Rights4Girls is dedicated to protecting the rights of young women and girls here in the U.S. Whether it is through our work educating lawmakers on child sex trafficking, opposing human rights violations against our girls behind bars, or advocating for alternatives to detention and comprehensive services for abused or exploited girls– Rights4Girls is devoted to defending the rights of our girls.
In 2011, Rights4Girls co-founded the Girls at the Margin National Alliance with The National Crittenton Foundation– a coalition of over 200 local, state, and national organizations reaching across disciplines and systems to address root causes of the complex issues confronting girls and young women at the margin, including family and community violence, sexual abuse, racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of adversity. The Alliance provides a platform and community for our members to connect with each other, share information about policy initiatives and campaigns, and to learn about policies, opportunities, and resources at the federal level. In June of 2016, we were invited to present on the Alliance and its policy goals at the United State of Women Conference. We also partnered with the White House Council on Women and Girls to bring girls and service providers from all over the country together to discuss the various issues impacting marginalized girls, and to engage in solution-focused discussions in the areas of education, child welfare, juvenile justice, child sex trafficking, and pregnant and parenting girls.
In 2015, we petitioned the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) to examine the United States for continuing to arrest and incarcerate child victims of sex trafficking. Together with the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights, we asked the Commission to explore the condition of child victims of sex trafficking in the United States and how the U.S. has failed to prevent states from enforcing prostitution laws against such children even when such laws conflict with state, federal, and international law. Rights4Girls was grateful to Kerry Kennedy for assisting our petition by demonstrating how the United States is not fulfilling its international human rights obligations and falling behind other member-states in responding to child trafficking victims. The resulting hearing helped expose the human rights violations that child victims of commercial sexual exploitation suffer in the U.S. at the hands of state authorities instead of receiving the care and assistance to which they are entitled.