Beyond Victim Identification: A Practitioner’s Guide to Designing a Youth Anti-Sex Trafficking Advocacy Program

ABSTRACT

Thousands of youth are sexually trafficked each year in the United States. In order to address this concern, anti-trafficking advocates often emphasize the importance of uniform screening protocols to assist with the identification of survivors. Unfortunately, an oft-overlooked component of sex trafficking identification is what to do once a victim has been identified, and how to best meet survivors’ complex needs. In this article, the authors provide social work practitioners and other advocates with best practice guidelines for how to design and evaluate anti-sex trafficking advocacy programs for children and youth. These guidelines include considerations related to direct services with clients, community partnerships, and organizational capacity, as well as recommendations for how to begin and then evaluate programming. Regardless of the form selected for the program, all anti-sex trafficking programs should be designed to provide effective, client-centered follow-up and advocacy once a positive identification is made in the community. The recommendations included in this paper are based upon extant literature, the authors’ practice experience with survivors, and insights from anti-sex trafficking program evaluations.

KEYWORDS:

• Commercial sexual exploitation of children
• commercial sexual exploitation of youth
• domestic minor sex trafficking
• commercial sexual exploitation
• anti-trafficking advocacy
• anti-trafficking program
• counter-trafficking advocacy
• human trafficking
• social work practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by a Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) federal pass-through grant awarded to the Office of the Texas Governor (OOG) Child Sex Trafficking Team and Traffick911. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the VOCA, OOG, or Traffick911.