The Los Angeles Community Outreach Alliance addresses the specific need of providing outreach and education to both the public and survivors of commercialized sexual exploitation. Anne Bissell, the Executive Director of Voices for Justice, has been on the frontline in her attempts to do this job.

Author/Activist Bissell developed the Los Angeles Community Outreach Alliance as a compre-hensive component to the Voices for Justice umbrella of services. Currently, there is a lack of awareness in knowing how to proactively respond to the needs of commercialized sexual exploitation. In addition, communities tend to look the other way, ignoring the problem, hoping it will go away, or that it really isn't that bad. According to Bissell, "It is that bad. And the problem of what I call the commodification of human sexuality is only getting worse. More and more, it is our children who are for sale. We have entered into an era where porn stars are heroines, and pimps with songs about pimpin' all over the world are our heroes."

Because the sex industry has become so glamorized and accepted by mainstream culture, communities tend to minimize, and ignore the problems that surround commercialized sexual exploitation. Soon, the sex industry, much like a computer virus, insidiously moves into the various social structures that make up this community.

Cutting edge technology is the conveyor for increasingly graphic pornographic images that begin to instruct the men and women in the community as to what sex is. Bissell calls this the "everything happening all at once all the time pornographic paradigm," and that "if we continue to ignore the ever increasing prevalence of sexual exploitation, the results will be disastrous."

The Los Angeles Community Outreach Alliance will utilize innovative outreach techniques geared to the specific needs of both the clients and the community. The model developed in Los Angeles and Ventura County will be replicated throughout the United States.

The LA/Ventura County Community Outreach Alliance helps locate victims of sexual exploitation. These victims include survivors of sexual exploitation, and human sexual trafficking. Community Outreach Alliance assists survivors in getting out of the sex industry, in finding new job skills, and receiving a variety of services they need to redesign their lives.

Within the structure of the Outreach Alliance there is a collaboration of agencies that help these survivors stay on track, including the Sex Industry and Sexual Abuse Survivors recovery programs, and the proposed Collaborative Court System Model.

The Community Outreach Alliance, as well as all the services provided by Voices for Justice is unified by the symbol and healing principle of the Silver Braid. The Silver Braid is a symbol of reintegration and spiritual healing, for both the survivor and the community.

Any community that has been infected with the virus Executive Director Anne Bissell calls the sex industry virus is in great need of what this symbol implies. When communities are strengthened the collective Silver Braid become stronger. When the silver braid is extended between survivors and the community, there is a ripple effect that is truly revolutionary.