Human Trafficking Awareness Day

Human Trafficking Awareness Day is January 11! Use the day to raise awareness about the tragic issue of human trafficking. Human trafficking includes sexual exploitation, but it's more than that. Human trafficking is about the coercing of persons into bonded labor and domestic servitude, the enslavement of persons in agricultural work and in factories, the capturing of children to be soldiers, the buying and selling of human beings.
 

American Baptist Women’s Ministries (ABWM) has been engaged in raising awareness about human trafficking, particularly sex trafficking, for many years. Through the new Bridges & Gateways Endowment: Break the Chains Fund, ABWM will continue to provide education, advocacy, partnerships, and opportunities to learn how to prevent sex trafficking through workshops and events, partnerships, and grants for new projects.
 
Help American Baptist Women’s Ministries in this effort by giving to the Bridges & Gateways Endowment: Break the Chains. Give online at www.abwomensministries.org/give or send your donation to AB Women’s Ministries, 1075 First Ave STE C-210, King of Prussia, PA 19406.





Human Trafficking Awareness: What can you do?

1. Plan a worship service with a human trafficking theme.
2. Plan a community awareness event in your community. Speaker ideas: local coordinator of a human trafficking awareness organization, police department, Salvation Army.
3. Host a Human Trafficking Mission Fair for American Baptist churches or local churches in your community. Invite local organizations to have a table and display; make displays on each of the Break the Chains grant recipients—email them for flyers and up-to-date information to share on their ministry; have a speaker; have a dinner with a free-will offering to benefit a human trafficking abolitionist group or outreach to trafficking survivors or other related organization.
4. Ask your local library to have a display in the month of January on books in their library on the issue of human trafficking. Make a display board to place with the book display.
5. Write letters to the editor to your local newspaper on the issue or write a guest commentary on the issue for the paper.
6. Have an awareness/fundraiser event to support a local human trafficking abolitionist or outreach organization.
7. Invite women in your community to a Human Trafficking Awareness Breakfast with a speaker.
8. Hold a book discussion using a book on the issue of human trafficking. Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers is a great book for this. You might want to do this in conjunction with your local library.
9. Movie Night and have a discussion afterwards.
10. Prayer Walk/Candlelight Vigil—Plan a prayer walk in your community bringing awareness that human trafficking happens in every community. End at your town center or a church with candles and a time of prayer.
11. Make a traveling mural focusing on victims of human trafficking. (This is a great way to get your youth involved.) Begin in your church and arrange for it to be on display at a different church, the public library, or town hall in your community each week through January. It could also be accompanied by an informational display on the issue.
12. Plan a brown-bag lunchtime discussion at your workplace, sharing with your colleagues about the issue of human trafficking.
13. Decorate the outside of your church with lights, purple ribbons, and a human trafficking banner so that your church will be a beacon of light on this issue in the month of January.