Operation Red Alert launched India’s first National Helpline exclusively for sex trafficking last year in the month of October and the response has been nothing less than overwhelming. We have received over 1,000 calls from 500 unique callers in the past 4 months!
After 4 months of Safe Village program rollouts advertising our helpline in at risk villages, we are thrilled to share the progress so far. This is an especially exciting update because it is coming to you just 1 week before we start internal training with the incredible Khadijah Faruqui who pioneered the 181 helpline for Women in Distress in under Delhi Chief Minister, Sheila Dixit.
We’ll be sharing more about our work with Mrs. Faruqui in April, but you can look at the impact of our Helpline now.
Operation Red Alert launched India’s first National Helpline exclusively for sex trafficking last year in the month of October and the response has been nothing less than overwhelming.
We have received over 1,000 calls from 500 unique callers in the past 4 months. The majority of the calls have been to thank us for our work and to verify the helpline. A handful of sex trafficking cases came through the helpline and close to 20 cases were reported directly to our field workers during the Safe Village Program.
Currently, our helpline (focusing on sex trafficking) is predominantly promoted in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and we will be launching operations in Karnataka in June 2016. We have also gained momentum with our Safe Village Programs and have been successful in completing over 140 safe village programs in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in the last 4 months – we are working very closely with the local NGO’s in all of our programs and Safe Village Programs. We also conducted safety programs at the world’s largest tribal gathering for 6 days.
Operation Red Alert’s primary focus is on prevention and raising awareness and we envisage ourselves doing most of our work in the at-risk areas. We have strong relationships with IJM and Justice & Care to which the identified cases are referred to.
We hope you are as excited about the future of the Red Alert Helpline as we are. Check back or subscribe for updates!
My Choices Foundation
This post was authored by the My Choices Foundation communications team. Our mission is to keep you informed on the cause, and hopeful that transformation is possible one story at a time.
Your donations make it possible for us to give families the choice to keep their girls safe from exploitation and violence. Help us educate more families, bring awareness to India and run its first national anti-sex trafficking helpline.