Post Conference Prayer Day 30

Find Your Voice. . .Break the Chain



Prayer:

Dear Heavenly Father,
We come before you in the Name of Jesus on the issue of human trafficking in our world.  Lord, we have brought people and projects and places to Your remembrance over these past 29 days.  We have wept and become angry, we have felt overwhelmed and helpless, we have despaired and given up as if we could make so little difference against this huge evil.  Then a small light began to shine as we joined in with organizations and others passionate to make a difference.  We learned not just about the exploited in this industry but we learned about those standing in the gap, marching in the front lines and bringing change.  We now know how to speak about this subject with knowledge to those who want to learn and even to those who want to hide from this ugly truth.  More importantly, we have learned how to better pray for those enslaved in human trafficking.

Lord we lift up the victims and we ask that You would reveal yourself to them today.  We pray that You would protect them and free them from the bondage of their culture and this industry.  Show them a way of escape in You Jesus even if their circumstances don't immediately change.  Give them hope.  Whisper to them that they are not alone.  Use others in their world to reach out to them with compassion.

We pray for those demanding and those exploiting.  We pray for their salvation, Lord.  That they would turn and run far away from this evil practice.  Bring those demanding insight into why they would resort to this behavior and set them free. Let the number of those demanding diminish by the thousands so that those exploiting will not have a market and this insidious industry will stop.

We pray for the governments and the local authorities of the countries including the USA where human trafficking is big business.  We pray that those in authority will not turn a blind eye, that they will not succumb to bribes and dishonest gain.  Empower organizations that are working to bring justice to the exploited and let the governments and local authorities honor their work.

We pray for ourselves.  Use us, Lord, to make a difference for these victims.  Use us to educate and advocate for justice on their behalf.  Show us as consumers where we are supporting exploitation of children, women and men in the labor industry by buying products made at the expense of their lives.  Give us the courage to stop wearing name brands and stop frequenting stores that carry products that exploit these victims.  Give us the gumption to make the sacrifices of our time, talents and money to work for this cause of anti-trafficking on whatever level You might call us.

We love You, Jesus and it is in Your Name that we pray. Amen    

Post Conference Prayer Day 29

Find Your Voice. . .Break the Chain

Human Trafficking at change.org

This website has a forum for writing petitions for social reform.  One of the causes listed is human trafficking.  By going to this site, you can write a petition by providing a title and description of your petition, background information about the issue and why it is important for others to join. Then you select the elected representative you want to target.  Next you write the form letter you want sent to your target. People signing your petition will add their name to this letter. They will also be able to add a personal message, or edit the letter content if you select that option.

Below is an article posted on this website written by Amanda Kloer who has been a full-time abolitionist for six years. She currently develops trainings and educational materials for civil attorneys representing victims of human trafficking and gender-based violence. 

America: Land of the Free, Home of the Slave



"America is so often a contradiction in terms. It is a land of immigrants, for whom immigration is a contentious, sometimes even violent issue. It is a land of immense wealth and plenty, where millions of people still live in poverty. It is a land thick with shrines to liberty and dogmatic in its worship of personal choice and self-determination. Yet it is also a land where thousands of men, women, and children still live in slavery. Yes, America may be the land of the free, but it's also the home of the slave.

Modern-day slavery is woven into the social, political, and economic fabric of the U.S. just as much as antebellum slavery was on the first Fourth of July, over 200 years ago. While the exact number of people trafficked in the U.S. is unclear, estimates indicate that around 15,000 foreign nationals are trafficked into the U.S. each year, and around 100,000 Americans (mostly children) are trafficked within America.

Slavery in America affects men, women, and children. It happens in big cities and small towns, immigrant communities and native populations, middle-class neighborhoods and poor ones. In the U.S., slaves can be found in brothels, construction sites, fields, factories, private homes, strip clubs, meat processing plants, hotels and restaurants, and Internet sites. Slavery is woven through the American experience just as much as if not more than the Statue of Liberty or the Lincoln Memorial or the Liberty Bell.

But America doesn't have to be the home of the slave. It could be the country is strives to be, the country it deserves to be. It could be the land of the free. Period. But it needs one person to help make that dream a reality. And that one person is you.

