Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Tricked and Courtney's House

Salutations everyone. This is Katherine and Zach reporting live from the church choir room. We're here to tell you about our amazing day learning about sex trafficking.

To start off the day, we split into two groups. Our group, the cool group, watched a documentary called Tricked, which contained interviews and footage surrounding survivors, traffickers, "johns", police department, and families of those trafficked. The video shed light on a serious issue that is not talked about as much as it should be. It also gave people a new perspective on the depths of the issue, exposing outrageous concepts such as the Player's Ball. Afterward we held a discussion where we further looked into the insights provided by the survivors. During this reflection, we also discussed ways we can expand on this knowledge in order to take further action.

The next stop was at Courtney's House, a drop-in safe house for survivors of sex trafficking. There, survivors typically of a Latino or African American descent aged between 12-16 come to have a safe space and eat a nice home-cooked meal. In order to help the transition between their past life and their future life, they are given new clothes and hygiene products if needed, as well as a welcoming environment with support groups. We helped by cleaning the entire house, including everything from the offices to the courtyard. Phylicia, the program coordinator, explained to us a little bit about how Courtney's House runs and how prevalent human trafficking is within the local area.

Today was very much eye opening. We were able to see firsthand the effects of human trafficking within the local area as well as learn about the effects it has had on others across the country. We had such a productive and wonderful day and we can't wait to educate students tomorrow!

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