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Grace Forrest receives the Freedom from Fear Award
The Australian Grace Forrest is the founder of Walk Free, an international human rights organisation dedicated to eradicating modern slavery in all its forms. Forrest has been working to combat slavery for over a decade, and thanks to her efforts, politicians, policymakers and businesses now have access to the Global Slavery Index, a dataset designed to measure and understand modern slavery. Forrest has also spent a great deal of time in the field to document the experiences of survivors. A crucial part of Walk Free’s work is emphasising the need for greater transparency in global supply chains to identify modern slavery and strengthening the leadership of survivors against modern slavery.
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.