On November, 11, 2011 (11-11-11) an amazing global collaboration is taking place. Bands, solo artists and a variety of other musicians are coming together in harmony for a worldwide stance against child trafficking and slavery.

TODAY, OVER 27 MILLION PEOPLE ARE TRAFFICKED & ENSLAVED – caught up in brothels, barracks and factories. Over half of these slaves are CHILDREN. Children being raped for profit 10 to 20 times a day. Children trafficked into militias that kill their own families. Children forced to work 16-hours days at 1000-degree brick kilns. Children stolen.

It’s time to jam up this global traffic!

So, how can YOU be a part of this historic event?

Solo Artists & Bands

• If you already have an event/gig scheduled for 11-11-11, simply incorporate the GLOBAL TRAFFIC JAM message into it. We’ll give you the info and resources to make it easy.
• If you don’t have anything set for 11-11-11, go ahead schedule something for that date. You can dedicate your whole event to anti-trafficking, or feature the issue for a few minutes during your set. Again, we’ll give you the tools to help you communicate to your audience.
• No venue is available (or scheduling/promotion time too short) for that date? – Do an unplugged set for a gathering of special friends instead.
• Whole band isn’t available on that date? – Put together some solo performances instead.

Fans & Wannabe Promoters…

• If you know a member of a local band, tap your inner music-promoter, and put together a show for them! We will give you the materials to help you and your event be a success.
• If you know an owner or manager of a local venue (bar, nightclub, theater, restaurant, community center, church, etc.), see if you can work with them to arrange something in their space on 11-11-11. They may already know the perfect band or artist! If they already have live music scheduled for that date, try to incorporate the GLOBAL TRAFFIC JAM theme into the night’s schedule.

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Tara Teng, Miss Canada 2011 is really putting her crown to good use. She is currently on a 10-city tour titled ‘Ignite the Road to Justice’ aimed at educating, and advocating participation to end human trafficking that kicked off August 15th in Vancouver. The tour is set to end in Toronto from September 2-4.

Teng, a fourth year education student at Trinity Western University, is joined on tour by former Madam and fellow abolitionist Tania Fiolleau, recording artist Kevin Boese, and others advocating the end human trafficking. The team will partner with organizations in each community community to hold events that provide opportunities to educate and stimulate participation to fight humantrafficking. Its goal: “to ignite a powerful, unified, grassroots movement that speaks up for the oppressed.”

Prior to this tour, Teng spent the summer traveling through California, Thailand, and Cambodia to visit and work with women affected by human trafficking. She also spoke on behalf of Dalit Freedom Network Canada to highlight the plight of this high risk and often discriminated group.

“I find when you hear about social justice problems you immediately think, ‘That’s awful,’ but the more you learn about it,” she says, “the more you have to start asking yourself hard questions like, ‘How have I directly or indirectly contributed to this injustice?’”

When Teng and her father, Terry, went to Cambodia in partnership with the advocacy group Traffic Jam, they stayed in some of the cities’ red-light districts. “I went to listen and to get a sense of what’s going on in order to come back and share their stories,” she says.

In June, she spoke at the MTV Freedom Concert in Thailand, in support of the music station’s EXIT to end exploitation and trafficking campaign. The concert brought together Teng’s largest audience yet, a crowd of nearly 40,000 people. The following month, she passed along her Miss BC title; her Miss Canada reign will continue until January 2012. “At the end of that term, I feel like that chapter in my life will come to a close, and I’ll be able to focus more of my attention on the things I’m really passionate about,” she says.

This fall, as a student at TWU’s Laurentian Leadership Centre in Ottawa, Teng will intern with Member of Parliament Joy Smith. Smith has gained support for a new bill that aims to abolish thesextrade by targeting its market.

“I believe in big things,” says Teng. “Last semester, I poured myself into the planning of Freedom Week and spoke at numerous awareness engagements.”

Since then, Teng has been able to look back at the ripple effects caused by her work. She has seen churches declare themselves justice churches, working on their own social justice projects and events; students at a Walnut Grove school write and present letters to MP Mark Warawa; and the beginning of a regular dialogue for Langley stakeholders to address how to take practical steps to traffick-proof the community.

