School For Justice
Around 1.2 million children in India are sexually exploited every year. They include the 12,000 Nepali underaged girls who are trafficked each year to India for sexual exploitation. There has also been explosive growth in the trafficking and exploitation of Nepali girls in Nepal. We work with local authorities to rescue survivors from illegal brothels, but the offenders are rarely punished. In order to achieve lasting change, survivors must be empowered to fight for justice. In 2022 the School For Justice Brazil opened in Fortaleza.
Access to justice
To ensure that the offenders are brought to justice, in 2017 Free a Girl USA founded the School for Justice in India. In 2019, we opened a second school in India and a third school in Nepal. In 2022 we have opened the School for Justice Brazil. The School for Justice trains survivors of sexual exploitation and their daughters to become their countries’ best lawyers, paralegals, police officers, socials workers, sociologists and journalists. When they graduate, they join the fight against child sexual exploitation.
Change the system
Our aim is to educate the survivors. This will empower them to bring offenders to justice, act as change agents and provoke debate, develop support in the community, change the system from within, fight impunity and raise awareness about child sexual exploitation on national and international platforms.
“As an innovative model of social inclusion, the Special Rapporteur has been impressed by the work carried out by the Free a Girl USA NGO, in the context of the School for Justice project implemented in India and Nepal.” – Report to the UN Human Rights Council by the Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, Dr. Maria Grazia Giammarinaro.
We strengthen our local partners by providing training in online investigative methods.
Smart rescue
In the past few years, we have seen a trend towards a fall in the number of rescues from brothels and a shift towards more hidden locations such as massage salons, private homes, hotels or via webcams. Online elements are playing an increasing role in exploitation cases, including the recruitment and blackmailing of victims via social media and the offering of minor victims on the Internet for sexual exploitation online.
The shift from offline to online sexual exploitation accelerated enormously in 2020, because many red-light districts were closed due to COVID-19 measures. The perpetrators are using new technology such as social media, special forums and the dark web to contact minors and/or exchange information about the sexual abuse of children. However, governments and local NGOs often lack sufficient in-house knowledge to conduct online investigations to trace CSE. This means that the criminals stay one step ahead and cases often remain hidden. In order to change this, Free a Girl USA has developed a program, Smart Rescue, which uses technology to gather information and evidence that lead to concrete cases. Our partners are being trained to use this technology.
Online Scraping Program
Free a Girl USA collects data and processes them using the online ‘scraping program’ we have developed. The data are analyzed and converted into intelligence that can be used for further offline research. Free a Girl USA’s partners are trained not only to share the information, but also to analyze it themselves. A dashboard is used to make all of the information available to various stakeholders. Free a Girl USA makes the software and training available to local partner organizations, and they use the combined information to set up rescue operations with the local police and rescue minors.
Blockshare is a technology in which the blockchain is used to share sensitive data with various parties by means of so-called smart contracts. Free a Girl USA wants to invest in this technology and make it available to organizations around the world. Information can be exchanged globally using the blockchain, and this promotes the efficiency and effectiveness of all parties fighting the sexual exploitation of children and child trafficking.