Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Crystal Bennett as the two discuss the importance of building survivor informed organizations and how the Toolkit for Building Survivor Informed Organizations serves organizations who seek to do so.

Crystal Bennett

Crystal Benett is a seasoned professional serving as the Deputy Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, and Special Initiatives at the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center. With a rich background in social justice, advocacy, and community engagement, Crystal is dedicated to fostering inclusive environments and advancing initiatives that combat human trafficking.

Key Points

• The Toolkit for Building Survivor Informed Organizations is for organizations who serve individuals who have experienced trafficking, are working to prevent situations where an individual may experience trafficking, or are wanting to include individuals with lived experience in anti-trafficking efforts. 
• SAMHSA’s 6 Guiding Principles to a Trauma-Informed Approach are vital in the Toolkit for Building Survivor Informed Organizations. The principles guide organizations in cultivating a physically and psychologically safe environment. 
• It’s important to listen to and uplift the voices of those with lived experience in order to guide the work of the anti-human trafficking movement. 
• An organization should ensure that all staff members have access to self care and should have a foundation set in which leadership shows a commitment to the organization’s ability to achieve its mission. 
• It is essential to ensure the culture of an organization values all staff and members, giving individuals with lived experience control over their stories and whether or not they are shared. 
• Equity represents access and opportunity. 

Resources

• Toolkit: Building Survivor Informed Organizations
• National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center
• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
• SAMHSA’s 6 Guiding Principles to a Trauma-Informed Approach
• Human Trafficking Leadership Academy
• On the “VIBE” Framework

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:14
Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. My name is Dr. Sandie Morgan. This is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Today, we’re going to explore the Toolkit For Building Survivor Informed Organizations. I talk to people all the time, who say, “Well, we have had a conversation with so and so who is a survivor and they tick the box.” Well, I’m here to tell you today that our guest is going to show you there are a lot more boxes to tick on this. Our guest today is from the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center. Crystal Benett is a seasoned professional serving as the Deputy Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, and Special Initiatives at the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center. With a rich background in social justice, advocacy, and community engagement, Crystal is dedicated to fostering inclusive environments and advancing initiatives that combat human trafficking. As I’ve followed her leadership, I have admired how she’s driving strategic planning and implementation of programs, and it is a delight to have you on our show today. Crystal, thank you.

Crystal Bennet 2:09
Thank you, Sandie. It’s an absolute honor to be here.

Sandra Morgan 2:12
So Crystal, I want to start with who is this toolkit for?

Crystal Bennet 2:18
Yeah, Sandie. I think that there are a lot of organizations that are currently serving individuals who’ve experienced trafficking, or are working to prevent situations where an individual may experience trafficking, or maybe wanting to bring in individuals with lived experience to be a guide, and support a leader to really help to implement practices around anti trafficking efforts. I think this toolkit really can be for many folks across the gamut. Whether it’s individuals who may be providing funding to support organizations, to support the work with individuals who have experienced trafficking, or it can be for organizations that are currently providing services or who are providing preventative services. So I think that’s often organizations that are missed, is that if we don’t do anti-trafficking work, we think that this work is not for us. But many of the services, when we’re thinking about upstream determinants of health and meeting, just basic needs of folks, can be considered anti-trafficking work, because they do fall into the scope of being prevention.

Sandra Morgan 3:28
So as we dive into the toolkit, let’s review the guiding principles, because they show up throughout this toolkit. I think it is important that any organization is clear and has these principles somewhere on a wall, in a handbook, in a policy guide.

Crystal Bennet 3:53
Absolutely. So when we look at the guiding principles, really, as you said, this is the overarching framework for any organization when we’re thinking about involving those with lived experience, or working with individuals with lived experience. We’re really looking at Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s, otherwise known as SAMHSA’s, 6 Guiding Principles to a Trauma-Informed Approach. Those principles are around how do you as an organization, create safety? To make sure that not just those that you’re working with, but also those that work within your organization feel safe physically, and psychologically. Also looking at trustworthiness and transparency. Does your organization conduct work in a way where decisions are made transparently and maintain that level of trust? Because I think many of us are familiar with being part of organizations where decisions are being made, but we’re not really sure why the decisions are made, or having the opportunity to be part of those decisions. Also peer support. Peer support is not, again, just about providing someone with lived experience to those that we’re serving, but also thinking within the organization, how are we engaging with each other in a way that really holds space for the work that we’re doing, and allows people to just show up as themselves with that availability of one another to align with and support us? Collaboration and mutuality. How do we see some of the leveling around power differentials that often exist, either between staff persons at various levels, or when we think about service providers or individuals within an organization, meeting the needs of those out in the community, and making sure that everyone has an opportunity to be part of decision making, sharing power, and recognizing the value that everyone brings into the space. And then the last two, e mpowerment voice, and choice is really around providing choices and centering the strengths that are inherent to each and every one of us, to cultivate an environment of contribution to organizational decision making and policy setting. Lastly, cultural, historical, and gender issues. This is really looking at how does our organization address the explicit and implicit biases and historical trauma? We do this through practicing cultural competence, being culturally humble, and then ultimately changing the way that we work through being culturally responsive in our protocols and our policies to ensure that people’s needs are best met.

Sandra Morgan 6:44
Some of the language that you use, it’s so natural, but really inspires me. The terms around leveling and centering are words that make me feel like there’s room for me somewhere in this space. It balances with the use of language around biases, where I’m afraid that I’ve got biases, and I’m going to hurt somebody, so I have to be really careful. Your approach to looking at this as a framework also, is not just a structure that, “Oh, you’re an organization, you need to do these thing,” but this is also a foundation that makes your whole organization stronger, and more suited for a broader community to be involved. We do need that mutuality and that collaboration. Collaboration, people who know me for very long, they know that is my favorite word. Let’s dig into this now, and let’s start out with how this toolkit should be implemented.

Crystal Bennet 8:06
Yeah, and one thing, as you were talking, Sandie, that really just came to mind as I thought about the “why” that the toolkit is there, as we think about the “why” that people do the work, right? I think when we’re thinking about implementation and organizational readiness, is certainly creating the space for organizations to ask themselves the why. Why are we doing this work? Why do we want to engage with individuals with lived experience? Why do we want to make sure that we’re survivor informed? I really think about the slogan, “Nothing about us, without us, is for us.” We know that that’s been rooted in the disability justice movement, but as we think about being able to consider that phrase, as it’s related to the involvement of individuals with lived experience and informing our work, is it is absolutely necessary when we think about the implementation of this work to recognize, uplift, affirm, and utilize the voices of those who have experienced the situations to really guide the work ultimately, that we’re going to be doing. I think your question was, how should organizations implement that? I would start with the “why” first, and then really think about the “how.” Because the “why” gives us the vision. Why are we doing this? We can see it, we know what the vision is, and then the “how” is that there are resources such as this toolkit, to really start going through the various chapters to identify: Is your organization ready to do some self assessment? And making sure that we’re doing that self assessment because that’s so critical, rather than just jumping into the work and taking action steps that you’re not able to really evaluate or hold yourself accountable to how you’re doing it.

Sandra Morgan 10:05
One of the things I really appreciate about this toolkit is how it is designed. Sometimes I get really good information and then I’m trying to figure out the “how,” what you’re talking about. This is laid out with the structure, and the assessment for whatever that point is. So if you’re not naturally inclined to creating an assessment plan, don’t worry, it’s already here. Let’s talk about this. We’re going to do six chapters today. Hahaha, we’re actually going to point you to six chapters, and then I’ve asked Crystal if she’ll come back in two weeks, and we’ll do the last chapters. We’re going to take our time. Let’s start off, you’ve already mentioned organizational readiness, let’s jump into chapter two.

Crystal Bennet 11:04
Chapter two. We’re looking at Mission, Vision, and Leadership. So as I was starting to kind of preface this conversation, is when we’re thinking about our missions. It’s really around the action of what does your organization do? Who is it serving? And how do we serve those that we’re serving? And then that vision is what is it that we’re hoping to solve, create, or influence? I really think about that vision as to what do we see as a result of the work that we’re doing? In chapter two, with looking at our mission, vision, and leadership, we want to make sure that your organization has a clear, concise mission statement. Does that clear, concise mission statement, was that informed ultimately, by individuals with lived experience, community members, or collaborators, as you think about those that are impacted by human trafficking? Here, when we’re thinking about the being informed by, we want to look at what stage did we bring people in to inform us? Because I think sometimes what happens, is maybe a bunch of people sit around, and we start to gather ideas and thoughts, and put together a mission statement and vision statement, and then we just have maybe that group of individuals with lived experience look at it to give us the sign off. It’s important in all of this work, as we’re going chapter to chapter to chapter, is that we really want to look at how are we involving individuals with lived experience, from the very start through the end, so that we don’t fall into the trap of tokenism. You’ll see that word throughout the toolkit, but just as a moment to define that is that tokenism is a superficial practice that creates the appearance of inclusivity and diversity. It can really be symbolic, rather than ensuring that all people who are involved in our work have equal opportunity to make decisions and have power to have decision making abilities. I just really want to note that. But additionally, in the mission, vision, and leadership section, it’s looking at how does your organization ensure that all staff members in your organization have access to self care, in order to be able to avoid vicarious trauma? Does our leadership, including our board, show a commitment to the organization’s ability to achieve the mission and not just verbally, but also making sure that there’s an allocation of funding to support the work? And that everyone within the organization understands the current issues that are relevant to the organization, and continue to receive training and support to implement those guiding principles that we originally talked about. So really, this looks like in practice, it looks like ensuring really the foundation is set when we’re thinking about our mission, our vision, and the leadership within our organizations.

Sandra Morgan 14:18
One of the things that really appealed to me about the title of this particular chapter, is that it talks about mission and vision, which I always skim that. But when I got to this chapter and it said leadership, there’s a whole page of practical strategies and tips. So if you’re inspired by the motivational content here, but you have trouble with putting it into action, this toolkit has the starting point for making it part of your organization. Those tips are really important. And it uses language of evaluation and assessment. It talks about promising practices, and policies, and procedures. And those are things that are going to operationalize our good intentions, we have a wonderful mission, we have great vision, but how we get there, that is the part where things often get a little dicey, and maybe even fall apart. I want to sit here in chapter two, but we’re going to keep moving. Let’s go on to chapter three. I love this chapter because it is going to challenge you to change the culture, to shift. I’m going to stop because Crystal is the expert here.

Crystal Bennet 16:05
No, keep going, Sandie. Just kidding! As we think about this chapter, and I’m a person that holds a lot of quotes in my head because I really do get inspired by so many individuals who do a lot of work and can provide guidance on a way forward. So as I think about organizational culture, I’m reminded of a quote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Sandra Morgan 16:31
Oh, who said that?

Crystal Bennet 16:33
So that actually is a quote, by someone by the name of Peter Drucker, who is a management consultants. I find that it shows up so often, in like anything I do. Oftentimes as organizations, I think we invest a lot of time and strategy, and it’s not to say that strategy isn’t necessary, but strategy will only get us so far if the organizational culture is not ready to do this work. So many of us understand, in our day to day, when we’re working, is that we may be part of organizations that have a lot of amazing written policies, written practices, have amazing strategic plans, but when we think about our organizational culture, is that that ultimately impacts the delivery as we think about the norms that might be ingrained in our day to day, that can create high turnover and impede our ability to pursue our organizational goals and objectives. Really thinking about your culture is about thinking or analyzing your programs and policies to make sure, again going back to those six principles of trauma informed approach, is your organization seeking to minimize tokenization, re-victimization, and re-exploitation? Do we value our team members as people, rather than having an expectation that we ask staff to speak directly about their personal lived experience? Do we make sure that we’re giving individuals with lived experience control over when, and how, and where they share their stories, if they even desire to share those stories, and we’re practicing informed consent? This goes back, Sandie, to your comment around loving collaboration, right? So when we’re thinking about our culture, does our organization culture promote that mutuality and that collaboration amongst all individuals within the organization, at all levels, our volunteers, our communities, and key partnerships that we have with other organizations or groups within our communities? Are we consistently valuing our people, right? I think value is something you can’t necessarily write in a policy, but it’s about how do people feel? And do people feel that they’re valued and that they belong?

Sandra Morgan 19:14
I am so inspired. And when I get inspired, I want to go rush in and do something. But this toolkit, and I’m going to keep bringing our listeners back, download the toolkit, it’s free. I’m on page 17, and then these things that Crystal just identified, there is an assessment and you have to check the box. No, never, we don’t do that, or occasionally we get it right, or yes, always. And if you answer yes, always, please reach out to me because I want to be your best friend. These are important parts of assessment. If you do this now and then you use the toolkit for a year and you go back a year from now, you can measure your progress, but you cannot manage something that you’re not measuring. That’s an old adage. So okay, jumping into chapter four.

Crystal Bennet 20:20
Yes, chapter four. This is really where we’re looking at Survivor Leader Engagement. Survivor leader engagement. The whole premise of this toolkit is recognizing how that engagement is truly foundational upon the ways that anti trafficking organizations and programs should be built. And as Sandie keeps bringing us back to the toolkit, and back to our assessment, again, you have a self guided assessment tool. This particular assessment tool was created by the Human Trafficking Leadership Academy, which certainly feel free to visit the website and learn more about the Human Trafficking Leadership Academy, because there’s some phenomenal work there as we think about using individuals who have lived and learned experience to help inform our practice. So this particular assessment looks at how does your program or project provide opportunities for survivors? Really looking at those employment opportunities that are through various levels within an organization. This is where we want to be mindful that we’re not merely bringing on individuals with lived experience to serve at maybe entry level or frontline positions, but do we look at their expertise to determine where their expertise aligns with carrying out positions perhaps in management, leadership, advisory boards, boards of directors? Also, if you do not have someone who may have lived experience on your team, being able to bring in consultants. Again, when we’re thinking about feedback from individuals with lived experience, these are paid opportunities, so that we’re minimizing that tokenization, and further harm and exploitation. We’re looking at the diversity of community, when we’re thinking about those with lived experiences. Trafficking, we know encompasses both sex and labor trafficking, and can look very different when we think about the experience of trafficking, and so just being mindful that there’s not a one size fits all, and it doesn’t fit neatly in a particular box. We’re always taking a strength-based approach when we’re bringing in individuals with lived experience, to be part of our projects. As I mentioned, and we’re on page 22 of our toolkit, is that they should be at all stages. You will really see this is highlighted here, where have we accessed the expertise of someone with lived experience in developing the initial program, in developing the policies and procedures, in creating some of the program or project materials, and then continuing to utilize that expertise and uplifting that expertise throughout the entirety of implementation, through the evaluation process, and then ultimately in also obtaining that feedback from those who participated in your projects. We really can see there, the necessity of having survivor voice from start through finish, of any project that we want to plan and implement.

Sandra Morgan 23:46
This brings a question to mind, because you identified there’s no one size fits all, so how do we approach this so that we’re not one sided? I’ve seen that some groups only talk to sex trafficking survivors, and they don’t really have any experience with the labor trafficking victims.

Crystal Bennet 24:14
Absolutely. I think if you’re serving, and you may be an organization where the specific focus of your work is to serve individuals who have experienced sex trafficking, but because we know that there might be intersections between sex and labor trafficking, it’s also important to engage in ongoing professional development and learning opportunities so that you’re aware of the various ways in which trafficking may present itself. It’s really being willing to commit to that ongoing learning and development, because you’re right, if you only know one thing, or if you’re only communicating with individuals who have the experience and expertise on a particular topical area, it may not even cross your mind to consider accessing various resources and education. I would certainly say, to commit to ongoing education to ensure that you are educated in all areas. That’s one of the great things about the work done with NHTTTAC through the US Department of Health and Human Services Office on Trafficking in Persons, is that there are a lot of resources besides just the toolkit, that are available. There are free trainings online that are offered, many that offer continuing education hours, and many of our trainings do offer insights that are inclusive of both sex and labor trafficking. Certainly accessing those resources to continue to remain up to date with the most current information.

Sandra Morgan 25:53
From my perspective, remember collaboration? From the framework, that element of mutuality and collaboration, I’ve hosted focus groups that are half labor trafficking, and half sex trafficking. I think one of the most informative moments in one of those episodes, was when a sex trafficking victim began crying as she listened to the story of a labor trafficking victim, and began to see a different aspect of the inhumanity of human trafficking. That mutuality, building that community, creating space for those conversations has been a growing, as you probably have framed it, as you have framed this, it’s like professional development. It’s an engaging conversation where everybody in the room grows, and that’s going to be necessary for us to be able to work together to end human trafficking. On the assessment part here, this is an area that I’ve struggled with keeping on track. I’m definitely going to spend a little more time in the practical strategies and tips, as I get ready for the fall semester this summer. Let’s move on to chapter five.

Crystal Bennet 27:39
Let’s do that, absolutely! And Sandie, when you introduced me, you did mention that I’m the Deputy Director here at NHTTTAC where part of my role is diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, and so I could keep us on this chapter for a really long time, but also noting that we only have so much time, and not enough. When we’re thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion in this work, it’s really about, again, going back to that culture shift. As organizations, as programs, how are we paying attention to incorporate social responsibility, social concern, social accountability, and social justice into our organizations? I know that that’s a mouthful there, but the key word is “social,” and really about humanity, and about people, and aligning our work to the larger impact by ensuring that we’re amplifying the voices of all people and increasing those opportunities for communities who have experienced not just historical oppression and marginalization, but where we find that there continue to be present day inequities and harms around oppression. When we’re looking at diversity, equity, inclusion, again, I bring us back as an organization, is finding common language around what do these terms mean to us? Sometimes we can get stuck on the term “diversity,” which is really about how people differ from one another which is inclusive of, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, gender expression, national origin, religion, ability, but really thinking about equity. That’s about how do people access and have opportunities in order to eliminate barriers and decrease and mitigate disparities when we’re thinking about inequitable outcomes? One of the recommendations in this toolkit is for staff and leadership to engage in ongoing opportunities for education and training around implicit and explicit bias, but also thinking about that practice of cultural humility. I want to take a moment here to just call our attention back to that assessment. When you’re assessing, and every time you assess yourself, just really being honest with yourself and your organization in where you are. Again, a quotes person here, but Maya Angelou said, “We do the best we can until we know better. And when we know better, we do better.” I think this provides that opportunity, that maybe there are some things that we just didn’t know, and now that we can really invest the time and resources to completing the assessment, it helps us to know, and then as Sandie has continued to say, is that then there are the practical strategies and tips so that we can then do better. The things that we really need to make sure that we’re doing better at, is to ensure that decision making and policy setting is made with inclusivity of diverse voices and demographics, particularly with individuals with lived experience. Individuals who are two spirited, LGBTQIA plus persons, and culturally and linguistically diverse people, ensuring that our organizations and our staff are reflective of the communities that we serve, and that staff in our organizations, if they’re not reflective, what are the partnerships that we have with other organizations and service providers that are in our communities? We make sure that when we’re creating any type of job postings, or any type of communications content or products, that we’re creating those using plain language, and that we’re using language that really resonates with people that we’re marketing those particular resources to. There’s organizational advancement opportunities that are open, they’re transparent, they’re inclusive of individuals with lived experience, they’re unbiased, and that they mitigate barriers. Additionally, making sure that every person that’s part of our organization has that training and understanding on working with individuals from communities that really span the gamut when we think about variances in culture and the way that we’re able to resonate with people.

Sandra Morgan 32:45
All of this part of the assessment really reflects your lead-in statement that equity represents access and opportunity. Too many times people talk motivationally about empowerment, creating opportunity, but if we do not create access, which means you build the bridge, you build the steps, you plow the pathway forward, without access, it’s just aspirational. Our last chapter we’re going to look at today is chapter six. Don’t worry, we’re going to be back in two weeks.

Crystal Bennet 33:31
Yes, chapter six, Organizational Policies and Procedures. We identify three guidelines in this sectio, when we think about policies and procedures that are able to support the practices within organizations to be in alignment with its missions. When we’re looking at our policies and procedures, we want to be sure that our policies and procedures do not create additional barriers in the work. We want to make sure that they are person-centered and that again, they incorporate those guiding principles in being trauma informed, being ethical, being person-centered, into all of our policies, all of our procedures. Again, you will find an assessment here with some tips. But one of the key tools that I want to leave you all with as we start to wrap up our time together today, is that I recently came across a framework that was developed by an individual out of Sacramento State and it’s called the VIBE Framework, V, I, B, E. This framework, I have found so instrumental in a lot of the work that I do when I’m thinking about reviewing policies and procedures through an equity lens. The V stands for views. You would look at your policies or procedures, or as you’re sitting down to create a new policy or procedure, and you would ask yourself whose views are being centered. Whose views were centered in the creation of this policy or this procedure, or whose views are being centered as we’re thinking about the creation of the policy or procedure? Inclusion is the I. We would ask ourselves, are those who are going to be most directly impacted, included in providing their views? First we’re asking whose views are centered, the “I” is, are the views that are part of being centered, those that are most directly impacted by this policy or by this procedure? The “B” is for benefits and burdens. We want to ask ourselves, who does this policy or procedure benefit, who might it burden? Then the “E” is for equity. Will the decision or the policy lead to equity? Or might it further inequities? I want to just give an example of how this sometimes can play out. In my experience I’ve done a lot of service provision, and I’ve had a really great opportunity to work in organizations. One policy that I often see pretty reflective in a lot of work around service provision, is a late or no show policy. When I think about the “B” around the benefit and the burden, and I think about who might this policy benefit, versus who might it burden, we have to reflect on if you have a late or no-show policy where perhaps maybe someone if they’re 10 minutes or more late, the appointment gets canceled, then we have to think about well, who might be the people who are more likely to be 10 minutes or more late? It might be someone who relies on public transportation. It might be someone that lives in a particular area of town, it may be someone from a rural community where there’s less access to transportation. Maybe a single parent who is caring for children and needs to get their children off to school, or off to daycare. We can start to see that then that can create some disparities, resulting in folks from particular communities then being underserved. That then could lead to greater inequities when we’re thinking about who might benefit the most from our services, and because of some of those policies and procedures, just not be able to have access.

