Human Trafficking won’t stop. Once you find one way to stop it the traffickers will find another way around it. So for Anti-Trafficking you always need to keep on finding new innovative ways to stop it.

Every year in Vietnam, thousands of children and teens are illegally trafficked to China, Cambodia, Malaysia and Europe. Forced into marriage, prostitution and slave labor.

Pacific Links, the leading Anti-Trafficking organization in Vietnam is trying to find cost effective ways to educate and stop it. The budget was zero. So we needed a simple and cost-effective idea. An idea that the Traffickers wouldn’t be looking for.

When trafficked everything is taken from the victims except their clothes. So we made their clothes the solution. Creating Anti-Trafficking clothing tags designed to look like any common clothing tag. The tags can be sewn into any type of clothing, so traffickers would never notice them. The tags contain crucial information to help the victims call for help from help hotlines, Vietnamese Embassy and police. The tags are in multiple languages, in Vietnamese for the trafficked and other languages for possible countries they might be trafficked too. With the hopes if the worst happens they will have a life line in the shape of discrete clothing tag. Creating a way to help trafficked victims that Traffickers won’t suspect.

There were no patents. This idea was to mimic already existing common clothing tags so traffickers wouldn’t notice them. Pacific Links began to incorporate the Anti-Trafficking clothing tags into their educational outreach program starting in December 2018. They are continuing to pass out Anti-Trafficking tags to high risk areas in Vietnam.

The Anti-Trafficking tags had to be designed to look like common clothing tags so they blended into clothing without being noticed by the traffickers. They had to be designed so the multiple languages and crucial information to the victims was easy to read and share with someone that could help them. They needed to be simple and cost-effective. Over 25,000 tags were produced in the first month to be distributed in high risk areas in Vietnam by Pacific Links the Anti-Trafficking organization in Vietnam.

The long-term outcome is the hope that these Anti-Trafficking tags can help trafficked victims come home to their loved ones. The Anti-Trafficking tags are also used as an educational tool for Pacific Links when they do their outreach programs to high risk areas in Vietnam. The more educated potential victims are the less chance they will be trafficked. The tags are simple and cost-effective way to help potential victims and Pacific Links is able to produce more and more for their outreach programs. With over 25,000 tags produced in the first month to be distributed in high risk areas in Vietnam by Pacific Links during their outreach program. When passed out for the first time a mother asked Pacific links why they didn’t pass the tags out last year before her daughter was taken. Giving hope all with a few inches of nylon.