On 17th October 2011, I helped to launch the Human Trafficking Foundation’s Inaugural Media Awards Ceremony.
Human trafficking, despite our work on Anti Slavery Day, was then seen by many as a being a London based, red light issue involving foreign nationals, far from the radar and attention of our media or politicians.
A notable exception was campaigning MP Anthony Steen who, to the annoyance of some MPs, kept bobbing up and down in the House of Commons and who managed to insert the topic of modern-day slavery into almost any debate that was going. It was his stubbornness, persistence and his ability to unite, to an extent, the many NGOs involved in the fight against modern-day slavery that gave the issue momentum in Parliament and which was then picked up, and built on, by others.
I was drafted in to help Anthony keep up the momentum and I was quite shocked by the imbalance between the scale of the issue in the U.K. and its visibility in the media. I came up with the concept of an annual media awards ceremony and Anthony told me: “Great idea. Go do it.”
This was the aim of the awards: “Celebrating and applauding those in the media covering the fight against human trafficking, giving them the recognition they deserved for their (often dangerous) work and to encourage other news outlets to do more.”
Read more on the awards, and the winners, in this link below. They are heroes who were writing about this obscene practise long before it became an everyday topic.