Dawn's Place

In my previous Slate Post I talked about the effects victims have after experiencing being trafficked. Whether they are affected Mentally, physically, emotionally or all three everyone’s situation should be equally justified.

The biggest way victims of sex trafficking are being supported that I found through my research is organizations that give victims the support they need. Some bigger organizations I found are the Center for Human Trafficking Awareness (Florida), National Sexual Violence Resource Center (Pennsylvania), and Project Reach (Massachusetts).

Ways that people who haven’t experienced anything like trafficking but still want to help can always do things like, sign petitions, volunteer with local organizations, educate themselves, and create a club to spread awareness. Those are just a few simple ways you could help! I think these are great ways to educate yourself, others and support victims. The first way to become an ally is to make sure you are educated on the topic. As for the organizations, I also think these are really great sources for any victims that will find comfort in them.

While I was researching for ways to be an ally towards victims of sex trafficking I stumbled across an organization, here in Philly called Dawn’s Place. The mission of Dawn’s Place is to proactively support women affected by CSE and its abuse by providing direct services to women, raising awareness through education and generating prevention, public policy reform, and community collaboration. Dawn’s Place was a local organization, the website made it sound like all of the workers were so passionate about helping these women in need. So I emailed them asking if anyone was available for me to interview and Mary Shay, the program director and trauma therapist responded! So we talked for about half an hour, if you are interested in listening to the interview I will put it at the bottom of this post and hyperlink it here.

The reason I wanted to do an interview was that I think it was one of the best ways to learn more about my topic, and to hear about it from someone who dedicates their life to it and not just researching from google. Ms.Shay was an excellent resource and interviewee. She seemed super passionate about her job and how awesome of a place Dawn’s Place is. I am incredibly grateful I was able to interview her. I hope that through this project I was able to educate others about how much of a negative impact sex trafficking can have on a victim, I definitely learned a lot myself.

At the start of this project I was pretty nervous and had no clue what I was going to do. I am a pretty shy person and didn’t know how well my project would end up because of that. But in the end, I think the Agent of change portion of my project went very well. As for my project as a whole, I am pretty proud of it. I worked really hard and learned a lot about my topic. I think I maybe could have done better in finding resources, not necessarily better ones, just maybe more of them? Obviously, there is so much to do to prevent sex trafficking but like I said earlier and if I am remembering correctly it was also said in my interview, the best way to start is to educate yourself to the best of your abilities.

This is my annotated bibliography