This World Day Against Trafficking in Persons (2024), Outland Denim joins survivors, advocates, governments, charities, NGOs, law makers, law enforcement, public institutions, academia, researchers, the private sector and the finance community across the world in bringing awareness to the issue of human trafficking and to its victims and survivors, particularly child trafficking.
Leave No Child Behind
The theme for this year's World Day Against Trafficking in Persons is "Leave no child behind in the fight against human trafficking." (1)
Children account for a third of trafficking victims globally. Girls are mainly trafficked for sexual exploitation, while boys are mostly trafficked for forced labour. Children are nearly twice as likely to suffer extreme violence from traffickers compared to adult victims, with an even higher rate for girls.
"Child trafficking undermines healthy societal structures and perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation," says the UNODC.
"It destroys childhood and can trap trafficked children in a cycle of violence and exploitation when they become parents themselves; it disrupts education and hinders community development. Addressing child trafficking is crucial for achieving broader social and economic stability and societal cohesion."
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Explainer: Understanding Child Trafficking
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Outland Denim's Commitment
Notably, Outland Denim was established to disrupt this cycle of exploitation after its founder and CEO James Bartle witnessed an instance of child trafficking on the streets of Southeast Asia. Outland soon became an employment and training avenue for survivors of human trafficking exiting NGO restoration programs.
"We know that child slavery exists, and is proliferating, and that it exists on the streets of redlight districts, behind closed doors with online child exploiters, and also hidden deep in fashion supply chains," says Outland Denim founder and CEO James Bartle.
"We know that children are gluing shoes, picking cotton, sewing embroidery and fast-tracking fashion's insatiable appetite for new clothing with their unpaid labour."
"We know that the fashion industry at every level - from luxury to cheap fast fashion - is complicit in these crimes and that consumers are unwittingly contributing to the problem through their purchasing decisions."
The Role of the Fashion Industry
According to Walk Free, G20 countries are collectively importing US$148 billion worth of apparel goods and US$13 billion worth of textiles at risk of being produced by forced labour every year.
And while tech-led solutions, such as supply chain mapping, can identify risks and risk areas, and modern slavery laws are becoming increasingly stringent, the private sector can go further to help reduce vulnerabilities, such as demanding living wages and fair working conditions.
Incorporating survivor programs into business models and supply chain strategies can be a proactive way for business to actively combat the issue and divert human resource into the legitimate economy. Ethical employment models mitigate against child slavery by enabling parents to create sustainable livelihoods while keeping children in school and out of harm's way.
A Collective Effort
"It's up to everyone to combat the problem. No one brand alone is the panacea for human trafficking or modern slavery more broadly," says James.
"But we can point to the solutions and refuse to be a part of the problem. We can do business with suppliers who are committed to addressing exploitation, and we can actively search for trafficking and slavery in our supply chains."
In 2022, Outland Denim's partner program Sag Salim (a communications program designed by Precisions Solutions Group and IN2 Communications to be a worker advocate in Turkey's cotton fields that allows workers to communicate via social media and worker hotlines) reported instances of child labour on cotton fields in Turkey.
While not explicitly tied to the product produced by Outland Denim or its denim supplier (separate farm audits showing no child labour and no migrant workers were conducted on Outland's organic cotton farms at the same time), the discovery pointed to an issue that is "hidden in plain sight".
Challenges and Solutions
"Everyone knows this is happening but can feel powerless to do something, because the reality is that these families, who may be migrants from Syria or seasonal workers and usually contracting their labour to the farms, are desperate and need the income," says James.
Distinct from human trafficking but not always exclusively, child labourers are often accompanied by their families to the fields but miss out on schooling while their parents pick cotton or while they pick cotton themselves to supplement the family income in what is a seasonal job that may provide income for an entire year.
"Many parents struggle with legal status issues to enrol children [in school] and the economy has faltered to such a point that they need their children to work or are otherwise looking for ways to have their children generate income for the family," adds Richard Williams from PSG.
"Enrolling children in school is a major mitigator to child labour, which seems to be a increasing phenomenon in Turkey."
ABOUT OUTLAND DENIM
Outland Denim exists to combat human exploitation, including human trafficking, employing several survivors of human trafficking in its vertically integrated factory. Here survivors are able to access education, health care, and living wages to help empower them to live full lives free of the clutches of human trafficking.
