Center for Violence Prevention & Recovery
The Center for Violence Prevention & Recovery (CVPR) provides a robust series of services and support to help people impacted by violence, as well as provider consultation and training.
Support for Survivors of Human Trafficking
Compassionate Support for Survivors of Labor and Sex Trafficking
Adelante/Moving Forward with Hope is an innovative, integrated, and collaborative project between the violence intervention programs of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Brigham & Women's Hospital. The Adelante Project assists current and former adult survivors of labor and sex trafficking throughout Greater Boston and Eastern Massachusetts.
All services are free, confidential and voluntary. We work with survivors at any stage in their experience of exploitation.
To reach Adelante, please call 617-667-8141, Monday through Friday, 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. If you need immediate assistance, call 911, go to your local hospital emergency room.
Our Services
- Community & Provider Consultations
- Complex care planning
- Connections to community resources
- Counseling
- Legal and immigration advocacy
- Medical advocacy
- Peer support
- Safety planning
- Shelter and housing advocacy
- Training and education for healthcare clinicians and community providers
Our Team
Our team is made up of two clinical social workers as co-leads, one social work advocate at each hospital, and two Survivor Peer Specialists. We are also an internship site for graduate social work students.
More About Human Trafficking
What is Human Trafficking?
Human trafficking is a crime that involves the exploitation of a person for the purpose of coerced sex or labor. Traffickers utilize force, fraud, and coercion to control individuals and profit from them.
Labor Trafficking
Labor trafficking, or forced labor, most often begins with a simple job offer. It becomes trafficking when pay or working conditions are abusive and the worker cannot quit or complain because the boss is threatening them or exploiting their desperate economic circumstances.
Federal Definition: Forced labor is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery. (United States Department of Justice, 2025)
Sex Trafficking
Traffickers target vulnerable people who have needs that the traffickers can fill. People in sex trafficking situations sometimes know and even trust or love their traffickers. Sometimes traffickers offer material support – a place to live, clothing or other basic needs. Other times, they offer love, emotional support, protection or a sense of belonging.
Federal Definition: Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing or soliciting of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age. (United States Department of Justice, 2025)
Signs of Exploitation & Vulnerabilities
This list can help you recognize if you or someone you know is being trafficked/exploited.
- Are you forced or pressured to trade sex for money or to have sex with people you don't want to?
- Are you getting paid for all of the work that you do?
- Is your job different from what you were promised?
- Did someone trap you in a job?
- Were you tricked into running away or leaving your home?
- Is your ID or other documentation being held by someone else?
- Are you afraid to leave?
You deserve to be safe and unharmed, no matter what you may have been told.
Vulnerability Due to Social Conditions or Lived Identities/Experiences
Traffickers exploit vulnerabilities that individuals possess, such as:
- Having an unstable living situation
- Having previously experienced other forms of violence, such as sexual abuse or domestic violence
- Having been involved in the child welfare or youth justice system and/or missing from home or care
- An undocumented immigration status
- Facing poverty or economic need
- Having a caregiver or family member who has a substance use issue
- Struggling with a substance use concern
- Living with a disability
- Holding a marginalized identity such as LGBTQIA+
Emergency Information
In case of emergency, please call 911 or go to your nearest emergency room.
