The Dortmunder Mitternachtsmission (Dortmund Midnight Mission) maintains round-the-clock, direct counseling services to prostitutes, former prostitutes, and trafficking victims.
Victims of trafficking are often helpless, and incapable of expressing themselves in the language of the country in which they are being held. Through maltreatment, humiliation, beatings, torture, drugs, alcohol, threats and Voodoo incantations they are reduced to total submission. Humiliation extinguishes any hope that young girls and women may have had.
For these women the Midnight Mission offers support and safety.
The first priorities entail providing food, clothing, medical attention, secure lodging, and psychological support. On the organizational level, the Mission’s work includes clarifying funding expenses, and assisting in overseeing the application for identity documents or temporary residence status,the organizing repatriation, or helping in the preparation of applications for asylum.
The Mission also supports family reunion by helping to find school and training positions for clients and their children, applying for social benefits, assisting in finding housing, and in seeking health insurance coverage.
Once the lives of clients take on a modicum of calm and normalcy, therapists are called in as needed to help with the process of managing traumatic experiences. Social workers sharing the native language and cultural background of the clients, facilitate clear communication and a caring responsiveness to specific needs.
The Mitternachtsmission is committed to facilitating the integration of these individuals. In cooperation with the Agency for Employment, it has been possible to offer clients jobs or training positions, thereby freeing them from dependence on public funds.
Particularly intensive is our mentoring program for victims who will be called on as witnesses in court. For many, the experience is harrowing, and without the close support of social workers, it can be retraumatizing.
The Shelter Stiftung supports the work of the Mitternachtsmission especially in those cases where aid is needed rapidly and unbureaucratically.
