Texting Out an SOS

Sophie Otiende is a late adopter. It was only last summer, she says, that she became obsessed with her smartphone. Even so, she had a better excuse than the rest of us for constantly checking her device. Otiende is a consultant in Nairobi with the nonprofit Awareness Against Human Trafficking. By last spring, 31 women—in a group spread across war-torn Libya and linked via social media—had found her on Facebook through the organization and asked for her help. The first thing she could do, the endangered women told her, was join their group chat on WhatsApp.

Soon, Otiende was using the free messaging app to provide information to each of the women in Libya, who’d met in person or found one another through social media over several weeks and formed a support group. Many said they were afraid for their lives and needed a way out, so Otiende and her colleagues began supplying them with the directions, paperwork, and points of contact needed to flee to Kenya, with assistance from the Kenyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs & International Trade and the International Organization for Migration. By December 2014, all 31 women had escaped sex slavery and begun building new lives in Kenya, according to Otiende. “They risked everything,” she says. “We were constantly worried about them. But we were able to communicate.”