University of Alabama receives grant to fight sex trafficking

The University of Alabama’s School of Social Work has been awarded a $1.35-million federal grant to improve training for those working with young human and sex trafficking victims statewide and developing a database of information and resources

The Juvenile Victims of Human Trafficking in Alabama Project will help strengthen the state’s working relationships between treatment services, law enforcement and prosecutors and others who work with victims. The project will also develop a statewide multidisciplinary system of screening and training to ensure a unified approach statewide, while also addressing the individual needs of different communities.

“There are a lot of people doing a lot of amazing work to target this problem in Alabama, but what this grant will do is really coordinate those efforts with a unified protocol for helping children who are victims,” said Javonda Williams, UA associate professor of social work and principal investigator of the grant. “This will unify those pockets of great services in the state, give us a common language, a common to-do list for support and help.”

The grant from the U.S. Department of Justice will also fund development and implementation of a database resource system, Safe iMmediately-Accessible Resources for Trafficked Youth, known as SMARTY, to provide immediate coordination of trauma-informed services to fully meet the needs of trafficked youth.

The three-year project will begin with a thorough assessment of needs and resources throughout the state, which will help UA researchers create a locale-sensitive training system that will help people better support victims in each county. The next step will be to create a statewide database of information and resources.

“We’re not going to produce another big book training where they go back to their part of the state and do not have the same resources and services of a larger county,” Williams said. “We’ll need to catch up with what traffickers are currently doing and fit that into both smaller and larger areas. We need to be as nimble as the perpetrators.”

Since 2007, there have been more than 300 cases of human trafficking in Alabama, the majority of which have been related to sex trafficking, according to the Human Trafficking Hotline. The Hotline received more than 1,100 calls and/or tips of human trafficking during that span.