Multi-disciplinary Healthcare Professionals Dedicated to Ending Human Trafficking

Believing human trafficking is a public health issue, a number of health-care professionals in the USA have created an organisation named Heal Trafficking, whose vision is “A world healed of trafficking”.
Education, advocacy and networking are the cornerstones of the organisation which believes that effectively confronting commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking requires informed professionals who are equipped to identify, respond and prevent these crimes.
A recent article by Dan Gorenstein, at the Marketplace’s Health Desk, highlights the disbelief of medical staff at an Emergency Room Department of a hospital in the US in October, 2015, when they encountered a patient who presented with a GPS tracking device (an RFID chip) implanted in her body by her trafficker.
Apart from the indignity to the human person, there are serious concerns for maintaining the anonymity of care-workers and those who run shelters and safe-houses, as they work to support victims of human trafficking and abuse.
In recent years, healthcare professionals in the US have accepted they can play a vital part in the fight against trafficking, sometimes unwittingly encountering victims through routine emergency medicine activity.
The mission of Heal Trafficking may very well be one which will travel across borders and continents, in order to address this latest and base development in the profile of trafficking and exploitation of human beings.
 
More information at:
www.healtrafficking.org
www.marketplace.org
 
Compiled by Anne Kelleher, RENATE Communications Person