JWT’s program School for Justice aims to turn former underage child prostitutes into lawyers, by equipping them with a targeted education. Via Adweek:
In recent years, underage sex trafficking has run rampant in India, with as many as 1.2 million children—some as young as 7—forced to serve as prostitutes. Yet, only a handful of cases leading to convictions are ever brought to trial. (That number was 55 in 2015, the most recent year for which statistics are available.)
J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam believes education will help solve the problem, but raising public awareness is just one element of an initiative the agency rolled out this week with social rights organization Free a Girl Movement.
Dubbed “School for Justice,” the program seeks to make a real-world impact by educating some of the young women who previously worked in brothels, providing them with training geared toward a career in law. Nineteen former underage sex workers between the ages of 19 and 26 began their studies this week. JWT hopes that one day they may become prosecutors, or even judges, empowered to combat the criminals who once exploited and abused them.
“The client came to us with a brief for an awareness campaign for child prostitution in India, aimed at Indian men,” JWT Amsterdam executive creative director Bas Korsten tells Adweek. “After a few concept rounds, the creative team came up with the idea for School for Justice. We presented it, and Free a Girl liked it, although they were aware of the huge implications this approach would have. In close collaboration with them, we worked out the educational program, looked for a physical space, selected the first class of girls, and built the campaign around it.”