Sex Trafficking Awareness: Essential Education for the Next Generation of Nurses

Author Type

Undergraduate Student

Publication Date

Winter 3-6-2025

Document Type

Instructional Material

Executive Summary

Sex Trafficking Awareness: Essential Education for the Next Generation of Nurses

The agency we collaborated with is a Christian organization that is committed to providing survivor-centered, trauma-informed services for hundreds exploited in the sex trade annually. Their value focuses on unconditional care, relationships, strengths, minimizing barriers, and walking with clients on their journey to freedom. They strive to give these communities a sense of belonging, which communicates the message “You are worthy of love.” This organization focuses on being truthful, honest, and reliable for their clients. They have a 24/7 hotline where many clients can reach out for more information and emotional support. The agency has become a home to many individuals and provides a safe and reliable community to be a part of. They also have education and training programs to spread knowledge on how to provide trauma-informed care. Our overarching goal for this project was to use a training session made by the agency to reach out to community members to help them understand the basics of sex trafficking.

Background

Two to three thousand men, women, and children are being exploited in the greater Seattle and King County area (REST, 2024). A plethora of providers have little to no experience receiving education on recognizing sex trafficking survivors, and very few can confidently identify potential survivors (Rapoza, 2022). Sex workers in Canada have reported experiences with healthcare workers who had condescending attitudes towards them and refused to take these survivors' needs seriously. According to this study consisting of 33 individuals who reported barriers to healthcare access, 61% believed that there was judgment towards sex workers, and 59% believed that healthcare workers were under or uninformed about sex work (Ross et al., 2021). These negative interactions with healthcare providers can create significant barriers to care and prevent individuals from seeking necessary medical attention in the future. Further, they reinforce the stigma surrounding trafficking survivors, which makes it more difficult for them to find safe, compassionate and informed support. Taking these discrepancies into consideration, this project was tailored toward current and prospective healthcare workers in the greater Seattle area to better understand the sex industry and how to provide trauma-informed care.

Activities with Rationale

The main goal of our project was to educate healthcare workers on the definition of sex trafficking, the signs of trafficking, who the people behind the sex trade are, and how, as healthcare workers, we can help and provide resources to survivors. Here at Seattle Pacific University, we believe that providing education to quarter 2 nursing students can help them understand how to provide trauma-informed care to their patients as they approach quarter 3. Quarter 3 will be working in obstetrics and mental health, where providers are more likely to encounter victims of trauma (whether it is related to trafficking or not). One study led by Xue et al. (2023), found that providing education to nursing undergraduates improved their ability to empathize and provide competent care compared to students who did not receive additional education. We believe that trauma-informed care should not be limited to survivors of sex trafficking; the information we provide about this population should help our audience to empathize and provide competent care.

With these intentions in mind, we reached out to different groups of healthcare workers to inform them of these training sessions. We made connections with the education coordinators of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the University of Washington, and the psychology department to provide a resource to give students who are pursuing a clinical psychology vocation. We also coordinated with our program leads to create a discussion for future groups to present this information to a larger demographic of nursing students through extra credit incentive. This incentive was an hour of clinical-specific focused education that could be logged onto Typhon for the student’s clinical hours. During the process of completing these tasks, we created email and phone scripts that future groups can utilize when trying to form connections with various organizations. These resources allow for the next groups to more effectively build partnerships and maintain continuity of these educational efforts.

Outcomes

Following the presentation, a limited amount of feedback was given regarding quality improvement on content or delivery. Feedback given included verbalization of a more profound effect from the videos due to real-life experiences being shared. Participants also stated that they believe this information is relevant to their roles within the healthcare setting, especially as they move forward in their education. Overall, the feedback regarding the presentation involved people expressing their satisfaction with the material that was presented. In the future, we hope to gain a bigger audience by better advertising. We also would like to see future groups be able to use real-life stories for a greater impact on the audience. We hope that future groups can work with survivors within the agency and observe Aurora for a more thorough assessment of the environment in which trafficking occurs. We were unable to directly communicate with the population at the organization and feel that this would have made our presentation stronger because students reported that they were most impacted by the videos of survivors recounting their experiences.

Conclusion

Our goal through this project was to present education on trauma-informed care to at least two different groups within the healthcare community. We were able to present to nursing students who are starting to interact with communities that require specialized care and communication due to trauma they may have suffered in the past. We also believe that this education would be beneficial to integrate into the nursing program as a whole to provide more awareness to solidify a holistic care approach. A limitation we met was being unable to get a large turnout, and we would like to expand more on the audience we are educating. We hope as this project is carried on to the next group, this training can reach more groups of healthcare workers and help create a safer space for victims of sex trafficking.

References

Rapoza, S. (2022). Sex trafficking: A literature review with implications for health care providers. Advanced emergency nursing journal, 44(3), 248-261.10.1097/TME.0000000000000419

Real Escape from the Sex Trade. (2024). Real Escape from the Sex Trade. Retrieved February 19, 2025, fromhttps://iwantrest.com

Ross, L.E., Sterling, A., Dobinson, C., Logie C.H., & D’Souza, S. (2021). Access to sexual and reproductive health care among young adult sex workers in Toronto, Ontario: a mixed methods study. Cmaj open, 9(2), 482-490. https://doi.org/10.9778/cmajo.20200049

Xue, M., Sun, H., Xue, J., Zhou, J., Qu, J., Ji, S., Bu, Y., & Liu, Y. (2023). Narrative medicine as a teaching strategy for nursing students to developing professionalism, empathy and humanistic caring ability: A randomized controlled trial. BMC Medical Education, Vol (23). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04026-5

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