In mid-November, college student members of the International Justice Mission chapter at the University of Tennessee were one of many colleges to participate in “no slave November” to raise awareness about the widespread perils of human trafficking. The student activist group “fight[s] against injustice and oppression” on their campus, in part by promoting an app that helps combat sex trafficking. This app, called TraffickCam, encourages hotel patrons to capture photographs of their room and upload the photographs to the app’s hotel room image database. A database of hotel room images will allow human trafficking investigators to match images of trafficked persons taken at the same location.
TraffickCam was created by the Exchange Initiative in 2015, an American organization which focuses on assisting child victims of commercial sexual exploitation by providing them with resources, information, and networking solutions. Their app, TraffickCam, has the potential to engage people of all ages, which in turn will create widespread recognition of the reality that human trafficking can happen almost anywhere, to almost anyone. As seen at the University of Tennessee, college students have been inspired to become a part of the solution to combat human trafficking. But the genius of TraffickCam is that anyone with a cell phone that has the capability to download the app. Any person with a smartphone has the capabilities to click on the “App Store” icon, search TraffickCam, and download the program onto their handheld device. Due to the universal nature and appeal of technology, the creators of TraffickCam have created a space where individualized efforts have the potential to lead to large-scale change.
We applaud the Exchange Initiative for creating the TraffickCam app, which allows users to become personally invested in the fight against human trafficking as blossoming activists. We further applaud the International Justice Mission chapter at the University of Tennessee for promoting TraffickCam and making evident the large-scale benefits use of this app will have. While many discuss the need for change to combat human trafficking, TraffickCam has actually provided a solution that we all can engage in.