Razoo Giving Guide: Slavery

The Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST) works with officials on the state and federal levels and local organizations to ensure that people who have been forced into slavery will be able to find a way out and become independent. As one of the preeminent anti-trafficking organizations in the U.S. for the last decade, CAST provides social services, legal services, and advocacy to victims of trafficking, and has trained more than 5,000 law enforcement officials in combating human trafficking. The organization has also opened America’s first shelter for women who’ve been victims of trafficking, where they can receive the medical help and counseling that they need to move forward. 

A donation to CAST could help a former sex slave move past her traumatic experience and learn to live as an independent, self-sufficient woman.

Setting free victims of human trafficking is important, but it’s only one step in a larger process: After a slave has become independent, it’s essential to punish the captors and bring them to justice. Only by prosecuting such criminals to the fullest extent of the law can we hope to put an end to such barbaric abuses of human rights.

By default, victims of human trafficking are penniless and cannot afford lawyers to plea their cases—but the International Justice Mission exists to serve their cause. This Christian organization is made up of social workers, investigators, and lawyers, who work together to protect the victim’s rights and wellbeing, and to take action against criminals in the world of human trafficking. The IJM has field offices in 12 developing countries, where it works with local partner groups to provide help and support to people who’ve been victimized by the human trafficking trade, and negotiates with local and state authorities to press charges against their abusers.

In the last four years alone, the IJM has helped to free more than 2,000 people from slavery. A gift to the IJM can help to serve justice for someone who’s never known anything but oppression.

In 1998, Linda Smith, then a Washington Congresswoman, traveled to Bombay’s Falkland Road, one of the world’s worst brothel districts. Horrified by the abuses she witnessed, Smith pledged to use her influence to stop the exploitation of children for sexual slavery, and established Shared Hope International.

Through SHI, she began working with local partner groups to build housing for former prostitutes, where they could live rent-free for as long as they wanted, and receive educational and job training. But it wasn’t enough to help the women who’d been sold into slavery: she wanted to bring the trade to an end. To do that, SHI has formed coalitions of leaders from all over the world, encouraging them to use their power to bring an end to the human trafficking trade.

SHI also discovered something shocking: thousands of American children are being trafficked for sexual purposes, right within our own borders. To end this horrifying practice, SHI is working with Anti-Trafficking Task Forces in ten cities to identify predators and victims. A donation to SHI could help keep a child in your very own neighborhood from falling victim to a sexual slavery ring.

Somaly Mam, the founder of the Somaly Mam Foundation (SMF) is, herself, a former sex slave. Born into a Cambodian tribal minority, she was forced to work in a brothel from a young age, and faced constant beatings and abuse. After one of Mam’s close friends was murdered by a pimp, she vowed to escape from slavery and to dedicate her life to helping other victims of sex trafficking reach independence—and that’s exactly what she’s done.

Since escaping from bondage, Mam has worked tirelessly as an advocate for victims of human trafficking, working with numerous anti-trafficking nonprofits in Europe and Cambodia. In 2007, she established her own nonprofit group in the United States, the Somaly Mam Foundation, which works to raise awareness of the global sex slavery issue, and to rescue and rehabilitate former enslaved prostitutes.

SMF enlists celebrities to speak about the issue, and provides former sex slaves with a platform to speak about their own horrifying experiences. The group grants money to support rescue efforts for women in Cambodian shelters, offers micro-financing opportunities to allow the rescued women to start their own businesses, and provides the women with opportunities to learn English and obtain work as hair stylists and seamstresses. A donation could help an abused and exploited young woman rise above her circumstances and become an activist for social change, just like Somaly Mam herself. 

You may already be familiar with the International Organization for Migration: helping more than 12 million refugees and immigrants resettle since its establishment in 1951, the IOM may have even helped a member of your own family find a better life. The IOM is a large international agency dealing with a wide variety of migration issues, but its U.S. partner site, the US Association for International Migration (USAIM), focuses much of its work on one of the IOM’s most important missions: ending the human trafficking industry.

USAIM provides financial support to several IOM programs working to end modern slavery, including the Trafficked Children in Ghana Project, which helps children who’ve been sold into slavery on fishing boats in Ghana reunite with their families, go to school, and receive counseling and medical treatment; the Moldova program, which rescues young women from Moldova who’ve been tricked and forced into prostitution; and the Ukraine program, which helps to raise awareness of the country’s strong human trafficking practice, and to provide assistance to victims of trafficking.

USAIM has used donations from concerned Americans to help the IOM free slaves in these and dozens of other countries: to date, IOM has provided help to about 15,000 victims of human trafficking. Your support could help an enslaved child return to the family he thought he’d never see again.