Not For Sale Trade Show

On March 16, the Stop Human Trafficking team hosted a Not-For- Sale Trade Show with guests David Batstone and Dave Bouchard. It was sponsored by the Canadian Religious Conference (CRC). Over 120 people of all ages attended.

David Batstone is the author of Not For Sale and president of the “Not For Sale Campaign”. He became interested in working to stop human slavery when a favourite restaurant turned out to be using trafficked women in their workforce. As a professor of ethics at the University of San Francisco, he involved his students in research on human trafficking in the San Francisco area and around the world. Some of the research included surveillance of businesses, such as massage parlours, where trafficking in human beings was suspected.

The presentation was solutions-based, filled with stories about what people are doing around the world to stop human trafficking. The campaign has developed several ways for people to work to end modern slavery. These focus on what specific groups might do:

• Free to Play: Sports enthusiasts make their love of sports a part of their abolitionist activities.

• Free to Create: Artists use their talents to stop slavery, to change the way people relate to each other.

• Free to Learn: This focuses on the activities of students to end slavery. Researching the facts are foundational to working for change.

• Free to Work: Businesses work to ensure that their supply chains are slave-free. For example, Cadbury has just committed itself to using only fair trade chocolate. 70% of the world’s chocolate is produced in West Africa, where an estimated 12,000 children are in slavery. Without a screening process that ensures forced labor was not used, we have no guarantee that the chocolate we buy is not promoting modern slavery.

• Free to Believe: This program recognizes that the roots of abolition are found within religious congregations.

At the end of the evening, items from the “Freedom Store” were available to purchase, including, the book Not for Sale (print and audio formats), jewellery (including a Not For Sale dog tag), Freedom bandanas and T shirts.

Dave Bouchard, the other guest, is a social justice field worker for the CRC. He spoke briefly about the recently completed awareness and action kit for high school students, “Being a Global Village: Human Trafficking and the 2010 Olympics”. The kit was available for sale as well. The School Sisters of Notre Dame helped create the kit. More information about the kit, including how to obtain one, may be found on the CRC website.

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