This 4th of July, between the barbecues and the bathing suits, take five minutes to take action against modern day slavery in America. Sign one of Change.org's many petitions to end human trafficking or create one of your own. You have the power to end slavery in America and around the world.

To continue in my brief tradition of quoting Fredrick Douglas on the 4th of July, 'Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. … This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.'

You cannot love freedom but not engage in agitation for social change. You cannot hate slavery but do nothing to act against it. But you can celebrate America today by changing slavery.

Happy Fourth of July!"

Prayer Focus:
Ask God to begin to move on the hearts of America about the truth of human trafficking in our country.  Ask God to reveal what is being hidden and bring His light into the secrets in this darkness.  Ask Him to help those who are passive in their regard for this atrocity become active in some way to bring about change to end slavery in America.  Ask God to give those who lack courage the boldness to take a stand against any trafficking in their local area.  Ask God to give Americans a zeal to make America become the land of the free as our forefathers hoped that it would be when they wrote our Constitution and established our government.  Ask God to bless America with a heart that breaks the things that break His heart including human trafficking within our borders.  Praise Him for what He is doing to answer this prayer through World Vision and other Christian organizations that are making a difference and mobilizing an army of activists in the movement of anti-human trafficking.  

Post Conference Prayer Day 28

Find Your Voice. . .Break the Chain

Verite

 Information:

VERITE RELEASES MAJOR REPORT ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING, FORCED LABOR & SLAVERY

Global NGO Shows Evidence of Widespread Abuse in Multiple Sectors

and Across Nations including United States

June 16, 2010 – (Amherst Massachusetts) --" Verite, the Global non-profit organization known for its state-of-the-art, ‘worker interview’ social audit, CSR training, labor rights research and supply chain expertise, launched a ground-breaking initiative today entitled HELP WANTED: Hiring, Human Trafficking and Slavery in the Global Economy.

As part of the HELP WANTED initiative, the organization released a major report from a year-long investigation that illustrated the prevalence of forced labor and human trafficking across multiple sectors, and widespread throughout the globe. In addition, the group launched a website to help direct the many stakeholder groups with the questions needed to ask and steps needed to take in order to eradicate forced labor and slavery in supply chains around the world.

 'Our findings in this report illustrate that human trafficking and forced labor in our modern lives and across the global economy are very alive and well,' said Dan Viederman, Executive Director of Verite. 'HELP WANTED was designed to highlight where this process begins – in the hiring stage – and to offer the tools, methods and solutions that need to be adopted by many groups in order to solve these widespread labor abuses; we look forward to guiding these groups through this process in the coming months,' Viederman added. Verite’s HELP WANTED report and website, verite.org/wellmade, offers the key questions needed to be asked by anyone who is connected to migrant workers and global supply chains. A key finding of the research and a focus of the site is the function of labor brokers in supply chains. The presence of labor brokers in the recruitment and hiring of migrant workers signals a heightened risk for forced labor, and whether you are a multinational brand, investor, government or advocacy group, you can have a role to play in lessening these trends and abuses and incorporating efforts to reduce trafficking and forced labor.

Verite, unlike labor advocacy groups, brands, or governments, offers an independent view – focusing on the conditions on the ground, in the factory or farm and from the voice of the worker. The organization is solutions-driven, working with all of these groups to solve labor issues so that workers have safe, fair and legal conditions. HELP WANTED will engage all of the varied groups who are linked to supply chains worldwide and will work through workshops and seminars in late 2010 and 2011 to deliver specific tools to help reduce human trafficking and forced labor abuses.

About Verite
Verité’s mission is to ensure people worldwide work under safe, fair, and legal conditions. The NGO’s international experts and global partnership network are operating in over 65 countries, humanizing the global workplace and changing lives. Verité's programs and services empower companies, factories, NGOs, governments, and workers to create sustainable labor practices in the factories and communities where consumer goods are manufactured. For more information, visit http://www.verite.org/."


Prayer Focus:
Ask God to use Verite in bridging the gap between bonded and forced laborers and their govrenments, companies, factories and farms so that the workers are provided with fair labor practices and working conditions.  Help our government in the USA to respond to the findings in the 
HELP WANTED Report and ask the questions suggested to insure that workers from other countries who provide us goods and services are protected against bonded and forced labor.  Thank God for the dedication and expertisethat the staff at Verite demonstrate in their work.  Ask God to use Verite to show the US government the ways that it can pass laws to protect workers and prevent human trafficking.  Ask God to bless their seminars in 2010 and 2011 and that they be well attended to impact these needed changes. 

