-TRICKED into leaving their home
-TRANSPORTED to an unfamiliar location
-TRAPPED in that place, and
-USED for forced prostitution, forced labor, forced marriage, or organ removal
Essentially - modern day slavery. It's a crime, it's happening in South Africa and all over the world. There are more slaves in the world today than at any point in human history. An estimated 27 million. And not just that, not just a number. But real people. Just recently, Justice ACTs actually aided in the rescue of 2 girls that had been trafficked into South Africa and helped to get them back home safely.
So we're partnering with this organization to help them get their message out across South Africa. We got some training from them and now we go out 2-3 times per week to public areas and do a little demonstration. Here's what we do:
-All wear black t-shirts (so we look semi-professional)
-Tie up 3 team members so their wrists and ankles are bound with rope, and put duct tape over their mouths. Also tape a bar code to their chest. This sounds intense I know! We do it to catch people's attention, so it's really effective.
-The rest of our team then hands out flyers to everyone who walks by. The flyers explain what human trafficking is and give a national helpline and the justice ACTs website. We try really hard to get into conversations with people, not just hand out the flyers silently. Usually my lead-in line is something like "We're raising awareness about human trafficking today, have you ever heard of human trafficking?" just trying to get people engaged instead of walking past us hurriedly. We hand out about 400 flyers each time we do a demonstration.
We've had some interesting experiences doing these demonstrations to say the least. The biggest struggle has been finding places where we can do them. Often, the best places are malls. But, at a mall, you have to consult with mall management which is sort of a bureaucratic nightmare. The team that came here last year said that they found mall management to be very open to them doing this, but we haven't had the same experience. I think part of that was the buzz from the World Cup last year. Trafficking increases dramatically when big sporting events happen in a city, so the team last year could use that in their favor because their presence was really needed in order to protect and inform the local communities. So, we've struggled a bit with getting our foot in the door many places.
On the other hand, if we just go out on the street, it's sort of a gamble as to whether many people will be there or not, whether we'll be in a safe area, plus just the awkwardness of setting this whole thing up in the middle of the street. Which should not be underestimated!!! hahaha, imagine a group of 8 white people (we already definitely stick out), wearing all black tshirts, walking with a purpose, then tying up three people in the middle of the street. You can imagine - it's awkward. But this is generally what we've been doing.
Once we get going, things usually go really well. We've been able to get in some great conversations with people, sometimes people just thanking us for what we're doing and encouraging us to keep going, sometimes people with terrible stories of how their lives have been affected by human trafficking (we've talked to people whose grandchildren, children, and even they themselves have been trafficked), and many times just being able to inform people who have never heard of this issue. It's definitely one of those things where we don't know for sure if we are helping people, or actually playing a part in the prevention of human trafficking, but one thing is for sure - there's a much greater chance that we're helping by doing this than if we were just sitting at home thinking about it. And even if it only helps one person, we would all agree that it's worth it.
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