Sandra Morgan 37:49
There’s my word, “access before opportunity.” This is so good. What a great conversation. This toolkit is a valuable resource. I want you to go to the website so you can find a link to download it. We’re only halfway through our discussion, so come back and join us again in two weeks when Crystal will walk us through the second half. If you haven’t been to our website, endinghumantrafficking.org, that’s where you can find all the resources we’ve mentioned and so much more. See you again in two weeks.

Dr. Sandie Morgan looks back on episode #208: The Intersection of Children’s Rights and Combating Human Trafficking, with Rabbi Diana Gerson.

Rabbi Diana Gerson

Rabbi Diana Gerson is the associate executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis. She has been a leading advocate with the New York Board of Rabbis role in confronting family violence, sexual abuse, and the exploitation of children by reaching across faith communities. Rabbi Gerson has developed programs for the New York City’s mayor’s office to combat domestic violence and has provided prevention education to thousands of community leaders and clergy, whose roles she considers critical to ending sexual exploitation and all forms of violence against children. In addition, she also serves on the international steering committee for the interfaith forum on child dignity in the digital world. She received her master’s degree and rabbinic ordination in 2001 from the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. Diana, we’re so glad to welcome you to the show.

Key Points

• One of the largest initiatives globally is the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was written and ratified by the United Nations in 1989. This is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the history of our global society, yet the only country who has not ratified this document to date is the United States.
• We need to be mindful of the images we share of our children, because they are susceptible to becoming child abuse material.
• The whole community, not just parents, has to be aware of the risks and the behaviors of people that might take advantage of their position. For every one adult that has training, at least ten children are safer in their communities.

Resources

• Episode #208
• Darkness to Light
• National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
• NetSmartz
• Cyber Tipline

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:14 Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. My name is Dr. Sandie Morgan. This is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. This year’s Ensure Justice Conference focused on keeping our children safe online. What an important topic. We continued the theme right after the conference when we aired episode #315, with Susan Kennedy, also focused on cyber safety. All this really got me thinking about an older episode we aired, #208: The Intersection of Children’s Rights and Combating Human Trafficking, with Rabbi Diana Garrison. I thought this would be a good opportunity to reshare that episode since I think it ties in with what I’ve been thinking, and I hope you find it as thought provoking as I did. Here’s Dave introducing our guest.

Dave [00:01:34] Rabbi Diana Gerson is the associate executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis. She has been a leading advocate with the New York Board of Rabbis role in confronting family violence, sexual abuse, and the exploitation of children by reaching across faith communities. Rabbi Gerson has developed programs for the New York City’s mayor’s office to combat domestic violence and has provided prevention education to thousands of community leaders and clergy, whose roles she considers critical to ending sexual exploitation and all forms of violence against children. In addition, she also serves on the international steering committee for the interfaith forum on child dignity in the digital world. She received her master’s degree and rabbinic ordination in 2001 from the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. Diana, we’re so glad to welcome you to the show.

Diana [00:02:27] Thank you so much for having me. You guys are doing incredibly important and critical work bringing people together for a common cause.

Sandie [00:02:35] And many of our listeners will remember Ernie Allen. And so big shout out to Ernie because he’s the one who introduced Diana and I. And that’s how she came to Vanguard to speak for our Priceless event this year. And it was such a great program and her message was right on target, and the response was incredible so welcome today.

Diana [00:03:02] Thank you so much for having me. And absolutely, Ernie Allen always brings the best people together, he’s really one of the great connectors.

Sandie [00:03:11] So, talking about connections. Let’s talk a little bit about how our work intersects, my work on human trafficking and your work on children’s rights. What do you think are the most common denominators there?

Diana [00:03:26] Well, we’re talking about vulnerable populations, Sandie. Wherever we look there are vulnerable people amongst us, whether they understand that or not, whether they identify as bad or not. And it’s our job really to create safe spaces and opportunities for prevention, and effective responsible response, as well as collaboration.

Sandie [00:03:50] So, one of the big initiatives globally is the Convention on Children’s Rights, right?

Diana [00:03:58] Absolutely. Celebrating its 30th anniversary this November 20th.

Sandie [00:04:03] Do you want to kind of break that down for people who haven’t heard of that before? What is it? What’s its purpose? How does it help our initiative?

Diana [00:04:11] So, the Convention on the Rights of the Child is written and ratified by the United Nations voted on and by the United Nations November 20th of 1989, if you can remember back that far. And it brought together all the countries of the world and was saying that children’s rights are human rights, and we need to do our utmost to protect children because they are vulnerable, and they have no effective voice in government. After all, a five-year-old isn’t going to be able to reach their elected officials or their leader and say, “hey, someone’s got to protect me over here.” And so, it’s set forth a number of policies and protocols for governments to basically set a bar to protect children within community. And it really was a remarkable day, as it went around the world and it is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the history of our global society.

Sandie [00:04:49] I did not know that. Wow.

Diana [00:04:50] Yes. There’s only one country who has not ratified this document to date.

Sandie [00:04:55] Wow.

Diana [00:04:55] And that’s the United States, very frustrating.

Sandie [00:05:17] We really need to investigate what that is all about.

Diana [00:05:22] Well, I’ve had many many conversations with children’s rights experts and legal experts, and I have heard all kinds of reasons thrown around as to why the Convention on the Rights of the Child has not been ratified by the United States. It was signed at the time, by the president, but it was never ratified by Congress. And while there’s always a movement afoot to try and get it through Senate, which is where we ratify all international treaties that are binding, we don’t seem to have any political will to get this done at this point and not quite sure why but I can posit many guesses, which makes me a great you know guesstimater but not a real critical answer to the question. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t lack the opportunity to engage in its basic tenets. So, children’s rights are universal, and we have to think about how we do protect children, whether we’re protecting children from exploitation online, whether we’re protecting children from some type of a child abuse in the home and community, whether we’re talking about the age of marriage in society. We just watched in India, they have just outlawed marriage for all children under the age of 18. And even in the United States today, this is a slow movement which is going across state by state by state.

Sandie [00:06:46] I just spoke at a forum on child marriage, here in California, because it’s an initiative to follow suit here. At this particular point, only two states in the U.S. have outlawed marriage under the age of 18.

Diana [00:07:02] Exactly right. In fact, the first state was supposed to be New Jersey. And in fact, it was not. It passed in Trenton, and it was vetoed by then the governor. And it was interesting because he vetoed it under the understanding and the thinking that it put an undue burden on faith communities.

Diana [00:07:24] And as a result, Delaware was the first one to pass the law and the faith leaders of New Jersey descended upon Trenton and they said absolutely not. This doesn’t put an undue burden on us, this is us saying we want to protect our kids. And so, it really helped to flip the conversation and then New Jersey, they did pass it again in the next session and it did pass and was signed into law. New York State hasn’t had the same level of success, so I hope California really does.

Sandie [00:07:59] Me too.

Diana [00:08:00] I think it’s really important to protect their only childhood. And we know that for children who are married at a young age, there are so many risk factors for them both health and development and success in life and fulfillment. And we want to make sure that they have the opportunity to grow up first.

Sandie [00:08:13] Exactly. So, vulnerability of children globally, you also serve on I think a steering committee for digital safety, right?

Diana [00:08:26] I do, so I sit actually on two boards. One is the Child’s Alliance board which is chaired by Alan. And that was created back in 2017 after the Child’s Dignity Congress held by the Holy Father, Pope Francis, at the Vatican. He issued the declaration of Rome and set forth an incredible strategic plan on how we as faith communities can come together and really work towards effective change on behalf of children to keep them safe online. The second board I sit on is actually also an outgrowth of the same Congress as a fulfillment of one of the levels of the strategic plan, which is the Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities. And I sat on their steering committee that launched their global forum in 2018 on Child Dignity in a Digital World.

Sandie [00:09:18] So, what does child dignity in a digital world look like? Everything is, I mean it’s out there on the cloud, how do I understand something I can’t touch?

Diana [00:09:30] Well, we all know that people post photos and videos online every single day. And sometimes its parents posting videos and parents posting photos, and sometimes its children posting videos and photos of themselves, and sometimes it’s people who’ve taken photos of children who don’t have the authority to have those photos and they’re using them for inappropriate and dark activities. And we have to be mindful of what we post online about our children. You know when a baby is born, we post photos of the baby we say the name, we say the date, at the time that they were born, and then these children live their lives kind of before our eyes on social media. But not every photo that was taken perhaps of us when we were kids that are sitting in a photo album in our house would be appropriate to share online. So, we have to think about the really the sexualized images that we’re posting online of children. We don’t necessarily think of this when we think about the family photos of yesteryear. But once a photo is shared online, it can be shared and re-shared, and posted reposted, downloaded and used for other purposes. And it may not be what we thought it was going to be used for, perhaps we just thought it was a nice photo, maybe you thought it was a really funny moment that we want to share with our family and friends. But unfortunately, these kinds of child abuse images are being traded like baseball cards on the dark web. And we need to be really mindful of how images of our children are being used.

Sandie [00:10:59] So, to be just a little more directed than what you’re really saying is that these images can be adapted and used in pornography?

Diana [00:11:10] So, we can we often call them sexual abuse material and it can be used for commercial purposes, absolutely. And they don’t even need to be altered. They can just be added to a group of photos, they can be put together in some kind of a montage if it’s a video of a child. But anything that would be posted online that has a, you know, a display of the genitals of a child of any age would be considered to be child abuse material.

Sandie [00:11:34] Wow.

Diana [00:11:34] And so we have to think about that when we post pictures online and the child can be fully clothed, but if it’s if it’s an explicit display we have to be thinking about that and sometimes we’re talking about young children. And sometimes we’re talking about older children who are posting self-generated pictures that they’re posting themselves or somebody they meet online asks them, send me a picture of yourself, you know send me a picture of yourself in a bikini. Then you get yourself a picture of her naked, all those images can be sent to somebody by a child who may not realize who they’re talking to online. And that material now can be used and misused, over and over and over again because it’s irretrievable, once it leaves your device, you have no idea where it will go.

Sandie [00:12:25] And that’s really hard for concrete thinking to move into the abstract and understand the risk and kids, their brains aren’t developed to the point where they have good risk management skills. They’re more likely to respond in the moment, oh this is fun, I’m having a good time and they’re doing this, not realizing it can come back later and then be used against them and they can be coerced into further explicit activity because they’re threatened that we’re going to send this to your father or your mother or your pastor. And then we start to see more of the actual commercial sexual exploitation that happens in the definitions of trafficking in persons.

Diana [00:13:14] Absolutely. We know that young people don’t have developed skills or really you know the brain development to understand the risks of this kind of behavior.

Sandie [00:13:26] So, we have to do a better job protecting them, right? I don’t mean to talk over you. I just get so frustrated with parents.

Diana [00:13:32] No, that’s ok. We do need to do a better job. I know, well I also think about this. You know I have nieces and nephews and oftentimes you know I see they post stuff on their Instagram, and they post stuff on their Facebook, and they’re on Snapchat and you know especially on Snapchat they just assume it disappears and you know 24 hours it doesn’t stay, Instagram live it doesn’t stay that they can’t figure out a way to download it, but it does stay. Everything leave an impression and imprint on the internet, and somewhere sitting on some server someplace and it will come back at you at some point in our lifetime. They have people, they come into the school, they come in every month and they talk to these kids about the risks and what they have to be aware of. And they’re thinking and they go Oh well that’s not me, it’s not going to happen to me, it doesn’t happen in my community. And there’s a sense of immunity. And what we do know about exploitation of children online digital world, is an equal opportunity destroyer that any child can be impacted negatively. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t see an article somewhere in the world about some trusted adult who has either been taking photos, has been disseminating or not child pornography, sending it somewhere, uploading it someplace, keeping it on their own device, whether they’re keeping it on their computer at home or a computer even at work. This is something that is going on and people who are in positions of trust within community offend, and they offend thinking that they’ll never be caught because they think that this is a private thing that happens in the dark and they do things in the dark that they think that no one would they would never do in the light. Yeah, they won’t necessarily touch a child on the street, but I hear so often from pastors or rabbis or imams you know, “well if it was online, I didn’t touch the child, so is it a sin?” And I go- Of course it is because you’ve harmed that child and unawareness of what goes on online can actually hurt a child over and over and over again every time that image is shared. And that’s part of the education and the awareness building that we need to do with adults. And I think we have to start with clergy. I think we have to start with the rabbis, and the ministers, and the priests, and the imams, and the sheiks because we have incredible responsibility to our communities.

Sandie [00:15:49] So, how often do you see a faith leader actually speak on this from there during their worship service?

Diana [00:15:59] Not as often as I’d like, and not as often as it needs to be. To talk about an issue once from the pulpit is not enough, we need to create cultures of safety and community where these are issues that we talk about openly and often. They say that the institutional memory of any congregation doesn’t matter what faith, what denomination. If you were there in the room to hear the sermon, or the educational program, or the speaker they say that the institutional memory of a congregation is approximately three years. So, if we’re not talking about it at least every three years, if not more, because ideally, we should be talking about it more because not everybody is always there that one Friday, Saturday, Sunday that class, that speaker. We know how that works. You know last time I went to synagogue we don’t take attendance. Just everybody was there for the day. We need to be talking about it often, we have to really have literature out in our lobbies and inside of our offices, we have to incorporate this into the curriculum for our Sunday schools or our Hebrew schools. We have to empower children, but we have to really give knowledge to parents, we really need to be that resource.

Sandie [00:17:05] And it feels to me, because you’ve already mentioned the fact that we see stories daily of trusted adults who violated these principles. And so, one of the things that I think is really important in our community, is to make sure everybody understands this. It is not just for the parents of children that okay you need to know this to protect your children. The whole community has to be aware of the risks and the behaviors of people that might take advantage of their position, because we’re the ones who keep the whole community safe.

Diana [00:17:47] It takes a village.

Sandie [00:17:48] Absolutely.

Diana [00:17:49] It takes all of us to be that safety net around a child. And it’s up to the faith community, the religious institution, to strengthen the child’s environment. We have to protect kids; not one parent, not one adult. You know there are trainings that we know at least for everyone adult we train, ten kids are safer in that community, whether or not you have a child in your home.

Sandie [00:18:09] Talk about that training. What does that look like?

Diana [00:18:12] So, when I do trainings, I do a lot of work with Darkness to Light, which is a nonprofit based out of Charleston, South Carolina. And I started working with them back in 2007, I want to say, and we know that the stewards of children training and now actually they have an app and they have all kinds of resources out there, but it’s really to empower adults to protect children. And it’s third party evaluated, we know that it works. And we talk about online exploitation of children, we talk about c-sec, we talk about the commercial sexual exploitation of kids, and we know that for everyone adult we train at least 10 kids in that community are safer. And when you’re talking about environments that are urban and we see how many kids we interact with in the course of a day, whether or not I have a child in my home. I don’t have a child in my home, but I can tell you I’ve got probably about 50 kids who live in my building.

Sandie [00:19:14] Wow.

Diana [00:19:15] And I know that I am constantly the eyes and the ears. And everybody in my building knows what I do for a living, and I get knocks on the door saying, “hey I have a question, something’s going on with my kid, I don’t know what’s going on. Will you talk to my child?”

Sandie [00:19:23] Wow. So, you kind of flipped to the conversation. I’ve been in a lot of community meetings and things where they’re talking about doing prevention with the kids. And here’s a curriculum for the kids to make them safer, all of this. But you what you’re saying and what I’m hearing is we actually have to have adults that take that responsibility, we don’t dump that responsibility on a child.

Diana [00:19:48] You know when children hear somebody say oh this is going to be our secret. They know what it means to keep a secret, they don’t tell, or they’re perhaps threatened to don’t tell anyone. Or if you tell somebody, this is going to happen. Children are very aware of their environments. Kids keep secrets. Kids don’t want to tell on people, they want to be the tattletale. We have to ask the questions, we have to be the ones watching, it’s an adult’s responsibility. We can empower kids, we can give them all the tools in the world, we can have a million conversations with them in school, at the end of the day- we know that when we see inappropriate material, whether it’s online or on a child’s phone or we suspect something, 90 percent of the time it’s reported by average adults saying, “you know what this doesn’t feel right. This doesn’t seem right to me.” If you talked to people at Instagram, they’re going to tell you 90 percent of the material that are removed are not removed by their staff, but they’re removed by because someone reported it.

Sandie [00:20:32] Yeah.

Diana [00:20:33] And I can tell you there’s not a week that goes by that I don’t report something I see online.

Sandie [00:20:54] So, you know I would love to see 100 more adults just from listening to this podcast start being just like you.

Diana [00:21:00] If we have one hundred adults start being more aware, at least a thousand kids are going to be safer.

Sandie [00:21:06] I like that math.

Diana [00:21:09] Yeah that’s the power of community. Think about your congregation, think about the average church, how many kids do you have there? How many children are in it, in your doors, in that worship service? I think about when parents are preparing to have their first child. And they take the CPR class and the first aid class, and they take the parenting classes, and they start baby proofing the house before that baby can even turn over. Right?

Sandie [00:21:28] Yeah.

Diana [00:21:29] But how many of them are taking classes to figure out Well how do I keep my kids safe from people who might want to cause harm to my child? Before you hire that first baby sitter, before you for hire that first nanny, before you put your kid into a school. Are we asking: what are your child protection policies? How many of us have asked our actual house of worship: what is your child protection policy? Is it sitting next to the fire safety plan on a shelf with dust on it? Or is it something that we’re living and breathing each and every day? Is it on our Web site? If they can’t provide one for you, tell your leadership we need to make one and we need to do it now.

Sandie [00:22:14] That urgency is what we need in our communities too because our kids are our future.

Diana [00:22:22] They’re not just our future, Sandie, I believe they are our now, they’re our present. And that present is a gift entrusted to us and we must do something about it because it’s happening to them right now. Eight hundred million kids are at risk every single day because they’re online. That’s a lot of children. And if you think about the relationship you have with one child and what you would do to protect that one child, you know you’re going to teach them not to touch the stove because you don’t want them to burn their hand. You’re going to teach them to look both ways before they cross the street, so they don’t get hit by a car. Well, aren’t you going to tell them how to protect themselves every time they go online and talk to somebody?

Sandie [00:23:00] Absolutely. And that’s one of the reasons why I loved the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children where Ernie Allen has made tremendous progress in protecting children. And they launched NetSmartz.org, and the last S is actually a Z. So, it’s a NetSmartz.org. And there is an abundance of Internet safety curriculum for every age level. We see parents putting screens in front of children at a really young age. Last night I was giving a lecture and one of the mothers said that her younger son started using her older son’s x box to play a game and then she heard her little boy talking to somebody and ask him “Who are you talking to?”, “My friend”. Because these are open access games, and suddenly there’s a stranger right in your living room. And mom took the headphones away, she was aware of what was happening, and this was not another little boy, this was a man talking to her little boy.

Diana [00:24:12] Of course and it happens all the time. The gaming devices are really an open entry point to connect with children.

Sandie [00:24:22] We’re going to put the link to the resource you just mentioned too, Darkness to Light?

Diana [00:24:29] Yes, Darkness to Light, d2l.org. And they’ve been doing incredible work for so many years. I also, you know if you see something, you know you have to say something, that’s what we say on the New York City subway. Yeah, there’s always a sign, “if you see something say something.” So, if you see something and it’s Online, report it. And if you don’t get an answer that you think is appropriate for you know whatever the social media site is, go to the Cyber Tip line from NCMEC. Let them know, let them advocate to have something removed. It’s so important that we are vigilant. Yeah, don’t just let something pass by. I saw something recently online a friend of mine had posted a video of their child, and it was so inappropriate, and I reported it immediately. And then I called my friend and I said this is why this is wrong. This is why you can’t post videos like that of your child. And they were like, “you know what I never thought about it.”

Sandie [00:25:20] So, you directly confronted a friend?

Diana [00:25:24] Absolutely. I’m everybody’s worst nightmare.

Sandie [00:25:28] I love it. So, building that kind of passion and knowledge in our communities is what is going to keep our kids safe. And the overlap to human trafficking with online access from strangers reaches into every socioeconomic strata of our communities. And there are stories of little girls who want to be models and met a so-called agent in a chat room and end up being sexually exploited in commercial sexual exploitation of children. Access to our kids on the internet doesn’t allow us to put up a fence around our house anymore because the cloud is everywhere.

Diana [00:26:17] It’s everywhere, it’s in everybody’s hand.

Sandie [00:26:21] Yes, we don’t have to live in fear, but we do have to be responsible to build that security in our communities, it’s an invisible network of safety.

