Youth sessions protect village

March 23, 2018

At Justice and Care, we want to stop children being trafficked in the first place. That’s why we run regular awareness sessions for young people in the most vulnerable communities, as part of our Safe Village Programme.

In these sessions, young people from the participating villages gather together to hear about the risk traffickers pose to their communities and ways in which they can protect themselves and their families.

The children actively participate in the meetings, giving our team lots of feedback on ways in which they think the villages could be better protected.

Not long ago, one of our participants Rohan* told the team how a trafficker had recently come into their village and approached vulnerable families, trying to lure them into sending their children to work for him.

As soon as Rohan and the rest of our youth group got to know about it, they quickly identified the trafficker, stopped the man and helped remove him from the village.

The group further explained that the reason they had the courage to do so was because of the awareness sessions they had been exposed to by our staff. They now knew about child rights and child protection. They now knew the danger this man posed.

By working on the ground, directly in the source areas of trafficking victims, our work is making communities stronger, reducing the number of people who go missing and producing much safer environments for children to grow up.