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1. Calling all Artists & Crafters

   10.Aug.07, 18:22 EDT
   
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   CALL TO ARTISTS and CRAFTERS! 
   
   The Truth Isn’t Sexy needs YOUR donations for our 2007 Leeds Art Exhibition & Benefit event. 
   
   We’re putting together an art exhibition to highlight issues affecting women; either work that highlights any of these issues, or work celebrating the strength, talents, abilities, or individualities of women (be that you as the artist, or the art’s subject matter). 
   At the end of the exhibition, we will auction the donated work to raise funds for the campaign. 
   
   By donating a small work of art or a craft that you've created, YOU can help us raise the funds essential to The Truth Isn’t Sexy campaign which has been devised to expose the truth between human trafficking and prostitution. 
   
   To learn more about the national campaign, visit http://thetruthisntsexy.com 
   
   At this early stage I am looking to gauge levels of support/response, and look to view how many artists would be interested in contributing to the art exhibition/benefit auction. Please leave a comment here (or email reassessyrweapons@manifesta.co.uk) if you are interested in supporting this project by donating a piece of artwork to be exhibited & sold, and I will contact you in due course when the event takes full shape. 
   
   Paintings, drawings, sculptures, photos, etc. will be silently auctioned, along with handcrafted items, including jewellery, knits, and household items. 
   
   Participating artists will be provided promotional space at the event. 
   
   * * * * * 
   
   Launched to coincide with the bicentennial abolition of slavery, The Truth Isn't Sexy campaign aims to highlight the realities of sex trafficking and mobilise support for the few organisations working to support women who have been trafficked. 
   Throughout the UK, TTIS Campaign Collectives are being set up to fundraise £2,500 in order to buy beer mats for at least 40 pubs in and around their home town. Designed to catch the viewer’s attention by imitating telephone box calling cards, one side portrays an enticing image whilst the other highlights the brutal reality of trafficked women. 
   
   For more info on the campaign, check out http://thetruthisntsexy.com and come along to the Leeds TTIS fundraising events (www.myspace.com/_alittlelessconversation) to show your support and have a good evening! 
   
   The Truth Isn’t Sexy campaign has been devised to expose the truth between human trafficking and prostitution. Networks of criminal gangs are exploiting impoverished communities across our world and are buying and selling women and children as though they were commodities. Promised a life freed from poverty, these girls are easy targets. All it takes is an unfortunate response to a carefully worded advert in a local newspaper, a new boyfriend skilled in the art of manipulation, or a scheming family. The girl is then passed from the hands of care-less traffickers and sold on to brothels. 
   The atrocities these innocent women suffer can be compared with the worst type of slavery. Many of the girls have no idea that they will be involved in the sex-industry and those who do are often misled about the violent and brutal entrapment that awaits them. 
   Often having to service 30 to 40 men a day, they are kept locked up in brothels unable to access help. They are brutalized and threatened until they are broken and compliant. Technically this is organised rape. Trafficked girls usually have no control over their earnings. They are told by their owners to pay off the highly inflated expenses of the journey; a journey they were either duped into taking or took without the knowledge of such costs being incurred. However, working off these ‘debts’ is almost impossible owing to constant fines and additional charges for food and board in the brothels. As well as the financial trap, they are caught in a physical and mental trap that uses violence and emotional coercion to maintain their enslavement.