Location: The Friday Center, Chapel Hill North Carolina. MAP
Contact: Pam Lach, Conference Coordinator, plach@email.unc.edu
Phone: (919)-962-8305
Conference 2008
The CWC's next biennial conference, Combating Sex Trafficking: Prevention and Intervention in North Carolina and Worldwide, will be held on April 3-4, 2008, at the Friday Center, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This conference will concentrate on areas which were not given significant attention during our first conference, including demand, the impact on communities of color, and childhood sexual exploitation. It will also include breakout sessions and working groups which focus specifically on the impact of sexual trafficking in North Carolina. In addition, the conference goals include:
- Facilitate research to quantify the specific ways sex trafficking is occurring in North Carolina, and the links to international and domestic sex trafficking
- Assist in efforts to inform and educate law enforcement personnel, social service providers, and the general public about trafficking so that traffickers can be prosecuted and victim-survivors can receive appropriate services.
- Address the demand side of trafficking.
- Contribute to efforts to eradicate trafficking.
Conference 2008: At a glance
Every year, approximately 800,000 individuals are trafficked worldwide across international borders and victimized through forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation. Nearly 20,000 of these victims enter the United States; an estimated 23 percent arrive in the southeast. In response to this crisis, the Carolina Women's Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in partnership with many other university programs as well as state and community partners, is sponsoring an international conference: Combating Sex Trafficking: Prevention and Intervention in North Carolina and Worldwide.
"Combating Sex Trafficking" will be action-oriented, focusing on:
- developing a working plan for North Carolina to put a stop to sex trafficking
- providing training for first responders, educators, health professionals, and the legal community
- the role of corporate, private, non-profit, and faith-based sectors in dealing with this global crisis
- sensitive advocacy for survivors of various ages, races, and ethnicities
- shutting down demand for commercial sexual exploitation
- the role of the travel and tourism industry
- legal research and advocacy
- local prevention models and efforts
- the media's impact in educating the public
History of the Conference
In April 2006, the Carolina Women's Center hosted, in collaboration with many campus and community cosponsors, a highly successful international conference on sex trafficking. The conference was organized in recognition of the fact that the trafficking of women and children is a profound global human rights violation and that human trafficking is the second largest criminal industry in the world. For more information from the 2006 conference, click hereIn April 2007, we sponsored a half-day campus conference designed to inform the UNC student body about sex trafficking. This conference was organized by a CWC APPLES intern, Sarah Schwarz. The program included the screening of a documentary film about sex trafficking, a panel of local experts, and a keynote address by Robert Goff, the founder and CEO of Restore International.
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