Prevent Child Trafficking Through Education

Dear friends,

Do you remember writing letters home from camp? I can remember writing snail mail letters from camp and the joy of getting care packages from home. Please consider these our care packages to you from our campers! 

Your support for our students to join camp activities is making a difference, providing at-risk children with a truly unique and meaningful experience that they deeply value. Our staff shared that the students who participated in our first camp were so eager and enthusiastic, they didn’t even need the usual reminders of the upcoming event! 

I’m so excited to share our students’ reflections with you. Here’s what they said: 

“I became a group leader at this camp. Since there were many students from different places, it was a bit challenging to encourage everyone to unite, but I did well! Being a leader helped me understand the benefits of the lessons TFS taught me because every lesson is helpful in my daily life. I feel very thankful for all the activities and I’m very proud of myself.” - P.

“This camp was the first time in my life doing something like this. Joining this camp, making many new friends, and getting to know all the mentors from TFS made me really happy. Apart from that, I learned many useful things such as about anti-trafficking, scamming prevention, family relationships, and mental health. The camp was really fun, and I’ve gained a lot of self-assurance from everyone there. I’d love to send my gratitude to you all and everyone at TFS for providing me this camp and my scholarship. It helps me and my family a lot, reducing the burden on my parents. Thank you so much—this means a lot to me and my family.” - Kr. 

“The camp was really fun and enjoyable! I made many new friends and played many new games that I had never played before. We had to run in every game, which was tiring but so much fun! Everybody was very happy! We didn't just play, though. I also learned many new things from this camp. In each session, there were important lessons for us, such as anti-trafficking, how to identify life goals, family relationships, risky behaviors, sexual abuse prevention, financial management, citizenship, and mental health. All of these lessons are useful in my daily life. I feel very safe and warm here with every mentor from TFS. Thank you all for making this camp possible. This camp will forever have a place in my heart.” - Kh.

Your support makes this possible, and you’re ensuring a long-term impact. The students set personal goals for the year and they are so determined to achieve them. Thank you so much for being a part of this special experience in their lives.

Yours, gratefully,
Lucy McCray
CEO

The lush rice paddies and evergreen mountains of Northern Thailand are tropical, warm, and brimming with life. Yet even in this magical place, a destructive force lurks. Traffickers and other exploiters are actively perpetrating one of the most awful crimes imaginable – child trafficking. They’re not just in brothels and red-light districts anymore, either. Increasingly, they’re perpetrating their crimes online, harnessing the latest technologies to prey on those with the fewest resources to protect themselves.

Children whose families struggle to survive on a few dollars a day or who struggle to access healthcare or education are at heightened risk, and the factors that put them at risk run deep: things like generational cycles of poverty, trauma, and social exclusion. Research and our own experience have shown that it’s not enough simply to warn people of the risk of traffickers. It’s essential to make safer life choices actually possible. Protection from trafficking involves a commitment to education and better job opportunities, investment in alternative sources of income, mentorship to help guide vulnerable youth through difficult life choices, resources that broaden their worldview and offer more pathways to success, and, of course, awareness raising about risks, their rights and how to protect themselves from exploitation along the way.

The Freedom Story has been working to prevent child trafficking and protect vulnerable children since 2008, helping individual youths, their families, and their communities build resilience from the inside out. We started with just one scholarship student and have since expanded to support hundreds of students through multiple years of schooling, even making higher education possible for the most ambitious kids. We are investing in student and local community leadership so that those closest to at-risk people are empowered to protect their fellow community members. That work has reached thousands of people.

This progress continued in significant ways in 2023. We are very proud to share the highlights from our latest annual impact report. Here are some of the things we’ve been able to achieve together:

Empowering Communities
A keystone to effective prevention work is community empowerment. We engage both children and adults in learning about the dangers of child trafficking and other rampant forms of exploitation. By fostering awareness and access to legal support, we empower families and community members both to recognize signs of trafficking or abuse and to act to protect children.

Our human rights program reached 2,809 people and was accessed 5,962 times in 2023. Our reach included 2,063 children and 746 adults with services such as rights training, activities, outreach, and capacity-building workshops.

Strengthening Legal System Capacities to Protect Children
Effective legal systems to protect children are essential in the fight against trafficking. One critical first step is ensuring children are properly documented. Some of the most vulnerable children are those who are stateless – that is, children without any citizenship or legal identification.

Thailand is working to ensure everyone has access to proper identification. We’re helping by working in local schools to identify stateless children and ensure that they are documented and can access the rights to which they are entitled. We aided over 1,203 stateless students and migrant workers in the documentation process to obtain fundamental rights.

Providing Safe Spaces
For children who have endured abuse in the home, feel lonely and isolated due to family breakdown, or have suffered other adverse childhood experiences, having a safe space to turn to for support can literally change their lives. Our resource centers offer a supportive haven where children can build healthy relationships, find help with personal or school problems, and participate in fun activities – healing in a social and caring environment.

Our resource centers offer after-school programs, academic support, and mentorship, reaching over 2,628 people in 2023. Our education program was accessed 20,014 times, and we provided 2,044 hours of mentorship.

Empowering Families
Our Sustainable Development programming builds on the existing skills of the families, teaches about sustainable farming practices, and promotes business development through microloans. We also provide support with entrepreneurship training, workshops, and access to our Eco Learning Center.

These projects empower families and raise living standards, thereby tackling poverty as a significant risk factor for trafficking and decreasing the lure of traffickers. We worked directly with 91 impoverished families in 2023.

Expanding the Power of Prevention Exponentially
A new collaboration made it possible for us to reach thousands more children in vulnerable communities to teach them about protecting themselves from child trafficking and exploitation. We signed an agreement with the first school district of Chiang Rai. Under this new partnership, we are working with 105 schools, reaching over 19,000 students!

This exciting new initiative enables us to work directly with all schools in the district in a way we have not been able to before. Through this expansion, we are:

• Providing training and education on preventing human trafficking, including online exploitation and child abuse
• Developing a network of student leaders
• Equipping those leaders to prevent trafficking in their schools

As we look back on the past year, we’re proud of the progress we can see. We have witnessed first-hand the power of your generous support in impacting lives. But there are still many challenges to confront, including the newest crisis in the region (trafficking people and forcing them to commit cyber scams). We are committed to bringing the full force of our whole community and coalition of partners to bear to prevent child trafficking and protect children from exploitation.

Together, with your support, we will keep fighting for a world where every child is safe and free to pursue their dreams. We continue to find daily inspiration in that mission, and thank you for being a part of this journey!

In Hope,

The Freedom Story

Links:

• The Latest
• The Freedom Story Website