Travelers Aid International is a global network that serves as a human services support system worldwide by facilitating interactions between social service agencies, airports, train stations, and other transit hubs in order to help children and adults who become stranded while traveling or are in distress or at risk of harm as a result of travel.
The Travelers Aid movement began in St. Louis, Missouri, under the leadership of Mayor Bryan Mullanphy. Its purpose was to provide assistance to American pioneers and new immigrants who became stranded on their journeys. At the time of his death in 1851, Mullanphy left a bequest of a half million dollars in his will to help "aid travelers going west."
By the 20th century, Travelers Aid Societies had sprung up in major cities across the country. The programs protected stranded travelers, especially women and children, from others who would use, abuse, or victimize them. The primary fear was that young women travelers, native born and immigrant alike, would be kidnapped and turned into "white slaves" (defined as white women forced into prostitution). Therefore, Travelers Aid Societies, most notably the Travelers Aid Society of New York, provided social work to vulnerable travelers at train stations and piers in order to prevent their falling victim to the white slave trade and related vices. [1] [2] Although many of the Travelers Aid programs were started by religious communities, services were often provided regardless of beliefs. It is the oldest non-religious social welfare organization in the United States.
The founder of the Travelers Aid Society of New York (TAS-NY), Grace Hoadley Dodge, had hoped to unite other Travelers Aid Societies to form a national association, but she died in 1914 before this could be accomplished. [3] Due primarily to the efforts of TAS-NY General Secretary Orin Clarkson Baker, national unification was finally accomplished in 1917. [4] This national association provided a "chain of service", with one agency helping another when intercity transportation of a client was required. Travelers Aid was one of the original "United Service Organizations" (USO) that provided assistance to traveling service men and women, operating 175 troop transit lounges. Today, Travelers Aid responds to the specific needs of the community. Although each member agency shares the original service of assisting stranded travelers, many Travelers Aid agencies provide shelter for the homeless, transitional housing, job training, counseling, local transportation assistance, and other programs.
Similar organizations were founded in other countries; in Great Britain and many other countries it is spelled as "Travellers' Aid Society", and originally was closely associated with the YWCA. [5]
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, also known as Joint or JDC, is a Jewish relief organization based in New York City. Since 1914 the organisation has supported Jewish people living in Israel and throughout the world. The organization is active in more than 70 countries.
COYOTE is an American sex workers' rights organization. Its name is a backronym for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, a reflection of the fact that sex work tends to be stigmatized primarily because of society-imposed standards of ethics. COYOTE's goals include the decriminalization of prostitution, pimping and pandering, as well as the elimination of social stigma concerning sex work as an occupation. Its work is considered part of the larger sex worker movement for legal and human rights.
Grace Hoadley Dodge was an American philanthropist who was the first woman appointed a member of the New York Board of Education.
Prostitution is illegal in the vast majority of the United States as a result of state laws rather than federal laws. It is, however, legal in some rural counties within the state of Nevada. Additionally, it is decriminalized to sell sex in the state of Maine, but illegal to buy sex. Prostitution nevertheless occurs elsewhere in the country.
The People's Recovery Empowerment Development Assistance Foundation, commonly referred to as the PREDA Foundation or PREDA, is a charitable organization that was founded in Olongapo City, Philippines in 1974. Its purposes include the promotion and protection of the dignity and the Human Rights of the Filipino people, especially of women and children. The main focus is to assist the sexually-exploited and abused children.
The American Sexual Health Association (ASHA), formally known as the American Social Hygiene Association and the American Social Health Association, is an American nonprofit organization established in 1914, that cites a mission to improve the health of individuals, families, and communities, with an emphasis on sexual health, as well as a focus on preventing sexually transmitted infections and their harmful consequences. ASHA uses tools such as education, communication, advocacy and policy analysis activities with the intent to heighten public, patient, provider, policymaker and media awareness of STI prevention, screening, diagnosis and treatment strategies.
The Federal government of the United States requires certain non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive federal anti-HIV/AIDS or anti-trafficking funds to adopt an organization-wide policy opposing prostitution and sex-trafficking. This requirement, known as the anti-prostitution pledge, has been in place since 2003.
Indonesia is a source, transit, and destination country for women, children, and men trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. The greatest threat of trafficking facing Indonesian men and women is that posed by conditions of forced labor and debt bondage in more developed Asian countries and the Middle East.
In the United States, human trafficking tends to occur around international travel hubs with large immigrant populations, notably in California, Texas, and Georgia. Those trafficked include young children, teenagers, men, and women; victims can be domestic citizens or foreign nationals.
