Raising Awareness Outside Our Center

It is the mission of the Outreach Prevention Program to raise awareness; to promote access to primary healthcare access and safe sex practices; to offer alternative exit options to sex workers to get out of prostitution by offering the young women alternatives and showing what else the women can do.

Reaching women and girls outside of our Center is another important mission of AFESIP  as there are many young women outside our institution that need help and often don’t know that there are ways to get out of a situations like theirs.

Providing Exit Strategies

Every week day Social Outreach team members visits sex workers in red light areas including brothels, massage parlors, karaoke parlors, beer-gardens, public parks, and slums etc... to educate them on STDs, STIs, drug abuse, personal hygiene, self-protection and exit strategies, promoting safe sex practices and primary health care. We aim to get women to rethink their situation and to contemplate their options.

Visits are the first steps in developing rapport and ultimately building trust between the sex workers and AFESIP. The team refers them for healthcare checks-ups and treatments on case-by-case basis as the need be, and concurrently tries to gain information about trafficking cases. We can then, to help get them out by working with our healthcare and legal aid partners, develop personalized exit strategies.

Helping one another

Team- recruited and -trained peer educators, who are current or former sex workers and survivors either currently working within sex industry or have formerly done so, to assist us day-to-day the daily work of our Outreach Program. The fact that they are survivors or former sex workers themselves, gives them a much stronger connection, level of trust and understanding with the young women that the team works with. We empower them to become part of our solution.

Two of our Social Outreach team members are survivors of sex trafficking and are now leading this program. This, in which provides a giving a strong connection, a foundation of trust between them and the young women we work with, as they can share their previous experiences and showing them that there are options and there’s hopes. This would help them to make informed-decisions for their futures.

Survivors in the Lead

Social outreach program is one of the key sources working to convince the young women to exit sex trades and pursue taking other alternative options for their livelihood. We empower victims to become survivors and survivors to become part of solution. This program is led by a survivor.

Raising awareness of the issues above is one thing but addressing immediate needs is another. By handing out toiletries and personal hygiene items like condoms, toothbrushes, soap... we can address their practical needs while we are with them. Contacting and communicating with women within certain establishments is hard, but with the tools we have we do everything we can to help!