Put a smile on your face this Christmas with these fabulous Fair Trade  Christmas decorations hand crafted in Nepal.  By buying Fair Trade you are helping disadvantaged women and communities work their way out of poverty and in turn increase their self-esteem. 

Be part of the change…

Available at the conscious consumer an online ethical boutique.

The Conscious Consumer will be at the following events in November & December:

November

8th Sunday – Christmas gift fair at the Clarke Foley Centre

10th Tuesday – St Aidens Harrogate Christmas shopping evening

12th Thursday – Wharfedale hospital

13th Friday - Ben Rhydding Pre-school playgroup, Burley-in-Wharfedale Christmas shopping evening

19th Thursday – Oatlands School Harrogate Xmas Fizz shopping evening

21st Saturday – Bradford Peace Fair, Saltaire

24th Tuesday – University of Leeds Fair Trade Fair

26th Thursday – Wharfedale hospital stall

27th/28th/29th Fri/Sat/Sun -  Simply Christmas shopping experience the Conference Centre Harrogate

December

3rd/4th/5th/6th  – Lightwater Valley Dickensian Fair

10th Thursday – Wharfedale Stall

12th/13th, Sat/Sun – Henshaws Knaresborough, Christmas Festivities

17th Thursday – Wharfedale Stall

Natural flower lights

Want to give a gift that gives more?  Pretty natural flower lights have arrived at the conscious consumer.   These lovely lights are made from preserved rubber tree leaves. The leaves are handmade into flowers and attached to a static light set 4 metres long…. Each set has 35 light bulbs. The plug is 3 pin BS and wire is CE certified. Ideal for home and shop decoration and a unique gift. Available in different colours and red roses too for that special person.

I’m so excited about the the arrival of my new products.  The first range for next season  have started to arrive and these bags and accessories are not just Fair Trade they are earth friendly too (sorry for those of you that haven’t had a summer as yet, but autumn is pending)!  

Our supplier Saffron Winds supports organisations in Cambodia that represent disadvantaged groups of people including landmine victims, extremely poor villagers, single mothers, those disabled including polio, street women and teenagers, and those that assist in development projects.

Your purchase will help someone to have a better quality of life…

Poor women turn company directors — OneWorld South Asia Home

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Beautiful “one off” individually designed pieces of jewellery packed with semi-precious stones and Fair Trade have arrived at the conscious consumer.    

Fair trade bracelet

Our supplier amba nature works directly with producers in the micro cottage industries in the Philippines and specialises in sourcing ethically and fairly traded products from non-profit voluntary cooperatives, foundations and ngos, and livelihood communities and community based enterprises and families.  

Created by skilful craft workers using traditional methods.  Quality products for you and a better quality of life for the producers.

black onyx

Available now at the conscious consumer.

I was struck by the clear message that comes through the article below.  Poverty is the main cause of trafficking of people and approximately  80% of those trafficked are women and girls.  And yes we all can do something to combat this slavery.  We have a responsibility to stop being bystanders because it doesn’t affect us directly.  Get involved with campaigns, there are some amazing organisations dealing with these issues.  Buy Fair Trade it helps women work there way out of poverty and takes them away from the vulnerable position of trafficking…whatever you do you must do something.

Dubai, New Destination on Trafficking Map

Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Jun 29 (IPS) – On May 26, the U.S.-based Center for Investigative Reporting published ‘The Price of Sex’, a vast multi-media project by photojournalist Mimi Chakarova who spent nearly seven years doggedly unraveling the web of sex trafficking.

Chakarova has charted hundreds of journeys across countries in Europe and to the tiny emirate of Dubai in the Gulf, where the sex trade is booming, seemingly condoned by authorities, according to a rights activist. The Bulgarian photojournalist currently lives and works in the U.S.

“I wanted to address the complexity of trafficking, how it works, and how deeply it breaks the human spirit,” the photojournalist told IPS in a detailed email interview about her work – a series of many videos, photos and text. “The impact I hope to achieve is first and foremost to inform and educate my viewers.”

“Ultimately, the viewers can make a decision whether they want to take the next step and help,” she says. “My goal has been to find a way to connect non-governmental organisations that work with trafficked women with those who want to make a difference. Launching http://www.priceofsex.org/content/price-sex-women-speakwas all about linking the two in addition to storytelling.”

Chakarova’s work sensitively presents the tragic stories of women from countries such as Moldova or the Ukraine sold into brutal sexual slavery often by neighbours or acquaintances. The few women who manage to escape find themselves facing not only serious health issues or psychological trauma, but also the social stigma associated with having worked as sex workers.

One of the young women interviewed by Chakarova, Jenea, from a small village in southern Moldova, was sold into prostitution by a neighbour who had promised to help her get a job in Moscow. At 18, Jenea found herself locked in a hotel room in Turkey, forced to sleep with as many as 50 men on some days. She escaped after one year.

