The Difference Between the National Human Trafficking Hotline & Rescue America
As a national anti-sex trafficking organization with a 24/7 hotline, we often get asked what the difference is between our Rescue hotline and the National Human Trafficking Hotline, run by the nonprofit Polaris.
You may have seen signs raising awareness of human trafficking which state to call the National Human Trafficking Hotline (NHTH) to report a tip or to get help if you or someone you know is being trafficked. *The NHTH “connects victims and survivors of sex and labor trafficking with services and supports to get help and stay safe. The NHTH also receives tips about potential situations of sex and labor trafficking and facilitates reporting that information to the appropriate authorities in certain cases.”
The NHTH does a great job of providing referrals to survivors; however, it “does not provide services directly to victims or survivors but rather connects them with vetted services and supports around the country.”
This is a key difference between Rescue America’s 24/7 Rescue hotline and the NHTH. In our experience, we’ve discovered that when a survivor is simply provided with resource referrals or connected with a service, they are often not in a stable enough place to find themselves the appropriate program placement or get themselves to a program, even if they are connected with one to pursue.
This is the gap in the anti-trafficking landscape that our founder and president, Allison Madrigal, discovered before founding Rescue America. There needed to be a way to quickly get survivors out of their situations, assess and stabilize them, and then pair them with and facilitate their transportation to a care program that meets their specific needs. That is what Rescue America was called to fill, acting as the “911 call” and “ambulance ride” of anti-trafficking.
After performing a landscape analysis of the anti-trafficking industry, she realized that the compound trauma, including PTSD, Anxiety, Depression and addiction issues that victims face requires a different touch. They need a hand to help them when they are in their darkest time.
You see, most victims have only known exploitation and abuse. The “love” that they feel is a false substitute for the actual love of Christ. When a survivor calls our Rescue hotline, they are shown the love of Christ in a very tangible way. For many of them, this is the first experience of this kind that they’ve ever had feeling this. The survivor is empowered to make the decision to leave, and when they do, this is where our highly trained Rescue hotline guides them with a gentle hand to freedom.
Our mission is to rescue, revive and empower survivors through a 24/7 Rescue hotline and emergency response. How does all of this work?
Rescue - Through direct outreach and our 24/7 Rescue hotline, we connect with survivors ready to exit the life and help facilitate their safe exit alongside trained volunteers.
Revive - Upon exit, survivors are transported to a secure location where their most pressing and practical needs are the first priority: food, water, sleep, and safekeeping.
Empower - Based on individual assessments, survivors then find stabilization and professional support to address their mental, emotional, and spiritual needs, preparing them for long-term placement in partner homes across the US.
Survivors can call our hotline from anywhere in the country and immediately receive a rescue response, be provided with food, clothes, and other necessities, and be placed with and transported to a care program that best fits their specific needs. We work closely with each survivor throughout the entire process, empowering them to make decisions for their next steps as we facilitate their exits to safety.
Empowering freedom and cultivating felt safety with survivors is incredibly important to us along the way, and we are grateful to be able to encourage and support them from the moment they call our hotline to the moment they arrive at their program. If survivors aren’t quite ready to take that step to exit after calling our Rescue hotline, we let them know that we will always be here, available to help them when they’re ready to pursue a new life.
As we care for survivors through our Rescue hotline, we spend time weekly in prayer for those we are currently serving; our hope for each one of them as they exit the life is that they will learn to hear the Lord’s voice, experience His presence, and be transformed by His truth that replaces the lies they’ve believed for so long.
While our hotlines differ, we are so thankful for the NHTH’s mission to eradicate modern slavery, for their diligence in reporting tips of trafficking situations to authorities when necessary, and for the awareness they continue to raise on a national scale of the problem of human trafficking. We are also grateful for their partnership in referring survivors to our 24/7 Rescue hotline when a survivor calls their hotline seeking to immediately exit the life of commercial sexual exploitation.
We believe there is a redemptive solution for every survivor who calls our Rescue hotline, and it is our honor to be able to serve, pray for, and care for them as they walk that out.
*Humantraffickinghotline.org
