save the Children Mission, is credited with freeing some 70,000 of them. In 1994, he started Rugmark, now GoodWeave International, in which rugs are certified to have been made without child slavery.

Malala Yousafzai's Nobel Prize Speech

Malala Yousafzai

Born: 12 July 1997, Mingora, Pakistan
Residence at the time of the award:United Kingdom
Prize motivation: "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education"

17-year-old Malala Yousafzai became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work promoting young people's rights. Here she is, accepting the prrize.

Thursday, 28 August 2014

Your Food Ties to Slavery

Antonio Martinez stood in the hot sun, exhausted from a cross-country journey, and waited. Just 21 years old, he had traveled from Mexico to the U.S. with the promise of a well-paid construction job in California. But now he stood in a field in central Florida, listening to one man pay another man $500 to own him.

“I realized I had been sold like an animal without any compassion," Antonio thought at the time, more than 10 years ago.

He was right. In modern times, in the United States, Antonio had been sold into slavery in Florida's tomato fields.

IMMOKALEE: A STORY OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

Antonio is not alone

Unfortunately, Antonio’s case is not an isolated one. Many enslaved farmworkers in Florida pick the tomatoes that end up on sliced onto sandwiches, mixed into salads and stacked on supermarket shelves across the country. Over the last decade, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an award-winning farmworker advocacy organization, has identified more than 1,200 victims of human trafficking picking produce in Florida's fields.

These slaves often work for 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week. They are kept in crampt and dirty trailers, constantly monitored, and have wages garnished to pay a debt invented by the trafficker to keep victims enslaved. Many victims face threats to themselves or their families, regular beatings, sexual harassment and rape. They can't leave, can't seek help. They are in every way trapped.

Exploitation in the tomato industry isn't just the work of a handful of immoral individuals – it's the result of a supply chain which is set up to support the exploitation of the very people who keep it running.

Prostitution: Victims or Whores?

Extract

by Captain Danielle Strickland

I’ve been immersed recently in prostitution legislation. A year and a half ago I was neck high in a raging debate around the legalising of prostitution in Canada. Some very vocal proponents were upholding the ‘rights of women’ to prostitute themselves. After all – it is their body. This neo-liberal feminism (far from the classic feminism that spear-headed abolition, women voting and the rights of children around the world) suggests that prostitution isn’t oppression but a profession and should be dignified with proper acceptance, education and wages – with protection of workers rights. There is a classic case of a ‘co-operative brothel’ operating right now (albeit illegally) in Victoria, BC on the west coast of Canada.

The problem is that the rhetoric around legalising prostitution sounds pretty good (in promised form anyway)… a society that no longer judges women or uses morality as a grid to punish those who don’t adopt a pure lifestyle… billed as a liberation and a right – it makes opposing it sound like a puritanical rant against the freedom of women. You’d think the only people left opposing legalizing prostitution were a bunch of old fashioned, purist holy rollers trying to save poor lasses from the den of iniquity and the fires of hell.

The truth is that classic feminism rages on and presents from a women’s right perspective, an impressive argument against legalising prostitution. Not simply theoretical in recent years they have presented a new model many governments around the world are adopting to combat violence and oppression against women through sexual slavery and prostitution. It all started in Sweden.

Gunilla Ekberg was at the helm of the new legislation that suggested (with a proper understanding of prostitution) any society that seeks to uphold the rights of women and children must stop it. On it’s website at the height of the experiment Sweden had written, ‘we want the world to know that in Sweden, women and children are NOT FOR SALE.’ Bring it. (Swedish Model of Sex Industry Reform) This women’s right perspective suggests abolition as the only proper feminist response to prostitution. But why? Well, it’s all about understanding oppression. Let’s break it down:

Who are they?

Prostituted women are almost always oppressed women. Studies the world over suggest that women who end up working by selling their bodies are desperate. 84% of prostituted women in Australia (where prostitution has been legalised for 14 years in the State of Victoria – but more on that later!) said they would do anything else if they could. They are most likely to be uneducated, from low economic backgrounds, minorities, addicted and abused. It’s not exactly a poster child for women’s rights. Unlike the popular media suggests prostituted persons do not consists of young sexually liberated women choosing to exercise their ‘right’ to sell themselves - they are overwhelmingly poor, uneducated and neglected – suffering from abuse.

Read: Harms of Prostitution

The Real Protagonists of 2014 Solidarity March

Yesterday, Solidarity Youth Path (SYP -Camino Juvenil Solidario-) received, undoubtedly, the most important support that 2014 Solidarity March can have had. Through BLLF (Bonded Labor Liberation Front) Societies, the real protagonists of this March, child slaves from brick factories in Mirpurkhas Sindh –Pakistan– have sent SYP in Spain photos where children can be seen holding their banners. Some in English and others in Urdu say: WE WANT EDUCATION and EDUCATION IS OUR RIGHT. These are their mottos.