Back in her village, she now lives in a two-room house with her sister and niece, unable to find a job because of prejudice, and health problems – incontinence, a direct result of the sexual abuse suffered in Turkey. “It would have been better for me not to have been born,” Jenea says softly, on camera.

Chakarova’s research certainly goes further than telling the terrible stories of trafficked women. The detailed personal accounts highlight the problems that need to be addressed if sex trafficking is to be controlled. Poverty emerges time and again as the main cause in each of her stories.

“Why do young people have to go somewhere else to work?” asks the desperate father of Natasha, a young Ukrainian woman who together with her 13-year-old daughter, would be considered as very vulnerable to being tricked into sex work. “Here we don’t live, here we just exist,” he tells Chakarova. The father pins the responsibility for the widespread poverty in his country on the closing down of factories after the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe after 1989.

According to the photojournalist, it is crucial to inform and educate the women who are potential victims of trafficking, about the risks associated with going abroad in search of new opportunities. “Education is the biggest and most important step, in my opinion,” she emailed IPS.

The project establishes the close links between authorities and traffickers that is crucial to keeping the sex trade going. Aurica, a Moldavian, tells of how when she managed to escape from pimps in Turkey, it was the local police who returned her to them, and even tried to have sex with her.

Chakarova pursued the trails of the sex trade to rich Dubai, one of the seven United Arab Emirates which has undergone explosive oil-fuelled development over the last few years. The massive presence of male foreigners, attracted by the job opportunities in Dubai, is considered the main cause for the high demand for sex workers there.

“We are an extremely globalised place with minimal regulations, and this is where it is exploited,” an unidentified human rights activist from Dubai says in an interview. “And our legal system isn’t really growing fast enough to catch up, because our government is scared of regulating, in case it turns off business and development.”

According to the U.S. State Department, up to 10,000 women from all over the world are being forced into prostitution in Dubai. As Chakarova’s report indicates, the number of women selling sex voluntarily in Dubai is much higher.

In her documentary on Dubai, ‘Night Secrets’, the photojournalist contrasts the apparent social conservatism in the Muslim emirate with the wide availability of information on popular clubs for picking up sex workers and the price ranges, from 150 euros per night for Asian women to a bit more for African and Eastern Europeans, and up to 1,000 euros for Middle Eastern women.

The high prices paid for sexual services in Dubai mean that many women are in the trade voluntarily. “Some women choose to sell their bodies. And some are forced into it and then they choose to stay because they have nothing to return to,” Chakarova told IPS.

“If you were sold to a pimp or a madam who put you through a “break in” period during which men violated your body every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, there is hardly anything left. A lot of women perceive themselves as dirty and unworthy of anything else after that!”

Much of the responsibility for the sexual abuse lies with the clients, thinks Chakarova. “The men who purchase sex need to understand that not every woman they pay for is willing (to do what she does). If a woman is visibly bruised and locked in a room with blankets on the floor and bars on the window, she is hardly a willing participant.”

“I am not naive to think that men will cease paying for sex,” the photojournalist continues, “but I do hope that those who engage in this act would realise that they are equal contributors to one of the ugliest and darkest criminal industries in our time.”

Just like in Turkey, trafficking in Dubai seems to be silently allowed, if not encouraged, by some of the authorities.

As she states at the end of the ‘Night Secrets’ documentary, the filming was not without risks. Chakarova’s hotel room was ransacked on her last day in Dubai. None of the other rooms in the hotel were broken into, and the front desk initially refused to call the police.

Even more, as Chakarova’s camera-woman was preparing to fly out of Dubai, the airport security confiscated all her tapes. “We had been watched and followed all the time,” Chakarova observes.

“It was only after making a spectacle that they returned her tapes saying that they had mistaken her identity. Her luggage did not arrive until a month later, but a few of Dubai’s night secrets did make it out,” she admits, wryly. (END/2009)

When I read something that is so important it needs to be passed on I like to share it through my blog as well as other mediums.  This article reinforces a previous post of mine where I claimed the global recession hits women first and the hardest. 

The following article can be found on the ipsnews.net

Ben Case for IPS wrote:

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 23 (IPS) – A groundbreaking U.N. General Assembly conference on the global economic crisis and its impact on development, set to begin Wednesday, may sideline women’s numerous concerns, civil society groups say.

About 70 percent of the world’s poor are female, and women are typically hit the hardest by economic downturns. The most recent meltdown has been no exception, and its fallout is expected to deepen before getting better.

Taina Bien Aime, executive director of Equality Now, a human rights group focusing on women’s issues, stresses that the ways such crises impact women in particular are profound and complex.

