How You Can Combat Sex Trafficking

 
 Pray

Pray for freedom for everyone currently a victim. Pray for physical, spiritual, and emotional wholeness for sex trafficking survivors, and for their continued safety and possible reintegration into their family or community.

Throughout the year, find updated prayer requests on sex trafficking at www.TodaysChristianWoman.com.

Learn

Discover what's happening in regard to sex trafficking in your state. Subscribe to the free U.S. Policy Alert Service through the Polaris Project at www.polarisproject.org to receive regular updates, maps, and notifications of legislative developments on trafficking in the United States.

Sign up for the latest news and information about sex trafficking from the Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking (IAST) at www.iast.net.

Tell

Hang an anti-trafficking poster in your church, business, or office. Posters advertising the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) victim hotline are available at www.acf.hhs.gov/trafficking/index.html or by calling 1-888-3737-888.

Introduce your book club, Sunday school, or other gathering to a book or movie on trafficking. Suggested books include Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery, edited by Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten, and The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, by Victor Malerek. Movies include Trade (2007) and Human Trafficking, the four-hour Lifetime miniseries on European women trafficked into the U.S. for prostitution (2005).

 Subscribe to Today's Christian Woman

In each issue of the magazine throughout 2008 we'll update you about this growing concern, introduce you to inspiring women who are battling this evil, and provide ways that you can join the fight. Subscribe today and $3.00 of your payment will go to our ministry partner, the Faith Alliance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAAST). Together, we can make a difference! Subscribe now!

Advocate

Ask your state legislators how they're working to stop sex trafficking in your state. If they're not, offer to provide information on what they can do. To obtain this information, see the U.S. Department of Justice webpage on slavery and trafficking at www.usdoj.gov/crt/crim/tpwetf.htm, and the model state law on trafficking at www.usdoj.gov/crt/crim/model_state_law.pdf.

Serve

Contact FAAST, the Faith Alliance Against Slavery and Trafficking (www.faastinternational.org), for current volunteer opportunities in the U.S. or abroad. FAAST welcomes volunteers to research, write, do graphic design, review laws, plan events, and more.

If you suspect slavery or trafficking is happening near you, report it to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Trafficking Information and Referral Hotline at 1-888-3737-888 or the U.S. Department of Justice Trafficking in Persons Complaint Line at 1-888-428-7581, or the FBI field office nearest you. Your call could save lives.

Give

Donate money toward FAAST's Rapid Response Kits. Throughout 2008, we're encouraging TCW readers to contribute to these kits for women who've just been rescued out of trafficking. Many of these survivors escape with nothing but the clothes they're wearing. FAAST Rapid Response Kits provide basic clothing and hygiene items, including a pair of rubber sandals, two T-shirts, a pair of pants/shorts or a skirt, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a small bottle of shampoo, a bar of soap, a small towel, and a comb or brush.

Along with the kit, FAAST provides recipients with transportation to a safe place. Although one of the most crucial forms of assistance to survivors, transportation can be prohibitively expensive. But since most survivors have been dislocated from their communities, they need to safely reach their home where they can be reunited with their family, or travel to an appropriate service provider where, removed from captivity, they can begin to heal. These kits will be distributed in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cambodia, India, China, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and South Africa. The cost is $60 each. 

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