Prevention

While services and response are critical in addressing human trafficking and exploitation, we must also have at least an equivalent investment in prevention if we are truly committed to ending human trafficking in Minnesota. 

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Community Awareness

Community awareness and education and prevention education in schools, is valuable and important in helping communities understand the issue, and for youth to understand and avoid potential risks. However, these individual-level prevention education efforts do not go far enough.

Human trafficking is a community and societal-level issue. What is needed and necessary is community and societal change in the way we can understand and address the issue, considering the causes and conditions contributing to it. We need to work further upstream, employing primary prevention strategies to address systems that contribute to harm and the lack of opportunities for youth and communities to thrive.

Primary Prevention

Primary prevention is a systematic process that promotes healthy environments and behaviors and reduces the likelihood or frequency of an injury or traumatization. Primary prevention efforts, or upstream prevention efforts, are actions taken that aim to stop the harm from happening in the first place. Primary prevention requires comprehensive efforts for reducing and ending exploitation and trafficking. Primary prevention requires a multi-disciplinary, intersectional approach including addressing issues such as child sexual abuse, homelessness, foster care, poverty, racism, classism, oppression, trauma and generational trauma, mental health, chemical health issues and more.

Primary prevention efforts in Minnesota are increasing an investment in and focus on strategies to end sexual violence and exploitation, and the demand for it. In contrast to victim services, criminal justice expansion and response after harm has occurred, effective primary prevention efforts focus on actions to significantly:

  • Reduce risk factors and increase protective factors for both victimization and perpetration, resulting in the likelihood that males will buy or sell women or children and reducing the likelihood that women and children will be vulnerable to such commodification and exploitation.

Minnesota Department of Health’s Sexual Violence Prevention Program (MDH SVPP)

Primary Prevention Plan , Minnesota Department of Health, Spectrum of Prevention
Primary Prevention Plan , Minnesota Department of Health, Spectrum of Prevention

The Minnesota Department of Health’s Sexual Violence Prevention Program (MDH SVPP) focuses on primary prevention (including evaluation measures evaluate the impact of prevention efforts). MDH SVPP uses numerous resources including the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) publication, Stop SV: A Technical Package for Preventing Sexual Violence (PDF). MDH SVPP is focused on several key recommendations from this CDC resource:

Promote social norms that protect against violence, including:

  • Bystander approaches
  • Mobilizing men and boys as allies

Potential Outcomes

  • Reductions in acceptability of SV
  • Increases in favorable beliefs towards safe communities
  • Increases in favorable attitudes towards women and girls
  • Increases in recognition of abusive behavior towards men, women, and children
  • Increases in bystander behavior to prevent violence against men, women, and children
  • Reductions in negative bystander behavior
  • Reductions in the perpetration of SV
  • Reductions in the perpetration of related forms of violence (e.g., stalking, dating violence, intimate partner violence)
  • Reductions in peer support for violence

Provide opportunities to empower and support girls and women, including:

  • Strengthening economic supports for women and families
  • Strengthening leadership and opportunities for girls

Potential Outcomes

  • Increases in economic stability for women
  • Increases in equitable education opportunities Increases in gender equality and economic and occupational status of women
  • Decreases in poverty of women and children
  • Decreases in pay differentials between women and men
  • Increases in employment stability for women
  • Reductions in sexual violence victimization
  • Reductions in sexual harassment
  • Reductions in sexual trafficking
  • Increases in knowledge of gender norms and health
  • Increases in knowledge and skills for girls on healthy relationships, education and employment, and civic engagement
  • Increased leadership skills for girls and young women

Create protective environments, including:

  • Improving safety and monitoring in schools
  • Establishing and consistently applying workplace policies
  • Addressing community-level risks through environmental approaches

Potential Outcomes

  • Reductions in perceived tolerance of sexual harassment and violence in communities
  • Reductions in sexual harassment
  • Reductions in excessive alcohol use at the community level
  • Increases in indicators of community connectedness
  • Increases in feelings of safety in one’s school, workplace, or neighborhood
  • Reductions in rates of SV at the community level
  • Reductions in bullying and other youth violence
  • Reductions in teen dating violence

MDH SVPP works in partnership with numerous individuals and organizations across Minnesota.  One key partner, Men as Peacemakers, has a ground-breaking campaign called the Don’t Buy it Project. The Don’t Buy It Project (DBIP) is a primary prevention strategy focused on reshaping mainstream culture by shifting the values, beliefs, and social norms that allow commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) to thrive. DBIP includes strategic messaging, educational resources, and organizing focused on changing the conditions that make it acceptable for a majority of men to remain silent, if not actively participate in CSE. The project connects men, and people of all gender identities, to the harm caused to those who are exploited through CSE.  

Additional prevention resources include: 

Minnesota

National

Please see the Primary Prevention Fact Sheet here for more information.