National Practices Survey Report 2017 A survey of residential service providers for victims of domestic human trafficking Jeanne L. Allert, Editor The Samaritan Women Express permission from The Samaritan Women is required prior to reproduction or distribution of any part of this report. For more information contact: Jeanne L. Allert
[email protected] © The Samaritan Women Institute for Shelter Care Section A. Background In 2016, our organization, The Samaritan Women, was gifted with the funds to host a national conference for service providers that offer residential care to victims of domestic sex trafficking. The gathering was held over a four-day period at Wheaton College in Chicago, Illinois in July of that year. Twenty-two agencies were present, and a host of individuals who aspired to get involved in survivor care. From that event, three observations emerged: 1. The majority of those in attendance were the founders of their organizations, many of whom left other occupations to pursue what they felt to be a calling on their lives. All of us had weathered long seasons of feeling alone, crazy, full of doubt, despair, and isolation...and yet we pressed on. It was poignantly clear that this group of pioneers needed the collegiality of this unique gathering. 2. Many of us were having similar experiences and making comparable decisions, but had no baseline against which to measure if we were doing things correctly. To this day there remains no credible, authoritative entity offering guidance (or dare we say, “best practices”) for how this work should be done. 3. The other group of people who attended the 2016 conference were those who were in some stage of envisioning a similar work, or having trouble getting started.