Post Conference Prayer Day 27

Find your Voice. . .Break the Chain

United Nations Inter-Agency on Human Trafficking

UNIAP

Information:
Is the global financial crisis leading to increases in exploitation and trafficking in Cambodia?

Several organizations are coming together, from the policy level to the grassroots, to answer this important question and to mitigate increases in human trafficking as a result of the financial crisis. To monitor and understand the effects of global financial crisis in Cambodia, UNIAP is conducting research on whether and how unemployed ex-garment factory workers and other vulnerable populations are being lured into exploitative brokering, trafficking, sexual exploitation, or work in degrading workplaces. UNIAP partner, Emerging Markets Consulting, is conducting an industry analysis identifying labor sectors vulnerable to the financial crisis, and the populations made vulnerable by this instability in livelihoods. Joining hands with other partners, such as Chab Dai Coalition, World Vision, IOM, and ILO, the alliance is using the data to collectively implement a joint plan of action that links outreach and awareness raising to vulnerable people and those in need of assistance with advocacy to government and donors and direct assistance to exploited people affected by the financial crisis.

Initiated by UNIAP in April-May 2009, research on women in the entertainment sector (that is, working in karaokes, massage parlors, and brothels) in Cambodia will determine where these women have come from and when, their previous livelihoods, how they got into their current situation, and the levels of deception, debt, and exploitation that they have faced. Collecting and analyzing this data will help us to understand what sectors are being affected and the level of exploitation that entertainment sector workers face.

Prayer Focus:
As our Women of Vision South Puget Sound Chapter sponsors a project in Cambodia, we have a special place in our hearts for these exploited peoples.  Ask God to continue to use World Vision in Cambodia as they partner with UNIAP to bring about solutions to the increase in human trafficking caused by the world's financial crisis.  Pray that after their data collection that they will be able to implement a joint plan of action that links outreach and awarness raising to government and donors.  Pray that as a result that direct assistance will come to the exploited people affected by the financial crisis.  Pray for the entertainment sector research that as the data is analyzed that understanding of the" who" and "what" involved will bring about freedom to those enslaved as entertainment workers.  Praise God that this is another example of light coming to the darkness.

Post Conference Prayer Day 26

Find Your Voice. . . Break the Chain 

Not For Sale Campaign

An interview is featured on the Women of Vision Blog today with David Batstone, author of Not For Sale and founder of  the Not For Sale Campaign where he tells Hannah Storm that slavery is a problem that persists in the United States today, largely due to human trafficking. (CBSNews.com)

          

 

Information: 

David Batstone is a professor of Ethics at the University of San Francisco. He is the founder and president of Right Reality, an international social venture firm. Batstone has authored seven books, the two most recent being Not For Sale (HarperSF) and Saving the Corporate Soul (Jossey-Bass). He was a member of the founding team of Business 2.0 magazine and served six years as executive editor of Sojourners magazine and founder of the SojoMail ezine. He currently serves as a senior editor of Motto magazine. He has contributed articles to the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, and SPIN. He is the recipient of two national journalist awards and was named National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at the University of San Francisco for his work in technology and ethics. During the 1980s, Batstone founded a non-governmental agency dedicated to economic development and human rights in Latin America. 

Magazine Article:

Finding Slavery in Your Own Backyard… and Deploying Solutions to Abolish It

Graduate Theological Union, Currents Magazine – September 2009

"David Batstone ─ professor of ethics at San Francisco University, entrepreneur, author, and social activist ─ founded the nonprofit Not For Sale when he discovered human slavery in his own back yard, Berkeley, that is.

