Our Mission
To end all forms of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation.
Our Core Beliefs
- No one deserves to be bought and sold.
- Everyone deserves to live free of violence.
- It is important to criminalize the buyer, and decriminalize the bought: to hold the demand accountable, not the victim.
Our Philosophy
At Breaking Free, we understand sex trafficking as a vicious cycle of violence, abuse, incarceration, and addiction. Repeated experiences of violence undermine people's capacities to avoid further victimization. Sexual exploitation distorts the lives of victims, destroys families, and undermines the fabric of our communities.
In order to break the cycle, we must first recognize sex trafficking and prostitution as forms of violence against an individual.
What is violence against an individual?
The United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women defines violence against an individual as "any form of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to an individual, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life." This encompasses the commercial sexual exploitation of individuals.
What is commercial sexual exploitation?
The Women's Support Network explains that commercial sexual exploitation is “a practice by which a person achieves sexual gratification, financial gain, or advancement through the abuse or exploitation of a person’s sexuality by abrogating that person’s human right to dignity, equality, autonomy, and physical and mental well-being.”
Sex trafficking utilizes two forms of violence against its victims:
- Direct violence includes rape, physical or psychological torture, abuse, isolation, kidnapping, forced drug consumption, and threats against the victims and their families.
- Indirect (or structural) violence includes pervasive and permissive attitudes towards the hyper-sexualization, objectification, and purchase of persons, the criminalization of individuals trapped by prostitution, and the collateral consequences and stigma that are attached to survivors whom society has failed to recognize as victims.
Recognizing sex trafficking and prostitution as violence against an individual is the first step towards the prevention of further victimization.
