TRAFFICK911

Traffick911 exists with the sole purpose of freeing youth from sex trafficking by building trust-based relationships. This is accomplished by a 24/7 crisis response and the Voice & Choice Program Team walking alongside child sex trafficking victims and with Multi-Disciplinary Team partners. Traffick911 was founded in 2009 by community activists who discovered that child sex trafficking was happening in North Texas. Over its history, the organization’s abolition efforts include training over 82,000 youth and adults face-to-face with prevention and awareness messages, training over 18,000 first responders, and directly serving over 2,000 survivors. To determine our success in meeting this goal, Traffick911 tracks the following outcomes:

1) 90% of clients recovered meet an advocate within 60-90 mins of being dispatched to a recovery crisis call and are given food, clothing, or other resources for immediate needs.
2) 75% of clients receive safety planning services.
3) 66% of client empowerment goals set within a quarter are met.

In turn, our intended impact is that the safe trust Traffick911 builds with child survivors rehabilitates lives broken by complex trauma and facilitates their ability to re-enter school, enter the job force, and make meaningful connections that build into overall community resilience.

1) 24/7 CRISIS RESPONSE
Traffick911 brings a unique understanding to working with this vulnerable population. When a victim is recovered from sex trafficking by law enforcement, responds and dispatches an Advocate to their location within 60-90 minutes. Through this unique field-based approach, T911 meets youth right where they are at their point of recovery—in a police station, hospital, jail, treatment center, or in the community—and begins building trust bonds with each child while simultaneously collaborating with system partners to safety plan and determine next steps.

Traffick911’s crisis response provides a trauma-informed, trust-based intervention that begins with meeting basic needs. Establishing trust and meeting basic needs begins with a simple backpack the Advocate brings for the child to keep. Traffick911 then finds services and resources attuned to the unique needs of each child in collaboration with system partners. Immediate goals include establishing felt safety, meeting clothing, hygiene, medical and nutritional needs, implementing safety plans, and securing safe shelter.

2) CRISIS STABILIZATION
At recovery, every child or youth is paired with a highly-trained Voice & Choice Advocate who continues with them throughout the program. Advocates are full-time, field-based victim service providers who are the core of the overall Team. Advocates operate through a trauma-informed lens to engage every child/youth in an individualized and collaborative process of identifying, accessing, and coordinating resources, support, and services for their emotional and social recovery. Advocates initiate relationally-based case management with each victim in close collaboration with legal guardians (caregivers) and each county’s Multi-Disciplinary Team. The Advocate's first and foremost goal is to build a trust-based relationship. Advocates meet and/or communicate with each child at least once a week, and often the early months are filled with addressing immediate needs to ensure safety and stabilization. Each Advocate coordinates necessary medical care and therapy and acts as a liaison between the survivor and public care systems and support services. Advocates also work with law enforcement and legal authorities to assist in prosecuting perpetrators. Above all, the relationship between the Advocate and the child is the intervention.

3) LONG-TERM EMPOWERMENT
Not only is the VCP Team available 24/7 upon a crisis recovery by law enforcement, but the team also continues to be available for clients 24/7 throughout services. Traffick911 offers continued support as long as it proves beneficial to every client. This continuum of care aims to decrease the risk of re-victimization through trauma-informed case management, goal-planning, educational achievement, job attainment, finding safe and permanent housing, and connection to safe relationships via community partners. Traffick911 regularly engages Survivor Leaders as a part of the program.

Traffick911 exists with the sole purpose of freeing youth from sex trafficking by building trust-based relationships. Traffick911 was founded in 2009 by community activists who discovered that child sex trafficking was happening in North Texas. Over its history, the organization’s abolition efforts include training over 82,000 youth and adults face-to-face with prevention and awareness messages, training over 18,000 first responders, and directly serving over 1,000 survivors.

Traffick911’s groundbreaking journey began by operating a state-licensed, long-term restoration residential home for child sex trafficking victims which catapulted their understanding of the day-to-day needs of trafficking survivors. In addition, T911 delivered the first-of-its-kind youth prevention outreaches in schools, juvenile detention centers, and youth shelters, teaching youth how to stay free from trafficking. Within those outreaches, Traffick911 encountered hundreds of youth who had experienced trafficking and organically learned from those encounters how to walk alongside survivors in their freedom journey effectively.

After seven years in the anti-trafficking movement, Traffick911 began to realize its true expertise: building relationships that weren’t tied to a specific residential program or service; but simply walking alongside survivors day in, day out, year after year on their unique healing journey. Traffick911 realized that relationship was the key to their success which ultimately laid the foundation for the organization’s premier program, the Voice & Choice Program, which is now the exclusive programmatic focus of Traffick911.

NEW PARTNERSHIPS
In 2022, Traffick911 entered into three new partnerships, which will result in an increased investment of resources by the VCP Team:
- Traffick911 became the sole NGO formal partner providing crisis response and long-term services to CST victims on the ​​North Texas Trafficking Task Force, a federal task force comprised of seven federal agents and nine state and local task force officers, led by Homeland Security Investigations
- Traffick911 began partnering with the Rockwall County Children’s Advocacy Center to begin serving CST victims in Rockwall County
- Traffick911 began to provide assessment/intake for advocacy services to Dallas County’s Permanency Court led by Judge Delia Gonzales, which sees more than 150 youth multiple times per year

CAREGIVER SUPPORT
After serving survivors for nearly 15 years, the lens of our advocacy has sharpened by increasing support to the caregivers of those survivors.

When we use the word caregiver, we mean legal guardians or parents. We intentionally use the word caregiver because often the legal guardians of the youth we serve may be their aunt, grandparent, relative, foster parent, etc. Whatever their title, we’ve seen firsthand just how much support they need as they journey alongside their child. We believe that communities free from relational brokenness begin at home.

In 2022, more than 20 caregivers were served by our Caregiver Support team, meeting them right where they are: in their communities, providing trust-based relational advocacy, emotional support, support services, and counseling. Our goal is to surround caregivers and watch them bring empowerment and freedom to their homes. By helping meet families' day-to-day needs and holding a safe space for each of them, we are helping to create emotional and mental capacity for homes to take the initial sustainable steps to heal from trauma. The reward of this is quite rich – a generational change.

Being proximate to each caregiver has confirmed for us, once again, that healing happens when we are in community.