Community Outreach Alliance

Sex Industry Survivors

The Community Outreach Alliance addresses the specific need of providing outreach and education to both the public and survivors of commercialized sexual exploitation. Anne Bissell, the Executive Director of Voices for Justice, has been on the frontline in her attempts to do this job.   

The Community Outreach Alliance as a comprehensive component under the Voices for Justice umbrella of services. Currently, communities lack the awareness to proactively respond to the problems surrounding commercialized sexual exploitation.  In addition, communities tend to look the other way, ignoring the problem, hoping it will go away, or that it really isn’t that bad.  According to Bissell, “It is that bad. And the problem of what I call the commodification of human sexuality is only getting worse.  More and more, it is our children who are for sale.  We have entered into an era where porn stars are heroines, and pimps with songs about pimpin’ all over the world are our heroes.”

When communities try to minimize or ignore the problems related to commercialized sexual exploitation, a virus that Bissell calls the Sex Industry Matrix insidiously creeps into every aspect of civil society.  Because of the fact that we are now in an “everything happening all at once all the time paradigm,” Bissell believes that if we continue to ignore the ever increasing prevalence of sexual exploitation, the results will be disastrous.

The Community Outreach Alliance will utilize innovative outreach techniques geared to the specific needs of both the clients and the community.  The Community Outreach Alliance will help locate victims of sexual exploitation.  These victims include survivors of sexual exploitation, and human sexual trafficking.  The Community Outreach Alliance assists survivors in getting out of the sex industry, in finding new job skills, and receiving a variety of services they need to redesign their lives.

Within the structure of the Outreach Alliance there is a collaboration of agencies that help these survivors stay on track, including the Sex Industry and Sexual Abuse Survivors recovery programs designed by Bissell, and the proposed Collaborative Court System Model.   

The Community Outreach Alliance, as well as all the services provided by Voices for Justice are unified by the symbol and healing principle of the Silver Braid.  The Silver Braid is a symbol of reintegration and spiritual healing, for both the survivor and the community. 

Any community which has been infected with the virus Executive Director Anne Bissell calls the sex industry virus is in great need of what this symbol implies.  When communities are strengthened the collective Silver Braid become stronger.  When the silver braid is extended between survivors and the community, there is a ripple effect that is truly revolutionary.