Kiwi's campaign targets modern-day slave trade

Jude Mannion is heading to Hong Kong. Photo / Richard Robinson

From a tiny cottage in a Red Beach motor camp, Jude Mannion is launching a worldwide campaign to help catch agents who are selling migrants from poor countries into a modern-day kind of slavery.

Ms Mannion, who gave up a high-flying business career as Kellogg's Oceania manager to found the charitable Robin Hood Foundation in 2002, wants employers to pay $10 for each employee to give their workers "freedom" from their computers for a day on Human Rights Day, December 10 - "Freedom Friday".

"Your staff may do something really reckless like talk to colleagues and clients instead of emailing," she says.

And the money will help the Bangkok-based United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP) win real freedom for migrants sold into slavery and prosecute agents who sell them.

After eight years with Robin Hood, which supports businesses giving their time and expertise to local charities, 50-year-old Ms Mannion is going global. She has formed a new trust, Robin Hood Foundation Asia, and is moving to Hong Kong next month.

"I want to do the biggest thing I can in the world with the biggest businesses in the world," she says.

"Robin Hood has given me the confidence to say I'm going to go to one of the wealthiest parts of Asia, Hong Kong, and pull out millions of dollars for this cause."

The cause is one that is barely known in developed countries.

"As a Kiwi, you can't believe that children can be sold for US$150 [$190]," Ms Mannion says.

She heard about it a decade ago when she was Asia-Pacific marketing director of Elizabeth Arden, based in Singapore. During a taxi ride in Bangkok, she heard someone on the radio quote the $150 price of a girl sold into the sex trade.

On a later visit to Bangkok, she tracked down the person she had heard - Sompop Jantraka, founder of an agency called the Daughters' Education Programme offering education to young Thai girls so they did not have to become prostitutes. Ms Mannion helped them to raise money for about five years.

This year, when she decided to do something on a larger scale, she started with the Government's aid agency.

"I said to NZAID: 'I want to create a global movement. No one talks about slavery, human trafficking. We have little non-government organisations around the world that don't come together in a clearly coherent platform'."

NZAID connected her with American Matt Friedman who runs UNIAP, one of the UN's smallest agencies with just 35 staff and a budget of US$2.2 million. It aims to co-ordinate all agencies and governments trying to stop human trafficking in Southeast Asia.

"What we are talking about is not slavery in the way you thought about it in the 18th century where a person is shackled, but they are held in slave-like situations through debt or intimidation or threats," he says.

Sex trade traffickers pick up girls from poor families or poor countries and sell them to brothel keepers.

"The victim will actually have to pay the brothel owner back for what the madam gave out to the trafficker," he says.

"But if the madam paid $1000, they would keep adding expenses to this so the person could never buy their way back. As long as they are making money for the house, they are often forced to stay."

Young men are sold to factory owners who might pay them $50 a month but charge them $54 for board so they go ever deeper into debt. They are not allowed to leave while they stay in debt.

Others are sold to fishing companies and work 16-hour days every day for two years and are then refused any pay when they return to port.

"After two years they ask for money and the captain says, 'I'm Thai, you're Cambodian, you are illegally in my country, go away'."

Mr Friedman hopes initiatives like Ms Mannion's "Freedom Friday" will raise US$2.5 million and inspire in-kind help, such as lawyers willing to donate time or ideas to help prosecute human traffickers.

He accepts that new agents will emerge to link desperate poor people with rich people who will take advantage of them.

"We know we can't stop trafficking," Mr Friedman says.

"But if we begin to go after the criminals and get precedent cases, and try to make it unprofitable, gradually we'll be able to make some sort of a difference."

HUMAN TRAFFICKING
* "Slavery" is being forced to work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk away.
* 27 million slaves in the world today.
* The majority of slaves are in India and Africa.
* Other words for modern slavery: debt bondage, bonded labour, attached labour, forced labour, indentured servitude, human trafficking.

Source - freetheslaves.net

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