Jan 2010

Living Lens have been awarded a grant from Comic Relief under the Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking programme. The project will take place over 2 years and we will be working with with the Metropolitan Police, Poppy Project, UK Human Trafficking Centre (UKHTC), Anti-Slavery International, Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and trafficked women to produce a video resource that Support Workers can use with victims. It will enable victims to make informed choices about giving evidence, and prepare those who go ahead, to ensure the process is as supportive and effective as possible.

We are also half way through a project working with a group of young people from the White Lion Centre in Islington. The White Lion Centre has just been closed for a £3.5 million refurbishment. In December the group organised an event that closed the centre and celebrated the new plans. You can read about this in the Islington Gazette, click here to view. The young people and youth workers have become a transition team whose responsibility it is to keep in communication with users of the centre and ensure that people are aware of the activities taking place. They will also be working with the architects in designing the interior of the building to suit the needs of the centres' users.

We are in the middle of a project with Anti-Slavery International and Children Unite that is taking place in India, Peru and Togo. We are working with child domestic workers in all three countries. They are making films that will be used to ensure that the new ILO (International Labour Organisation) Convention on Domestic Work protects children in domestic work from abuse and exploitation. In addition, the project will build the skills and capacity of child domestic workers and the organisations that support them to advocate internationally, nationally and locally through the production of advocacy guidelines to enable replication of advocacy activities with other groups of children.