“The repercussions of this financial crisis on women are enormous,” Bien Aime told IPS.

“First, it will affect women’s ability to remain financially independent. Then increased poverty is associated with increased violence in the home. If money is too short, girls often get sold into slavery, either sexual or servitude,” she said.

Some impacts will continue to harm future generations. “If parents have to make a choice of which child gets educated, girls get left out, which is hugely detrimental to the future of that country,” Bien Aime said. “Women and girls are the centre of a community, and these effects on them will impact the entire community.”

The General Assembly conference is considered by some observers to mark a key moment for the future of the United Nations, particularly in terms of its role in forging a new, more democratic roadmap for global financial and economic governance.

The three-day meet does include a Women’s Working Group for Financing and Development, and the draft text to be debated by diplomats and heads of state, which was submitted and finalised Monday, mentions the differential impact the economic crisis is having on women.

However, the working group’s participants are gender equality and rights activists, not member states or delegates.

“We are counting on member states to recall their commitments to gender equality and women’s economic empowerment,” Yassine Fall, economics advisor for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), told IPS.

“UNIFEM has a limited role in the conference itself, which is essentially for member states,” she explained. “What we have been doing is to provide support to a wide range of gender equality advocates and civil society partners to increase awareness among member states of the importance of gender equality issues.”

Last week, an international coalition of non-governmental organisations, mostly comprised of women’s groups, issued a four-page declaration calling for a “gender equitable” response to the global financial crisis.

“The United Nations, not the international financial institutions (IFIs), must lead this process,” Gigi Francisco, general coordinator of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), told IPS.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), 51 million people are projected to lose their jobs by the end of 2009, 22 million of them women.

These numbers appear to show a heavier toll on men, especially in more developed countries, since a larger number of men have reported losing jobs than women.

But Radhika Balakrishnan, director of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University, which focuses on women’s issues in the United States, told IPS that figure alone is misleading.

“More men have lost jobs, but more women have lost their homes, since one of the main targets of predatory lending [in the U.S.] was single mothers,” she said.

“Furthermore, when resources are short the time women spend on care increases. Cooking, laundry to save money etc. expand the amount of hours women work. This leads to an increase in stress as well,” she noted.

Women who lose their jobs may also have less flexibility to relocate, switch careers or acquire new employment, and the extra labour women pick up in care further reduces their ability to earn an income.

The ILO also acknowledges the likelihood that more women will be pushed into informal and insecure jobs than men, a fact often overlooked by national economic policies.

“Unfortunately, it is unlikely that women will benefit equally from the stimulus packages or fiscal policy measures that only industrialised and middle-income countries can adopt to stimulate renewed growth,” Fall told IPS.

“The assumption that men are heads of household too often result in plans that omit targeted strategies to shore up the economic roles that women play and that fail to provide opportunities for women to fully contribute to the recovery process,” she said.

And while the General Assembly conference includes a women’s working group to address these issues, according to Bien Aime, that is part of the problem.

“The U.N. is very good at segregating women’s issues,” she told IPS. “It is critical to incorporate gender into all issues, that’s where the U.N. fails a lot.”

“They reserve an afternoon for women, almost as an afterthought,” she added.

Gender is an issue the U.N. has long struggled to properly address, even within its own structure.

According to a 2008 report by the office of the secretary-general, progress in the percentage of women represented in professional and senior appointed posts at the U.N. over the past decade was “disturbingly slow”, with only a three percent increase in female representation since 1998.

“It’s very necessary to have women in politics, to have women in society who come into power,” Barbara Prammer, president of the Austrian parliament, told IPS in May. “We need women in leading positions in the economy, everywhere, I’m deeply convinced.”

The U.N.’s official summary of the conference states explicitly that one of its main goals is to mitigate the impacts of the crisis on “vulnerable populations”, but nowhere are gender issues specifically noted.

The draft resolution, submitted Monday, makes simple mention of gender issues and asserts the importance of “correcting imbalances… and having a strong gender perspective.”

The conference was originally scheduled for Jun. 1 to 3, and General Assembly president Miguel d’Escoto completed a draft outcome document in May, but it made no mention of gender issues whatsoever and was scrapped when the conference was postponed.

The new statements mark a possible change in attitude towards gender issues, and Fall told IPS she is confident this resolution will be approved. “The draft outcome is virtually agreed upon,” she said.

Still, the voice women’s rights groups have in the conference and the action taken as a result remain to be seen.

Prammer expressed pessimism to IPS in May. “Whenever the situation is difficult, you hear – like I hear in Austria – ‘Oh, it’s not simple at the moment. We have the financial crisis. We have to solve the problems there. Please do not speak about the gender issue. Do it afterwards,’” she said.

Creating new spaces for social outcasts in India — OneWorld South Asia Home

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