Diana [00:26:33] And it’s really means about being proactive, not reactive. We need to get ahead of this because we’re never going to legislate our way out of this problem. Technology moves too fast; the legislation moves too slow.

Sandie [00:26:42] So, tell me, we’ve got just a few minutes left tell me what proactive look like for parents who have never heard a message on this in their community.

Diana [00:25:49] They need to get educated, first and foremost, educate educate. Insist on bringing in speakers , insist on really gleaning as much information as you can from within community. There are so many resources online, there are so many resources in your community whether you’re talking to the local human trafficking networks, or if you’re talking to NCMAC, if you’re talking to your state task forces, you’re talking to your local police. They all have people working on these issues. So, educate educate educate, learn the facts, educate your community, learn how to identify and to respond and prevent, host awareness events in your community, distribute materials, and dedicate even a religious service. Even if it’s you know once a quarter, if it’s once a month, if it’s once a year then you know what this is something important that we’re going to figure out how to take collective action on it.

Sandie [00:27:35] So, I’m imagining that people listening to this podcast are going to call their clergy and say, “Why doesn’t our church, why doesn’t our mosque, why doesn’t our synagogue have anything like this?” And we actually have a feedback email on our podcast that I rarely mention. But you can go online and add feedback. So, if you are listening to this and as a result of this podcast you reach out to your community and ask them to host something, will you please let us know because I want to do the math. If we get 100 adults, that’s 10000 children. Am I right? Did I do the math right?

Diana [00:28:19] I like your math better than mine.

Sandie [00:28:24] Oh OK.

Diana [00:28:25] We’re going to go for that, I like that one. But if we gets one 100 adults, we got a thousand kids safer. So, it’s always upwards of 10 kids per adult. But I like your math better, so we’re going to stick with that.

Sandie [00:28:35] And I’m thinking if I get 100 adults to get 100 churches and clergy, then that’s going to be multiplying even faster. So, we want our kids to be safe. And we have to be proactive, that’s the message that I’m hearing here and there are resources to help us do that. But it’s our job to actually act.

Diana [00:29:02] Absolutely. And the last piece I want to add to that is if we’re look, we’re talking about education, we’re talking about advocacy, and we’re talking about reporting. But we also have to remember that we’re not the experts, we have to refer. We have the local service providers in our neighborhoods. We have to really make sure that we’re not trying to be vigilantes and trying to address the issues that we’re trying to connect to the experts in the field. So, I know everybody has the best of intentions, but we want to make sure we keep kids safe. So, we want to make sure that whatever we’re doing, we’re doing it in collaboration by building that network, that partnership. And I think that’s so important because we’re not in this by ourselves, we don’t have to figure it out all alone and the experts are here. You know all of you at the Global Center, you guys are experts, you provide an enormous amount of resource for community. Your local police, your state, don’t do this by yourself, look for the partners. You know we always say with little kids to look for the helpers. You know those are the people who are safe in the community. And I think that was Mr. Rogers. So, I really think it’s important for us to remember to partner partner partner partner partner.

Sandie [00:30:15] I love collaboration. That’s my favorite word. Diana, I can’t wait to have you back on the podcast. There are so many other topics I had on my list today, but this was fabulous, and I’ll get back to you and figure out the math as a result of this podcast. I promise you that.

Diana [00:30:32] Oh, I want to hear those numbers!

Sandie [00:30:36] Yes, thank you so much for joining us today.

Diana [00:30:40] Thank you for having me.

Sandra Morgan 30:43 So, what a great conversation. If you want to go deeper on this topic, have another listen to #315: Keeping Our Children Safe Online, with Susan Kennedy, which we aired a couple of months ago. And now, I invite you to head over to the endinghumantrafficking.org website. That’s where you can find resources we’ve mentioned in this conversation and so much more. If you haven’t visited our website before, a great first step is to become a subscriber, and you’ll receive an email with the show notes with every new episode. And of course, I’ll be back in two weeks for our next conversation.

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast intern, Nadia Sosa, as the two discuss Dr. Sandie Morgan’s new award.

Dr. Sandie Morgan

Dr. Sandie Morgan is recognized globally for her expertise on combating human trafficking and working to end violence against women. She is the director of the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University in Southern California.

She is passionate about the role of education in fighting human trafficking. She launched a 12-unit Anti-Human Trafficking Certificate that is totally online.

She believes everyone can do something. But first, they need to study the issue.  Then they can be a voice and make a difference.

Key Points

• As an educator, it’s important to ask questions and incorporate student voices in important conversation to better equip them to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference.
• A global context, the intersection of different dimensions across society, is essential when addressing issues in education.
• When a community is safer for women and girls, the rest of that community is safer and bettered.
• It is Dr. Morgan’s goal as an educator, that students learn principles of human dignity, to grow communities where exploitation and human trafficking cannot exist.
• The theme of women supporting women is important for the next generation of girls, as the nominees, finalists, and awardees of this year’s Orange County Inspirational Women awards aim to build a future that will support and inspire the next generation of women.

Resources

• 2024 Orange County Inspirational Women: Forum & Leadership Awards
• Sweat and Toil 
• Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice

Transcript

Nadia Sosa 0:14
Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is Episode #318. I’m Nadia Sosa. I’m the podcast intern and I major in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing, and a minor in Journalism.

Sandra Morgan 0:28
My name is Dr. Sandie Morgan and I’m the director of Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice. And it’s so exciting to have my intern being the interviewer today so thank you, Nadia.

Nadia Sosa 0:46
Thank you, Dr. Morgan. Today, we’re going to be talking about Dr. Morgan’s new award, the 2024 Orange County Inspirational Women Forum and Leadership Awards for Education and Government. So to start off, Dr. Morgan, I just wanted to ask you, what has been your reaction to winning this award and how do you think that it’s recently affected the way that you interact in the sphere of education?

Sandra Morgan 1:12
First of all, I was delighted that there was a category for Women of Inspiration in Education and Government. I sometimes feel like I’m so behind the scenes and my job, my passion, I feel compelled, is to equip the next generation in combating human trafficking and reducing violence against women. So I was delighted to hear that this was a focus. The day of the lunch I showed up, because I always show up to be a voice and to represent what we do at the Global Center, and to represent the issues that women and girls face. So when they actually called my name, I was stunned. I stopped and then I went into, “Oh, I need to go up there and say something to represent the women and the girls that I work on behalf of.”

Nadia Sosa 2:25
That’s wonderful to hear that they’re always on the forefront of your mind and that’s who you’re always keeping in mind and taking into consideration even when you’ve won such a big award. That’s wonderful to hear, especially as a student knowing that someone who has educated me really cares about what you’re doing. And then just piggybacking off of that, how do you think that being an educator helped you with your work in other spheres, like your work in the anti-human trafficking movement and in faith based organizations?

Sandra Morgan 2:54
I believe that being an educator gives me two advantages. First of all, it’s my job to ask questions. It’s my job to research and to look for, not just data, but what does that data represent? How can I make an impact to change trends that marginalize women, change trends of violence against girls and women? And so that job of research equips me to ask questions, and when you ask questions, people are very willing to give you their opinions. They may not always be right, but they will give you their opinions and you can begin to put together a better understanding in the context of the community and the culture. Then my second reason is because when students are part of the conversation and they learn to practice curiosity, and not jump to conclusions, not read the latest meme on Instagram and go from there, but really to study the issues, it’s what we talk about in this podcast. Study the issues so that you can be a voice and make a difference.

Nadia Sosa 4:26
Do you think that all of the different realms of your career intersect at all? And if so, how has that helped you to be a better educator and a better role model, spokesperson in the movement, as well as in the classroom and in the church?

Sandra Morgan 4:43
I think part of my gift to my students is my experience and you don’t get the kind of experience I have without having, let’s say passed a lot of birthdays. So I’ve been a nurse, I ran an operating room, I was a pediatric night charge nurse, so I have those experiences. I’ve literally been an editor for a Greek language magazine, I’ve had the opportunity to work in the public sector as a task force administrator, all of this before becoming the director of the Global Center for Women and Justice. When addressing issues around education, in the context of a center like this where our more formal mission is, “Research, Education, Advocacy, and Collaboration to Build Hope,” to do that requires a context that is more global. And by global I don’t mean the whole world, I mean global in the intersection in different dimensions across our society. With the experiences working in healthcare, then I have the opportunity to draw from that expertise, experience, and my network of other health care providers. Having worked in the faith community, that spirituality is an aspect in aftercare for victims over and over, I see that, and I’m able to bring that as well. And then, of course, I love teaching, it’s been my passion my whole life, and asking student questions, and helping guide them along their journey of discovery. I don’t really like multiple choice tests. I don’t like just verbatim answers. I want to give you a case study, I want to give you a scenario, and I want you to figure it out. Because honestly, you and your generation, Nadia, you’re the ones who are going to take us across the line to end human trafficking.

Nadia Sosa 7:22
That’s great, and it’s great to have seen that in the classroom from you. It’s great to have been in the classroom and instead of being given a multiple choice test, I was given these very important questions that prompted me to think about how I play a role in this world and how I play a role in the movement, and it’s just great to have seen that. And I know you were talking about how you started off as a nurse and that’s kind of how you were introduced to the whole world of human trafficking and ending it, but at what point did you realize that you were being called to be an educator? At what point did you know that that was your passion, that’s what you really wanted to do, among all the other things that you do and all the other things that you have succeeded in, when did you know that you wanted to be an educator and it was your life’s calling?

Sandra Morgan 8:07
Oh my goodness, no one’s ever asked me that before. If you talked to my family, they would probably say something about how I would set school up at home. That was one of my ideas of playing.

Nadia Sosa 8:27
Instead of playing house, you played school.

Sandra Morgan 8:30
I played school. I was never very good at sports. I have issues with one of my eyes, that means I don’t have depth perception. So nobody ever picked me first for softball team because I can’t catch the ball. I studied piano because my mom wanted me to be a pianist, and my hands never got big enough to do an octave. Then my piano career ended at level five at the College of Music in London, I studied under a British piano teacher. So I often felt like I wasn’t very good at anything. But when I became an operating room nurse, I had an experience that changed my life. I was scrubbed in on a case where it was esophageal cancer. The patient was 43 years old, he had three children, and I was with one of my favorite doctor/surgeon teams. And we’re having a great time, we get the report back from lab that the margins are clear, and then we start to sew him back up. The anesthesiologist says “stop” because we put these great big retractors in. They actually look like the end of a hoe, and you have two of them. So we had to take them out and pause while he got the patient back into normal sinus rhythm. And then we put them back in and pulled it so he could sew, and “stop, stop.” Well, three times of this, the surgeon stopped, and he literally reached over on the surgical tray and he picked up my gloved hand, and he goes, “I think this will be just right.” He sent me around to the other side and you know, I have small hands and you know, I’m vertically challenged. They brought my stool around and then the surgeon took my hand, slipped it down into the wound, and put this man’s heart in my hand. Hearing it go “kerplump, kerplump, kerplump,” as he pushed it off to the side and began to sew the esophagus back together. And when we were done, he pulled my hand back and the man’s heart never had a problem fluttering. We finished the case, I can never remember being so in awe of how the human body is created. But what I understood that day, holding a person’s heart in my hand, is that I was not a good fit for softball, or piano, or a lot of other things, but I was exactly what was needed right then. And I think that we often focus so much on achievement when all we need to be is ready to fill our purpose right where we are, and right now, my purpose is to pass on to you and other students, the things I’ve learned about being proactive in preventing violence, being part of a community that creates safety for our children, and also in advancing the status of women globally so that they are empowered to take care of themselves and not become dependent on other countries coming to their rescue. We can do that. And every single person, every student I have, I see as being just the right hand to hold the piece of the puzzle that God gives them.

Nadia Sosa 12:47
That is such a beautiful way to look at things, to grow and see that you are the right fit for the perfect thing that God made you for. And you were talking about how you felt like you weren’t good enough for so long, and like you weren’t the first pick for so many things that you thought you had to do, things that were being imposed on you. I feel like that is such a universal experience as girls, as young girls, we feel like we are just not good enough. We’re never going to fit in the way that we’re supposed to, we’re never going to look the right way, we’re never going to say the right thing. You were talking about your mom and I wanted to know, how do you think that the presence of women in your life, and not just your mother, but everyone in the community that surrounds you, specifically women, how do you think that helped you find your purpose, helped you figure out that you were perfectly made for the work that you do, that you were perfectly made in the image of God? How do you think that the presence of women in your life helped you figure that out?

Sandra Morgan 13:48
Oh my goodness. People ask, “Have you ever had a mentor?,” in small groups and things like that, and sometimes people will be, “Well, maybe one.” It’s like, my life is full of mentors. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Loomis, she changed my life because, I know you’re not going to believe this Nadia, but I have terrible penmanship, and it has never been good. And in second grade, at open house, my mother said, “Oh, my goodness, look at your penmanship,” and Mrs. Loomis said, “Oh, don’t worry. She has so much to write that her brain processes faster than her hand.” She just made me feel like I was just right. That kind of mentorship that recognizes and values who you are, where you are right now, has been part of my journey and I look to other women for that kind of affirmation. When I came to Vanguard University The founders of this Center, Dr. Elizabeth Leonard and Dr. Sherry Benvenuti, they were both my mentors in different spaces, and they saw something in me. They didn’t just say, “Oh, you’re just doing so great,” that’s kind of like a cheerleader and they leave after the game is over. They said, “You do this,” and they cited what it was, “really well.” They asked me questions, and they empowered me to be the one to go find the answer and bring it back to them. It wasn’t a question that they knew the answer to and they were just checking to see if I could find the answer, they valued what I brought back, and I want my students to do research with me. We’re teaching the Women and Justice research class this semester. I love that class because when you do Women and Justice research, the whole community is better. Because when it’s better and safer for women and girls, it’s better for men and boys as well.

Nadia Sosa 16:11
So you talked about all the women that have helped shape you, your second grade teacher. What do you think is the importance of seeing women in the education field, in the world of academia? How do you think that that impacts our generation and young girls, to know that we can one day be someone like you, someone who is influential and wins these awards, someone who, at the bottom line, over everything, even after winning the awards and succeeding in so many spheres, still keeps true to yourself and true to what you believe is good and the fight that you’re fighting? How do you think that that impacts girls, to see women like you being our educators?

Sandra Morgan 16:59
We have so much research that shows that if you see another woman doing something as a girl growing up, you can envision being that same person. When girls grow up, never seen girls, women, doing those things like being an astronaut, or a physicist, or a construction worker, then it’s less likely they’re going to think they can do it. I think modeling that has become a force multiplier of creating opportunity for young women as they enter their careers, their family development, all of those things, but they need to see someone else has been there, and there has to be a pioneer. And it’s always interesting for me because each generation that comes to sit in my freshman class has ideas about how we got to where we are here, in Southern California. I like to ask if women have always had the vote and people go, “Oh, yeah, sure!,” and we didn’t get the vote until 1920. We couldn’t take out a credit card until 1974.

Nadia Sosa 18:26
Today is the 50 year anniversary of being able to have a credit card without a man’s signature, your husband’s signature on it.

Sandra Morgan 18:35
Yeah, your husband or your father, which is, oh my goodness, so limiting, right? So all of these things are not to be taken for granted, and going back to the Global Center for Women and Justice from a geographical perspective, we have an opportunity to use our influence to inspire women in other places. I think one of the things that I pointed out at the event is how much I really like the title of this award, “Women of Inspiration,” because it has the sense of breathing life into those around you. It reminded me of going camping with my dad. My dad influenced my life a lot and camping with him, he would often say how you have to learn to go gently and to start a fire, you couldn’t be in a hurry. You couldn’t blow on it hard, you had to blow very gently. And that sense of starting a fire by gently blowing until it catches flame, that’s what I look for every semester in the students sitting in the chairs in my classroom. I don’t want to bowl them over with facts, I don’t want to force them to a conclusion I’ve drawn, I want to inspire them and ignite their own passion and commitment to making a difference.

Nadia Sosa 20:29
I love that analogy so much. I can remember being a freshman sitting in the classroom where you were teaching, and just knowing that I was being poured into. I was scooped up by you and everyone here, the community here at the Global Center, and you guys tied in all the skills that I have, all of the passions that I have, for this perfect role that I play, that I feel like I’m perfect for, and I feel like I love my internship. You guys just scooped me up and fostered all these skills that I already had so that I could help the Global Center, even if behind the scenes, but at the end of the day, know that I was making a difference somehow, that somewhere, somebody was listening to these episodes. Even though I just typed up the transcript, and I just hyperlinked the resources, somebody could click on that and have help, somebody could read what I typed up, who maybe couldn’t hear it, and understand how important the movement is. So it’s just great to hear that, and along those same lines, how do you as an educator hope to inspire students? How do you hope that you have inspired students?

Sandra Morgan 21:40
I think I want to be a catalyst to make them uncomfortable. I want young men to be uncomfortable enough that they will look a little further to the impact of some of the things they may take for granted. I want young women to feel uncomfortable with the status quo. Yes, things are much better than they were 50 years ago, when you had to have your husband or your father signed for you to get a credit card, but they’re not all there yet. And when women are not represented at the table, then we’re missing half of the whole. It takes men and women doing this together and I think there’s lots of research that shows when women are at the table, that treaties are more durable, that city councils make more decisions that support family. And when the families are supported, the community is stronger. There’s also a thing in finance that’s called ‘The Girl Effect.’ And when you educate girls, you get a slightly higher return on investment. That’s not to put the boys down, but boys often have more freedom to leave the community and go off on adventures, seeking their next big thing where girls are often expected to stay close to home. That’s beginning to change a little bit, so it’ll be interesting, by the time you’re a professor, Nadia, you may be researching ‘The Boy Effect,’ we’ll see. Things are not static and I want my students to learn principles of human dignity, and how we as a community can protect each other and grow communities where violence isn’t tolerated, where exploitation and human trafficking cannot exist.

Nadia Sosa 24:01
I love that you touched on that. Because even though here we’ve grown so much, and we’ve seen so much change within our community and society here, you’re looking past that, we’re all looking past that, at not just ourselves. We’re not just focusing on ourselves, but around the globe. How all women are affected, how all people are affected by these systems that are in place. And even then, there is still so much to do even here, in our own houses, in our own communities, there’s so much to do, so much growth left. But we don’t just look at ourselves. We’re looking, at the bigger picture and I think that’s really important.

Sandra Morgan 24:40
So one of the things that people say to me, like every year we do the Fairtrade Fashion Show, and we always promote using the Sweat and Toil app to check to see if children or adults are being enslaved, are being labor trafficked so we can have things like cheap chocolate. But people will say to me, “Well, how many chocolate bars do you eat? How much of a difference will that make?” And I understand that, but there are two other aspects. It’s not just the amount of chocolate, does it change the justice scales, it’s more about a way that we see each other around the world, as human beings. I want your generation, I want the kids in middle school and the kids in primary grades, to develop an empathy that understands that their choices at the grocery store in very affluent Southern California, impact children on the West Coast of Africa. If we don’t have that kind of empathy, then our world will not change, because we’ll all be just taking care of our own little backyard.

Nadia Sosa 26:08
Yeah, and I think that so many people, they use their head instead of their heart, and that’s always important as well, but it starts in the heart. It always starts in our heart. We have to feel that empathy and we have to feel in our hearts, humans, other people just like me somewhere, are being affected by this choice that I’m making, and then in turn, use their head, to make a different choice, to change their choices, to change the way that they think. But it always starts in our hearts, and it’s that little seed that’s planted in there of empathy that can grow and it will spread to our minds, and our choices will then be better. And we’ll make different choices, better choices that help all of us. This award, it’s about women supporting women, and I just wanted to ask you, what does that mean to you? What does women supporting women mean to you in terms of your career, the trafficking movement, and your everyday life, what does that mean to you?

Sandra Morgan 27:03
It’s one of the reasons I really loved receiving this award, because it was led by women, the panels were women, some of them my good friends and peers. Having them cheering me on, a friend nominated me and screamed louder than anybody else when my name was called, and I just have so much gratitude for having women in a community that actually support each other, we are doing this together. Afterwards, some of the other nominees, finalists, awardees, came to shake my hand to congratulate me, to find out how we can network and be together, and how can we support the next generation of girls going into technology, or business, all these different areas. Everyone there was about building a future that will support women inspiring the next generation of women.

Nadia Sosa 28:16
Well, congratulations, Dr. Morgan. As someone who came into Vanguard as a girl, and I feel like now maybe I’m a woman, maybe I’m still a girl. I think we’re always girls. But as someone who experienced your teaching firsthand, I just want to say congratulations, you deserve it and you’ve inspired so many people, and you’ve impacted so many people, and you’ve always stayed humble and kind. You always keep the mission on the forefront of your mind and I think that that’s so important as an educator. So I just want to personally thank you and congratulate you. Thank you for having me on the show and letting me interview you and bringing me forward from out of my little curtain behind the scenes. It’s been so great and so fun to ask you these questions, and get a little inside scoop.

Sandra Morgan 29:02
Oh my goodness, what a delight for me and an unusual experience to be interviewed by you. I do want to say thank you and make a shout out to the LA Times Orange County team that brought this award to Vanguard and the Global Center for Women and Justice, and me as the leader. I just think it is a way to amplify our footprint, our message, our voice, as we grow our efforts to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference where we are and beyond.

