Child labor and child trafficking affects a significant number of children in Sierra Leone. How best to aid those children identified as trafficking victims? It’s an important question that researchers and service providers working in the West African country eagerly want to tackle.
Investigating the past might provide some answers, says University of Georgia social work doctoral student Elyssa Schroeder. Buoyed by a special award from a United Nations agency, Schroeder’s research seeks to turn lessons found in archival documents into improved futures for child trafficking survivors.
Schroeder is an African Programming & Research Initiative to End Slavery (APRIES) Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center on Human Trafficking Research & Outreach (CenHTRO) at UGA. She recently received a $10,000 seed grant from the International Labor Organization (ILO) for a nine-month research project, “Using the Past to Inform the Future: Archival Data Analysis to Improve Evidence for Policy and Practice for Child Labor Trafficking Survivors in Sierra Leone.” The project builds on other West African anti-trafficking research, programming, and policy efforts operated by APRIES in Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Guinea.
Looking into the past, Schroeder says, means combing through old case files of trafficking survivors. In Sierra Leone, those case files are supplied by World Hope International (WHI), an NGO operating the only residential child labor trafficking program in the country.
Schroeder will analyze four years worth of data provided by WHI to understand trafficking survivor demographics, the kinds of services survivors received and how those services impacted their outcomes, like mental health, physical health, and social reintegration.
“This information can really tell us what gaps exist in assessment and how we can fill those gaps,” Schroeder said. “Also, what patterns are there? Do survivors from a specific area face different challenges from another area? Is there a certain age group that we are seeing more of that can be targeted for prevention?”
Findings that emerge from the fellowship will improve programming for child trafficking survivors and inform policy through APRIES’ work with governmental agencies in Sierra Leone.
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