Antigua and Barbuda is a destination country for a small number of women from Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced prostitution. To a lesser extent, it is reportedly also a destination country for women subjected to involuntary domestic servitude in private homes. Business people from the Dominican Republic and Antiguan citizens acting as pimps and brothel owners subject foreign women to forced prostitution primarily in four illegal brothels that operate in Antigua as well as in private residences that operate as brothels. Some of these foreign women voluntarily migrate to Antigua to engage in prostitution but are subsequently subjected to force or coercion and become victims of sex trafficking. After their arrival, brothel managers confiscate their passports and threaten the victims with deportation until they repay the brothel owner for travel and other expenses they were not aware they had incurred. Some other foreign victims of sex trafficking enter the country legally with work permits as “entertainers” then are subsequently forced to engage in prostitution.
Transnational efforts to prevent human trafficking are being made to prevent human trafficking in specific countries and around the world.
Orin Clarkson Baker was General Secretary of the Travelers Aid Society of New York (TAS-NY) from 1911 to 1917. The TAS-NY was formed by Grace Hoadley Dodge in 1907 to protect native-born and immigrant women from the moral dangers, especially "white slavery", that were thought to be rampant at urban train stations and piers. Upon Dodge's death in 1914, Orin Baker became the face of the Travelers Aid movement in New York and the United States. He criss-crossed the country to promote travelers' aid as a legitimate subfield of the emerging social work profession. While in California, he helped establish the Travelers Aid Society of California for the purpose of providing travelers' aid to the female visitors of the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition. Under his leadership, local Travelers Aid Societies and similar organizations were federated to form the National Travelers Aid Society in 1917. That same year he published the first travelers' aid textbook, Travelers Aid Society in America. Baker abruptly resigned from both the Travelers Aid Society of New York and the National Travelers Aid Association in 1919 when he thought board members were attempting to undermine his authority within the movement.
The Travelers Aid Society of New York (TAS-NY) was founded by Grace Hoadley Dodge in New York City in 1907. Thirteen other prominent Christian and Jewish women, including the social worker Belle Moskowitz, made up the Society's first Board of Directors. The Travelers Aid Society's purpose was to provide social work to women traveling alone in order to protect them from moral danger. The TAS-NY believed that the greatest threat to female travelers in the early twentieth century was white slave trafficking, defined as the coercion of "white" women into prostitution and their subsequent sale to procurers or male clients. Agents of the Travelers Aid Society patrolled Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station, as well as the city's piers where transatlantic ocean liners docked, looking for women who they identified as vulnerable. Services usually entailed safely escorting women, immigrant and native-born alike, to city addresses, other transportation lines, or to a temporary lodging home, such as the YWCA. The TAS-NY's first headquarters was a four-story row house located a short walk from Grand Central Terminal at 238 East 48th St in the Turtle Bay neighborhood.
Aurora "Lola" Greene Baldwin was an American woman who became one of the first policewomen in the United States. In 1908, she was sworn in by the City of Portland as Superintendent of the Women's Auxiliary to the Police Department for the Protection of Girls, with the rank of detective.
HOPE Atlanta, the programs of Travelers Aid of Metropolitan Atlanta, is a non-profit organization that has served the metro-Atlanta area for 112 years. Since its inception in 1900, the organization has provided services to over one million people in need throughout the counties surrounding Atlanta, Georgia.
The National Refugee Service (NRS) was a refugee aid organization founded in New York City on 15 May 1939 to assist refugees from Europe fleeing Nazi persecution. It represented a reorganization of a predecessor organization, the National Coordinating Committee for Aid to Refugees and Emigrants Coming from Germany (NCC), which had been in operation since 1934 as an umbrella organization of refugee aid agencies.p. 364-365 The National Refugee Service remained in existence until August 1946, when it merged with the Service for Foreign Born of the National Council of Jewish Women to form the new organization United Service for New Americans.
The Travelers Aid Family Services (TAFS) was originally formed as a volunteer based social service organization seeking to provide resources for the massive numbers of immigrants arriving in the United States during the mid to late 1900s. Boston's branch, Travelers Aid Family Services of Boston, worked to assist immigrants arriving at the city's many train stations and boating docks. Today, TAFS has evolved into the non-profit organization FamilyAid Boston, working to end homelessness within the city of Boston, Massachusetts.
Sex trafficking in the United States is a form of human trafficking which involves reproductive slavery or commercial sexual exploitation as it occurs in the United States. Sex trafficking includes the transportation of persons by means of coercion, deception and/or force into exploitative and slavery-like conditions. It is commonly associated with organized crime.
The history of sexual slavery in the United States is the history of slavery for the purpose of sexual exploitation as it exists in the United States.
Margaret Theadora Allan (1889–1968) was a Community Worker and organizing secretary for the Travellers' Aid Society of New South Wales.