Nadia Sosa 29:42
Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you have enjoyed this interview, go over to endinghumantrafficking.org where you can find a library of past episodes, resources, and get more connected in our community.

Sandra Morgan 29:54
And if you’re not already a subscriber, subscribe to get the bi-weekly newsletter that lets you know a new episode has dropped and there are resources on the website. So Nadia, I guess I’ll see you back in the editing room and for everybody else, tune in again in two weeks.

Dr. Sandie Morgan looks back at episode #110, with founding co-host Dave Stachowiak, as the two discuss the importance of making just choices with our purchasing power.

Key Points

• It’s important to understand that as consumers, we all have a purchasing power that we can use, and it all begins with awareness and consideration of what’s good for those who were behind the production of a product.
• The Bureau of International Labor Affairs provides a list of goods produced by child labor or forced labor and can be found below.
• The Bureau of International Labor Affairs takes a research based approach to creating this list, using information that is available to the public and can be replicated.
• Being aware of the good that are produced by child labor or forced labor is a start to individual and collective action. It is an opportunity to become educated in order to change the quality of life for a child, an adult, a human being.

Resources

• California Supply Chain Transparency Act
• U.S. Department of Labor
• Office of Child Labor, Forced labor, and Human trafficking
• Bureau of International Labor Affairs
• List of Goods Produced by Child or Forced Labor 
• Reducing Child Labor and Forced Labor: A Toolkit for Responsible Businesses
• Chocolate ScoreCard
• Department of Labor Comply Chain 

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:14
You are listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode number 317. We’re here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. My name is Dr. Sandie Morgan and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Today, we are bringing back my founding co-host, Dave Stachowiak as we revisit a previous episode. You’re going to be listening to Episode #110: “Just Choices: Is it Too Complicated?”. I was reminded of this episode as I saw all of the chocolate in the stores as we celebrated Easter. This episode opens the door for more reflection on our personal ethics in our fight to make a difference in ending human trafficking. With the passage of time, I’ve come to value a personal ethic that builds empathy and bleeds into other spheres in our lives where we have influence: your business, your office, your place of worship. Take a listen to this conversation between Dave and me.

Dave 1:50
Sandie today, we are looking at a topic that is one that actually pretty much all of us are dealing with, whether we understand that or not, are aware of that or not. That is some of the choices we make in sourcing supplies and working with forming partnerships with organizations that supply things to our organization, and to businesses, and to nonprofits and thinking through that, or not, as the case may be. We’ve got a lot of tools and resources to look at today, in order to help us all to be more effective.

Sandra Morgan 2:28
I tell you, Dave, I’ve had so many conversations of late, where it’s part of who I am. We’re having a conversation and I hear people say, “Well, that’s too complicated.” Because I explained, during Ensure Justice preparation, the idea was to order a little cotton tote bag, and someone had found a really good deal, and I said, “Well did you check the supply chain? Because here in California, we have the Supply Chain Transparency Act.” The person looked at me and said, “That’s kind of complicated, I don’t have time to do that.” I said, “Well, it’s out of my department, I’m going to do it.” This is something I really want listeners to pay attention to. If the people in your company, in your organization, in your church, if you’re a pastor, you’re the CEO, and the buck stops here. If decisions are made, to not follow through on something that looks a little complicated, ultimately, that’s going to be my responsibility. So I stayed a little later, I went online, I checked out the website, and according to the law, they needed to have certain information. When that information was not transparent enough, I made phone calls. We did not give out tote bags that year, because I couldn’t find one that I felt was done ethically and I knew for sure there was no child or forced labor in it. So I’m very committed to this and I wanted us to look at the tools that are available to us whether you’re in California or anywhere. The US Department of Labor in 2005 was mandated to develop the Office of Child Labor, forced labor, and human trafficking. As a result of that, the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, the ILab is conducting research on child labor and forced labor in order to produce a bi annual report. We’re going to talk about how that report helps us do our homework. It is a little bit complicated, but it’s not nearly as complicated as if we didn’t have these tools and resources.

Dave 5:04
I think you’ve mentioned something Sandie, here that all of us bears responsibility for. When I think just to my own experience here, is that there are times that I have gone online to purchase something or been influenced in making a decision to purchase something from an organization, and I have thought through this. Like, “Okay, where’s this coming from? What’s the supply chain and done some research on that?” I will say more often than not, I’ve gone on, especially if I’m looking for something that could be purchased potentially different places or more of a commodity item, I am as guilty as anyone of going on and finding the lowest price and like, “Oh, this organization has it cheap and we can get it even cheaper here, and not really thinking of the implications of that.” I think it’s sometimes easy. This is one of those things where, what do they call it in psychology? Diffusion of responsibility, it’s very easy to just kind of mentally offload the responsibility somewhere else. It’s like, “Oh, well, it’s already for sale here. It’s cheap. And this is a great dea,” and yet, we all bear the responsibility for if we only look at price, if we only look at getting the cheapest product. Then we’re part of that process. We are part of, potentially, a supply chain that is not really doing the things that would be in alignment with the values and with looking at what are things that might be risk for trafficking, or forced labor and the things that we’ve talked about on the show a lot. So I think one thing that we can all take away, whether you go and use this tool immediately, or looking these resources or not, is just I think a starting point for all of us is when we’re trying to purchase something, or we’re looking into where we’re going to spend our money, is just stop and think for a minute. Am I only making this decision on price? Or would I be willing to take a few extra minutes to look at what the supply chain looks like? And we’re going to give you a bunch of tools in this episode to do that. But I think just changing that mental attitude, and I’m saying this as much to myself, Sandie, as much as anyone else, when we’re going online searching for something, or looking for something for organization, just to take a moment to stop and think, “Okay, what else can I ask in addition to price? Not that we’re going to ignore that, but what else can I ask in addition to that, so I’ve got more data points to make a good decision that supports the things we’re talking about.

Sandra Morgan 7:32
And anytime you’re you’re involved in a conversation, where ethics is the bottom line, it is messy, because we don’t live in a perfect world, and it is very difficult to be completely sure that any particular product is 100%, slave free. But that doesn’t excuse us from making the effort and making choices that will be more justice oriented choices for the people whose labor has gone into that. And we could get diverted from the toolkit, just talking about the ethics of making choices that are based on what’s good for me without any consideration of what’s good for someone else.

Dave 8:18
Yeah, no, exactly. It’s tough. So awareness is one big area. Just one example, and I may have mentioned this on the show before, we’re recording this in October, so Halloween is coming up. I remember a couple of years ago, we had talked so many times in the show about Fairtrade chocolate, and I was thinking about, “Oh, it’d be great if we could hand out Fairtrade chocolate to kids on Halloween.” And I went online and did some research, and I think I figured out it was going to cost like $300-400 with the amount of kids that come to our house, and I was just like, no. We’ll figure out something else. But that’s just an example. Just because you go into the read doesn’t necessarily mean that you spend the money or that’s always the right choice, but thinking about it, being conscious of that decision that you’re making, versus just blindly doing the price shopping.

Sandra Morgan 9:11
And that’s a great segue back to the ILab efforts with the report that they produce bi-annually, called the “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.” One of their key objectives is awareness, public awareness. And we’re going to talk just for a second about how they produce this report, because it is a research based report. They don’t use secret information that only these special people have because there’s lots of challenges. What they have done is they’ve used publicly available primary and secondary sources. Now in a research based approach, you want to be able to replicate the research. So that means other people have to have access to the same information that you did. And it gathers the information using qualitative and quantitative data, and then the list of goods is made available to the public. The list of goods are from countries that ILab has reason to believe, are produced by forced labor or child labor, in violation of international standards. So the standards are not just what we’re looking at here in California or in the United States, but these are international standards.

This is almost a, this is not the best term, but a clearinghouse of information. They’ve assembled the information that’s out there, we could go find it on our own, but they’ve put it all in one place, and provides an easy way for us to access and to get that information quickly.

And, for instance, in the most recent report from December 2014, there are 136 goods from 74 countries on the list. And if you wanted to have a lot of detail, there is a link to the procedural guidelines. If you look at the report, there will be a bibliography for the products and how it was arrived at that it was put on the report. So it’s a very carefully produced report.

Dave 11:31
Perfect.

Sandra Morgan 11:31
Now they also, in December 2012, created a Reducing Child Labor and Forced Labor: A Toolkit for Responsible Businesses. I’m pretty excited about this, because businesses say to me often, “Wow, you’re in a an academic institution, reading all of this and learning about this as part of your job. I have to actually produce a report that shows a profit, and I have to conduct business, it’s commercial, it’s for profit. So how do I do this?” Well, this toolkit is available, it’s online for companies who want to develop, and this is a quote from their document, “robust social compliance systems in their global supply chain.” So Dave, take a look at that and tell me what you see when you open that up.

Dave 12:30
I believe I’m on the correct page here. So we’re at the Department of Labor (dol.gov), and I’m on the ILab site for Reducing Child Labor and Forced Labor. There is a graphic on the front, with the eight steps of ‘select a step for the process.’ If you click on any of these, it kind of goes through the process of explaining these. What I’m not sure Sandie, looking at this, is how you pull up that report or what pieces are here. Let me see, learning objectives, key terms. It just kind of guides you through, it looks like the process for how you would go about this on each of the steps.

Sandra Morgan 13:14
Now, in California, because we have the Supply Chain Transparency Act, there are a set of of legislated guidelines for reporting social compliance of supply chain and sourcing. So this toolkit is aimed at people who are not necessarily required to do this, but there is a sense, and I was in a meeting recently where a marketing expert was speaking to leaders about the idea of cause-based marketing. So there is a sense that today’s consumer, and especially with the rising influence of millennials, are much more interested in social responsibility and their purchases. So how would a company begin to align themselves with that expectation? This toolkit provides some of those resources. So for instance, the…

Dave 14:18
Now that I looked through here, it’s actually way easier.

Sandra Morgan 14:21
It is pretty easy?

Dave 14:22
It is. So if you start out here, on the page, and we’ll put a link to the page in the notes, there’s a graphic with the eight different steps. You click on the first step and then you just click ‘continue’ at the bottom of each page. And it walks you through exactly what the process is to do this, of how to engage stakeholders, of how to assess where your organization is, of how to develop a code of conduct, how to communicate effectively. I mean it looks very much in alignment with some of the organizational change models that I’ve seen, Sandie. So I think that it’s a great starting point on thinking through this as an organization, if this is important to you, or if you are partnered with an organization that you’re working on starting to think about these things. What a great place to start.

Sandra Morgan 15:12
Well, as soon as I opened it, I thought, this is giving me some benchmarks, vocabulary for having this conversation with people in other departments that I partner with in my environment, but even more importantly, I do so much community education and awareness, and there are people who listen and look at me and say, “Wow, I wish I could do something but this is way beyond me. It’s too complicated.” Here’s a step by step toolkit that makes it clear there is a place to begin.

Dave 15:49
Indeed.

Sandra Morgan 15:50
And we can all do something. I think I’ve heard that somewhere before.

Dave 15:55
I have heard that somewhere before, too. Yes.

Sandra Morgan 15:57
So the list of countries and goods that is produced every two years, added two items to their list, this last report. They added alcoholic beverages and they added meat. And for me, it’s like, I hadn’t really thought through how they decide what to study. And as I did that, and looked at one of the early lists that I had downloaded, and then at the latest list, there are 353 items on the December list. That’s a lot of items.

Dave 16:36
And these are items, again, that the Department of Labor is identified, as they’re reasonably sure, based on the information and the research and the observations, that there’s a correlation there with forced labor or trafficking.

Sandra Morgan 16:53
Absolutely. And one of the things when I listen to people, and when people ask me questions, standing in the lobby of a hotel, I write it down, and it keeps me awake at night sometimes, because I want to find an answer. To have someone say, “Well, it’s too complicated,” that happened in a lobby, in a hotel in Nebraska, last week. It just made me want to go and figure out how to make it more streamlined.

Dave 17:20
Yes.

Sandra Morgan 17:20
I can’t tell you what to do if you’re online shopping, and you’re looking at a particular product, but I can tell you go to this report, and you have 353 items that our Department of Labor has done research on that can be replicated, that are most likely being imported and stocked on the shelves of our stores. So then, I can reasonably assume that there is going to be some information on those products. So I don’t have 1000 products, but I have 353. And so I can be responsible with what I do have.

Dave 18:01
And how specific does this get, Sandie? Would it make sense to pull up the list and just to look? I mean, does it get specific to like a brand or particular item? Could you give us an example?

Sandra Morgan 18:10
Actually, it does not list brands. For me, that is a really important aspect. I do think that people who get involved in just researching one brand, end up getting themselves into some serious quagmires. I’ve had students, you mentioned Fairtrade chocolate, and Fairtrade is a certified trademark, there are other trademarks as well. It isn’t like a generic term, a more generic term is ‘slave free.’ When they looked at a particular product, and they said, “Well, this company has made this product,” and then they paint the entire company as all bad, there were other projects that were socially responsible by the same company, and they actually produced one of their chocolate bars that was entirely Fairtrade and had the certification. So it gets very messy. Leave out brand names. A lot of companies are doing work. They’re going to this website to have more social compliance, and if they’re doing business in California, they’re being held to a higher accountability, but it is not good practice to list the actual brand names.

Dave 19:30
Got it. And that goes right to our philosophy. We’ve talked about on the show many times, that business and organizations are partners in this effort, not adversaries by any means.

Sandra Morgan 19:40
Absolutely.

Dave 19:41
All of us, many of us work in businesses and organizations that produce products. So how can we partner with those businesses and organizations to do that more effectively? Like you said, we could cite so many examples of organizations that are doing that fabulously in some areas and maybe not as well in other areas, just like people. Right?

Sandra Morgan 20:03
Right.

Dave 20:03
Some things we’re doing well as people and at any given time or situation, other areas we’re falling short on. How do we partner to help everyone to be more effective?

Sandra Morgan 20:12
We’re trying to do better. Being perfect is kind of an illusion, but we are trying to do better.

Dave 20:18
Well, let me ask a follow up on that. Because I am still curious, though, as far as just the practical use of this list. So when you say something like alcohol, that’s, that’s too broad. If I’m going to the store and thinking like, “Okay, what would I purchase and not purchase?” How specific does it get as far as the direction that it provides to me as a consumer? What would be the kind of alcohol or meat that I’d want to watch for to maybe make different decisions?

Sandra Morgan 20:42
It would probably, and I haven’t looked at the alcohol list, but for instance, blueberries. If the report indicated that blueberries from Southern Argentina are often harvested by children who are not getting an education, and who are not being compensated appropriately. Then if the store I’m in has a little label and says, “Wow, you get to have these off season blueberries at this great price,” I’m going to think about that and do a little homework before I decide that I want to have blueberries off season.

Dave 21:21
Got it. That’s a great example because they always say on the package, at least, where it’s from. That’s interesting. Okay, so for fruits and vegetables, that’s the kind of thing you’d look for. Are there other things that you know of, off the top your head that you’ve looked at?

Sandra Morgan 21:21
I’ve at chocolate, I’ve looked at cotton. If a t-shirt says that it was made in a particular country, I can go back and look and see where that cotton came from. And in fact, the little episode I talked about with buying cotton tote bags really cheap, the company when I called them said, “We have a zero tolerance policy for child labor.” I was like, “Well, so do I. But show me how you implement that. How do you enforce it?” And ultimately, after a couple of emails, a letter, and two phone calls, they finally said, “We don’t actually know where the cotton to make them comes from,” and they wouldn’t tell us. I’m sure they didn’t want us to know, but I know that if the cotton comes from Uzbekistan, that there are kids on cotton plantations who don’t get to go to school because that’s what they are doing instead.

Dave 22:31
So looking at the source, and when we say source, like literally the source, where the ountries are, where certain products are coming from. That list would help with perspective on that, as far as if I’m looking at two different shirts in a store, and I look at the country of origin and the materials, I might make a different choice based on that information. It’d be really interesting to grab that list and download it on your mobile device, and next time you’re in the store and you’re looking for a particular kind of thing, you’d just pull up, see if anything’s on the list as far as direction.

Sandra Morgan 23:06
Oh yeah.

Dave 23:07
It almost reminds me Sandie, of those really neat cards that they have where when you go out to a restaurant, on seafood, they have that watch list of, “Yes, okay to eat.”

Sandra Morgan 23:17
Yes.

Dave 23:18
Have you seen that red light, yellow light, green light?

Sandra Morgan 23:21
Exactly.

Dave 23:21
Eat occasionally, don’t ever order this fish at a restaurant because they’ve been over fished and supplies are down. It sounds a little bit like that, you’d just have some sort of reference that will be helpful to you in the moment of thinking, maybe here’s some information I can use.

Sandra Morgan 23:38
There are some apps that are being developed. Free to Work is one of them. We can do some research and maybe post some of those on there. You mentioned seafood, there is a lot of research now on forced labor and slavery in the shrimp industry in Thailand and Southern Asia, to the point where it would be difficult for me to go and order scampi right now, because I just read that report. So, our choices end up when we’re out celebrating at a nice restaurant, doesn’t it?

Dave 23:38
Yeah, well, I know it affected my choices. When I saw some of those fish lists, years ago, when they first started to come out. I was like, “Oh, wow, I’ve ordered that a bunch of times at restaurants,” and I never knew that there was an overfishing problem, or an over supply issue with this particular fish, and so I stopped ordering that fish. I don’t remember which one it was, but I know I changed my behavior. It goes back to what you said earlier in the episode Sandie, of just awareness. Awareness goes a long way. If you know that there’s an issue with something, I can make a different choice now, and if enough people make that choice, then that affects what is purchased, and what’s supplied, and the choices that are made economically, and that’s huge.

Sandra Morgan 24:59
It happens for all of us. Let me give you a couple more little highlights from this report from Department of Labor. I want you to think about the definition for child labor, the international standard, because often people say, “Well, you know, it’s not like kids in America, kids in other countries are used to working.” But it’s not 18. The International Standard is work performed by a person below the age of 15, and it includes any kind of practice that is a form of slavery, the sale or trafficking of children, debt bondage, serfdom, forced or compulsory labor, and it includes forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict. So, the definitions are international definitions, and they have five principles for evaluating the information. That kind of procedural guide, for some people, is really important detail information. Just quickly, it’s the nature of the information, the date of the information, they don’t use anything older than five years, they try to keep it very current, the source, whether the information indicates significant incidents of child labor or forced labor, and then the extent of corroboration from various sources. Corroboration is key. They try to limit single source references on their report, they want corroboration. So that’s really important. And their process is related to their goal, they want a transparent process using publicly available primary and secondary sources, so that this is something that is available for all of us, it isn’t something hidden. When I look at their uses for the list, that idea of raising public awareness about forced labor, and child labor, that is the real goal. This list isn’t included or intended to be a punishment, but it’s a starting point for individual and collective action. That’s why we wanted to spend some time here on this podcast, because we can take action as an individual, but we can also take action collectively, whether in our business communities, or beyond, in our advocacy work. Becoming educated on this and understanding how to use the list will be a significant stepping stone, something solid. It’s not people just making generalized statements, but you can pull this up and say, “Yes, cotton in Uzbekistan is a problem.” And if we address this, that means that we have to also go over there and see how are we going to get those kids into a place where they go to school? So it isn’t just about not buying a t-shirt, it’s about changing the quality of life for a child, an adult, for another human being. Our just choices.

Dave 28:22
Exactly. And the thing that really strikes me of what you just said is that this has been done well, and the research has been done well, there’s good processes, procedures, standards put in place to make sure it’s reported accurately. And I just pulled up on the website, neat info graphics, just a one page overview of the entire list, and it’s really neat. Sandie, I know this would be really easy to have when you’re shopping or just to look at when you’re looking for something, just a quick reference guide. It’s really helpful from that standpoint.

Sandra Morgan 28:55
Wow, there was a lot of food for thought there. We have more tools now and we’ll add a few to our show notes, like the Chocolate ScoreCard, and the Department of Labor Comply app. Now, I’m inviting you to take the next step if you’re a new listener. Go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. You can find the resources that I’ve mentioned in this conversation, and so much more. You can check out the anti-human trafficking certificate program here at Vanguard University, and if you haven’t visited the site before, it’s a great first step to become a subscriber. You’ll receive an email with the show notes when a new episode drops. And of course, I’ll be back in two weeks for our next conversation.

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Kirsten Foot as the two discuss the role that government agencies play in equipping and influencing others against trafficking.

Kirsten Foot

Kirsten Foot, PhD, is the CEO and Executive Director of Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking (BEST) which educates employers to prevent  human trafficking, and provides pathways to safe employment for trafficking survivors. BEST offers employers consulting on anti-trafficking strategy development and implementation, video-based and in-person training services, and advisement on communicating about human trafficking with employees, customers, vendors and the public. Kirsten Foot was also a guest on Episode #111 and Episode #310 of the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. 

