Preventing, Identifying, and Responding to Trafficking Among Systems-Involved Youth: A Toolkit for Colorado Professionals
Despite increased awareness of human trafficking, minors who have experienced exploitation or are at risk are still frequently overlooked or misidentified. These youth often end up in detention centers, disengage from school, or turn to substances to cope with complex trauma. How can professionals begin to recognize trafficking when it manifests in everyday scenarios including survival sex […]
Defeating the Illicit Massage Industry: A Scalable Strategy to Disrupt Organized Exploitation
The Network’s goal is to defeat trafficking in the illicit massage industry. Integral to that is enabling a research ecosystem capable of achieving greater analytic sophistication than the strategies used by traffickers themselves. By combining infrastructure, domain-specific data engineering, and academic rigor, we aim to accelerate the pipeline from intelligence to insight to decision to […]
Barriers and Breakthroughs: Navigating the Complexities of Civil Litigation in the Fight Against Sex Trafficking
Sex trafficking civil cases can be a powerful tool for justice—but they’re also incredibly complex and challenging on the survivor. This session explores why, from proving harm and navigating deeply personal trauma to litigating against corporate defendants rather than the individual traffickers. At the same time, civil litigation can offer real value: validation, resources for […]
Building Child Welfare Responses to Child Labor Trafficking
Since the beginning of modern efforts in the United States to address human trafficking around 25 years ago, child welfare agencies have played some role in responding to youth who have or may have experienced human trafficking. In more recent years, federal law has significantly reshaped the way child welfare agencies approach identification and service […]
The Power of Unlikely Relationships
This presentation examines how engagement strategies, rapport-building, and intentional funding efforts can either transform or hinder a survivor’s journey. There is an unseen journey from exploitation to empowerment, and this session brings it to life through the lens of relational impact and interactive, “real & uncut” dialogue. Participants will engage in interactive hypothetical scenarios. A […]
Boys are Trafficked, Too
Sean grew up in a quiet Midwestern farming town—far from the places people assume trafficking occurs. In this workshop, he challenges those misconceptions and explores how communities and service providers can shift from narrow, outdated ideas of who “counts” as a victim to a more accurate understanding grounded in lived experience. Sean shares a timeline […]
Healing Through the Law: Credit Repair and Other Legal Pathways to Recovery
Survivors of human trafficking and other forms of exploitation often face serious legal and financial barriers long after the abuse ends. Damaged credit, coerced debt, eviction records and criminal charges can stand in the way of housing, employment and economic stability. This session will provide a practical overview of the legal needs survivors commonly face […]
From Voice to Vision: Building Survivor Leadership for Change
This session reframes lived experience as a form of expertise and a foundation for leadership. Moving beyond storytelling, it highlights how lived experience shapes the ways survivors analyze systems, build programs, and influence policy. Drawing on the realities of exploitation, survival, and healing, the session explores how survivors develop critical skills—such as strategic thinking, adaptability, […]
Preventing, Identifying, and Responding to Trafficking Among Systems-Involved Youth:A Toolkit for Colorado Professionals
Despite increased awareness of human trafficking, minors who have experienced exploitation orare at risk are still frequently overlooked or misidentified. These youth often end up in detentioncenters, disengage from school, or turn to substances to cope with complex trauma. How canprofessionals begin to recognize trafficking when it manifests in everyday scenarios includingsurvival sex and forced […]
Present, Engaged & Committed: Building Trust Without Reenacting Control
Survivors of exploitation and sex trafficking often carry deep trust injuries shaped by coercion, betrayal, and repeated violations of autonomy. Too often, after the trafficking ends, survivors encounter helping systems that unintentionally echo those same dynamics through pressure, credibility testing, and support that feels conditional. This presentation offers a practical, non-clinical, relationship-centered approach to trauma-informed […]
