Prevention: Stopping Human Trafficking Before It Starts
There are three key components when it comes to anti-trafficking work, and each of them has their own unique purposes. With prevention as the foundation of anti-trafficking, the subsequent components are intervention and protection. The purpose of prevention is to stop trafficking before it begins, and in order to do so, education and awareness about trafficking itself are key. Dressember has partnered with organizations in The Dressember Network that make it a point to prevent trafficking; we’ll highlight a few of them in this post!
Just as prevention is the cornerstone of anti-trafficking work, education and awareness are the foundations of prevention itself. If you don’t know much about human trafficking on a global scale, you won’t know how to properly go about working towards preventing it. Alongside education and awareness, the reformation of legal systems in communities that are most at risk for human trafficking is key in prevention. At Dressember, we believe once a trafficker is convicted, other traffickers are less likely to continue down the path of exploitation. Therefore, ensuring legal systems are holding traffickers accountable is a substantial part of prevention.
One of our goals at Dressember is to aid in educating those who come across our organization about what human trafficking is, not only by doing our own research and sharing it on our platform, but also by pointing individuals to organizations in The Dressember Network. Another organization that provides education is the Human Trafficking Institute, as its annual Federal Human Trafficking Report thoroughly details trafficking cases and convictions each year in a digestible format.
How the Dressember Network engages in trafficking prevention
Dressember Network Partners work around the world to combat trafficking. Anti-Slavery International is an organization that is actively reducing exploitation in supply chains across Europe while training businesses to improve labor conditions. They recently tackled (and won) a legal battle in the United Kingdom considering ongoing individualized support for trafficking survivors rather than the then-standard 45 days before having support cut off. Another international organization in the Dressember Network is The Freedom Story, an organization that uses scholarships, mentoring and tutoring to provide at-risk students in Northern Thailand options for freedom and independence, thus preventing the risk of their involvement with being trafficked. Their heavy focus on prevention within trafficking is making a positive impact, with 93% of their students graduating from their program.
In the US, Dressember focuses on prevention and education to prevent trafficking with several organizations including Olive Crest, youthSpark and Truckers Against Trafficking. Olive Crest fights to end child abuse and specializes in training staff and educating children in Washington and California on how to prevent commercial sex trafficking. youthSpark is an organization based out of Atlanta that works within the Fulton County Juvenile Court; youthSpark’s purpose is to protect at-risk youth, and their impact since they were founded in 2000 has proven to be great. Truckers Against Trafficking (TAT) is an organization that provides unique training for members of the trucking, bus, and energy industries (as well as travelers) to spot trafficking on the road. This type of training points towards the importance of prevention in every type of situation where trafficking can be spotted. It’s important that anti-trafficking organizations cover a multitude of territories, and just as TAT works within the travel realm, Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking (BEST) is an anti-trafficking organization that focuses in on the business realm. Since 2012, BEST has “provided awareness, consultation, and training to employers in a variety of sectors: hospitality, information technology, oil and gas, and tourism, to name a few.” Their online training platform, launched in 2016, includes labor and sex trafficking prevention courses for employees of all different sectors.
As you can see, these organizations are working hard to prevent the risk of individuals being trafficked before they have the chance to be. The Dressember Network includes groups that cover all types of human trafficking, and we are honored to call them our programmatic partners.
If you want to learn more about the key components of anti-trafficking advocacy as a whole, visit our blog, where we discuss a myriad of topics that can serve you as a guide.
About the Author
Erin Diaz Cleveland is a writer and planner from Central Virginia. Her life goal is to use her passions to inspire and encourage others to serve and better themselves and their communities. She loves spending time with her family, instructing yoga and drinking iced espresso in the afternoon.