Key Points

• To prevent human trafficking, the act and crime must be made more costly to traffickers, more expensive financially, and have higher risks and consequences so that they can no longer benefit from it. 
• BEST aims to drive trafficking out of businesses and the same strategy can be applied in the public sector to help public sector employers drive traffickers off of public property, agencies, and infrastructures. Government agencies have the power to do all of these things, and in turn, make trafficking harder and hurtful to traffickers rather than easy and beneficial. 
• It is important that businesses cross-train their employees and equip them to observe and report labor trafficking. 
• It’s important for management of a government agency to be trained as well, in order to support their front-line employees and provide a clear protocol for when a potential case of trafficking is identified. 
• Government agencies have the power to influence not only residents of the county they’re based in, but many other types of organizations by encouraging businesses that they work with, providing awareness-raising materials, and encouraging leaders to learn and contribute. 

Resources

• EHT #111
• EHT #310
• NCMEC
• Ports of Freedom
• Not Alone Campaign
• Be the One Campaign
• BEST
• Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:14
You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice. This is episode #316: Government Agencies as Equippers and Influencers Against Trafficking, My name is Sandie Morgan and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Kirsten Foot is back today to discuss how government agencies leverage tools and strategies developed by Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking, the organization she leads to counter human trafficking. Kirsten has a Ph. D. She’s CEO and Executive Director of BEST, Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking, and she leads their initiatives to educate employers to prevent human trafficking, and provide pathways to safe employment for trafficking survivors. BEST offers employer consulting on anti-trafficking strategy development and implementation, video based and in-person training, services, and advisement on communicating about human trafficking with employees, customers, vendors and the public. Kirsten has been a guest on episode #111, and episode #310. Kirsten welcome back.

Kirsten Foot 2:01
Thank you, Sandie, it is always good to talk with you. I learn things in our conversations too, I’m just excited to have this chance.

Sandra Morgan 2:09
So I’ve been trying to reconsider the approach that I take to educating my community, and from the beginning of the podcast, a lot of my goals were designed around providing resources. But as I kind of lean into this new season, I want to understand better the “why”, and my students can look up the “what”, they Google it before I can get it out in my classroom, but the “why”, that is the message. So I want to start today with the “why” for BEST, particularly in the context of serving government agencies.

Kirsten Foot 3:03
Well, glad to have the chance to speak to that. It’s a big question, but it’s actually relatively simple. Because if we grasp the fact that human trafficking is ultimately a crime of greed, it’s human rights violation, it’s exploitation in so many ways, but the “why” of human trafficking: Why do people traffic other people? it’s greed. Because they profit from it. Then that means that our efforts to prevent it need to be dedicated to making the activity of human trafficking much more costly to the traffickers, more expensive financially, more difficult, more risky for them. It’s simply too easy. So prevention needs to be thought about as making it much harder for traffickers, and government agencies have such a strong role to play in that. Often, I think people think, “Well, you know, government agencies and trafficking, it’s law enforcement.” That’s what government does, that’s the main thing government does and law enforcement is absolutely essential in countering human trafficking. And so are our government-provided social services. So much of the support for survivors of human trafficking comes from government sources in the federal acts, and other state resources. It’s never enough, but there is government funding for survivors. But my emphasis in my position within BEST is looking at government agencies as employers, as managers of significant amounts of public property, buildings, parks, facilities, libraries, transit systems, infrastructures that have been built with public dollars and that they steward for the public. They have government agencies at the city, county, state and federal level, have so much opportunity for influence over what happens on their properties, through their workforce, and the ways that they influence all the other entities that work around them and with them. The businesses, the non-government organizations, the community organizations, the schools, there’s so many ways in which government agencies are prime for influence, and for equipping of their own employees, as well as all different aspects of the public that they interact with. So that’s the big picture. Curious what you think there as my attempt to explain the “why”.

Sandra Morgan 5:36
I love that. I love that because when we try to look at the issue around greed, and then we just counter it with prison and things like that, we know that those with greater resources may find ways around those kinds of deterrence, and the the reduction is a minor blip on the screen in their world of millions and billions. So making it a financial deterrent, looking at it from that perspective, is flipping the script for sure. I love that.

Kirsten Foot 6:23
Well, let me add one phrase there, a memorable phrase that BEST uses when talking with private sector employers, so businesses, is that BEST is here to help businesses drive trafficking out of business. So, “driving trafficking out of business,” is one of the phrases that BEST uses. But the same is true for the public sector. What does it mean? How do we get public sector employers to drive traffickers off of public property, out of public agencies, off of public infrastructures? The government agencies have so much possibility, and many of them are doing great things to make it much more costly and risky for traffickers to operate on public land, public property, public infrastructure.

Sandra Morgan 7:12
I just look at the changes we’ve seen in the landscape since the passage of the Uyghur Labor trafficking Prevention Act, where now the onus is on the corporate world to prove their supply chains, so that’s flipping the script. There’s lots of good reasons for us to do this and I’m a huge proponent of public-private partnerships. We’ve seen how that has been so effective for organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who were featured during last episode of the podcast. So let’s move to the “how,” and the how is in the title of this episode, we’re talking about equippers and influencers. So tell us how that works.

Kirsten Foot 8:09
Yeah. So as government agency leaders catch the vision for what their realm of influence can be within and through their agency, I see tremendous innovation, and dedication, and really strong leadership, to equip staff within the government agency, to be trained on behavioral indicators of labor trafficking and sex trafficking that they recognize signs when they see it in the context of their agency’s purview. I’ll give you a few examples of that bit, but also to to recognize their role as leaders in our society, to influence the culture, influence the public in its awareness of the various forms that human trafficking takes and the multiple types of coercion, of the dozens of aid of industries in which human trafficking is happening, as well as to influence businesses and others through incentivizing them to do the right thing, to step up and take leadership, to demonstrate as public agencies the leadership that any organization can take, and that every organization should take to lead within their realm. I’ve got lots of examples, but we can start just with airports. Think about airports as public agencies. In many states across the country now, airport leadership has taken the initiative to put signage in public spaces, in restroom stalls and various types of publicly visible places to raise awareness on the issue of human trafficking and to address potential victims that may be in the airport facility under duress, or actually being coerced right then. So that’s just that act of signage in airports, it’s happening in many airports across the country. That’s an example of a government agency, the port that oversees the airport, that entity, taking leadership, taking advantage of the opportunity it has to use its premises as a place to message against human trafficking, and provide resources, hotline numbers, protocols within the airport, to interrupt trafficking as it’s happening. With time, over time, that kind of, we call it “inhospitality,” being inhospitable to trafficking in airports, makes it harder and more risky for traffickers to see an airport as an easy place to be. We want to make it difficult for traffickers to have their victims in airports and think they can be undetected. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because the signage is just the beginning. What really matters in airports around the country, just keeping with that example, is when airport leadership train their staff and make training available to all the vendors, all of the shop owners, the businesses that operate within the airport and that service the airport. When all of those people are influenced by the leadership of an airport to also get trained so that their employees know what to look for, and know what to do when they see instances that could be human trafficking, then you’re watching an airport, as a government entity, influence so many private sector organizations that are always there, and on its premises and working together. That’s when you really start to see a multiplier effect, that a government agency can lead. That’s just one example, but it is happening in many airports, it needs to happen in every airport.

Sandra Morgan 11:42
We did a training for our airport and one of the questions that one of the higher level managers asked me is, “Okay, so we are looking for potential victims who are being trafficked through the airport, but you’re describing some behavioral indicators that I think we might be seeing in third party contractors who are here doing cleaning, serving in some of the vendor areas. So how do you see this impacting actually, the employment practices in the airport?”

Kirsten Foot 12:28
In any space, not just airports, but all businesses are vulnerable to contractors with zero integrity and high exploitation, of being taken advantage of. Even a high integrity employer can be taken advantage of by a labor broker that’s bringing in employees through illicit contracts, or no contracts, that are actually being forced to work in that facility. It’s not just airports, not just public entities, that can happen anywhere, and it is happening in so many places. So it is part of what needs to happen. Every public entity has a good reason to want all of its vendors that use its premises to be trained, to recognize indicators of human trafficking, in case their very own shop within a public space is being exploited in that way, where people are being exploited through wrongful contracts, or lack of contracts for work in that area.

Sandra Morgan 13:28
So let’s look at a couple of examples of how this works and what the training entails. So I know that you guys have worked with Washington State Department of Ecology, and can you describe the ports to freedom training?

Kirsten Foot 13:48
Yeah, well, this is actually a really exciting example because among the industries for which BEST has developed industry-specific training, the maritime industry is one of them. So the name of BEST training for any employer in the maritime industry, public or private sector, is Ports of Freedom. It is a specific training, that is specific for the kinds of risks that employers in the maritime trades face, as we know that human trafficking is happening in every aspect of Port based work. It’s shipping cargo, cruise vessels, fishing vessels, there are an increasing number of validated cases of people being trafficked for their labor, exploited without pay, in those aspects of the marine trades. So every port, and every business that works in ports, is vulnerable to being complicit in that and has the opportunity to recognize it when they’re seeing it. What happened just in the last year with Washington State’s Department of Ecology was just a phenomenal example of government agency leadership. A few people in the Department of Ecology, in the area, the division that oversees oil spill prevention efforts, so people who are environmental disaster prevention inspectors, the leaders of that department had access to BEST reports to freedom training. When they saw that training, they realized that over the last few years, their environmental inspectors had been talking about things they’d seen on the ships they boarded, that indicated something very wrong, very amiss in terms of the labor conditions of some of the people on some of those ships, they were there to inspect for oil prevention, but they noticed indicators of labor exploitation, and they didn’t know what to call it, they didn’t have any way to to define it or report it in a clear way, but when the leaders of that division of the Department of Ecology saw BEST ports to freedom training, they recognized that what some of their inspectors had been observing was actually indicators of labor trafficking. So the Washington State Department of Ecology Oil Spill Prevention Division, has partnered with BEST to ensure that all, hundreds, of their oil spill prevention experts get cross training, crossed from their environmental expertise on labor trafficking, on sex trafficking as it can happen as well, but really emphasizing the behavioral indicators of labor exploitation that they may be seeing on the ships they board when they board to look for oil prevention. I find that just a phenomenal vision and creative, strategic thinking on the part of the leaders of that division, of that government agency. When I started here at BEST, I wanted to be sure to meet those people, that pair of people, and ask them who their counterparts are in California, and in Oregon, and in British Columbia, and over on the east coast, and on the Gulf Coast. So gradually here, BEST is working on reaching out to individuals in each of those state agencies and state and provincial agencies as well. Because any agency that has people boarding ships, has the capacity to watch for, observe, and learn how to report safely and effectively, the indicators of labor exploitation, maybe human trafficking, that they see in the ship setting.

Sandra Morgan 17:36
So when I started engaging with business leaders, whether government or private, some of the resistance that I encountered, was the amount of time away from work their employees would have to take, because that’s a financial consideration. So you always want to count the costs. So let’s talk about what the training entails, and then what kind of accommodations you need to make to train your staff that’s on the front line. The guy in the office on the 12th floor probably isn’t going to see this, although it’s possible, it’s more likely that the frontline folks are going to be most able to encounter and report.

Kirsten Foot 18:31
Yes, that’s very true. So the training that BEST provides for people in any industry is always kept to 30 minutes. As you know, single base training, there’s always room for more. Many agencies, government agencies, have asked us to train not just their employees with the 30 minute training, but to do a “train the trainer’s,” to have q&a sessions with their employees that go beyond what’s presented in the introductory training. Because they know that for employees to feel fully equipped, to recognize the indicators to report well, but also to have confidence in their management, that when they report to the management, that the management is going to support them and recognize with them, and help them think through what they saw and what needs to happen, depending on the urgency or emergent nature of the situation. We can say yeah, it’s just 30 minutes for everyone, and that’s true, and that’s good, and in many cases, it’s not sufficient, because leadership needs to be trained as well. At least, there needs to be a response team among management and leadership, to whom if any kind of trafficking potential situation is reported, that there’s a clear protocol within the organization of who else is going to need to know and how that employee will be supported in their reporting. Beyond an emergency call the 911, what else is being reported and what vulnerabilities in that government agencies’, property, or premises, or operations, does that report reveal? That the leadership then need to take action on. So this is why BEST offers strategy consulting for organizations, partnered with a number of different state, county, and local government agencies in Washington and other states, to help leadership develop the strategy that their particular agency needs, and figure out a plan for implementation. Training is a key part of that, but I would say it’s necessary and not sufficient on its own. Because, again, employees need to know that their management is with them, and that there’s a very strong support from leadership in the organization for what will happen when reports are made, or when potential situations that are sometimes hard to parse, when that’s brought to management, how will there be both support for the employee and a clear set of response decisions and communication, to protect that employee, report quickly when it’s necessary, and take stock of what’s happening in the property, or the office, or the operations that this reveals.

Sandra Morgan 21:05
That really resonates so much with what I’ve been learning, Kirsten. I’ve gone in and done training, and two things happen. I go back a year later, and it’s different people. The people that I trained to begin with were passionate, they had wonderful intentions, good intentions, but there’s not much left of the structure that we thought we had put into place by training in areas like identification, safe intervention, and other kinds of protocols. So we began to understand how critical it is, at the beginning stage, to start the process to operationalize those good intentions in written policies that then continue to replicate what you’ve established. So how, and what can you do to assist people in not having to start from the ground up with those kinds of policies?

Kirsten Foot 22:19
Sandie, you just hit the nail on the head. That’s what needs to happen. For strategy development, there are certain things that are going to be based, core elements in any organization, whether it’s a business or a public sector, government agency, premise based or operations based, there’s a set of core things. But beyond that, there are practices that need to be put in place. There’s policies, and there’s practices, and having internal communication that is consistent, meaningful, coherent for employees of you know, “Here’s how we’re talking about that.” This is what human trafficking is, here’s what it’s not. We’re looking for behavioral indicators of force, fraud, or coercion, in any form of work or sex. And if a minor is involved, we’re dealing with an entirely other situation, but there are core elements of that, that are true for every organization, and there are specific decisions to be made by each organization, depending on its particular opportunities and vulnerabilities, given its location, its premises, its operations, and the various types of turnover and leadership that are in place for that organization. So BEST works with organizations to help that strategy development phase that is both, a set of things that BEST recommends as best practices for every employer, and there’s a delineated list of best practices, and they need to be customized for each employer for ultimate impact or optimal impact within that organization.

Sandra Morgan 23:52
Okay, so I like stories, and I was really encouraged by learning about having signs at rest areas in Washington. Tell me when that started and what kind of out put you’ve experienced?

Kirsten Foot 24:16
It actually started many years ago. I want to say back in 2014, even. The Washington State Department of Transportation has been phenomenal in its embracing of its opportunity and responsibility to make use of the state funded rest areas on the major interstates across the state of Washington. As a place where all different kinds of people are making use of facilities, and where there is space for public signage behind Plexiglas as well as inside restroom stalls. From more than a decade ago, various nonprofits have worked with the State of Washington’s Department of Transportation to create a couple of different generations of messaging, poster-type messaging in rest areas. But what is really exciting is that the most recent version of this that has now rolled out, implemented in every rest area in the state of Washington, all of its major highways, is an awareness raising campaign that was designed by a survivor. It’s titled “Not Alone,” “You are not alone,” is the message. There are multi-language posters, one set that is addressed to people who may be experiencing labor trafficking, and another set that are addressed to people who may be experiencing sex trafficking. But the message is, “You are not alone. There’s help available,” it’s in multiple languages, and it is now displayed in every rest area in the state of Washington, thanks to the Washington State Department of Transportation’s leadership and creative thinking, and willingness to cooperate and work really well with other government agencies and with nonprofits, including BEST. BEST led the “Not Alone” campaign with Washington State Department of Transportation, to get those posters in Washington State rest areas. It’s just terrific the way that they’ve engineered it, how to make those posters safe. There’s been a lot of vandalism of anti-trafficking posters in rest areas over the last decade, and now there’s some really good engineering to make sure that signage lasts as long as possible.

Sandra Morgan 26:29
I have to brag a little bit on our home base here in Orange County, our Department of Transportation did “Be the One” campaign with bus wraps and posters in buses. It has been a great example of your lead comments about being influencers. I think that’s not something we’ve talked about from either the public or private sector. Can you give us a little more understanding of ‘influencer’ in this context?

Kirsten Foot 27:09
So in a very concrete way, government agencies by using their property, their premises, whether it’s rest areas, buses, library foyers, the waiting area of every government agency, that’s city, state, county, has space for signage. When they choose to dedicate some of that real estate of messaging space, to anti trafficking messaging, they are influencing the culture. They’re influencing public, they’re raising awareness at a scale that no single employer could do. They’re doing it in a way that’s saying, “We are government, we care, and we think everybody should care. Here’s how we want you to be aware of this and here’s what we want you to do with it.” So that’s just one way but then, at a higher level, as government agencies that interact with businesses, so the Department of Labor and Industry, for example, in Washington State, in many states, has the opportunity to influence, to encourage businesses that it works with by providing access to awareness-raising materials, by encouraging business leaders to learn about this and get on board and be part of a city-wide campaign, or a county level coalition. Those are also ways that I see government agencies influencing many, many other types of organizations.

Sandra Morgan 28:29
Wow, I just looked at the time and Kirsten, we’ve been friends for a long time, so we could keep going. But I know somebody who commutes and listens to this podcast, and they just hate it when we’re not done and they get to their destination. So last question, how do people find these resources?

Kirsten Foot 28:55
BEST’s website is bestalliance.org, and resources on the Not Alone campaign are there to be downloaded, resources about the consulting and training opportunities that best offers are also available through the website, and anyone can contact [email protected] for any further info. I’d happily talk with anyone from a government agency or anyone else that wants to think together about how employers, either public or private sector, can be better equipped. If your own employer is open to thinking about what its strategy needs to be, how it can communicate better, and what it can do to equip and influence others, please give me a call

Sandra Morgan 29:35
Alright. Thank you so much for coming on today. And thank you for listening today. I’d love to invite some feedback. I know other organizations are doing this in their areas. I’ve seen it in Madrid, Spain. I’ve seen it in Arizona. So I would love to invite you to send us your feedback at feedback@ending human trafficking.org, or come on to our social media and tell us what you guys are doing in this space to equip government agencies, and those who are influencing our movement against trafficking, and changing our culture. I look forward to seeing you again in two weeks and I encourage you to come online and look at the show notes to see the links that Kirsten and I have talked about today. Have a great week.

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Susan Kennedy as the two discuss the importance of keeping our children safe online.

Susan Kennedy

Susan Kennedy joined the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2018.  At NCMEC, Susan leads NCMEC’s prevention, outreach, training, and partnership programs. Previously Susan was the Director of Programs at the Center for Alexandria’s Children where she conducted child forensic interviews, coordinated the Child Advocacy Center program, and oversaw a community-based primary prevention program for children aged zero to five and their caregivers. She earned her Bachelors’ degree in Psychology from The College of William & Mary and a Master of Education degree in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University.  

Key Points

• The National Center for Missing and Exploited children is the nation’s largest and most influential child protection program, and creates vital resources for children and those who keep them safe. 
• In 2023, NCMEC’s Cyber Tip Line received 36.2 million reports of suspected child exploitation. 
• Reports of online enticements have almost doubled from 2022 to 2023, observing an increase of more than 300% from 2021 to 2023. 
• An important part of the policy agenda is to equip local, state, and national agencies with equivalent technology that has enabled offenders. 
• There has been a shift in sextortion where now, offenders target teenage boys and are financially motivated. 

Resource

• NCMEC
• 48 – International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children
• NCMEC CyberTipline
• NCMEC Impact Page
• NetSmartz

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:14

You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode #315: “Keeping Our Children Safe Online” with Susan Kennedy. My name is Sandie Morgan and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Our guest today is Susan Kennedy. She joins us from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where she leads their Prevention, Outreach, Training and Partnership programs. Previously, Susan was Director of Programs at the Center for Alexandria’s Children, where she conducted child forensic interviews, coordinated the child advocacy center program, and oversaw a community based, primary prevention program for children aged zero to five and their caregivers. She’s earned her degrees from the College of William and Mary, and from Harvard University, I am so glad to welcome you here, Susan, and there are so many things in your bio that make me want to go back and ask, but we can’t do that, we have a job to do today.

Susan Kennedy 1:39

Yes, thank you so much for having me, and I’m excited to talk about all the things we have to talk about today.

Sandra Morgan 1:44

Well, let’s talk first about NCMEC, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the strengthened value of being a public-private partnership with the FBI.

Susan Kennedy 1:59

Sure, so NCMEC, for those of you who may not be familiar, the National Center for Missing Exploited Children, is the nation’s largest and most influential child protection organization. We really see ourselves as leading the fight to protect children, creating vital resources for them, and for the people who keep them safe. So we’re going to talk about a range of issues today. I think most relevant probably for our conversation, is the work that we do around the cyber tip line. So receiving reports of child sexual exploitation online, as well as providing services for victims, for law enforcement, including the FBI, as you mentioned, around child sex trafficking cases as well. So we are a nonprofit, but we have very strong work and partnerships with law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, but also other federal agencies, and local law enforcement. Really, that’s because what we do is we are receiving information from the public, from law enforcement, from internet platforms, and working with law enforcement. Law enforcement are the ones who are going to investigate those cases, who are going to figure out what happened, who needs help, how they can hold people accountable, and make us all safer. It’s really law enforcement that has to do that work and that does do that work, so we really see ourselves as lending a helping hand to those agencies and providing some resources that might not be possible without that private support as well.