Visit ignitetheroadtojustice.com to support Tara Teng and her fellow abolitionists.

To learn more about Tara Teng’s activities, read her blog at impact.twu.ca

Compiled with files from Trinity Western University

Obnoxious as the sex trade is, globally many more people are physically or mentally enslaved by those who trade in human lives to provide cheap and malleable labor to the fishing, seafood and shrimp processing, domestic maiding, garment and agricultural industries.

In a new report centered on Southeast Asia, we have not only found that the practice of bartering for labor within and between countries is widespread but has listed ten truths about trafficking that most people are ignorant. Many are not aware that laborers are being imprisoned in private homes, factories and on fishing boats.

In Thailand and Malaysia, the fishing business is a multi-billion dollar industry. Young men and boys are often recruited from poor villages in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar onto boats where they are literally imprisoned at sea. Escapees have reported being drugged to work harder, threatened at gun point, seeing colleagues killed, being beaten, starved, worked half to death and not being paid.

Kyaw is one such man. Born in Myeik, Myanmar, he wanted to support his family and ended up on a Thai fishing boat operating illegally in Indonesian waters. At first, he was pleased to join four other Myanmar workers as a fisherman. But he soon discovered conditions on the boat were worse than those on an 18th century slave ship.

“They allowed us to sleep only about an hour per day. There were Thais and Khmer people but they got better treatment than us,” said Kyaw.

Thailand has taken steps to improve the fishing industry by setting up a National Sub-Committee on Fishing Labor and it has upgraded legislation to criminalize men and boys trafficking. It is now in a position to charge some of the biggest players in the game. However, other countries, like Malaysia, also need to follow suit to end labor trafficking into various industries.

There are around three million foreign workers in Malaysia working in a variety of industries. It is accepted local practice for employers to keep employees’ legal documents, including passports, for “security purposes”. Confiscation opens the door for unscrupulous employers to abuse workers.

Although Malaysia promulgated A Trafficking in Persons (A-TIP) Act in 2008, misunderstandings about how it relates to foreign workers means trafficking is perpetuated. Under the law trafficking victims are individuals who have been subjected to exploitation, including forced labor and services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, and as such should not be prosecuted for illegal entry, unlawful residence or possession or procurement of fraudulent travel or identity documents.

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It said in a statement Friday that globally for every person forced into the sex trade, nine were forced to work.

The report stated that trafficking for labour exploitation was generally not considered as severe a crime as trafficking for sexual exploitation, and there was a high level of impunity for offenders.

“Victims of labour trafficking are often not identified as such, and instead are detained and deported from the country where the exploitation took place.

“As a result, the majority of trafficked persons do not have access to assistance or justice, and the traffickers remain free to exploit others,” it said.

The report also comes with a list of recommendations on how to fight trafficking, including urging the private sector to take responsibility for all labour within their supply chain with ongoing monitoring for compliance, banning the confiscation of workers’ official documents by employers, having government target high-migration areas with vocational and skills training and safe migration information.

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Her mother is a prostitute here in Kolkata, the city better known to the world as Calcutta. Ruchira Gupta, who runs an organization called Apne Aap that fights human trafficking, estimates that 90 percent of the daughters of Indian prostitutes end up in the sex trade as well. And M. has the extra burden that she belongs to a subcaste whose girls are often expected to become prostitutes.

M. seemed poised to escape this fate with the help of one of my heroes, Urmi Basu, a social worker who in 2000 started the New Light shelter program for prostitutes and their children.

M., with her winning personality and keen mind, began to bloom with the help of New Light. Both her parents are illiterate, but she learned English and earned excellent grades in an English-language school for middle-class children outside the red-light district. I’m concealing her identity to protect her from gibes from schoolmates.

Unfortunately, brains and personality aren’t always enough, and India is the center of the 21st-century slave trade. This country almost certainly has the largest number of human-trafficking victims in the world today.

If M. is sold to a brothel, she will have no defense against H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. Decisions about using a condom are made by the customer or the brothel owner, not by the girl. In one brothel I slipped into to conduct some interviews, there was not a single condom available.

