You can disrupt slavery. Outreach and disruption teams focus on reaching out to both victims of trafficking and those who purchase them and hold them in captivity.
Through prayer, policy changes, and in person and over the phone interactions, volunteers fight to disrupt the cycle of trafficking. These teams strive to show the love that Jesus demonstrated to the broken as He walked this earth.
In early 2017, God called us, members of the Church, to go out and demonstrate the love and freedom through Jesus to sex buyers.
Teams, full of God’s grace, started conversations with sex buyers outside of illicit massage businesses to bring awareness to sex trafficking. We offer to pray and share the hope that we have in Jesus Christ. Through this approach, we hope to create lasting change in sex buyers that will greatly reduce the demand of sex trafficking services. Our teams have visited more than 110 illicit massage businesses in northern Virginia to date.
We know that the illicit massage businesses are not the only place sex buyers are purchasing victims for sex. Another common ritual is for men to visit sites online where they can see pictures and videos of victims to purchase in Northern Virginia for sexual services.
We started phone outreach because 84% of criminal sex trafficking cases used the internet to sell their victims for sex. If the sex buyer can find them…then so can we. Via our phone outreach, we have the opportunity to utilize phone numbers where people are being sold online in Northern Virginia and text them to provide the resources they need to break free.
Illicit Massage Businesses (IMBs) impact the community in a variety of ways. In 2019, Reset180 conducted a study to access the impact of the 85 IMBs in Fairfax County, VA. The goals of the study were to capture numbers for demand and revenue, determine demographics of customers and workers, determine how close these places are to public schools, and how they impacted legitimate massage businesses.