Sexual Trafficking of Women: Strategies for Developing Trauma Recovery Teams

Learning about and understanding sexual trafficking is critical as more and more children and young adults are either captured or sold into this experience of sex slavery or bondage. Employing a social development framework requires that as we create program responses that promote well-being and recognize and work to promote successful economic development. Sexual trafficking exists because of economic vulnerability in communities. Thus, examining sexual trafficking and creating effective response strategies fits into a social development framework. This paper gives some background on sexual trafficking and how this experience places its captives at grave risk physically, emotionally, and socially. A second segment of this paper introduces a conceptual practice approach that can be developed by regions and communities. This practice model uses a multidisciplinary, multi-systems orientation to create a practice triage. The model incorporates trauma recovery methods and proposes the use of a simulation training to prepare the varied participants to become a competent response team