Today is the Oak Tree Foundation’s End Child Slavery day.
Although we won’t be able to attend, my thoughts and prayers are with this little group of young people who are out to change the world. First it was Melbourne’s Make Poverty History concert, where Bono dropped in. Now they’re tackling the massive problem of child slavery.
From their website:
Did you know that there are 8.4 million child slaves in the world today? These children are without freedom and are denied the educational opportunities they need to break the cycle of poverty and exploitation.
The End Child Slavery campaign is made up of thousands of young Australians who are speaking out against the injustice of child slave labour.
End Child Slavery is an advocacy campaign of The Oaktree Foundation towards our mission of Education For All. The End Child Slavery campaign calls on both Governments and Corporations to ensure that all children are in school, not in slavery.
It’s people like these who are bringing these issues to the front, where people can’t just ignore them. More power to them!
I checked out the Oaktree website. I was surprised to learn that:
“8.4 MILLION CHILDREN ARE DENIED AN EDUCATION BECAUSE THEY ARE FORCED TO WORK AS SLAVES…. [Wow]… As Australians indulged in $100 million worth of chocolate this week, some 100,000 child slaves worked on cocoa fields in West Africa producing up to 70% of the world’s cocoa. In 2001, all the major chocolate companies promised to end child slavery in cocoa by July 2008. This promise was made seven years ago, and we now have just four months to go!”
Pretty amazing….
WOW.
I was able to go to the show in Perth.
It was pretty amazing. The acts were groovy, they had fire throwers, drum&gance groups, some singers, some dancers and some freeze-framers, but the overwhelming message was pretty hard-hitting.
There are small children enslaved in the world, making our chocolate and clothes. It almost doesn’t matter how many (although the statistics are overwhelming), the fact that there are ANY is unacceptable.
It made me remember though, the slavery problem in the world is not JUST with Children. There are women & children being trafficked around the world as we speak for sexual exploitation and prostitution. It’s crazy.
hopefully, fundraising and awareness-raising do their bit in this case.. but maybe we need to go and bust open some factories, and rescue some victims. Is it about time?
There’s also a video on Youtube that is great for this issue. Unfortunately they’ve disabled embedding, but you can see it here