Our initial idea was to talk about San Luis Obispo being a hub for human trafficking, however after researching we realized we needed stronger angle. We thought it would be interesting to discuss how dating sites like sugardaddie.com are linked to human trafficking because it is often used by college students to help pay for school. In a college town like San Luis Obispo, it hit close to home. Once we completely the community engagement report, our respondents made it clear that they wanted to know more about the topic because they weren’t entirely familiar with the information. People specifically wanted to know what they could do to avoid predators on social media. In the age of the internet, we decided that this would be a large focus in our story.
Through my social network engagement report, we were hoping to to hear back from someone who had first-hand experience with websites like Sugardaddie.com. However, we realized that it’s highly unlikely that someone would reach out and share a personal story about exchanging dates for money. Luckily, we had a girl reach about the experience of someone she knew in college. Although it wasn’t directly in San Luis Obispo, it gave us insight into the world of dating sites like sugardaddie.com and why young girls use them to make money. Even though we weren’t able to find a direct source in San Luis Obispo, Dan Dow was able to put us in contact with Opal Singleton who is the CEO of Million Kids. Million Kids is an organization that works to fight to end Human Trafficking. She gave us valuable information about the increase in human trafficking and what we can do to stop it. After talking with her, it became clear that we needed to discuss ways to avoid the dangers of social media and online dating sites. Additionally, our backgrounder gave us insight into how prevalent these sites and human trafficking are all over the US. After reading through some of the articles, we were able further decide what we wanted to focus on in our story.
As for our interactive and video portion of the project, we plan on attending an event for survivors of sexual assault and take a video of the candle ceremony. It’s been difficult to find visuals that would be a meaningful attribution to the story. We are still deciding what to do for our interactive portion of the project. We would like to have different sound bites of victims talking about their story so people can hear the emotion directly though them. Before we really start to work on our interactive portion, we need to get an interview with someone who has experience with these sites and human trafficking. We posted a survey online asking for people to interview with us and told them that they could remain anonymous. As for the candle light ceremony, we want to use that as the banner when readers click on the article.