Abstract:
The United Nations defines human trafficking as “the recruitment,
transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons by means
of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud,
of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of
the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of
a person having control over another person for the purpose of exploitation”
(United Nations, 2006). Affecting hundreds of thousands of victims
in the US, it emerged as a federal priority, with the Department of Justice
(DOJ). We defined capacity building as establishing understanding and enabling
skills to assist excluded individuals participate more effectively in
their communities (Henderson & Thomas, 2004; Payne, 2005).We adopted
the five-component definition of capacity building developed by Glickman
and Servon (1998) that analyzes the organization’s resource, internal, programmatic,
network and political capacities. Using a qualitative approach,
we determined whether enhanced organizational capacity in addressing this
vulnerable population occurred.