Sandra Morgan 3:16

I remember the first time I had an NCMEC guest on this show, I think it was Ernie Allen, one of the cofounders. Just beginning to understand the significance of the work of finding missing children, and then now bringing decades of that work to the issue of online exploitation, it feels like a really different approach and we need new and different tools. So let’s dive into our theme for this episode and talk about the way to keep our children safe online. I love your background in prevention and forensics with children. I’m pretty interested in the recent congressional hearings, because that tells me that there is a response to the growing public concerns and that we are going to begin to see better policy, stronger policy, I’m not exactly sure what how I want to term that. But can you give us an overview of NCMEC’s view of online safety from a policy perspective?

Susan Kennedy 4:53

Yeah, absolutely. So I would start by saying the National Center, as I mentioned, runs what we call the Cyber Tip Line, which is a program authorized by Congress, that receives reports of child sexual exploitation, again, from the public, from law enforcement, from victims themselves, from these internet safety platforms. Teally what we’ve seen, unfortunately, is a continued increase in reports of that cyber tip line. Last year, in 2023, we received 36.2 million reports of suspected child exploitation.

Sandra Morgan 5:21

Woah!

Susan Kennedy 5:22

Yes, and that has been increasing year over year for a while. It’s a big number, it’s a lot of reports. I think within that, what we have really been highlighting or noticing is a huge increase in the reports of what we call online enticement. So that number has increased, it almost about doubled from 2022 to 2023, and we saw a an increase of more than 300% from 2021 to 2023. Let’s dive into that.

Sandra Morgan 5:50

Okay, lets go back. Tell me, what is online enticement?

Susan Kennedy 5:55

Right, so the definition of online enticement. It’s a pretty broad category of things, anything where an adult is communicating with a child in order to commit a sexual offense, or it could even be an abduction, and a subcategory of that that’s getting a lot of attention, that people may be familiar with, is called sextortion. That’s when there is blackmail, it’s kind of a mix of the word sex and extortion together, and that blackmail is around generally nude or explicit images of the child. So a common scenario is a child provides, sends a nude image of themselves to someone else, and then that person turns around and says, “Unless you pay me money, or unless you make more of this imagery, I’m going to spread this image around to everyone you know.” There’s variations on that, but that is what sextortion is, and that’s inside this category of “online enticement,” and really what we think is driving a lot of the increase. We’ve seen a real spike in those kinds of cases, particularly in 2022, and continuing in 2023.

Sandra Morgan 6:51

So these numbers that you just spouted, that just blew me away, are those online, so we can put them in our show notes?

Susan Kennedy 7:01

Absolutely, we have a couple of blogs that have come out recently tied actually, to the congressional hearings you were referencing before that I’m happy to provide. They’re right on our website. Every year, we do update what we call our Impact Page, which will have all the latest numbers, and we’re in process right now of doing the full revamp of that to show our 2023 numbers. But the blogs have the most recent numbers that I just cited. I can definitely provide you those links for your show notes.

Sandra Morgan 7:26

Thank you. So let’s go back to that congressional hearing. What were your top three takeaways?

Susan Kennedy 7:36

I mean, I think as you said, one takeaway for me is, we did really see a lot of public attention on those. Lots of parents of kids who’ve been harmed, or have even died as a result of some of the harms they’ve experienced on social media, where they are in present, and I think people are starting to really pay attention that issue, which is really important to see, we hope that there’s progress there. I think for us, the overarching thing we want people to know is that our laws around what the tech platforms are obligated to do, how they report, what can be reported, what should be reported, and some of the measures we can have around accountability for those tech platforms, really need to be updated to reflect the explosion in use of social media. Just the changes and how technology has changed vastly, and our laws and policies have not, and that we really want to see some more accountability and some updating to how the Cyber Tip Line works, and how things are reported to us.

Sandra Morgan 8:31

So this takes me back to the very first time Ernie Allen spoke here at Vanguard University, and he talked to us about changing technology. The illustration he used is when our law enforcement was still on horseback, and the thieves got cars, and the law enforcement felt like it’s not fair. I think that part of our policy agenda is to equip our local, and state, and national agencies with equivalent technology. Is that part of the conversation you’re hearing in this space?

Susan Kennedy 9:23

I definitely think that’s true, that the the tools and the policies need to be updated to be able to hold platforms accountable, and again, to increase what they’re voluntarily, or what they are mandated to report to us and things like that. One simple example that would be within these bills, is part of what they are updating is the requirement for tech platforms to hold on to materials that are relevant for investigation. So when a piece of content is reported to the National Center, we pass it on to law enforcement. Right now, the tech platforms are only required to hold on to that information for 90 days. And you can appreciate the process and the legal process they have to, understandably, go through to get into someone’s social media account, and to understand which account we need and what documents we’re talking about. A lot of law enforcement have told us, by the time we’re able to work through that whole process that we need to do, the content is gone, or the information is gone. So one of the bills, and this is just one example, but one of the ways it kind of modernizes the requirements and the processes around that is to require tech companies to hold on to that information for a year. So it’s like an example of a tool that we need to give law enforcement to help kind of level the playing field, as you’re saying with with what the technology has enabled offenders to be able to do.

Sandra Morgan 10:37

Okay, that’s very helpful. Let’s dive in to what you called sextortion. We did an interview with Aaron Burke after the documentary came out, and it was clear that some of our old conceptions around vulnerabilities, and it’s kids who, no one’s home, or they’re already marginalized, those old paradigms are not exactly accurate, because predators have morphed, and they have access in ways that we’re just not ready for. What should we be looking for now.

Susan Kennedy 11:26

I think it’s helpful to know that in 2022, what we saw at the National Center, and in turn, our federal partners, the FBI, Homeland Security, and others really saw a big shift in sextortion. What we saw is a big increase in offenders targeting teenage boys, and targeting them for money. So what we had previously seen, was that the majority of sextortion cases, the victims were female, and the the motivation for that victimization was that the offenders wanted more content. The example I gave before, the child would send one image and the offender would turn around and say, “I want more images like this, I want fully nude images, I want an image every day when you get home from school.” That was the the motivation behind that offense, was it was sexually motivated to get more content of the child. What we saw kind of come out of nowhere and then spike tremendously was sextortion of boys for money. So the victim will oftentimes send an initial image and then the offender turns around and says, “You need to give me $100, $500 in gift cards, or just a payment app, or whatever it is, and if you don’t, I’m going to send this image to everyone you know.” What we also saw was an increase in the sophistication of those kinds of offenses. I would actually characterize a lot of these as social engineering fraud and scams. Just as, I think many of us, in the working world have gotten more sophisticated phishing emails, and things like that, where someone wants to call us right away and give us a gift card, and those overtures, those attacks have become more sophisticated in that they’re including names of people we do work with, and they’re understanding who supervises who, and doing that kind of background research to make these threats seem more realistic. In the same vein, what they’re doing is they are infiltrating these kids’ social networks. So they’ll say “I know this person you’re on the soccer team with,” and then they can show you they’re friends with everyone on your soccer team, everyone who goes to your high school, they know exactly who your girlfriend is, they know who your parents are, and they’re ready to send that image. So it doesn’t seem like an empty threat, it seems like it is ready to happen. They’ll show, “I’m right here in the group chat, ready to hit send with your image, unless you send me this money right now.” And we’ve seen these threats are egregious, they are quick moving, that’s the other big change that people need to really be aware of. We used to see in sextortion cases there was a gradual, as you see in other types of sexual offenses, a gradual building of trust. You might call it grooming, you might call it manipulation over time, these offenses now are quick. The initial contact can be made at six or seven o’clock at night, it can escalate quickly. The FBI has documented more than a dozen kids who have died by suicide associated with these offenses, and sometimes that happens overnight. Initial contact is six, seven o’clock at night, the child has died by suicide by the morning. They’re very fast moving, they’re very egregious, and they target again, primarily boys, and they’re financially motivated. So they’re very different than what we used to see and so for parents, and teachers, and professionals to be aware of that and how that has shifted. I’ll pause there because I know that’s a lot.

Sandra Morgan 14:28

Wow, yeah. We’re going to have to have a glossary for this episode, social engineering. So okay, things have morphed, but how can I better prepare the children and youth in my community to be their own first line of defense? Things are going to change again, and so I can’t just tell them, “Be aware that somebody’s going to do this social engineering tactic,” because they move away and do something different. So what do you suggest?

Susan Kennedy 15:07

I think the first thing is to make sure that the young people in your life know that you are a resource, and you are a source of support, even if they feel like they made a mistake. One of my colleagues said, something I think is very powerful, she said, “These offenders are really weaponizing the shame that these kids feel for having taken this imagery or sent this imagery.” I think many of us as well intending adults, even doing Internet safety prevention, talking with kids about how to be safe online, we have emphasized to them, “don’t ever take these kinds of pictures, don’t trust people you meet online.” All of those messages are well intentioned, but what we have found is that there’s a real backfire effect for kids who have already engaged in that behavior, or kids who engage in that behavior, and then are under threat, and what they remember all of us telling them is, “don’t do this,” and they’ve done it. Now they don’t feel like they can come to us for help. They’re embarrassed, they’re ashamed, they know that they did exactly what we told them not to do, and that has really increased the vulnerability of these kids for those impacts where they continue to kind of deal with these offenders on their own. Paying them doesn’t help, ignoring them doesn’t help, I mean, it really needs an adult and a law enforcement response, to be able to support these kids. And it’s out there, and and not enough kids know. They don’t know that this is a thing, they think, understandably, that they’re the only ones who’ve experienced that. So we need to get the message out to kids that if they ever find themselves in this situation, and I think we should be explicit and clear, especially with our teenage boys, that this is a scam going around. Just the way we might warn our older, elderly parents about phone scams or different types of things like that, I think we should be explicit with them that this is a possibility. I also think we’ve got to start talking with kids about the harm of recirculating non-consensual imagery.

Sandra Morgan 15:13

Yeah, let’s break that down. Non-consensual imagery. Tell us what that is.

Susan Kennedy 17:05

So what I mean is a picture, an explicit, a nude picture. Kids will call them nudes, kids are fine if we still say sexting, that’s not what they say, but that’s okay. So any image of someone where they don’t have their clothes on, and we’re going to focus on minors here. They send a picture, say they send it to a classmate, that classmate sends it to someone else, that classmate sends it to someone else, it circulates online. That is where a lot of the harm of this imagery happens, is because of that circulation, and the harassment and the bullying that happens when an image is circulating out there. That, I would argue also gives ammunition to these people who are sextorting children. Because if the child could say to this offender, “Go ahead, send it to everyone on my soccer team, literally no one will care. Everyone will delete it, no one will say anything to me.” But that’s not the reality, and that’s not what they think will happen. They know that they’re going to be embarrassed, they know that people are going to possibly say mean things about them, repost it, put it publicly, put their name with it online. All of these things that they’re worried will happen, may happen, and that is part of what gives ammunition to these offenders. So that’s where we need to take their power away and tell kids that it’s up to them, the climate, and what happens when this imagery circulates at their school is up to them. It’s not up to me, it’s up to you guys, and how you treat each other when this image is circulating. So we really need to broaden the conversation beyond just, “Don’t send this imagery, don’t talk to strangers.” We need to broaden it to think about how we view each other and how we behave as bystanders and supporters of each other.

Sandra Morgan 18:34

I think the bystander element of this is so important because you can build that sense of a youth community already prepared to protect their group, and if you see this happening to somebody in your group, you know what to do. Because when it’s happening to you, you may not really feel like you have the power but when it’s happening to your friend, you have a sense of coming alongside, and I think that bystander element of this is an important protective tool and quality to help flourish in our kids’ groups, our teens, our youth groups, so that they become their own first line of defense. I have so many more questions and we’ve only got like 10 minutes left, but we probably will have to have another conversation. When we’re looking at prevention strategies from a community based approach for all of our children. Every time I talk to parents with kids that are on computers for homework or just because they get this amount of screen time every day, I feel pretty confident that these parents are doing a good job of what you’ve just described. But then, I end up in some other areas where I’m with kids, and there is no consistent caregiver, the child may already be system involved because of a lack of appropriate family support and even neglect. So how can a community based approach help us keep our kids safe?

Susan Kennedy 20:40

I think that’s such an important point, and one of, I think, the most challenging aspects of Internet safety is just what you said. The parents who show up to the Internet safety presentation, who are going to the National Center, and looking at NetSmartz, those parents have a lot of advantages and are engaged, and those kids have that going for them. Those are, in some ways, the easiest parents and kids to reach with this messaging, and I think what you’re highlighting is such a huge challenge. The first thing I would say is, that’s one reason why this policy stuff is really important. Making the platform safer, holding these platforms accountable for the ways that they can increase child safety that benefits all kids, and so there’s lots of analogies about rivers and oceans, and making the river smoother, versus teaching kids how to swim and all that. So if we can make the river smoother, if we can make the internet safer, that’s obviously going to be an effective way, or more effective way to help all kids, just make those waters easier to navigate. I think beyond that, one of the things the National Center tries to do is we try to not only talk to parents directly, but we also want to partner with schools. We also partner, you said in your intro, I used to be a forensic interviewer, I used to work at a Children’s Advocacy Center. CAC’s employ mental health therapists and victim advocates who are working with kids who have experienced child sexual abuse, working with them to understand some ways you can use part of our Internet safety program called NetSmartz to have one on one conversations with those kids about Internet safety moving forward. Here’s how you can talk to them about the ways in which you can be a support. We’re always trying to get our resources into the therapist’s office, the advocates’ offices, get them to Child Protective Services, talk to folks who work in residential treatment, and group homes. We work with after school programs, just trying to really reinforce and get that message to all adults who have contact with kids, not only focusing on parents, but trying to get to all those systems where kids might be able to reach out for help, might voice a concern, might go for guidance. I think that’s another really important approach, is we can’t just focus on talking to kids and families directly, we’ve got to get to all these settings and all these professionals who have opportunities, not only to intervene, but to speak about prevention with the children that they interact with.

Sandra Morgan 20:41

You’ve mentioned NetSmartz, I’ve mentioned it, we will put a link to NetSmartz, age appropriate prevention curriculum online, one of the best out there and it’s free. Okay, definitions are so important, and we need to use the real words with kids. I see a lot about CSAM and SGCSAM, what are people talking about when they’re using those acronyms?

Susan Kennedy 22:04

Okay, so CSAM (CSAM), stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material. This is the terminology that we prefer to use for what we used to call child pornography. In fact, another one of the provisions in that legislation, that group of bills before Congress right now, changes that terminology officially in federal legislation. Right now, the Criminal Code, and most places where it’s referred to in the federal government policy and laws, it’s called child pornography. But we believe that that term is not accurate for this imagery, because it is not legal to have sex with a child. This is the sexual assault and abuse of a child and there’s nothing consensual about their participation in this imagery. It’s important for people to understand when we say child pornography, when we say Child Sexual Abuse Material, the vast majority of it is the hands on, sexual abuse of the child that is filmed and put on the internet. That’s what we’re primarily talking about, and that’s really important because I think sometimes people think of child pornography, “Oh, a lot of it is probably innocuous bathing suit pictures, or kids coming out of the bathtub, or self generated content maybe, “just kids”, teenage girls in their bras,” and certainly there’s a wide range of imagery, and all of that, everything I’ve described could be exploitative and could fall under this legal definition. It’s just important for listeners to know that the vast majority of what we’re talking about is someone sexually abusing a child, and filming or taking pictures of that abuse. It’s hands on sexual abuse that is then filmed and put on the internet. So we feel like CSAM or Child Sexual Abuse Material, is a much more clear and accurate term for those images and videos. Now, when you see SGCSAM, that SG stands for Self Generated. There are other terms for that, some people might call it youth-produced explicit content. What that is referring to is when the child who is depicted in the imagery is the one who took the picture or created the video. Again, as I said, it could be a child taking an image of themselves partially clothed, unclothed, and sending that. Sometimes that could be in the context of a romantic relationship, but as we’ve already talked about, sometimes kids are under threat, forced intimidation and fear, and they’re taking that imagery and sending it to someone who is forcing them to do that. And it’s important for providers, as well as parents, to understand that you’re not going to know the full context of a picture when you first discover it. So you could think this image was created, and this child is willingly doing it, and being irresponsible, and sending it to someone. It could also be true that they are being threatened to take that image, and the person threatening them to take that image is asking them to smile or pose. We see that often. You see it also in child sex trafficking cases, where a child is instructed to pose in a certain way or do certain things on camera, it is impossible to tell from the image the full context under which it was created. That’s important for people to know, but that’s the difference. Child Sexual Abuse Materials is the broad category of what we used to call child pornography, and when you see the SG in front of it, it means that in some way it was generated by the child in the image.

Sandra Morgan 24:19

So when those images are out there, what can someone do?

Susan Kennedy 26:55

Great question. So the most important thing we want people to know, and we want to ask people to do, is anytime you see suspected child exploitation online, we want you to report it to the CyberTipline. I can also send you a link, but it’s easy to find: cybertipline.org, it’ll come right up. We have a brand new public reporting form where we’ve actually invested a lot to make that an easier report to make, more user friendly, more clear about how to report. That will trigger what we call a cyber tip, which will let our analysts look at it. Also, it’s important for people to know that by definition, that process involves law enforcement, because our job is to get that information back out to law enforcement so that they can investigate it. What it also allows us to do is once the national center looks at it and says, “This is CSAM, this is an explicit image of a child,” we get law enforcement to verify that is in fact a child. So even if the child in the image may look like they are 19, or 18, they are really 16, or 15, or 14. Those two pieces together, the National Center is identifying this as child sexual abuse material, and law enforcement is verifying that this is in fact a child, makes that image legally, child pornography or Child Sexual Abuse Material, and platforms must remove it when they are notified that it’s on their platforms. That’s actually the only level of mandatory reporting that exists across all platforms, is that once it is known Child Sexual Abuse material, you have to remove it, and the National Center actually has staff whose job is to notify these platforms, and monitor over time, and make sure that that content comes down. The identifying information from that picture is added to what we call a hash list. That list is shared with many platforms. Anytime a picture on that hash list appears on their platform, they have to take it down. So that is your most powerful tool to get content removed and prevent re circularization. That’s making a report to the CyberTipline. We know that that law enforcement involvement can be a barrier for people and we very much understand that. I mean, I can say a lot of the times law enforcement, the only thing that’s going to happen is they’re going to put that on the removal list. But there could be circumstances around your case, and the person and people involved in it, and offenders who may be involved in other cases, and it may result in law enforcement involvement in that report that you made. We can’t say for sure, law enforcement needs to hold people accountable and investigate things that we bring to their attention. We have other resources. You mentioned, Take It Down. Take It Down is a really specific resource for a child who has a self generated image of themselves, they want to report it, but they want to stay anonymous. So what they can do, they have an image on their phone because they sent it to someone and now that relationship has gone south. It’s important to note that sextortion still happens in that context, peer to peer, where you’re in a relationship one minute, the relationship goes south, and now that person doesn’t want you to break up with them or is controlling you in some way. This can be a form of domestic violence, where they’re going to control you because they have this image of you, and if you want to make a report to Take It Down, what we do is just pull that hash value that I mentioned, just that hash value, we don’t see the image, we don’t know who you are, but that we can share that hash value with platforms who are participating voluntarily, and they will look for that image should it appear on their platform. That’s a very powerful tool but it’s not as potent of a content removal tool. But it is important, and for people who aren’t ready to make that CyberTip Report, we definitely want them to report to Take It Down so that we can help look for that image. There’s also tools on our platform where you can self report to the platforms, and we go through every few months and make sure that those instructions are up to date, in terms of reporting to popular platforms out there about your self generated content as well. So there are different tools to really empower victims to pick which one works for them the best, but the important takeaway for professionals, for parents, for kids, is that we used to say, “Once it’s out there, it’s always out there,” that’s not true. There’s a lot we can do with technology to get your image down, and so it’s really important that you reach out and get support and help in whatever way you’re comfortable, so that we can get that imagery down and stop it from circulating.

Sandra Morgan 28:50

I am so encouraged by that. Our time is up, but I’m going give you one more statement. What gives you hope, Susan?

Susan Kennedy 31:06

I think working at the National Center and seeing the incredible work and resiliency of the people who look at this imagery and try to help kids, and even adults who have imagery circulating, and coming up with these new innovative tools, that makes me feel really optimistic, as well as just talking to young people. I think they are taking control of this new technology and really speaking up and advocating, and most of them, when you read the research, are making really good decisions online. I think we have a great opportunity to come alongside them and empower them to be safe, and take care of each other out there.

Sandra Morgan 31:39

Talking to you gives me hope. Thank you, Susan. Thank you for tuning in and listening today. I’m going to see you all again in two weeks. In the meantime, go to the show notes to find the links that Susan and I have talked about and if you haven’t been to the ending human trafficking website, go on over to endinghumantrafficking.org where you can find a library of past episodes and resources and get connected with our community. And Susan, will you tell us the website for NCMEC?

Susan Kennedy 32:18

Sure. It’s missingkids.org and the NetSmartz is missingkids.org/netsmartz.

Sandra Morgan 32:26

And spell NetSmartz.

Susan Kennedy 32:28

N-E-T-S-M-A-R-T-Z. NetSmartz with a Z.

Sandra Morgan 32:33

Okay, yes, gotta spell it with a Z. It has been a delight. Thank you so much, Susan.

