In February, Emily Scott hosted fellow Legacy members in her home for a conversation around Legacy Member JaMel Perkins’ multi-stakeholder initiative to end child sex trafficking in San Francisco. JaMel and her “Freedom FWD” Co-Founder, Natasha Dolby, shared openly with us about their experience with this project and the lessons learned. A few key takeaways from the lessons shared:

• The Freedom FWD idea came as a solution to fill the void after Sage, a survivor-led organization aimed at addressing this issue in San Francisco, abruptly folded after having been in operation since 1992
• The five primary road blocks JaMel and Natasha have identified are:
  • Difficulty in identifying victims
  • Challenges in data collection and sharing due to privacy concerns and HIPAA compliance
  • Complexity in bureaucratic institutions and the challenges in working with them
  • Social norms that enable adults to buy youth for sex
  • Racial, social and economic inequalities
• Vison for the first three years:
  • Strengthen frontline organizations
  • Collaborations within the space
  • Identify and close gaps
• Important next steps:
  • Amplifying survivors’ voices
  • Leveraging technology
  • Parent/Caregiver Toolkit
  • Strengthening frontline organizations through workshops, storytelling
  • Providing meeting places and convenings to increase collaboration
• Part of the solution involves unlocking San Francisco residents’ awareness of this issue—media connections are an important tool for scaling and making systemic impact

Additional information:

• News stories on how a  flight attendant  and an uber driver helped intervene in cases of trafficking
• Sex Trafficking Prevention: A Trauma-Informed Approach for Parents and Professionals, a book by Savannah Sanders that lays out steps parents and professionals can take to mitigate risk factors that make young people vulnerable to trafficking
• Stolen Youth, another Legacy-connected organization in Seattle for which Legacy member Paula Clapp is on the Board