Airline Ambassadors International is pleased to partner with United Against Slavery during January, which is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention month. AAI has worked alongside UAS for several years in preparation to collect comprehensive data in the aviation industry and introduced UAS leadership to Department of Transportation Human Trafficking Task Force during 2019. Those introductions led to UAS forming an Air Transportation Working Group to develop custom survey questions for Flight Attendants on the National Outreach Survey.
During January, a soft launch of the National Outreach Survey for Flight Attendants is already underway.
Flight Attendants are on the frontlines of identifying potential signs of sex and labor trafficking. Traffickers transport victims through various transportation sectors, including airlines. It is imperative that new empirical data is collected to support Flight Attendants and other transportation stakeholders that will help their efforts to identify trafficking. Victims of sex and labor trafficking are relocated to different states and across country borders during their exploitation. We want frontline stakeholders to be equipped and empowered to recognize signs of trafficking and feel the confidence to report those signs to authorities.
In addition, many Flight Attendants are also completing the Concerned Citizen public opinion survey questions. This data confirms the knowledge base of current human trafficking statistics, provides public opinion on decriminalization of prostitution, confirms the impact of community and national issues affecting locals, and allows survey respondents to write a word of encouragement to survivors of all forms of human trafficking.
See this video by Christi Wigle, the CEO of United Against Slavery on the the National Outreach Survey.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with multiple entities from the former D.O.T. Human Trafficking Task Force who have distributed the custom NOS link to their members. The NOS data will identify areas where Flight Attendants need more training on sex and labor trafficking, confirm recommendations for airlines to equip Flight Attendants on ways to identify signs of trafficking, and provide data to support new policies to strengthen human rights pursuits, as well as many other topics.
As we look ahead, the soft launch of the National Outreach Survey for Flight Attendants is part of the official National Outreach Survey that will be distributed at a later time. The NOS is a comprehensive research and data collection platform for more than 23 anti-trafficking stakeholder groups that will identify challenges and success that need to be addressed on the frontlines and will collect the data simultaneously among all the stakeholder groups. More than 50 experts from more than 22 countries have collaborated with United Against Slavery to build this unique survey platform. Future collaborations will allow UAS to partner with other sectors of the transportation industry, as well as additional stakeholder groups, to participate in the upcoming National Outreach Survey.
The anti-trafficking movement has reached a pivotal time in history where it is vital to find out what is and isn’t working on the front-lines. Billions of dollars have been spent over the last decade to combat human trafficking around the globe and trafficking survivors still do not have the much needed resources to help them in their healing journeys. The National Outreach Survey is essential to providing updated data for the main anti-trafficking stakeholder groups, that will support data driven decisions on all levels of anti-trafficking work.
Human trafficking survivors are counting on us to figure this out. We need to keep pressing onward so that every man, woman, boy, and girl is freed from enslavement and receive the much needed resources in their healing journeys.
We look forward to United Against Slavery releasing a report from the National Outreach Survey for Flight Attendants and making this data available to the public-at-large. We are confident that this data will help drive improvements to our responses against human trafficking. For more information, you can visit www.UnitedAgainstSlavery.org.” Christi Wigle, CEO United Against Slavery
