Why prevention?

While it is necessary to shut down the perpetrators and save girls, it is imperative to prevent it from happening at all. Educating girls gives them viable opportunities and renders it unnecessary for them to take a high risk job, for parents to sell their daughters, or to marry them off too young. We believe that teaching a girl about confidence, women’s rights and health can empower her against traffickers. With access to education she can pursue her dreams. Learn how

The issue

As many as 2 million children are forced into prostitution every year and more than half of them live in Asia. Unlike many problems in developing countries, this is one that is actually getting worse. At the peak of the transatlantic slave trade, 80,000 slaves were transported from Africa to the new world. Today, more than 10 times as many women are being forced into brothels or other forms of slavery. Every 30 seconds, another person becomes a victim. Women are lured by traffickers with false promises of work, such as domestic help, models, and other hospitality jobs, and are then forced into slavery. The good news is that our generation can end this horrible human rights violation and everyone has a role. You can be part of the solution.

A Trafficking Story

In a poor rural village, a daughter decides to the make the journey to the city. She’s been offered a job from a friend of a friend as a hotel maid, where she can finally earn enough to help out her parents and give her little sister a chance at going to school.

She rides the bus all night and crosses the border the next morning. She exits the bus and feels very vulnerable and lost in the big city, until a woman with a big smile waves her over. The hotel sent someone to pick her up! Everyone speaks a strange language but she understands enough to know that they need her passport and travel papers. She’s taken to a building with a high fence and brought to a room. They lock her in and she starts to feel scared, but she knows that it’ll be okay — only silly farm girls would be scared.

 They put a knife to her throat and threaten her. Every day they tell her she needs to pay back her travel costs, room and board. They tell her she is under contract to work for them. They tell her if she escapes they will kill her parents and make her little sister join her. Finally her first customer arrives and rapes her. She will be raped again and again, multiple times every day.