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   The joint operation between Northumbria Police and the UK Border Agency involved around 50 officers, saw five people arrested on suspicion of sex trafficking and rescued two women allegedly being forced to work as prostitutes.

 Two white men believed to be customers were also lead away from the Chinese Medical Centre, Pilgrim Street, Newcastle.

 The shop, in direct view of and less than 100 yards away from the city’s main police station, advertises massages, Chinese Viagra and treatments to boost sex drive in its window.

 The UKBA said those suspected of being involved in sex trafficking and the rescued women were Chinese.

 Officers led out a respectable-looking silver-haired man in handcuffs, and separately, a woman in her 20s in glasses.

 Elsewhere in the city, police arrested two others and a simultaneous raid in Foyle Street, Sunderland, saw a woman held for questioning.

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Ms Sy says several factors make it difficult to identify Southeast Asian girls who have been recruited into the domestic minor sex trafficking trade. [AFP]

An outreach organisation in California says young Southeast Asian women are vulnerable to sexual exploitation in America.

Banteay Srei, which works with young women and girls aged betwen 12 and 24 in Oakland, says the risk of sex trafficking is pronounced for second generation Southeast Asian-Americans dealing with cultural divisions such as language barriers.

“The girls are struggling with a new cultural identity of growing up in a newly emigrated refugee household where often times there isn’t a common language that parents and kids can share,” founder Elizabeth Sy told Radio Australia’s Connect Asia program.

“Even as the kids are going through this issue and being recruited, they can’t tell their parents not only because they are ashamed of it…but also because they don’t have a language capacity to do it.”

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The taxis, according to one Queens State Senator, are just as much of the problem as the nefarious pimps who force undocumented women into having sex upon threat of violence or deportation.

Stepping up his offensive to tackle the sex trade on Roosevelt Avenue in Corona and Jackson Heights, State Sen. Jose Peralta (D-East Elmhurst) announced the introduction of a bill which would educate cab drivers about human trafficking.

“We have to dispel the dangerous notion that prostitution is a victimless crime,” Peralta said. “Someone aware of this brutal reality is less likely to participate in the continued exploitation of these women.”

The bill would require taxi and livery cab drivers to be educated on how to identify a situation of human trafficking while they are on duty and would be incorporated in the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission’s training program.

Joining the effort to curb both human trafficking and prostitution, Restore NYC, a nonprofit organization which helps sex-trafficking victims, welcomed the first-time collaboration between the Senator and the TLC.

According to Faith Huckel, executive director and co-founder of the nonprofit, there are approximately 27 million people currently enslaved throughout the world.

“Most are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation,” Huckel said. “Eighty percent are female.”

Sold the “American Dream,” women are lured with the promise of a good job or false marriage then kidnapped or sold into the sex trade where they have ended up in brothels within the borough, Huckel said.

“By raising public awareness about what is really going on, there will be a greater flow of information to law enforcement,” she said.

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Police in Nigeria freed 32 teen girls from an alleged “baby factory” used to feed the region’s exploding sex trade and human trafficking markets, authorities said.

Cops in the southern Nigerian city of Aba raided the clinic, known as The Cross Foundation, Monday after receiving a tip that the owner was harboring pregnant girls and selling their babies, Nigeria’s Daily Champion newspaper reported.

Some of the girls, who were between 15 and 17, told authorities that the clinic’s owner, Dr. Hyacinth Orikara, forced them to sell their babies to him for around $190, depending on the gender, Agence France-Presse reported.

“We rescued 32 pregnant girls and arrested the proprietor who is undergoing interrogation over allegations that he normally sells the babies to people who may use them for rituals or other purposes,” police commissioner Bala Hassan said.

Orikara could face up to 14 years in prison for selling babies, authorities said.

The doctor denied the charges, telling the Champion that the clinic cared for teenagers with unwanted pregnancies.

The women were transferred to the regional headquarters of an anti-trafficking organization, authorities said.

“Baby factories” or “baby farms” are common in western Africa.

The organizations sell newborns to the highest bidder, and the children often end up being used as factory workers, mine workers or sex slaves.

Human trafficking is ranked the third most common crime in Nigeria, after fraud and drug trafficking, according to the UN.

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