Our Solutions

Ending sex trafficking takes more than escaping exploitation—it takes prevention, restoration, and justice.

A holistic solution to an urgent problem.

Since 1998, Shared Hope International has been leading the movement to end sex trafficking—by addressing the root causes, not just the symptoms. Our three-pronged approach unites prevention, restoration, and justice into a single, powerful framework that changes systems and lives.

1. Prevent

Stop trafficking before it starts.

We confront the conditions that allow trafficking to thrive by targeting demand, raising awareness, and equipping communities to recognize and stop exploitation. Through education campaigns, research, and professional training, we help build safer environments where every child can grow up free from harm.

2. Restore

Walk with survivors toward healing and hope.

Our survivor-centered approach continues long after a survivor exits “the life.” We partner with local organizations and advocates for policies that ensure survivors have access to trauma-informed care, housing, education, and economic opportunities that help rebuild dignity, stability, and independence.

3. Bring Justice

Hold buyers accountable. Change systems that fail survivors.

Justice begins when laws protect survivors, not punish them. We work to change laws so that buyers and traffickers, not victims, are held accountable. We fight to remove the legal barriers that keep survivors from rebuilding their lives and train professionals across every system and sector to respond with the compassion and justice survivors deserve. We rewrite laws to criminalize buyers instead of victims, eliminate legal barriers that prevent survivors from moving forward, and train professionals across every system to respond with the justice survivors deserve.

How Shared Hope International Turns Research Into Action

Shared Hope International works to end the sex trafficking of children and youth by connecting research, action, and community impact into a single ecosystem. Through its Institute for Justice & Advocacy, every program traces back to the same starting point: rigorous policy research that gives the organization its credibility and shapes how the United States identifies, prevents, and responds to child and youth sex trafficking.

That research foundation begins with the Child & Youth Sex Trafficking Legislative Resources, a cornerstone analysis of trafficking law. Alongside it sit the Just Like Me Report Card & Toolkit, which grades state protections and equips advocates; the Roadmap Report, in collaboration with our JuST Response Council, a national body of experts and survivors, whose 2025 guide advances community-based responses as the next step in anti-trafficking reforms; and Shared Hope’s advocacy briefs, publications, amicus briefs, and testimony, which carry that research into courts and legislatures.

This research powers Shared Hope’s action initiatives. The Just Like Me Campaign raises awareness, the Keep Our Kids Safe Initiative mobilizes prevention and protection, the Community-Based Responses to At-Risk and Trafficked Youth turns policy analysis into practical, local solutions for trafficked and at-risk youth, and the annual JuST Training Conference brings together the universe of stakeholders working to prevent, restore and bring justice to trafficked children and youth.

From there, the work reaches communities through advocacy, awareness, training and restoration programs: the Online Learning Center, the Invading the Darkness Podcast, the Just Like Me Incarcerated Survivor Project, the Anti-Trafficking Resource Network, the Survivor Wellbeing Initiative, Faith Initiatives, and Shared Hope’s Ambassadors of Hope, Teen and Young Adult Ambassadors, and Defenders USA programs.

Together, these efforts form one continuous pathway — research to action to impact — built to prevent the exploitation of children and youth, support survivors, and bring lasting change to communities across the country.