Fact Sheet

Mission
Our mission is protect women and children by raising public awareness of human trafficking and to work with other NGOs to provide housing and care for these victims in the United States and around the world.
According to the UN, over three million women and children are trafficked every year. This modern-day slavery generates a $32 billion industry yearly for international criminals.

Vision
Our two-fold goals are: to prevent human trafficking and modern day slavery. We plan to help those who have already been victimized. By creating a public awareness campaign, we will generate awarness of the crime and raise funds that build safe havens where victims can live after being rescued.

Who We Are
Innocents at Risk is a child-advocacy non-for-profit 501C-3 organization established to fight child trafficking though awareness programs aimed at educating the public of these crimes. We have established a public-private partnership with the United States Department of State to support our battle. We are also working together with the NGO's.

What We Are Doing
We are currently producing a 10-minute public service video to support the awareness campaign about human trafficiking. The video will be distributed to embassies and schools in the U.S. and around the world in order to further our goals of education and awareness. This orginal video is intended as a wake-up call to those who are unaware of this threat and to the millions of innocents who are most vulnerable. We are printing brochures and posters for educational awareness for schools and public locations for the purpose of prevention.

Governments need to commit to combat trafficking. This includes ensuring that the necessary legislation is in place to punish traffickers, the necessary resources are made available to ensure that police are equipped to fight trafficking, and that government officials themselves take every opportunity to warn people, in particular children, of the dangers of trafficking.

Laws need to be in place and reliably enforced: Cross-border international agreements help prevent trafficking and facilitate the safe return of trafficked children. Laws should not penalize children who have been trafficked. Crime and corruption can all undermine law enforcement. Attitudes and practices need to change: Beliefs about the role of girls, particularly with regard to their education, can lead to families putting girls at risk. Sometimes it is considered better for a girl to seek domestic work, perhaps in another country, than go to school.

Children need to be aware of dangers of trafficking so that they can protect themselves. Children are often lured with promises of money and a "better life". Children need to be offered practical skills that allow them to find viable alternatives to being trafficked. This could include vocational training or income-generating activities at the community leave.

Adults need to be able to recognize the signs and respond accordingly. A teacher needs to recognize in a child the warning signs of a troubled home. Likewise, police raiding a brothel need to know to search for girls who have come from other countries, since they are often trafficking victims. A border guard with limited awareness of trafficking may not react when seeing young children crossing a border without their parents.

Media Attention can be an important element in the fight against trafficking. Many families and children will be dependent on the media to inform and educate them about the danger of trafficking. Media reporting of trafficking issues can also encourage, influence or pressure others, including government and civil society, to respond to the problem of trafficking.

Reintegration and rehabilitation for survivors of trafficking: Children who have been trafficked need services to help them escape their situation, and to return home to a "normal" life. These services might include hotlines that children can call to ask for help of safe shelters for them to stay in while they work out what they want to do. Children, their families, and their communities may need assistance when a trafficked child comes home. Survivors of trafficking may need special assistance to come to terms with what has happened to them, or medical services, including HIV/AIDS test.

Definition: 'Commercial Sexual Exploitation' comprises sexual abuse by an adult and remuneration in cash or kind to the child or a third party or persons. The child is treated as a sexual object and as a commercial object. The commercial sexual exploitation of children constitutes a form of coercion and violence against children, and amounts to forced labor and a contemporary form of slavery.
Commercial sexual exploitation of children consists of practices that are demeaning, degrading and many times life-threatening to children. There are three primary and interrelated forms of commercial sexual exploitation of children: prostitution, pornography, and child sex tourism.
Child Prostitution: the use of any child in sexual activities for remuneration or any other form of consideration;
Child Pornography: any representation, by whatever means, of a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes;
Child Sex Tourism: the commercial sexual exploitation of children by persons who travel from their own country to another usually less developed country, to engage in sexual acts with children.

Definition: 'Trafficking' refers to the illegal transport of human beings, in particular children, for the purpose of selling or exploiting their labor.
Trafficking is a global problem affecting large numbers of children every year. Children and their families are often lured by the promise of better employment and a more prosperous life far from their homes. Child trafficking is lucrative and linked with criminal activity and corruption. It is often hidden and hard to address. Trafficking violates a child's right to grow up in a family environment. In addition, children who have been trafficked face a range of dangers, including violence and sexual abuse. They are even arrested and detained as illegal aliens - often with little or no access to their parents or other support services. An estimated 2 million children are trafficked each year.