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UA Social Work awarded $1.35 million Department of Justice Grant to fight human trafficking

The University of Alabama’s School of Social Work has been awarded a $1.35 million grant from the United States Department of Justice to improve outcomes of Alabama youths who are victims of human sex trafficking.

The Juvenile Victims of Human Trafficking in Alabama Project will help strengthen the state’s working relationships between treatment services, law enforcement and prosecutors, and develop a statewide multidisciplinary system of screening and training.

“There are a lot of people doing a lot of amazing work to target this problem in Alabama, but what this grant will do is really coordinate those efforts with a unified protocol for helping children who are victims,” said Dr. Javonda Williams, UA associate professor of social work and principal investigator of the grant.

“This will unify those pockets of great services in the state, give us a common language, a common to-do list for support and help.”

Additionally, the project will design and implement a database resource system, Safe iMmediately-Accessible Resources for Trafficked Youth, known as SMARTY, to provide immediate coordination of trauma-informed services to fully meet the needs of trafficked youth.

The three-year project will begin with a thorough assessment of needs and resources throughout the state, which will help UA researchers create a locale-sensitive training system that will help people better support the victims in each county. The next step will be to create a statewide database of information and resources.

“We’re not going to produce another big book training where they go back to their part of the state and do not have the same resources and services of a larger county,” Williams said. “We’ll need to catch up with what traffickers are currently doing and fit that into both smaller and larger areas. We we need to be as nimble as the perpetrators.”

Read more about the Juvenile Victims of Human Trafficking in Alabama Project in UA News.