AEquitas - Champions for Justice

Calling all prosecutors! Connect with AEquitas Attorney Advisors and your peers on the third Thursday of every month at 2:00PM ET to examine prosecution strategies, emerging issues, promising practices, and more.

Office Hours is an uninhibited, unrecorded conversation between all registrants. It is NOT a webinar. Take advantage of a chance to meet our experts, converse, brainstorm, and share best practices and challenges in a national conversation.

2:00pm-3:30pm ET / 11:00am-12:30pm PT

Traditional approaches to identifying and investigating sex trafficking have often relied on undercover operations targeting individuals engaged in commercial sex, with subsequent efforts to determine whether force, fraud, or coercion was involved. However, the field has increasingly recognized the need for alternative, victim-centered strategies that reduce harm and improve outcomes.

Over the past several years, AEquitas has convened Roundtables with law enforcement, prosecutors, legal and medical service providers, victim advocates, and individuals with lived experience. These discussions have focused on emerging trends, effective investigative strategies, and promising practices that increase victim identification, enhance offender accountability, and reduce the risk of re-traumatization or criminalization of trafficking survivors.

This presentation draws from those Roundtable conversations and highlights practical, proactive strategies that do not rely on undercover operations that target potential victims. It also incorporates insights from individuals with lived experience—both those who were impacted by such operations and those who have worked alongside law enforcement to improve undercover tactics when used in a targeted, trauma-informed manner.

This presentation was produced by AEquitas under Grant No. 15POVC-21-GK-03263-HT, awarded by the Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this presentation are those of the contributors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Pending OVW approval.

The NIPSV is a three-and-a-half-day interactive course designed to challenge participants to re-evaluate their approach to prosecuting sexual assault. The Institute is grounded in a multidisciplinary, victim-centered response to sexual violence and encourages participants to expand their concept of justice in these cases by balancing  victim autonomy with offender accountability and community safety. Through a combination of hypothetical case scenarios, participant exercises, small group discussions, interactive lectures, and faculty demonstrations, participants will re-examine their own beliefs about sexual violence and refine their prosecution case evaluation, litigation, and trial presentation skills. The highly interactive format enables prosecutors from different jurisdictions, with varied levels of experience, to learn from one another and engage in "real-life" scenarios that are readily transferable to their everyday work. At the end of the Institute, participants will be better equipped to hold offenders of sexual assault criminally accountable while centering victims' needs and voices throughout the process.

The National Institute on the Prosecution of Sexual Violence is supported by Grant No. 15JOVW-24-GK-03009-MUMU awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed during the Institute are those of AEquitas and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Justice.