BOSTON, Jan. 29, 2019—Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins joined local, state, and federal officials along with the leaders of public, private, and non-profit agencies today to adopt updated protocols protecting the young victims of human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation.

District Attorney Rollins was among dozens of representatives of law enforcement, medical and mental health care, human services, youth advocacy, education, and other disciplines at the Children’s Advocacy Center of Suffolk County who signed a memorandum of understanding outlining their responsibilities as participants in the Support to End Exploitation Now (SEEN) coalition. The MOU codifies policies and practices that have evolved since the coalition was first formed more than a decade ago.

“More than 12 years ago, the agencies in this room forged an unprecedented partnership to tackle what’s been called the nation’s least recognized epidemic – the commercial sexual exploitation of children,” District Attorney Rollins said. “Today, the SEEN Coalition is known as one of the most effective strategic responses in the nation to this insidious form of child abuse.”

The Children’s Advocacy Center of Suffolk County founded the SEEN coalition in 2007 to ensure that prostituted youth were properly treated as victims rather than offenders and that law enforcement, clinicians, social workers, and others provided them with a trauma-informed, multi-disciplinary response. The agreement uniting those agencies, however, had not been updated since that time. As a result, it’s been revised to accurately reflect the tighter collaboration among agencies and more specifically delineate their various responsibilities.

“In the 12 years since SEEN’s inception here at the Children’s Advocacy Center of Suffolk County, not one juvenile in Boston, Chelsea, Revere, or Winthrop has been arrested or charged with a prostitution offense,” District Attorney Rollins said. “The ‘safe harbor’ provision in Massachusetts’ landmark 2012 human trafficking law was born out of the voluntary practices that SEEN put in place. And SEEN partners like you have trained professionals in every county in the Commonwealth to increase the state’s capacity to identify child exploitation and provide a multidisciplinary response.”

But the need for SEEN and its partner agencies’ collaborative approach remains urgent, officials said – in 2018, for the second year in a row, the project received more than 200 referrals for high risk or exploited youth.

“So today, as we close out Human Trafficking Awareness Month, we’re renewing the shared commitment to this partnership,” District Attorney Rollins said. “We’re updating our memorandum of understanding to reflect our progress since 2007, not to mention the institutional changes at almost every partner agency. Today’s MOU is a better reflection of the high level at which the CAC and partner agencies are operating in these cases – with tighter collaboration, increased training, and more than a decade of experience under our collective belt. It memorializes our practices as we’ve refined them through the years, and it’s a how-to guide for other jurisdictions contemplating a modern approach to an age-old problem.”

SEEN has twice been named a Top 50 Innovative Government Program by a Harvard University think tank, and it’s been praised by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. To learn more about the project, visit https://www.suffolkcac.org/what-we-do/seen.

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