
I've spent a fair amount of time this week handing out beermats similar in style to the image above. Sometimes I was wearing a dog collar, and people expressed shock that a vicar should be distributing such material. The headline reads 'Natasha's been a naughty girls', and the text below says,
She tried to escape from her traffickers. Instead she was imprisoned, beaten and forced to have sex with up to forty men a day. Her pimp says he will kill her baby if she tries it again.
The truth isn't sexy.
It's a campaign against sex trafficking led by a small group of inspired volunteers from the UK emerging church network. On Saturday they oprganised a 'pub crawl' in Croydon, and I went along. Instead of drinking lots of beer, we offered campaign beer mats and posters to the managers of each of the pubs we stopped at. My group visited eleven pubs, and nine took beer mats. In the other two, the manager was out, and the staff didn't have the authority to take them. No-one refused point-blank.
I've just spent the last couple of days at the chaplaincy stand at the Freshers Fair at Thames Valley University in Ealing. As well as telling people about the chaplaincy, I handed out TTIS beer mats, and got into a lot of conversations about sex trafficking. It got the message about sex trafficking out to a lot of students, and it was an effective piece of chaplaincy work as well; everyone knows that I'm the chaplain, and something of what I stand for.
The next pub crawl is in Ealing on Saturday 17th November, beginning at 11:30. It's being organised by The Truth Isn't Sexy in conjunction with Grace and the TVU Chaplaincy. I'll post more details on the blog when I have them. Everyone is welcome, provided you are old enough to enter a pub.