Just days after securing a new property for a crisis centre in Cape Town, funded by donations raised at Passion 2012, the organization assisted in the repatriation of a female survivor back to her native country.

Twenty-year-old Kim was trafficked from China to Johannesburg, where she was forced to work in a brothel.
In the summer of 2011, she managed to escape and ended up in Cape Town. Local police found her wandering the streets in a haze and presumed she had been drugged.

She was brought to a safe house and police contacted Not For Sale South Africa in a bid to help Kim receive the best support available.

For some time Kim felt unable to speak, and although she eventually opened up about her circumstances, some of the information surrounding her life remains unknown.

Not For Sale South Africa’s Coordinator, Christina Bacino, believes her extreme introversion was a direct result of the trauma she endured at the brothel. However, as time went on and she received care from the safe house staff, it seemed she slowly gained more emotional stability.

During her time at Not For Sale’s partner shelter, the young survivor bonded with another survivor in a similar situation. This new friendship eventually helped Kim speak up about how she had been trafficked from China to work in a brothel.

Following months of intensive support and care, Kim recently felt ready to return to China.

Speaking about her departure, NFS South African Coordinator Christina Bacino said: “This week I was able to bring one of our girls to the airport and see her off. As we came to the security line and I could go no further, I had mixed emotions. I was so happy to see her freedom and independence restored, but also sad to have to let go and say goodbye. As she disappeared beyond security and I turned to walk away, I thought about how lucky I am to be in the business of setting people free. When this job is rewarding, it is extremely rewarding.”

Not For Sale believes its new crisis centre, due to open later this year, will better assist survivors like Kim by providing a safe place for immediate emergency care.

Not For Sale Intervenes in China-Thailand Trafficking Operation

[Mae Sai, Thailand: March 10, 2011] Not For Sale, the international anti-slavery agency, reports that its operation in the north of Thailand intervened earlier this week in the case of three teenage girls trafficked from China.  The girls were destined for the commercial sex industry in Chiang Saen, a resort city in the Golden Triangle region of Thailand. The girls have found refuge in a children’s village that the agency runs in the Golden Triangle.

The girls claim that their trafficker is holding twelve additional teenage girls in Myanmar, awaiting clandestine transfer into Thailand. The girls come from a region in the south of China that borders Myanmar,  which is heavily populated by tribes that are stateless, lacking official nation-state citizenship. Their trafficker promised them high-paying restaurant jobs in Thailand, and charged them the equivalent of US$5000 for transport and job location. The girls come from poor families, so the trafficker reportedly offered to hold their debt which they could pay off with future wages. Once the first three girls had been smuggled via cargo boat into Thailand, their trafficker took them to a brothel and told them that they had to pay off their debt by selling themselves.  The three girls escaped the brothel and a local Thai police officer delivered them to the children’s village run by Not For Sale Thailand. The Not For Sale team thwarted the trafficker’s subsequent attempt this week to extract the girls from their village sanctuary.

Not For Sale president David Batstone, who was visiting the project in northern Thailand this week, notes that the trafficking of boys and girls from China is becoming an alarming trend. “We are seeing girls from as far away as North Korea arriving into the northern border regions,” he reports. “The scarcity of economic options in rural China, coupled with the prosperity of criminal enterprises, means bad news for vulnerable peoples.”

Corporate responsibility today is moving beyond traditional concerns such as environmental impact. I am seeing companies move to ensure their supply chains – including suppliers and contractors – are free from slavery, and labor conditions meet international standards. These steps are often taken not just from a moral standpoint, but a punitive one – companies don’t want to risk litigation or tumbling share prices off the back of bad publicity. A Chinese factory that produces light bulbs for General Electric was only last month accused of making employees work 64-hour weeks and exposing them to mercury. To their credit, GE is investigating, but on the same day their stock price dropped.

Indeed, a ‘second wave’ of corporate social responsibility is emerging, as managed funds start to closely examine the ethical standing of companies they are investing in. Last week I spoke at the World Bank in Washington DC about combating human trafficking. There were plenty of business leaders present, but fund managers representing $1.3 trillion of fund equity were present too. I think that illustrates how seriously they are treating these supply chain issues.

Yet the next challenge for publicly listed companies operating in countries like China could come from a surprising direction – shareholder activism.

Traditionally shareholder activism has centered on issues of corporate governance and executive compensation. But in the US we are starting to see shareholder group’s holding companies to account and saying hang on – how we make our profit matters.

They have just started to smash the windows. Next, they will pull us out and, well, let’s not think about that …

I am trying not to meet their eyes, but they are staring at me and my companions with rage and hatred such as I haven’t seen in a human face before. Those companions, Barbara Jones and Richard van Ryneveld, are – like me – quite helpless in the back seats.

If we get out, we will certainly be beaten to death. If we stay where we are, we will probably be beaten to death.

Our two African companions have – crazily in our view – got out of the car to try to reason with the crowd. It is clear to us that you might as well preach non-violence to a tornado.

At last, after what must have been about 40 seconds but that felt like half an hour, one of the pair saw sense, leapt back into the car and reversed wildly down the rocky, dusty path – leaving his friend behind.By the grace of God we did not slither into the ditch, roll over or burst a tire. Through the dust we churned up as we fled, we could see our would-be killers running with appalling speed to catch up. There was just time to make a crazy two-point turn which allowed us to go forwards and so out-distance them.

We had pretty much abandoned our other guide to whatever his fate might be (this was surprisingly easy to justify to myself at the time) when we saw that he had broken free and was running with Olympic swiftness, just ahead of pursuers half hidden by the dust.

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