Southeast Asian victims of domestic minor sex trafficking: Advocacy lessons from a community health center

There are an estimated 300,000 victims of domestic minor sex trafficking/commercially sexually exploited minors in the United States at any given time. Oakland, California, is a center of the epidemic of commercial sexual violence against youth, which spans all racial and ethnic categories. Through a community health center, Southeast Asian youth have been identified as particularly high risk for commercial sexual exploitation, due to factors including language and culture. Asian Health Services, a community health center based in Oakland, and Banteay Srei, an outreach and youth development program for Southeast Asian adolescents at high risk of commercial sexual exploitation, worked together to craft a public health model for this high risk population (education and youth development services, early detection via screening and referral protocols, and clinical services for promoting prevention and wellness in this high risk population). To promote the health needs for Southeast Asian youth at risk of becoming domestic minor victims of sex trafficking, Asian Health Services and Banteay Srei embarked on several advocacy efforts aimed at combating the problem - training professionals to identify victims of sexual exploitation, collaborating with media outlets to raise awareness, building coalitions and organizing locally and nationally, developing a research agenda, and advocating for the implementation of a victim-centered public health model, rather than relying on justice interventions which may sometimes implicitly criminalize the victims. Many lessons were learned from advocating for a public health model to address the prevention and wellness needs for the Southeast Asian commercially sexually exploited minors.