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Our aim is to launch a program in Portuguese schools in order to prevent human trafficking through awareness raising and training.

Through the training of teachers, awareness campaigns for students and parents and creation of Active Communities against Trafficking (persons of the community that work on campaigning), we believe that we can reduce the number of children that are recruited, manipulated, and/or forced into human trafficking.

IT and social networks play a major role in the targeting, solicitation, manipulation, marketing and exploitation of children. Children are bought, sold and advertised online every day. Mobile phones, social media, messaging apps and other digital forms of communication enable traffickers to target and investigate children around the clock and from almost anywhere.

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The "Active Schools Against Trafficking" project aims at preventing trafficking, especially amongst children, teenagers and young adults, who are recruited via social networks/internet, sports clubs and at the doorsteps of their schools, with false promises of relationships or employment, often glamorous, inviting them to become international models or football players.

Please follow the link below to some videos about this topic that were created, acted and directed by students of a Portuguese school where NSIS has implemented a similar project:

Be aware of potential recruitment by traffickers - sexual exploitation

Be aware of potential recruitment by traffickers - labor exploitation

Training the teachers to use the various classes they teach as a platform for awareness raising, blending it in their own curricula (history, economics, geography, maths etc), and at the same time how to identify indicators of potential recruitment from traffickers is one of the key elements of our project. The schools is also a pathway for reaching the community, namely through the parents of the children who are enticed by teachers to organise activities that will bring the community to the school (plays, cinema, exhibitions).

By encouraging people in the community to play an active role in preventing trafficking, the project helps create Active Anti-Trafficking Communities, mobilized citizens' groups that carry out public awareness activities. The basic idea of the project is that an informed community is a hostile community for traffickers, successfully managing to prevent new victims from falling into trafficking networks.

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Active Schools Against Human Trafficking