Susan Kennedy 32:40

Thank you very much.

Dr. Sandra Morgan is joined by her friend and colleague, Kimberly Casey. The two discuss the National Human Trafficking Prevention Framework and the ways in which human trafficking is not simply a crime, but a human rights and public health issue.

Kimberly Casey

Kimberly is Communications and Prevention Specialist at the Office on Trafficking in Persons, Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families. Kimberly is a graduate of George Mason University with a Master of Public Policy, culture, society and development. She is a self proclaimed learner and a strong proponent of connecting proven public health strategies with the vision of what we believe is possible to advance efforts to prevent human trafficking and other forms of violence.

Key Points

• Human trafficking is not just a crime, but a human rights and public health issue, meaning it is also preventable.
• To effectively prevent human trafficking, real systemic change is needed as well as a system response, like this prevention framework.
• The National Human Trafficking Prevention Framework takes into account factors that make individuals or communities more vulnerable to violence, and assess the ways that buffers can be created to prevent violence from being experienced by an individual or community.
• Collective action is important for the prevention framework, making shared definitions essential, ensuring all those involved in the framework are working to move in the same direction and have common goals.

Resources

• Office on Trafficking in Persons, Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families
• George Mason University
• National Human Trafficking Prevention Framework
• CDC Terms for Strategy and Approach

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:00

It’s time to register for the annual Ensure Justice Conference at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice. The conference is always the first Friday and Saturday of March. That way you can make it a recurring event in your calendar. 2024, it’s March 1st and 2nd, we’re just a couple of months away. Our theme is “Keeping Our Children Safe Online.” We will explore the issues, what is happening online? What are the risks for our children at this stage of their development? What can we do as parents, caregivers, teachers, community members? Our speakers include many of our podcasts expert guests, and we are partnering with our Orange County Department of Education. Check out our website for more info and don’t miss the early bird rates. Go on over to gcwj.org/ensure justice, right now. There is a virtual option for our global listeners, as well as special rates for college students. Join us to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference at Ensure Justice, March 1st and 2nd, 2024.

Kimberly Casey 2:05
Thank you, Sandie. I’m very excited to be here. We’ve talked about this for a while now, so looking forward to the conversation.

Sandra Morgan 2:12
Well, you and I have been having this prevention conversation for a really long time, and sometimes it feels like we’re trying to find a magic formula, or even something just super simple, like teaching toddlers to brush their teeth, that becomes a lifelong habit that prevents dental decay. The more I look at prevention, the more I realize it cannot be a one off presentation. Awareness is maybe the beginning, but it certainly does not encompass prevention. When I learned from you that the National Human Trafficking Prevention Framework was being developed and will be released, I wanted to have a conversation. So can you tell us just a little bit about your expectations for the framework?

Kimberly Casey 3:16
Absolutely. So we know that in addition to being a crime, in addition to being a human rights issue, human trafficking is really a public health issue. And like any public health issue, it’s preventable, right? But we need to have a whole system response put in place to be able to effectively prevent human trafficking because like you said, Sandie, human trafficking isn’t something that can be prevented with a one off presentation. It is something that will require real systemic change, and that is something that we have seen through the prevention of other types of forms of violence, other types of health issues. Through this prevention framework, what we’re really hoping to be able to do is bridge the connections between what we’ve learned to be effective and other forms of violence prevention or health promotion activities, to the human trafficking issue, so that we can advance from that knowledge base that already exists. So we’re fortunate that we don’t have to start from the very beginning. We can build off of what it is that other experts in communities have learned and advance our efforts from there. Through that, what we’re really hoping with this framework is that everyone will see their place in this particular activity. Sometimes human trafficking revention can feel very overwhelming. Sometimes people may not understand what role they have to play if they’re working on housing or health care or financial security. We want to make sure that we’re showing people really the depth of opportunity to become engaged in this work, and to be able to move forward together through collective action.

Sandra Morgan 5:24
I love the term collective action and when we close this session out, we’re going to come back to that. But let’s start with imagining ourselves on a journey where we’re all going to the same destination, prevention of human trafficking. Whether we’re talking about child sex trafficking, adult commercial sexual exploitation, or labor trafficking, our destination is prevention and to get there, we have some guiding principles in the framework. So before you even get in your vehicle to leave, these are the things you need to know. Can you walk us through how you designed the principles for this framework?

Kimberly Casey 6:13
Absolutely. So as we were building the framework, in general, we went to the existing evidence base. We went to the experts who have been working on prevention activities related to domestic violence or child abuse, talking about substance use prevention, various forms of violence and various different health activities, and ask them, “What were some of those core components that you really feel are translatable to any type of prevention work that we may want to achieve as a collective?” Then we also spent a lot of time talking to people with lived experience in human trafficking. So people who have experienced labor trafficking, people who have experienced sex trafficking, and we asked them, “What do you feel like need to be these foundational components before we really start diving into strategies and approaches what carries over everything that you might want to be doing?”. They came back with several really key components. One is equity and inclusivity. So recognizing that the people who experience human trafficking come from various races, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, sexes, gender identities, orientations, disabilities, and ages, right, we were looking at a full spectrum of humanity, as we’re looking to address human trafficking. It’s so important that we don’t assume a one size fits all approach, that if we set a table, everyone will be able to come to that table, unless we’re really intentionally thinking about ‘what are the components that will bring people into those discussions? What are barriers to people coming into those conversations?’ Right? So we might think everyone has the ability to show up at that meeting that we may be hosting, but without really thinking about ‘how do they get there? What’s the transportation like?’ to kind of use a general example. We’re really trying to think through what do we need to put in place to make sure everyone has access to the work that we’re doing and that everything is culturally, linguistically appropriate for the communities that we’re working to serve, and really personalizes the approach based on the communities that we’re trying to reach. We know certain communities are at much higher risk for trafficking, looking at indigenous communities, people of color, to LGBTQIA communities, people with varying disabilities, youth who are system involved, foreign nationals, when we’re talking about reaching that breadth of a group, we really do need to be as intentional as possible in our efforts to do that work.

Sandra Morgan 9:19
And one of the things that is always a bit challenging in this and we’re looking at this from a US based perspective, but we have listeners and 148 countries, and sometimes there is a tendency for us to assume that if we have survivor voices here, then this is going to be a great program. But I probably need to find out from survivors in another place, what their experience is because it may not all be transferable. What happens in California may not happen in Arkansas, or Mexico, or Argentina. So in a public health model, we have to be really aware of who our community is composed of. That probably was not grammatically correct but you get what I mean.

Kimberly Casey 10:20
Absolutely, really understanding who it is you’re trying to reach, what are the daily experiences that they have? If you’re doing awareness activity, what is their level of literacy, right? Sometimes we think about just needing to translate materials into a person’s first language. But one of the things that we also know is just because it’s that person’s first language doesn’t mean they actually have the ability to read and write. Or, there are some languages that actually do not rely often on the written word and so we need to think about what is the verbal kind of representation of that look like? Really just making sure you understand your community, you understand those barriers, and truly the best way to do that is to make sure you’re in active conversation with people with lived experience, people who have come from those communities, who can tell you what the needs of those communities are, and the best way to reach them. I think one of the things that we often see too, is people will speak to one person with lived experience as they’re engaging on a project, but not thinking about how that one person can’t represent the voice of all survivors, and all different types of experiences. And so really finding opportunities to engage a diverse group of people with lived experience in that conversation as well and to make sure that you’re starting that discussion very early in the process, not bringing people in to kind of rubber stamp the work that you’ve already done. But oftentimes, when we’re doing this work, we’re talking to them before we actually put pen to paper to a concept, right, making sure that they’re engaged from the very beginning, so that we can make sure that what we ultimately create will be effective for those communities we’re trying to reach.

Sandra Morgan 12:14
Absolutely. Okay, so you ended up with the framework with eight strategies? First of all, how did you get it down to eight strategies?

Kimberly Casey 12:29
That was not easy. We really did try to go, like I said, back to the literature, back to what has really been proven to be effective, in various other forms of violence prevention or health promotion activities. We relied a lot on our colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, particularly the Division of Violence Prevention, who has done a lot of research and have published a lot of work around how we can effectively impact various forms of violence. They’ve also done some work around, they call it connecting the dots. Recognizing that different forms of violence are often interconnected and they also often have very similar risk and protective factors. There’s things that make people more vulnerable to violence, and there’s things that help to create buffers, or to help prevent violence from being experienced by an individual or community. We tried to take all of those lessons learned, and bring it into this particular framework, through our strategies and our approaches. There is so much else that we could have included, but we did try to make sure that we were staying within that really strong evidence base. Then we also went to the experts with lived experience to other groups that have been studying trafficking for quite some time to pull in those connections to anti trafficking work specifically to make sure we were filling in any gaps of things that might be unique to the anti trafficking space. It was a multi year process, honestly, of going through the literature refining, talking to experts, having peer reviews by people with lived experience to really refine that down. What I think we have landed with through the strategies and approaches that we do have, is there’s so much work that can happen within each of those because they are somewhat broader categories. I really do think, as I mentioned earlier, we are trying to create this framework in which everyone will see their place, I think through these strategies and approaches. Everyone who we know need to be involved in this ecosystem of prevention, really do have a space or a place within these strategies and approaches.

Sandra Morgan 15:08
One of the things that really stood out to me as I was reading this document, which we’ll put a link in the show notes, so people can download it. It’s big, it’s like around 70 some pages, but it’s really laid out well so that you can lay out your strategy, your organization goals, and compare, contrast, find out where you fit, it is connecting the dots. But it starts off with the CDC terms for strategy, and for approach and defined strateg as: “lays out the direction or actions to achieve the goal of preventing violence.” And the approach is: “to provide specific ways to advance the strategy through programs, policies, and practices.” We have another three P’s folks, Programs, Policies, and Practices. I think having practices here really activates this vision for these strategies. So let’s do like, less than a minute for each strategy Kimberly. I want to just engage people, and if you’re listening to this, and this is something that you hear, we need people in a collaborative formula, not to do, everybody does everything, but each one does what they’re good at and then together, we make progress. So what is the first strategy?

Kimberly Casey 16:51
So our first strategy is strengthening skills to promote self efficacy and prevent human trafficking. Here, what we’re really talking about is reaching the individual who may be at risk to human trafficking, and making sure that they have the information and tools to be able to identify and respond if they become vulnerable to trafficking, or if someone is trying to recruit or perhaps take advantage of them.

Sandra Morgan 17:22
That self efficacy, the fact that I can actually do something for myself, really is empowering. When I talk, especially to youth, they don’t want me to help. How many times, if you’re a parent, have you tried to help your youth and they’re like, “No, I want to do it myself.” I think that starts like at about two years old. So this strategy really leans in to this natural desire to be able to do things on our own. Let’s take a look at number two.

Kimberly Casey 17:45
So two is identifying and supporting people at risk or who have experienced trafficking, to increase safety and reduce harm. So here, again, really looking at those individual risk factors of someone who may be at high risk. Maybe they’re experiencing homelessness, or they are migrating and don’t have access to the resources that they need, or they’ve experienced human trafficking. We want to make sure that we’re intervening so that they don’t experience trafficking again in the future. Really, within this framework, we’re looking at preventing trafficking from happening ever, intervening as soon as we can, and then preventing re-trafficking later in life as well.

Sandra Morgan 18:47
Well, the thing I notice about the strategies as you take us into number three, is that they build on each other. They’re connected.

Kimberly Casey 18:57
Absolutely, yes. So we really kind of started with this individual aspect, looking at how we can target building resiliency within the individual, and then move through what we refer to as the social ecological model, which then addresses relationship, community, and society. With our third strategy, we’re looking at strengthening economic supports. We know that often people who experience trafficking are vulnerable because they don’t have access to the resources that we all need for living a safe and healthy life. They may be in a position where they have to take increased risks that some of us who have more financial stability wouldn’t even have to consider. We really want to make sure that we’re safeguarding that economic peace so that they don’t end up in situations where they have to engage in riskier decision making.

Sandra Morgan 19:58
I think when we look at that in the context of family environments, I know family because strategy number four is about promoting family environments that support healthy development. And if both of your parents are working two jobs and you come home to an empty apartment, that’s going to be connected to the economic aspects as well.

Kimberly Casey 20:28
Absolutely. What we want to be able to do is to create the supports that families need to be able to thrive, right. When we’re looking at economic supports and this promoting family environments, as you said, they’re very connected. We know that a lot of families, in order to meet their basic needs, you do have multiple families or multiple parents who may need to be working. We want to make sure that we’re thinking through, how do we create safe spaces within that situation to be able to come in and support the family so that everyone can thrive?

Sandra Morgan 21:15
And when we do that, and we go to strategy five, how does that connect to our communities?

Kimberly Casey 21:24
Absolutely. So with strategy five, we’re looking at promoting social connectedness. Here’s where we really start moving through the social ecological model, to move just from the individual, just from the family, and really look at communities. So oftentimes, when we think about risk to trafficking or we think about responsibility for preventing trafficking, oftentimes, we unfortunately put that responsibility on the individual or on the family, who is really doing the best that they can with the circumstances that they have. We want to start moving from this idea of individual protection to how can we build safer communities that protect the individuals within it. Here, we’re really looking at community and school engagement activities. Perhaps we know that a lot of the students in our communities do have families that require both parents to be working outside of the home. In a community and school engagement activity, we could create safe spaces for those youth to go. We can create mentoring programs or peer to peer support programs, and then resources that help people engage and connect to their community so that they’re not experiencing isolation, which could be used by someone who is looking to traffic an individual as a way to build connection that may be taken advantage of in the future. We want to build in those healthy, productive social programs.

Sandra Morgan 23:06
And real connections. The last podcast we did was about helping youth online understand who a real friend is. People reaching out and so much of the exploitation, recruiting, has been done online. That social connectedness in person has become a critical factor in especially keeping our youth safe, for sure. Your strategy six, because we could spend a long time on five, but we’re doing an overview today. Strategy six, seems really huge. I think of the whole sky and what part of it can I contribute to? This sixth strategy is create protective environments. Help me with that.

Kimberly Casey 24:07
Absolutely. So it is very broad, right? Because when we think of all of the different places, that people are connecting, and living, and engaging, we really do want to make sure that all of those environments are safe. For individuals who are in the workplace, how do we make sure that there are well established, consistently applied, policies and practices that if something unsafe happens within the work environment, there is an opportunity to seek support and for help in that situation. How do we create structures so that that maybe is even prevented from happening right? We look a lot at our supply chains. We know that oftentimes within supply chains, workers are taken advantage of so that people can reduce the cost of production and sell goods at a lower rate, however, we need to make sure that all of those workers are protected. We also really want to be looking at our school environments. How do we create safety in the school environment so that if someone feels unsafe, they have the opportunity to reach out for help? This can be as simple as enforcing programs and policies related to bullying. When you send kids out on the playground, and you have monitors who are looking to make sure that those environments are safe, that is something that should be translated into the monitoring and practices of school environments as kids progress and age. And so really thinking through what is it that we can put in place to enhance safety from a physical, emotional, and mental well being component. We often think about physical safety, but we don’t necessarily think of that mental and emotional safety, which is extremely critical for youth who may be at risk or experiencing trafficking.

Sandra Morgan 26:11
Absolutely. So strategy seven is my sweet spot, foster multidisciplinary networks and coalitions. I think that is a way for us to move forward where we are all going in the same direction. But where I wasn’t really clear, is in strategy eight, promote social norms that protect against violence. What kind of social norms are we addressing in this strategic approach?

Kimberly Casey 26:50
Absolutely. So there are so many, again, that can kind of fall under this umbrella. But one of the things for example, within labor trafficking, we all like to purchase goods that are budget friendly, right?

Sandra Morgan 27:07
Yeah, I just use the word cheap.

Kimberly Casey 27:09
Cheap. Yes. Right. So we all want that, right? We’re all operating on a budget, we have limited resources. But one of the things that’s also really important for us to consider is, if a good is purchased extremely cheap, what were the production costs for that? So thinking through the supply chain, right? So if I’m paying $3 for a shirt, how much did it cost to produce that? And if I’m purchasing something so cheap, what’s the likelihood that someone may have been exploited through the production process? Really, one of the social norms is, while yes, we need to operate on budgets and be responsible with the funds that we have, how do we also interrogate and investigate to make sure that people who are producing the goods that we consume, didn’t experience exploitations so that they could receive something at a cheaper rate. So really, it’s holding businesses accountable for saying, “You need to be responsible for looking to make sure that your supply chains are free of forced or coerced labor, so that I can then feel comfortable and ethical in my purchasing of particular goods.” We know that there are certain industries that may be at higher risk for supply chain abuse and so it’s really being a responsible consumer, both from the financial perspective but also the ethical perspective to make sure that we’re not increasing demand for resources at a rate that our system can’t support.

Sandra Morgan 28:55
I love that. Our Live2Free student team here at Vanguard has been promoting changing social norms around fast fashion that feeds this area. I think it makes us begin to think about our own complicity in driving demand. We sometimes think, “Oh, I’m only one,” but that’s part of the social norms that we have to change. Oh my goodness, our time is almost up. But I don’t want to finish without looking at Appendix A, Appendix A in this framework. Sometimes people read something they never open the appendix. Appendix A is a treasure trove for your organization. It has activities and outcomes. If you’re writing up a program and you haven’t looked at how to do these things, you’re going to find some things that will fit for you. But the best part of this appendix is the idea of a collective forum. There are a few guidelines that help us all go in the same direction. When we’re talking about building a movement, ending human trafficking, we have to all go in the same direction so we leverage the momentum that we build. Can you give us just like 90 seconds of what the guidelines for a collective forum might be based on?

Kimberly Casey 30:39
Absolutely. So as we’re looking at collective action, like you said, we’re all working to move in the same direction. And so some of that is shared definitions, right? We need to make sure that we’re all talking about the same thing. We all want to have common goals, we also want to make sure that we are using similar measures. So if I’m collecting different data points than my partner is collecting, it will be difficult for us to show that collective impact. The other piece that I think is really important is recognizing, as we said, not everyone is going to engage in the same activity. So how do you make sure that there is synergy with the activities that you are implementing? So is what you’re doing mutually reinforcing? And are you regularly in communication with your partners? It is difficult to have a shared or common agenda if you are not constantly talking about what you’re learning and how you’re adapting. And so really making sure that those conversations are ongoing, and that everyone who needs to be in those conversations are involved.

Sandra Morgan 31:59
We are all going in the same direction, and giving us guidelines and kind of like map directions. It’s like listening to Siri or Alexa tell me where to turn next. That’s what this framework is really going to give us as we move forward. And I just have to say, Kimberly, that I am very grateful that you are serving in the Office on Trafficking in Persons at Health and Human Services and I’m grateful for your leadership. I want to invite you to come back and talk about some of these issues more in depth. I think the one I really want to look at next, so I’m like inviting you to our next podcast interview already, online so you have to say yes, right?

Kimberly Casey 32:58
Fantastic.

Sandra Morgan 32:58
Yeah, I want to talk about two generation, whole family approaches. And there’s just so many pieces of the framework, that we’ll take a deep dive, so I encourage everyone to go online, click on the link to the framework, and just spend some time figuring out where you fit in this structure, because it is going to help us grow the momentum of our movement to end human trafficking here and elsewhere. So Kimberly, thank you so much for joining us today.

Kimberly Casey 33:38
Thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed it. You know, I will talk about prevention at any point someone gives me the opportunity. So thank you for having me.

Sandra Morgan 33:46
I wish we were closer, we’re on opposite coasts, but we’ve got zoom. So that’ll be a great conversation. We’ll see you again another time.

Kimberly Casey 33:56
Thank you, Sandie.

Sandra Morgan 34:00

Thank you so much for tuning in today, I will see you all again in two weeks. In the meantime, go to the show notes to find the links we’ve talked about here today, and if you haven’t been to the website, go over to endinghumantrafficking.org, where you can find a library of past episodes, of resources, and get more connected with our community.

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Lisa Murdock as the two discuss the critical response of medical institutions to human trafficking.

Lisa Murdock

Lisa Murdock, MSN, RN, CNE Pediatric Acute Care Nurse  & Co-Chair Healthcare subcommittee of the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force. Over the past 23 years, Lisa has worked in pediatric acute care hospitals nationwide and in Puerto Rico. Lisa began her journey in anti-trafficking efforts in 2014 after meeting a survivor in the community. That meeting inspired her to expand her work to include exploitation and human trafficking in healthcare education and to implement comprehensive, multidisciplinary, evidence-based protocols for inpatient pediatric hospitals. Lisa believes that healthcare providers, specifically nurses, are uniquely positioned at the frontlines of patient care to identify, advocate, and improve healthcare outcomes for at-risk individuals or those already being trafficked. She is the co-founder of ReVEST Medical Experts which provides healthcare providers and institutions with the necessary tools to improve their knowledge, recognition, response and prevention of violence, exploitation, and risky behaviors amongst their patients and families. 

Key Points

• It is important to inform health care workers with an updated and accurate education regarding human trafficking to move away from the sensationalized imaging and education they might be receiving from the media. 
• Using a screening tool that is comprehensive, including not just commercial sex trafficking, but also labor trafficking and aids in sensitively asking high risk questions, is important in both aftercare and prevention. 
• It is essential for an organization to have a policy surrounding exploitation and human trafficking, as well as a response protocol in place, to ensure that people know who to call and how to respond.
• Upon discharge, it is critical a healthcare provider be aware of resources and referrals to provide the survivor with the tools they need to stay safe. 

