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Missing Persons’ Families Support Centre in Vilnius, participates in a multi-city event performance, to mark the 18 October, European Day against Human Trafficking.
Augusta Kierienė & Natalja Kurčinskaja.
Taking place simultaneously in five biggest cities of Lithuania, we presented the issue of human trafficking, by means of drama and street theatre thus touching on different topics and reaching more than 300 participants, over 30 institutions and organizations and departments.
Our Centre ‘’The Missing Persons’ Families Support Centre- represented Vilnius city – capital of Lithuania. Our theme was “Youth exploitation, sexual offenses and pornography on the Internet”. During the event we tried to attract as many young people as possible, using interactive questionnaire-quiz testing young people’s knowledge about cybersecurity.
We had a stand to reflect the problems of the topic where everyone could stick a sticker if they had encountered this phenomenon.
We are very happy that we also had a tent where a specialist counselled the victims.
A very important detail of the event was the performance. We have shown that not everything is real in cyberspace.
The following are the agencies with whom we cooperated in order to prepare and participate in the event:
Ministry of Internal Affairs,
Lithuanian police,
National Anti-Trafficking Association,
Vilnius city municipality,
Vilnius district municipality,
Caritas Lithuania,
Vilnius Archdiocese Community.
In the cities below, the following topics were covered as by our colleagues:
Kaunas – The topic of “Slavery labour”
Klaipėda – The topic of “The last girl first” (against prostitution)
Panevėžys – The topic of “Against trafficking in human beings, including in the commission of crimes”
Tauragė – The topic of “Sexual exploitation and involvement of minors in criminal activities.”
In conclusion, while it was a lot of hard work, during extremely pandemic difficult times, we are happy with the success of the events overall. Not only did we reach so many hundreds of people directly, we are confident that more people will be discussing the events for a long time to come.
The work gone into the events helped us to further forge our links with the above agencies, with whom we try to work collaboratively in the common mission to prevent human trafficking, exploitation and the disappearance of our citizens.
To view a video about that day performance: