7. Help your church, school, or company become slave-free by using only Fairtrade coffee and supplies.
8. Inform your local and national government officials about modern-day slavery, and ask them to commit time and resources to help.
9. Support education for children or anti-slavery campaigns around the world. A few recommendations are: www. worldvision. org, www. savethechildren. org, www. notforsalecampaign. org, and www. freetheslaves. net.
10. Never give up on trying to make a difference.
A quick internet search will turn up dozens of addresses for various companies in lots of different countries. They are too many to list here. Don’ t know who to look up? Flip to the Buying and Boycotting guide at the back of this booklet.
3.2 Interpol intervenes
On the 18 th and 19 th of June, 2009, Interpol led an operation conducted by Côte d’ Ivoire police. Nearly 300 Ivorian law enforcement officers took part in the two-day operation, during which eight teams simultaneously targeted a selection of plantations believed to be using illegal child labour. On the main roads leading from Ghana, vehicles were systematically checked for potential victims of the slave trade.
Codenamed BIA after the river which makes up the border of Ghana and Côte d’ Ivoire, the operation resulted in the rescue of 54 children of seven different nationalities, as well as the arrest of eight people in connection with the child slavery.
The children, having been bought by plantation owners who needed cheap harvesters for the cocoa and palm plantations, were discovered working under extreme conditions, forced to carry massive loads seriously endangering their health and safety. Aged between 11 and 16, children explained that they were regularly forced to work 12 hours a day. They received neither salary nor education. Girls were usually purchased as house maids and would work a seven-day week all year
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