Time for Equality is supporting the End Child Slavery Week between 20-26 November 2014 – a petition launched by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Kailash Satyarthi that can be signed online here. We encourage you to take part and help child slavery come to an end!
With an estimated 21 million slaves of which 5.5 million are children, there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in human history.
Child slavery today is at an all-time high. 26% of slaves today are children under 18 years, with some being as young as five. Forced to work for up to 18 hours a day, these children are sold at prices less than even that of cattle.
Shameful facts about slavery:
- Between 1450 to 1900, there were 11.3 million slaves in the world, today, there are 21 million slaves.
- 5.5 million children are trapped in slavery across the globe.
- In 1850, a slave in the US cost $40,000. Today it costs $90.
- Slave labour generates $150 billion a year.
About the petition:
The petition will be hand delivered to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and has the power to put child slavery on the UN Sustainable Development Goals agenda for the next 15 years.
By signing it, you urge decision-makers to take immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour including recruitment and use of child soldiers and child slavery, and, by 2025, end child labour in all its forms.
What you are about to sign has the power to end the abominable crime of child slavery that violates every basic human right and destroys the well-being of future generations and declares that you are taking responsibility for the world’s children who suffer beyond imagination at the hands of slave masters.
Peace Nobel Prize Winner Kailash Satyarthi calls on you to end child slavery:
“Child slavery is undeniably a blatant violation of human rights and a grave violence against children.
The incidence of child slavery is an impediment in the way of attainment of education for all which Global March and its partners, has always held as non-negotiable in its fight against child labour. These hard-to-reach category of children miss out on education and learning and thus continue to languish in a vicious circle of poverty and deprivation.
The need of the hour is thus for all of us to come together and demand for the inclusion of child slavery in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.
With only five days left for the launch of the End Child Slavery Week (ECSW) Campaign, Global March along with the joint initiators, urges you to sign the petition that has the power to end the abominable crime of child slavery. This petition will be hand delivered to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and has the power to put child slavery on the UN Sustainable Development Goals agenda for the next 15 years.
Thus I call upon you to lend a voice to the 5.5 million children trapped in slavery across the globe and help create a better future for them.”
If you do not raise your voice now, these children will lose an opportunity for a life. Help change their destiny. Sign the petition today to end child slavery!
By Roxana Mironescu
Freelance journalist, communication professional, blogger and gender equality activist, currently based in Luxembourg.
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