Education

if your business or organization would like a specialized training, presentation, or a q&a session with us, please email info@safeharbors.org with your request.

sexual violence

Sexual violence means that someone forces or manipulates someone else into unwanted sexual activity without their consent. Reasons someone might not consent include fear, age, illness, disability, and/or influence of alcohol or other drugs. Anyone can experience sexual violence including: children, teens, adults, elders, and people of any gender. Those who sexually abuse can be acquaintances, family members, trusted individuals, intimate partners, or strangers.

Forms of sexual violence include:

  • Rape or sexual assault
  • Child sexual assault and incest
  • Intimate partner sexual assault
  • Unwanted sexual contact/touching
  • Sexual harassment
  • Sexual exploitation
  • Showing one’s genitals or naked body to other(s) without consent
  • Masturbating in public
  • Watching someone in a private act without their knowledge or permission

domestic violence

Domestic violence is a pattern of coercive and/or violent tactics perpetrated by one person against a family member or intimate partner, with the goal of establishing and maintaining power and control over that person. Domestic violence can happen in all kinds of intimate relationships, including married couples, people who are dating, couples who live together, people with children in common, same-sex or gender-nonconforming partners, people who were formerly in a relationship with the person abusing them, and teen dating relationships.

Domestic violence includes behaviors that physically harm, arouse fear, prevent a partner from doing what they wish, or force them to behave in ways they do not want. It includes the use of physical and sexual violence, threats and intimidation, emotional abuse, and economic deprivation. Many of these different forms of domestic violence/abuse can be occurring at any one time within the same intimate relationship.

stalking

Stalking means engaging in a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to fear for his or her safety or the safety of others or suffer substantial emotional distress.  Stalking is serious, often violent, and can escalate over time.

Some things stalkers do:

  • Follow you and show up wherever you are.
  • Send unwanted gifts, letters, cards, or e-mails.
  • Damage your home, car, or other property.
  • Monitor your phone calls or computer use.
  • Use technology, like hidden cameras or global positioning systems (GPS), to track where you go.
  • Drive by or hang out at your home, school, or work.
  • Threaten to hurt you, your family, friends, or pets.
  • Find out about you by using public records or online search services, hiring investigators, going through your garbage, or contacting friends, family, neighbors, or co-workers.
  • Posting information or spreading rumors about you on the Internet, in a public place, or by word of mouth.
  • Other actions that control, track, or frighten you.

human trafficking

Human trafficking is defined as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons by means of coercion, abduction, or abuse of power of a position of vulnerability for the purpose of exploitation. Now that is quite a definition but what you need to know is that Human trafficking is a problem all around the world and is much closer to home than you think. Victims, younger than ever, are just as likely to be the kid next door as they are people from other countries.

Around 82% of victims of trafficking are under the age of 18, the average age is about 13 years old. The U.S. Justice Department estimates there are about a quarter of a million children and youth at risk for sex trafficking each year, however we believe that number to be much higher.