“Uncontained” is a new Canadian human trafficking awareness campaign, directed by Mark Zibert of production company Scouts Honour for Banfield Agency. The emotional Public Safety Canada campaign video is set to Billie Eilish’s “When the Party’s Over” and reveals a shocking stat–almost one-third of human trafficking victims in Canada were trafficked by a current or former intimate partner.
Shot during COVID-19 with heightened restrictions and parameters in place, the intimate partners depicted in the spot are actually a couple in real life, with only one of them in the role of a professional actor.
“The main objective of the campaign is to highlight public misperceptions and help to define what human trafficking is,” said Lindsay Gavey, strategy director at Banfield Agency. “95% of Canadians confused human trafficking with human smuggling when asked to define the term. This campaign aims to educate Canadians about the reality of this problem, along with its prevalence in Canada, and ultimately recognize the signs and take action to stop it.”
Human trafficking involves recruiting, transporting, or holding victims to exploit them or to help someone else exploit them, generally for sexual purposes or work. While most Canadians said what they thought was human trafficking is a serious issue, they felt that it was not a serious problem in their own local community. The number of police-reported of incidents of human trafficking however is on the rise in Canada–from 50 cases in 2009 to 340 in 2016.
“We were presented with a unique creative challenge for this project–one that meant confronting our team’s own misperceptions about human trafficking”, said Craig Lobban, creative director, Banfield Agency. “We wanted to create something relatable to the Canadian public by evoking the common imagery many mistakenly associate with human trafficking–the shipping container. We debunk these misperceptions using the ‘Human Trafficking isn’t what you think it is’ campaign tagline and reveal that things sometimes aren’t what they seem between traffickers and victims.”