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Grace Forrest receives the Freedom from Fear Award
De Australische Grace Forrest is de oprichtster van Walk Free, een internationale mensenrechtengroep die zich richt op de uitroeiing van moderne slavernij in al haar vormen. Forrest werkt al meer dan tien jaar in de strijd tegen slavernij en dankzij haar inspanningen beschikken politici, beleidsmakers en bedrijven nu over de Global Slavery Index, een dataset voor het meten en begrijpen van moderne slavernij. Ook bracht Forrest veel tijd door in het veld om de ervaringen van overlevenden te verankeren. Een cruciaal onderdeel van het werk van Walk Free is het benadrukken van de behoefte aan meer transparantie in wereldwijde toeleveringsketens om moderne slavernij te identificeren en het versterken van het leiderschap van overlevenden tegen moderne slavernij.
Meer over Grace Forrest
During her teenage years Forrest spent some time working in a shelter for exploited children in Nepal. When she returned to the shelter two years later, the children had disappeared, and she was told they had never been there, which was clearly not true. This was her first encounter with the extensive consequences of global human trafficking, which lead to the realization that she needed to fight it. At the end of that year, Forrest, in collaboration with her family, founded Walk Free to combat modern slavery. Modern slavery refers to situations of exploitation in which a person cannot refuse or leave due to threats, violence, coercion, deception, and/or abuse of power. To operationalize this complex definition, Walk Free focuses on core forms of modern slavery: forced labor and forced marriage. By conducting 110,000 interviews in 75 different countries, identifying government efforts, and combining measurements of countries' vulnerability to modern slavery, estimates of modern slavery cases were made in 160 countries. Under Forrest's leadership, the organization continues to evolve in order to illuminate and eradicate modern slavery globally.