Lima – IOM, the UN Migration Agency, and the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism of Perú, this week (6 November) launched in Lima, A Theater against Trafficking project that seeks to prevent human trafficking for sexual exploitation in the travel and tourism sectors in Perú.

Perú, like many other countries, has identified cases of sexual exploitation of children in the context of the tourism industry, some believed to be actual trafficking victims.

"Through this project, we want to engage the educational community to develop preventive actions in their schools and contribute to the reduction of social tolerance and the normalization of exploitation," said the IOM Perú Chief of Mission, José Iván Dávalos.

This project will impact more than 5,000 schoolchildren and tour operators, as well as teachers of the selected schools of the mentioned regions.

At a national level between 2009 and 2016, according to the Crime Observatory of the Public Ministry of Perú, 4,274 alleged victims of trafficking were registered and the most vulnerable age range was between 13 and 17 years old.

The project will be taken to ten schools in Piura, La Libertad, Ica, Loreto, Puno, Arequipa, Cusco, Junín, Lima and Callao. These regions were prioritized both for the high numbers of cases of trafficking identified as well as for being important tourist destinations.

Two main activities will be implemented:  the presentation of the play Angel without wings (Angel sin alas) and “awareness raising workshops,” in which, trafficking specialists—through an approach based on play and art—will inform audiences of students in the third, fourth and fifth year of high-school about the risks of human trafficking.

The play Angel Without Wings represents a common reality in the country and communicates very closely the risks that young people can face.

This project is based on the pilot that IOM developed in 2016 and on the various initiatives carried out in recent years, such as the presentation of the plays Lita’s Nightmare and Prison of Angels. These  the theatrical plays were presented in several districts of Lima as well as Puerto Maldonado, the capital of the Madre de Dios region, one of the regions with highest number of trafficking cases linked to illegal mining, logging and tourism. 

For more information please contact Inés Calderón at IOM Perú, +511 6330000, icalderon@iom.int