Our Mission
Every Woman Free
Since 2016, we've stood beside migrant women in the Middle East who were promised honest work but found themselves trapped in systems of forced labor, abuse, and imprisonment.
These women deserve freedom, dignity, and someone who will fight for them.
Why are so many women from Ethiopia, Uganda, Ghana and more traveling to the Middle East to work as migrant domestic workers?
For many it begins with hope. Hope to provide for their children. Hope to support aging parents. Hope for a steady income in communities where jobs are scarce and wages are low.
Recruiters promise good salaries, safe homes, and dignified work. Families gather their savings to help their daughters take these opportunities. But too often, the reality is very different. Many women arrive to find long hours, withheld salaries, confiscated passports, exploitation and in the worst cases - abuse and trafficking. Yet they remain silent because they fear losing everything they sacrificed so much to pursue.
At Set Captives Free, we walk with these women - before, during and after their journeys. We educate communities about the risks and advocate for safer migration in countries of origin. We visit women in prison, offer legal aid support, provide for immediate needs, and help provide tickets and travel packages so they can return home. We also connect survivors to after care as they return to their home countries.
Our heart is to support survivors returning home with dignity, safety, and the hope they were promised.
What We Do
Support Emotionally, Physically, & Spiritually
Prison Visits
Every week on visitation days, we go to the prison to spend time with the women. During these visits, we encourage the women and seek to understand more about their situations. Most importantly, we let them know they are SEEN, HEARD, AND CARED FOR.
Hygiene Items
In detention centers, the women cannot access hygiene items unless they purchase them themselves. On every prison visit, the volunteers bring a small financial gift for the women so they can buy things like toothpaste and sanitary pads. Often, these gifts are from the volunteers themselves.
Case Processing
Part of our team’s role is to assist the women in learning more about their legal cases. This often entails inquiring about their cases on their behalf at the local police stations or applying for travel documents through their regional embassies when necessary. Recently, through a generous donor we have secured a lawyer to help us with some of the harder cases and he has a been a huge help in our work.
Tickets Home
A big part of what we do is to support the women ready to travel by buying a repatriation ticket to their home countries. They will not be released from detention if they cannot purchase a flight back to their country, regardless if they have no case against them or have finished their sentence. We fundraise and purchase their tickets so they can finally return home.
Care Packages
We provide care packages for women in prison and detention centers. This includes hygiene items and approved clothing items. Care packages often depend on an application process to do a distribution that must be approved by the police director, but is an additional way to encourage the women.
Reintegration
We are currently developing partners throughout African countries where most of the domestic workers are from to help receive women when they are released and repatriated. These partners offer services such as airport pickups, counseling, spiritual enhancement programs, and job training for the women to be reintegrated back into their home countries.