Grassroots campaigning movement Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation has released its annual ‘Crossed Off’ list.

First launched 15 years ago, the blacklist is a curated line-up of company offenders who have objectified women and sexualised girls to sell products and services through the year.
 
This list serves as a guide for consumers who wish to spend their Christmas shopping dollar ethically. 

Every year in the lead up to Christmas we release our Crossed Off list – an annual blacklist of business offenders who objectify women and sexualise girls in their advertising, products and services – and call on our supporters to boycott these unethical companies.

This is our 15th Crossed off blacklist to help guide you in your shopping choices.

This year’s list includes a number of repeat offenders as well as new additions we thought you should know about.

The lineup includes Melbourne-based t.shirt company Teepublic (owned by Articore) for trading in violence against women, global e.commerce giant Shein for sexualising children in products and advertising, and repeat offender - with 80 advertising ethics code violations to its name, Honey Birdette.

Once again we’re asking supporters to send these companies a message that we don’t tolerate business practices which cause real harm to women and girls. If they don’t understand Corporate Social Responsibility, perhaps losing money might help them see its importance.

Looking for ethical alternatives? Check out our CSR Pledge Partners – companies which refuse to profit from objectifying portrayals of women and girls. Please reward them for doing the right thing!

Guest post by Professor Cordelia Fine

Originally published on LinkedIn.

What are your views on women? Apparently, according to some, they should be:

bound, gagged, naked, treated as animals, degraded, humiliated and subordinate. Women exist to be used then thrown out with the rubbish.

That's a neat summary, from a petition by Collective Shout, of the images on t-shirts being sold by TeePublic, owned by Melbourne based parent company Articore.

Our persistence has paid off!

After 7-weeks of calling out e.commerce platform TeePublic for selling baby clothes covered in p*rn themed and violent slogans, we can at last report progress.

On Monday we met with parent company Articore (formerly Redbubble). We received a verbal and written apology and an official undertaking to remove these products which should take about a week (many of those we have exposed before have already gone). Articore will also work on improving its tech and moderating systems to stop it happening again.

Special thanks to all supporters who took action!

Prominent Australian adolescent and child advocates have joined us in condemning ecommerce company TeePublic for its range of children's clothing normalising child sexual abuse and violence against women.

Leading adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg, parenting author Maggie Dent, Bravehearts founder Hetty Johnston, cybersafety expert Susan McLean and Sydney lawyer and child safeguarding expert Maha Melhem have publicly criticised the company.

Last month we launched our campaign against online apparel company, Teepublic, who is selling harmful and degrading clothing, including onesies for infants, with slogans glorifying violence against women and exploitation of children. 

I'm fairly certain there's minimal moderation happening on Aus owned @TeePublic. Slogans encouraging sexual assault of infants? @BraveheartsInc @AusChildhood @Child_Wise @AnneHollonds @mike_salter @TeamCarlyCRF @DanielMorcombe @ActforKids @icmecauofficial @TheCybercop1 @MCG58 pic.twitter.com/ohyTyrRIR5

— Coralie Alison (@CoralieAlison) February 26, 2024

The following day TeePublic responded claiming they had removed the identified items from their platform however we found hundreds more still up. We continued to call them out on social media requesting they do a full investigation and remove all harmful products depicting violence against women and child abuse. 

Five days later, I decided to purchase one of the onesies to test whether TeePublic would in fact produce the products and ship it. Well guess what just arrived in the mail.