Through these banners, they are joining their voices with the young people that have been demonstrating against unemployment and child slavery throughout the streets of Spain since Monday, 14 July. These photos put a human face to 400 million reasons to march. May they be the driving force for those who are walking, may they encourage more people to join this March during the following days and may this march not be over after its main meeting and performances in Puerta del Sol, Madrid, on 26 July. May our lives be a march along the path against unemployment and child slavery!

Below is the email, SYP (CJS) has received with the photos:

Hope you are doing well and the March in Spain is going well. Please find attached pictures from children working on Brik Lins in Mirpurkhas Sindh. These pictures are sent by Bonded Labor Liberation Front society Mirpurkhas in solidarity with the March in Spain by youth of SAIN.

The placard in Urdu language says 'Education is our Right'.

Best Regards

Atiqa
Nation Project Coordinator
BLLF societies

Click Read More to see more pics:

2014 SOLIDARITY MARCH is just around the corner

2014 SOLIDARITY MARCH

Against Unemployment and Child Salvery

From 13 to 26 July

At the beginning of the 21st century, millions of child slaves in the world are exploited in many varied forms:

- Children harvesting our food
-         Children manufacturing our goods
-         Children in mines
-         Child soldiers
-         Sexually exploited children
-         Children murdered for trafficking in human organs

More than 400 million children exploited as slaves!

By being deprived of their childhood, right to play and to education, they are being deprived of their lives.

It is child slavery. It is not child labour

In parallel to this outrageous fact, there are more than 1,600 million unemployed people in the world.

On 13^th July, the Christian Cultural Movement and Solidarity Youth Path start the march they are organizing against these evils and hundreds of people will be marching throughout Spain for 15 days to culminate the march with performances and different actions in Puerta del Sol, Madrid, on 26^th July.

During these 15 days there will be thousands of meetings; thousands of shared efforts which will let us experience solidarity and which will help us think of the next steps to take so that a whole generation of young people can discover the path of solidarity.

Thursday, 15 May 2014

Boko Haram Doesn’t Respond to #Hashtags

The tone of this article is not in line with other articles published in this blog. This blog means to side with the impoverished, the oppressed, the victims... when giving ideas for a better education or commenting on different issues.

The person who writes the article below centres his analysis on how the USA has tackled the drama of the Nigerian girls' kidnapping to the detriment of the USA and what should be done in the interest of this country. Notwithstanding, it serves the purpose of explaining the reason for the international uproar over this case.

Extract from: The Daily Caller

By Joseph Miller

On the evening of April 14, 2014, Boko Haram, a Nigerian Islamic terrorist group with links to al-Qaida kidnapped 276 school girls. The group initially said it took the girls so that they could become wives to its members. The group has changed its mind twice in the last two weeks, though, and has since offered to either sell the girls or trade them for imprisoned Islamic terrorists.

In the time since the incident took place, the world has expressed outrage over the incident — though the supposedly outraged nations have taken little action to address the situation. The kidnapping has galvanized the American public in particular, and it has become a trending topic on social media. Despite the uproar, the Obama White House has refused to take military action.

Why advocate for military action in Nigeria? While it is terrible that Boko Haram has kidnapped a large group of school girls, does the U.S. really have a national security interest in Nigeria? The answer is simple: Yes.

The United States has a national security interest in Nigeria and in countering and ultimately neutralizing nascent terrorist groups like BokoHaram. That interest is oil. Nigeria is the single largest producer of oil in Africa, and at one time was the world’s fourth-largest producer of liquid natural gas. The West African country is a member of OPEC and has been, up until recently, a relatively stable democracy. Additionally, Nigeria has not suffered from many of the issues that have caused instability in the Middle East, and has maintained good relations with the United States.

More than 200 Nigeria girls abducted to be enslaved and sold

Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram has threatened to "sell" the hundreds of schoolgirls it abducted and enslaved three weeks ago.

Militant leader Abubakar Shekau sent a video obtained by the AFP news agency, in which he said for the first time that his group had taken the girls.

About 230 girls are still believed to be missing, prompting widespread criticism of the Nigerian government.

The Boko Haram insurgency has left thousands dead since 2009.

The girls were taken from their boarding school in Chibok, in the northern state of Borno, on the night of 14 April.

Boko Haram, which means "Western education is forbidden", has attacked numerous educational institutions in northern Nigeria.

Nigerian missing girls: Mothers' 'agony' for daughters

Monday, 5 May 2014

SYP’s 2014 Solidarity March throughout Spain: against Unemployment and Child Slavery

Marching as a sign of protest has served to empower those who are victims of injustice.

Solidarity YouthPath’s 2014 SOLIDARITY MARCH throughout Spain in the second fortnight of July 2014 means to side with the over 400 million children who are victims of slavery, with the over 1,600 million adults who are unemployed, with those millions of people worldwide who suffer exploitation…

We challenge every person aiming for a just society to take part in this initiative. If you cannot march with us, during those days you can support our march by carrying out local actions to raise awareness of the CAUSES of Child Slavery and Unemployment.

HOW CAN I HELP?