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Athens Community Training on Sex Trafficking

Athens-Clarke County’s Sex Trafficking Awareness and Response, or STAR, Task Force is hosting a free community training session regarding the problem of child sex Trafficking the event this week.

Dr. Deanna Walters is a professor in the UGA College of Public Health and the STAR co-chair. She says this session is for anyone in community.

“This is basic information provided to the community about what sex trafficking looks like in the state of Georgia, about what people can do if they suspect it’s happening, red flags to determine whether something meets that criteria, and what those local services look like if they have questions or suspect that trafficking is happening,” according to Walters.

Walters says while Atlanta is considered a major hub for sex trafficking, crackdowns there have the problem spreading into other areas of the state/moving elsewhere in Georgia.

STAR is working to get a handle on the number of local cases in an effort to determine the scale of the problem in Athens and north Georgia.

“The youth that are being trafficked, or sexually exploited for commercial trade, they tend to be youth that are lower SES (Socioeconomic Status), a marginalized population, they may be undocumented immigrants, they are likely to be from something like the LBGTQ community. They’re often the kids that traffickers think won’t be missed.”

Georgia Cares is providing the training which takes place Thursday at 6 pm on the Health Sciences Campus in the Global Health Auditorium of Wright Hall.

The training is Thursday at 6 pm on the Health Sciences Campus in the Global Health Auditorium of Wright Hall.

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