Making an Impact: LATTE Awareness and Prevention Education

Lawrence Anti-Trafficking Taskforce and Education Association (LATTE) was awarded a 2018 Community Grant to increase LATTE’s capacity for human trafficking awareness and prevention education. Working with area high school students, LATTE created an activity that provided tools and information for young people to help make a difference in addressing this critical issue.

From the LATTE 2018 Community Grant Report:

“One activity that LATTE developed for its education purposes is an interactive activity we named, “Not Our Fault.” This activity provides its audience with an opportunity to engage in a simulation that takes participants through real life scenarios of survivors of both labor and sex trafficking. During the activity, the audience must make decisions from the perspective of the survivor regarding what is happening to them. This year, we implemented this activity for the first time with youth involved in Free State High School’s “Can We Talk?” student organization.

In order to fully process the experience students had with this activity, we scheduled a follow-up session at another “Can We Talk?” meeting. During this second session with the students, we discussed ways in which our friends and loved ones in the scenario could have supported us better and could have helped prevent our further exploitation. This discussion translated into how we can help others who may disclose trafficking and exploitation to us. At the beginning of this meeting, one of the high school students initiated the discussion with the following statement, “I have been thinking about this scenario all month!” This statement was particularly profound to us, as it exemplified the impact of this activity and the discussion following the activity on this teenager. She now knows what signs to look for in potential trafficking situations and how to help a friend or loved one who may experience exploitation and trafficking. Our volunteers walked away from that presentation with a greater awareness of our purpose in providing human trafficking prevention education.”