Batstone learned that Lakireddy Reddy, owner of Pasand restaurant, had kept cook- and wait staff as human slaves. Reddy confessed to felony charges, including conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and transporting a minor for sex, only after a tragic accident came to light: A roommate found two teenage sisters ─ Chanti and Lalitha Prattipati ─ unconscious in a Berkeley apartment also owned by Reddy. They were poisoned by carbon monoxide leaking from a blocked heating vent, and Chanti was pronounced dead at Alta Bates Hospital. An investigation revealed that Reddy and several family members used fake visas and false identities to traffic adults and children into the United States from India. In many cases Reddy secured visas under the guise that these were skilled technology professionals who would be placed in software companies. They ended up working as waiters, cooks, and dishwashers at Pasand or other businesses Reddy owned, forced to work long hours for minimal wages they returned to him as rent for one of his apartments. Reddy had threatened to turn them in to the authorities as illegal aliens if they tried to escape.

Shocked that his favorite restaurant had become a hub for a trafficking ring, Batstone realized that far from being a thing of the past, slavery likely crosses our path on a regular basis without our awareness. His research reveals there are more than 27 million slaves in the world today, more than at the height of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. A tool called Slavery Map: http://slaverymap.org on the Not For Sale website, http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/, allows users to see, post, and report where slavery exists today.
“The shoes I wear, the coffee I drink, the sugar I put in my coffee ─ may all be invisible links to slavery,” Batstone says. “Being free to choose our destiny is fundamental to how we see ourselves. That’s why human trafficking strikes a nerve, and people want to help.”

Indeed, in two years of operation, Not For Sale has 42 state operations; projects in Uganda, Peru, Thailand, Cambodia and Honduras; eight full time staff members; and countless volunteers, including some top sports and music celebrities. The organization’s success, Batstone says, lies in a method they call “Open Source Activism,” derived from the high tech industry. “We don’t write the rules. We give you tools to act locally and show you how your local action connects with global activism.”

Another Not For Sale tool is Free To Work, a wiki, where users publish and find information on whether products they use are linked to slavery. The International Human Rights Forum now downloads its data into Not For Sale’s wiki. In addition to the wiki, Not For Sale invites companies to be Free To Work companies. These companies pledge transparency and allow investigators trained at Not For Sale to examine their operations and ensure they are free from slavery.

Not For Sale’s success undoubtedly arises from Batstone’s experience as an investment banker working in underdeveloped nations. The nonprofit is part of a social venture Batstone cofounded called Right Reality, which also includes business consulting services and a company that builds and sells organic farming tools. “Right Reality is about helping nonprofits be financially viable, and companies be socially responsible,” he says.

The thread running through all of Batstone’s work? He calls it a passion for transformation, and credits his GTU education with nurturing it. He uses another Not For Sale initiative called Free To Play as an example. It started with Batstone’s kids’ basketball teams: If a kid scored a basket they gave ten cents to free kids somewhere else on the globe. Now, a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants and a left fielder for the St Louis Cardinals give to Not For Sale when they score home runs; an Oakland Raiders linebacker gives when he makes a tackle; an international skating champion gives each time he performs a triple toe loop.

The beauty is you don’t have to be a celebrity to participate, Batstone says. “The idea is you transform whatever your gifts are to give a gift to someone else, to free another person.”

Action Steps:
Tell-Tale Signs of possible human trafficking
     If someone is controlled at all times and isolated
     If they speak only Chinese, Korean or Spanish
     If they can’t leave work place
Contact Health and Human Services at 1-888-373-7888
Go to http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/ and report your suspensions

Caution to Parents:
Be sure that your child is accompanied by adults
If your child goes to a sleep over or a party ask if there is adult supervision
Teach your children not to talk to strangers and how to be polite but draw a line if they are spoken to at a mall
Caution your child that if they run away they will be contacted by a trafficker within 24 hours
Oversee their Online accounts like myspace, facebook and make sure that they are private lines
Warn your child to never meet someone through online communication

Prayer Focus:
Pray that God would bless the efforts of the Not for Sale Campaign in the US to bring together law enforcement, religious agencies, and universities in communities to form a community engaged group against human traffickingn in local areas.  Ask God to prompt chucrhes to join the Not For Sale underground church community to care for freed victims of  trafficking in their local area by providing a safe haven with housing and medical and emotional aid.  Ask God to work through local universities to map out the areas within the local cities where human trafficking is happening to assist local law enforcement agencies and churches to mobilize against the trafficking.  Pray that parents in America would be more actively engaged in their parenting duties training their children on how to be safe from trafficking.   Pray that God would bless the global efforts of the Not For Sale Campaign in Thailand, Cambodia, Uganda, Hondurus and Peru.