Survivor Empowerment

+ Freedom Centers Around the world

A safe place of restoration and support is critical for a survivor’s journey of long-term freedom and reduces their vulnerability to revictimization. Dressember has built and sustained drop-in Freedom Centers in Greece, Bulgaria, and South Africa to provide survivors with holistic aftercare services, equipping them with the skills and resources required to achieve stability, restoration, independence, and integration into the community. This year, Dressember is continuing to support the Bulgarian Freedom Center.

+ Care for Survivors in Uganda

Dressember partners with one of the only organizations in Uganda with a license to provide residential care to victims of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) and operates the only formalized aftercare program for adult victims of transnational trafficking. This aftercare program empowers each survivor with an individualized case plan to heal from trauma, avoid revictimization, reconcile family/community relationships, access educational and vocational scholarships as well as legal services, and provides avenues to entrepreneurship through training and start-up capital. This program maintains a 95% success rate in preventing revictimization and has demonstrated a ripple effect in the community – ending cycles of abuse, poverty, and exploitation.

+ Economic Empowerment in NYC

A key solution to trafficking is creating safe and sustainable work opportunities for survivors. Foreign nationals of trafficking often experience compounding barriers to safe work, including complex trauma coupled with lack of documentation and language barriers. Since 2018, Dressember has partnered on this program to provide work opportunities for survivors in New York City focusing on job-readiness classes, job placement, and entrepreneurship training. Dressember’s NYC partner differs from other job programs by engaging with diverse businesses in order to offer survivors options when choosing a job. These choices are a fundamental aspect of empowerment for women whose ability to choose had been stolen throughout their exploitation.

+ Legal Services & Policy Reform

Human trafficking survivors are often left with criminal records as a result of being forced to engage in illegal activity. These records hold survivors back, impacting their ability to obtain employment, housing, education, benefits and financial assistance, immigration relief or adjustment of status and family stability. Survivors are routinely burdened with numerous records in multiple jurisdictions, requiring a comprehensive national approach. Dressember supports the Survivor Reentry Project, a program with pro bono commitment of six national law firms to help screen survivors, analyze criminal records, create a strategy for clearing eligible offenses, and expand access to criminal record relief.

+ Philippines Survivor Care

Dressember enables holistic aftercare and safe housing for survivors of OSEC (Online Sexual Exploitation of Children) in the Philippines. Children achieve their full potential in this program through counseling, education, caring for animals, tending to gardens and learning music. They are provided with hope, healing, and restoration, and allowed to grow and develop, release their potentials, and realize their worth; all working together to help children realize that they can have a new purpose in life.Dressember also supports adult survivors of sex trafficking and sexual violence on their journey to successful community reintegration and sustained freedom. This program brings sustained restoration and freedom by breaking the cycle of poverty and exploitation beginning with a three-month Skills Training and Empowerment Program, which provides holistic life, workplace, and social skills training for survivors.

+ Fast Track Vocational Training

Women escaping brothels in East Asia often aren’t able to finish basic schooling before they are trafficked. Alongside our social enterprise partner, Dressember is resourcing and equipping survivors with vital personal and professional skills to be independent and no longer at risk of trafficking. This involves several hours a week of teaching, counseling, mentoring, and developing specialized vocational skills to use in the social enterprise businesses.

+ Survivor Leadership in Anti-Trafficking

We recognize that the movement to end sex trafficking must draw upon the lived experiences of survivors for guidance on how to protect vulnerable youth and craft legislation and policies that will be the most effective in preventing child sex trafficking. Dressember supports compensating survivors on a nationwide Survivors’ Council to serve as consultants on policy, awareness materials, and more across the United States. The Survivors’ Council supports members’ voices and autonomy to lead and connect with others, valuing their experiences and know-how with this issue.

+ Seeking Survivor-Centered Justice in the U.K.

Through our UK-based partner's Victim Navigator Program, “Navigators” are embedded in police forces across the UK and given access to live cases and investigations, enabling them to reach some of the most vulnerable and at-risk people in society, while ensuring law enforcement prioritizes the fight against human trafficking. Through the Victim Navigation process, victims receive trauma-informed wraparound care including access to food, clothing, accommodation, transport, and health services. Further support can include counseling and access to other social service providers, immigration advice, and repatriation. When they are ready, survivors are encouraged to seek justice with the support of their “Navigator” advocating for them in the criminal justice system. 86% of victims supported to date have chosen to engage with police investigations, compared to 33% nationally, providing police with key evidence to improve investigations and prosecution rates. Through this process victims and survivors feel empowered and have increased agency in their healing journey.

+ Training Survivors to Become Engineers

Alongside our partner in the U.S., we walk alongside survivors of trafficking and gender-based violence in their journeys to become software engineers. This Coding Training Program serves survivors who are looking to advance their economic opportunity, especially in the face of pandemic job losses and financial insecurity, through access to high skills in an in-demand, high-earning industry. This program provides assistance to survivors who demonstrate the readiness and interest to explore the field of technology through the support of peers and mentors in a trauma-responsive, healing-centered environment. Our support ensures that survivors are provided the necessary hardware and software they need to participate in the training program, ensuring no one is left behind due to resource constraints and inequities, and opportunities to gain advanced learning and career exposure at no cost to them.

+ Dressember Survivor Scholarship Program

We empower survivors’ sustained liberation through capacity-building initiatives to build long-term stability. Dressember’s Scholarship Program was established in 2021 to fill a gap that survivors expressed: access to education. Through Dressember’s flexible academic scholarships, we are helping survivors close the gap between physical freedom and long-term economic empowerment.