Freeset Setting Women Free

In 1999 Kerry and Annie Hilton left New Zealand with their four children and moved to Kolkata, India to work and live amongst the poor. Naively, they signed up for an apartment in the middle of the day.

It was only when Kerry was taking a walk at night that he discovered they had moved into the largest red light area in the city. Their new neighbours were thousands of women forced into prostitution by trafficking and poverty. That was the beginning of a business named Freeset.

Freeset is located in Sonagacchi, the largest, most infamous sex district in Kolkata, India. Within a few square miles more than 10,000 women stand in line selling their bodies to thousands of men who visit daily. Many are trafficked from Bangladesh, Nepal and rural India. For others poverty has left them without options. The cries of their hungry children drive them to sell their bodies.

At thirteen, Sonali* was stolen from her village, dragged to the back streets of Sonagacchi and sold into prostitution. Her first customer drugged and raped her unconscious body.

Bashanti*, a daughter of poverty-stricken parents, was sold into the sex trade by her mother, sacrificed so the rest of the family could eat.

In India, prostitution is big business and thrives on exploitation and slavery, robbing the poor of dignity and innocence. (*Names have been changed.)

Freeset is a way of helping women escape a demeaning and exploitative life by giving them work making products which are sold around the world.

Freeset is a fair trade business offering employment to women trapped in Kolkata’s sex trade. We make quality jute bags and organic cotton t-shirts, but our business is freedom!

We would like to see the 10,000 sex workers in our neighborhood empowered with the choice of leaving a profession they never chose in the first place.

I had the privilege of speaking to Kerry on my radio program this morning about the work that Freeset does and their plans for the future. You can hear our conversation by clicking the play button on the audio player at the bottom of this post.



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Not For Sale

While we’d like to think that slavery was abolished back in the early 1800s, the truth is there are more slaves in the world at this moment than at any other time in history.

Some conservative estimates suggest that around thirty million people are enslaved today.

It’s a shocking statistic but even more shocking is that slavery exists in countries such as the USA and Australia. Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal activity in the world.

How can you be sure that the products and services you buy aren’t contributing to slavery in our world?

Not for Sale began when organization president, David Batstone, discovered that one of his favourite Indian restaurants in the US was using trafficked women from India as part of its labour force. The restaurant’s trafficking business was exposed when one of the women was killed in a gas leak.

A professor of Ethics at the University of San Francisco, David Batstone is also founder and president of Right Reality, an international social venture firm. He’s authored seven books, the two most recent being Not for Sale
and Saving the Corporate Soul.

David created Not For Sale as part of his all-consuming passion to stop modern day slavery.

Not For Sale is a Campaign of students, artists, entrepreneurs, people of faith, athletes, law enforcement officers, politicians, social workers, skilled professionals, and all justice seekers united to fight the global slave trade and end human trafficking.

The Campaign aims to recruit, educate, and mobilize an international grassroots social movement that effectively combats human trafficking and slavery through “Smart Activism”. It deploys innovative solutions for every individual to re-abolish slavery — in their own backyards and across the globe.

Not For Sale believes that everyone has a skill to contribute that can free an individual living in bondage, and together we can stop human trafficking and end slavery in our lifetime.

Do you want to make a difference? I recently spoke to David Batstone and singer/songwriter/social activist Brant Christopher about the Not For Sale campaign for my radio programme on 98.5 Sonshine FM. Click on the play button on the audio player at the bottom of this post to hear David and Brant talk about how you can be part of the solution.



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