The anti-human trafficking movement has been calling attention to how businesses can stop being enablers of the slavery of our time. Polaris Project has shown recently this is not just true for labor trafficking and supply chains, but in the sex trade. We’ve challenged craigslist to eliminate the Erotic Services section with ads of women and children for sale; and The Washington Post to drop ads for massage parlors, some of which have been shut down for sex trafficking. The leaders of each have agreed to meetings with Polaris Project in the near future.
Yet corporations can do good to fight human trafficking even when they are not remotely part of the problem.
A great example is LexisNexis, a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions. Its mission and its products are all about the rule of law. LexisNexis is known by attorneys, students, and academics as a comprehensive database. It has created an online legal resource center with information about anti-trafficking laws and policies all around the world.
LexisNexis has been an invaluable partner to Polaris Project to operate what is now the premier national hotline on human trafficking: 1-888-3737-888 or visit the National Human Trafficking Resource Center.
LexisNexis has made a number of contributions to Polaris Project:
• Database assistance for the NHTRC
• Donating laptops
• Providing call center/hotline expertise
• Donating research solutions
• Performing research on specific topics
• Direct financial support
Polaris Project today announced the implementation of a national database to assist staff working on the National Human Trafficking Resource hotline in locating referrals for callers throughout the United States.
This is a model partnership between a business and a nonprofit to fight human trafficking. The anti-trafficking field needs many more corporations interested in offering their comparative advantages to inform the public of slavery’s ravages, punish slavery’s perpetrators, empower slavery’s victims, and bring slavery’s extinction.