Resources

• Ensure Justice
• ReVEST
• Human Trafficking Task Force Health Care Subcommittee
• Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force
• #278 – Identifying and Interacting with Minor Victims of Human Trafficking, with Dr. Jodi Quas
• #259 – Which Screening Tool Should I Use, with Dr. Corey Rood
• Ending Human Trafficking Handbook
• Orangewood Project Choice 
• Lighthouse 
• Waymakers

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:00
It’s time to register for the annual Ensure Justice Conference at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice. The conference is always the first Friday and Saturday of March. That way you can make it a recurring event in your calendar. 2024, It’s March 1st and 2nd, we’re just a couple of months away. Our theme is “Keeping Our Children Safe Online.” We will explore the issues, what is happening online? What are the risks for our children at this stage of their development? What can we do as parents, caregivers, teachers, community members? Our speakers include many of our podcasts expert guests, and we are partnering with our Orange County Department of Education. Check out our website for more info and don’t miss the early bird rates. Go on over to gcwj.org/ensure justice, right now. There is a virtual option for our global listeners, as well as special rates for college students. Join us to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference at Ensure Justice, March 1st and 2nd, 2024.

You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode #313: Four Pillars of Medical Institution Response to Human Trafficking. My name is Sandie Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Our guest today is Lisa Murdock, MSN, RN, CNA. Look at all of those letters after her name. She is a pediatric acute care nurse, and here in Orange County, she is co-chair of our Human Trafficking Task Force Health Care Subcommittee. Over the past 23 years, Lisa has worked in pediatric acute care hospitals nationwide, and in Puerto Rico. Lisa began her journey in anti-trafficking efforts in 2014, after meeting a survivor in the community. That meeting inspired her to expand her work to include exploitation and human trafficking in health care education. Lisa believes that health care providers, specifically nurses, are uniquely positioned at the frontline of patient care to identify, advocate, and improve healthcare outcomes for at risk individuals or those already being trafficked. Lisa, welcome to the podcast.

Lisa Murdock 3:31
Thank you so much for having me, Sandie, I really appreciate it, especially as a fellow nurse and a mentor. I appreciate being here.

Sandra Morgan 3:39
I’m so glad to have you here. The focus I want to drill down on today is something that you have been so diligent to create here. As you are working in an acute care facility, as you are working in our anti-trafficking community and serving on our Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, you’ve built a model, and collaborated with others on a model of four pillars for medical institution response to human trafficking. This is so helpful because so many times nurses particularly learn more about human trafficking, and try to get something started in their E.R. in their admission somewhere, and it becomes bogged down in lots of bureaucracy, and how do you take the next step? So today, Lisa is going to give us some solid foundations for how we proceed. So let’s start by taking a look at why you chose these four pillars.

Lisa Murdock 5:01
Absolutely, and I can give you a little bit of background too, as to why I got started in finding he action steps in working with acute care, and also survivors. We know that survivors are intersecting with health care providers and not getting recognized, not being linked to the resources needed, not having prevention, and our response for people at risk. So that really stimulated me into thinking, okay, how can we make this better? And then also, as I started talking with healthcare providers, specifically nurses, I think what people don’t realize, especially in large healthcare institutions, nurses are the largest part of the workforce, and nurses saying, “I knew there was something off, I knew I was missing something, but I didn’t know the right questions to ask or the right steps to take.” So that really inspired me to create something that would be both survivor facing and also assist providers in having the tools to do their job.

Sandra Morgan 6:08
I like that. And for me, when I was the taskforce administrator, I went to hospitals. I tried to get them to adopt algorithms and all kinds of things, but I was not part of the internal workings, and I think you brought that specific perspective to this. So how did you decide what elements had to be part of this foundational model?

Lisa Murdock 6:38
Well, I started with a response algorithm back in 2018, and it was really created based on other algorithms that I worked with, for other diagnoses. So we have an algorithm for asthma, for example, or appendectomies. It’s very common in healthcare for people to be familiar with response algorithms for certain diagnoses. So I basically took that format, and applied that to exploitation and human trafficking. But from there, I’ve done the Evidence Based Scholar Program and extensive literature review and synthesis, and realized that there were huge gaps in multiple facets of anti-trafficking work and response in healthcare. So first and foremost, education and training. So what is currently out there for education and training? A lot of times, and health care workers are susceptible to this as well, is the sensationalized imaging and education that they’re receiving from the media. So as I spoke with health care providers, they were still looking for kidnapping and other situations that aren’t really reflective of the scope of exploitation and human trafficking. So that was the first pillar, we definitely need updated, accurate education, on what is human trafficking and exploitation, where it intersects with health care, what it’s going to look like in different facilities and with different diagnoses, and also have the training not only on human trafficking and exploitation, but on trauma informed care. I look at trauma informed care. Many health care providers may have knowledge of what it is and how it affects the neurobiology of the brain, but I look at trauma informed care as a skill. So do you know how to implement it? Do you know how to ask the sensitive questions, provide a safe place, build rapport? So that is basically how I came up with that first pillar is looking at the literature, the gaps, and also from survivor study and perspectives on their experience within healthcare.

Sandra Morgan 8:58
Wow. Okay, so pillar one, education. What’s pillar two?

Lisa Murdock 9:04
Screening, so really asking the sensitive questions. Many people with lived experience for both, there’s multiple barriers to disclosure, both from the provider’s side and the survivor’s side. So from the provider side, maybe they’re not asking the sensitive questions, maybe they are not aware that most people entering health care are either fearful, feel ashamed, have been groomed to not say anything or evade the questions, so they may not readily disclose. So you really have to build the rapport and be able to ask those sensitive questions without judgment, and really creating the environment that would increase that disclosure. Using a screening tool that’s comprehensive, not limited to just sex trafficking, but that includes labor trafficking, that includes the high risk questions, so we can capture those at risk as well, before they’re exploited or being trafficked and end up in situations, or vulnerabilities that are beyond their control. So I think that’s another very important step that we need to take because it doesn’t just stop at education, we really need to go forward in order to make a difference.

Sandra Morgan 10:24
This idea of screening requires a little more rigor than just being trauma informed, and sensitive, and building rapport. Dr. Jodi Quas was on the podcast last year, with her research that showed that while youth and children with child abuse, child sexual abuse, will disclose in a certain kind of pattern, those who are being sexually exploited, commercially sex trafficked is the term we often use, are not disclosing. I know for myself that I have been in situations with victims, where I, in my mind, I’m asking the questions, and then I’m deciding, “Oh, okay, so she’s not a victim, oh, he’s not a victim,” so I skip to the next group of questions. So it’s not a necessarily great algorithm, because I’m making that choice. In a rigorous screening tool, you have to go through every checkbox and that helps overrule your own biases, and I think that’s an important piece. What would be a screening tool you would recommend?

Lisa Murdock 11:58
You know, I work closely with Dr. Corey Rood, and we both work in pediatrics. So he’s a child abuse pediatrician, and has done extensive work, both clinically, but then also in research and in the use of screening tools, even in other states, like Ohio and Utah, and we developed our own screening tool for youth under 18, just to fill some of those gaps, because there’s many screening tools that might focus on sex trafficking, or might focus on the adult population. I think that’s really important to capture both sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and also high risk behaviors. I think what, for me, is most important for institutions, is to make sure you’re using a screening tool that is for your population, the population that you’re working with. There are some conversations around not creating something that appears to be a checklist, to have more of a natural conversation, which, in part I agree with, but when you’re working with large healthcare institutions, and healthcare providers are working with multiple populations and diagnoses in a very fast pace setting, not everybody is going to have expert level of human trafficking, exploitation, trauma informed care, and screening tools. So it’s really having a screening tool that’s written in a trauma informed way, that is applicable to your settings. So a very long screening might not be applicable, like an emergency room setting where things are very fast paced, you need a more efficient tool. The other thing I will say about screening, before you even get into choosing a validated screening tool for your population, we’ve created a checklist, both myself and Dr. Rood, to make sure that you have steps in place that it is safe, and you have these steps in place before you start screening. Are your staff educated? Once you start screening and you’re increasing your identification of people in these situations, do you have response and referrals in place? Which kind of go to our next pillar, but you really need all the pillars together, and you have to make sure you have the environment that’s going to be conducive to that safe response that’s based on evidence based practice.

Sandra Morgan 14:31
So when I’m listening to you, I’m thinking about that conversation about checklists and being more organic, and you know, pilots who have flown hundreds of flights use a checklist every time. So even if it isn’t a really overt process, it is still a very valuable process, and as we do move to the next pillar, I do want to remind listeners that Dr. Corey Rood did a whole episode about the screening tools, so I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. What’s the third pillar Lisa?

Lisa Murdock 15:17
I would say policy and protocol. Making sure your organization has a policy surrounding exploitation and human trafficking with a response protocol in place, so when you are identifying people with lived experience, or those vulnerable to trafficking, people know who to call, and how to respond.

Sandra Morgan 15:39
Okay.

Lisa Murdock 15:40
This would really include that response algorithm that we’ve been talking about, but also a comprehensive policy that defines: What is human trafficking? What is exploitation, including youth under the age of 18, who are exchanging sex for something of value or a place to stay? That’s one that kind of falls between the cracks for some health care providers and pediatrics, and that is something I’ve seen in recent practice, where people are not aware that that still falls under that umbrella of exploitation. So really having a policy, and what that does is it extends beyond any one person’s employment or position in the organization. It’s something sustainable, it’s something that people in healthcare and multiple institutions, once you have a policy in place that’s defining what it is and how to respond, that will carry on beyond any one person’s employment.

Sandra Morgan 16:42
And this is the thing that I love about policy and you hear me say this often, it’s even in the Ending Human Trafficking Handbook that my friends and I wrote, that policies create process and develop patterns of ethical best practices. If you have policies in place, then someone who says, “Oh, I don’t think I need to do that this time because she looks like she’s got a good family support system around her,” policies help us overcome our own biases, and help us resist taking shortcuts.

Lisa Murdock 17:24
Absolutely. In healthcare, policies exist for many processes within institutions, I was surprised from my own experience at where human trafficking and exploitation was in policies. In one instance, it was mentioned in the Victims of Violence Policy, and it basically stated exploitation is a form of human trafficking. It didn’t define it, it didn’t say what that meant, what the federal definitions were, and it didn’t say how to respond or who to call. In pediatrics, anybody under 18, even if it’s just suspected that somebody is being exploited, that you need to call CPS and law enforcement, similarly with other abuse situations, but it wasn’t defined as such. So when somebody is pulling a policy, if it’s not complete and comprehensive as to what exactly is it and what to do about it, then it’s going to fall by the wayside. That’s why I feel policy is really important, and if you would have asked me 23 years ago that I started out in nursing, and I still work clinically at the bedside, that I would be advocating and writing policy…

Sandra Morgan 18:42
Oh my goodness me too!

Lisa Murdock 18:43
I’d be like, “Wait, I’m a clinical nurse, I’m a bedside nurse.” So if I can do this, anybody can do this, you just need to have the passion and the work ethic to really want to make a difference. That goes beyond hearing about human trafficking, and everybody has that kind of visceral reaction, like, “This is horrible. This is happening in our community, in Orange County.” I want to take it a few steps further and say, “We can absolutely do something about this. We have the evidence, there is multiple articles on all of these pillars, and what needs to happen to create this comprehensive response. Let’s do it. Let’s put these things in place.”

Sandra Morgan 19:24
Tell us the fourth pillar.

Lisa Murdock 19:26
Resources and referrals. Really important that we’re educating our staff, they’re trained on trauma informed care and actually how to implement it. We have a policy, a response protocol, we’re screening, we’re increasing identification. Okay, then what happens upon discharge? Do we have safety planning that needs to be survivor driven? Working with survivors on what is safe upon discharge, whether that’s a phone number, warm handoff to another agency, it really needs to be comprehensive, and it needs to be clear to healthcare providers, so they know who to call upon discharge. A lot of times, it’s discharge time and you’ll get your paperwork based on your diagnoses or whatever follow up you need to do, but do they have a safe place to stay, do they have resources? A youth survivor that I was talking with said, “Even if I had resources just for one night, would have been helpful.” Another youth had said, “Yeah, I was getting called noncompliant because I didn’t go to my appointments. But if you expect me to take the bus in my neighborhood where my trafficker was, or friends or my trafficker, I don’t feel safe taking the bus.” So you know, really asking questions about transportation, was I able to get there? And another interesting thing that I found in my work the last four years, is that not all health care institutions have the knowledge of what we have available in Orange County for resources. So whether it’s Project Choice, or Lighthouse, or other agencies, Way Makers for victims assistance. Many institutions weren’t aware, or how to coordinate those resources and conversations to create more of a comprehensive resource and referral follow up upon discharge.

Sandra Morgan 21:26
Those resources and referrals, for me personally, are one of the most critical steps in helping a survivor take the initiative themselves, for this not to be in the context of a rescue, but of a restoration. They’re part of the process, because it’s hard work. It’s not just moving from inside one building to outside. Many times in a healthcare situation, personally and I’m sure you’ve experienced this, you have to let them go, knowing that they’re not completely safe. So how do you give them all the possible tools and resources you can to help them reach a better outcome? I am so glad that’s part of this four pillar section. When I look at this, and if it’s okay with you, Lisa, I’m going to put this graphic in the show notes for this podcast, because overlapping all four of these pillars of education, screening, policy and protocol, and resources and referrals, is data collection and distribution. What does that mean? I have to have like a university professor here all the time?

Lisa Murdock 23:00
No, I think, I mean, it would be great, right? We’d have a biostatistician and researchers that were available for all units on all projects. But no, when it comes to data collection, it’s just really important that we are looking at each of these pillars, like let’s take education, for example, and just gathering data on that. Was it effective? Is it comprehensive? Is it equipping the provider with the tools they need to recognize and respond? And so what I have experienced with some surveys, so let’s just take education, for example, some surveys will say, “Do you feel that this education, this training, this webinar, has increased your knowledge, and your ability to recognize human trafficking or to know what it looks like? And of course, people are going to say yes, because after your webinar, you absolutely feel well equipped, because you definitely have a higher level of knowledge than you had before taking it. But it’s interesting, if you look at different studies, even ones done here locally in Southern California, if you give a provider or first responder a scenario, and then ask if they’re able to detect it, that doesn’t always happen. So it’s really being able to assess, using different scenarios, was it really effective? Are they really able to detect what exploitation, human trafficking, or high risk behaviors are after the training? So when it comes to data collection, it’s really taking that data on each of the pillars and see, is it comprehensive? Is it effective? Does it need to be modified and improved? Hospitals use PDCA cycles for many things. Plan, Do, Study, Act, you know, we’re very accustomed to looking at our response, and our evidence, and our practice, and then coming back to what can we do better. So it’s just taking the same cycles that hospitals already use to evaluate policy procedure, and just applying this to anti-human trafficking work.

Sandra Morgan 25:18
We’ve got four pillars, education and training, screening and implementation, policy and protocol, referrals and resources, and we’re collecting data on this. That’s like building a home, a house, and I think that there has to be a pretty comprehensive plan for starting this foundation, this model in your hospital, in your clinic. How are you going to do that? I was really impressed when you were asked that question, you created a flowchart for creating an organizational response. And for some of us, who we start off and we’re motivated, but then we don’t know what the next step is, I think this seven step process would be really helpful. Can you just run us through it very quickly?

Lisa Murdock 26:19
Yeah. So are you referring to kind steps to create an organizational response?

Sandra Morgan 26:24
Yes.

Lisa Murdock 26:25
So this really starts with identifying a human trafficking champion, in your facility or institution where you work. This is really important, because if you don’t have somebody that keeps pushing momentum forward, in my experience, especially when the pandemic hit, if I didn’t keep caring and pushing forward talking to larger stakeholders, it would be really easy to kind of have that program fall through the cracks. So it’s really making sure that you have somebody to champion that within your organization. The next step would be to form a multidisciplinary team to address the needs of your institution when it comes to human trafficking and protocol implementation. That’s important. That includes all key stakeholders. So all departments, not just the emergency room, but maybe inpatient. If you work in a clinic, including physician social work, nursing, security, administration, making sure that you have that kind of multidisciplinary team to address all the needs.

Sandra Morgan 27:32
Excellent.

Lisa Murdock 27:33
The next step would be providing education in trauma informed care to all staff. Sometimes it needs to roll out in sections, so maybe start with clinical staff. I’m a firm believer that it really should be all staff that work within your institution. There have been situations where clinical staff have not picked up on a youth that is in this exploitive situation. Even environmental services heard a phone call while they were cleaning in the room and picking up the trash, heard the youth on the phone and reported it to staff. So that’s why I think it’s really important that everyone’s aware of the signs, risk identifiers, and have basic understanding of human trafficking and trauma informed care.

Sandra Morgan 28:23
And then we get to move to the next step

Lisa Murdock 28:27
Implementing a validated human trafficking screening tool for your patient population. The next step would be creating that patient response algorithm specific to your facility. So a flowchart basically, so people know what to do at each step of the way, with the list of the numbers so they’re not fumbling, looking for numbers while they’re in this situation. Having everything ready.

Sandra Morgan 28:27
Okay.

Lisa Murdock 28:55
The next one would be ensuring that you have the referral and resources available for patients upon discharge, and then collecting the data. So knowing how many patients maybe you identified, that was a big one. When I started this program at an institution that I was working with, a biostatistician had asked me, “Well, how many have we seen in the past?,” and it will look like zero, because nobody’s actually recording it with the ICD 10 codes for the diagnoses. It’s really hard when people are doing retrospective chart reviews to really pull how many patients you’ve seen because nobody’s actually documenting it. Collecting data is really important, not only based on how many patients you’re seeing, but also is your education, up to date and effective, is your response, policy and protocol, is that effective? Do you have all the information you need? Have there been situations where there was a phone number or referral and resource on that algorithm that didn’t exist, and people can add to that to make it more more robust? Is your policy comprehensive? Does that need to be modified? Really collecting that data on all those pillars and then sharing that information with other institutions. Whether it’s at a national conference, whether it’s within your own county, maybe by being a member of your local coalition or Taskforce, but really making sure that information is available, because that is what’s helpful to other people. You know, when people talk about liability, like what if we see somebody that might be being trafficked and they get discharged, is that a liability? And I’m like, “No, the liability is if you’re not recognizing people.” People continue to get victimized, traumatized, and tortured, and we’re not giving them the tools they need to enter recovery.

Sandra Morgan 30:48
That leads to my favorite, because it’s almost like back to the beginning, now’s your opportunity to improve and modify, and this iterative process, every time we do it, we get better. We share that information and our community response is better as well. Lisa, there’s so much here. I am thinking through some of the areas where we need to drill down and I have to have you come back and do another podcast. So listeners, if you are in the healthcare field, and you have questions, I think we need to have a health care provider q&a. If I get enough questions, I’ll pull that together. In the meantime, as we wrap up this episode, Lisa, I am so grateful for your leadership, but especially for your ability to do the detailed and sometimes boring work. You nailed it. When you said as a bedside nurse, you’re like, I don’t want to do policy, and now it’s like you see the tremendous value. I think we all have to create space, as a movement in the health care, anti-human trafficking, create space for our various abilities and directions, because we need everybody in that section you talked about at the beginning of the seven steps. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary teams. I remember when I was a night charge nurse in pediatrics and we didn’t even have the language of “human trafficking,” but we did deal with sexual assault of children, and it was a respiratory therapist. That was the one who came and said, “I saw this, what should I do about that?” Everybody needs to be on the team. I love that in your response, protocol as well. Last statement, you’ve got one statement to close out. What do you want, especially nurses to do next?

Lisa Murdock 33:21
Well, first, I just want to thank all the survivors that are colleagues, friends, people with lived experience, who actually inspired me to go down this path and improving health care for all people, especially those most vulnerable. And to all the health care providers out there, it’s really working together to make sure they have the tools to do a better job, to improve practice, and to make sure that they don’t leave work, feeling like “I missed something. I feel like I missed something, I wish I could do something better.”

Sandra Morgan 33:57
Wow, and that is in the heart of every nurse. I have worked with nurses across the California area, nationally and internationally, male, female, everybody has this sense of care that extends beyond just, “I’m going to take your temperature, I’m going to get you well enough to discharge you. I want to see you thrive.” And that’s one of the things I love about being a nurse, and I think it’s why Lisa, you and I have stayed friends now for a decade, and I’m grateful for you. Thank you for being on the podcast today.

Lisa Murdock 34:45
Thank you so much for having me, Sandie.

Sandra Morgan 34:48
I will see you all again in two weeks. In the meantime, go to the show notes to find the links we’ve talked about here today, and if you haven’t been to the website, go over to endinghumantrafficking.org, where you can find a library of past episodes, of resources, and get more connected with our community.

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Kevin Bales as the two discuss the importance of intersectionality when fighting to end human trafficking.

Kevin Bales

Kevin Bales is a professor of contemporary slavery and a co-founder of Free the Slaves, a nonprofit organization that works to end slavery worldwide. He has written several books and articles on modern slavery, human trafficking, and climate change. One of his main ideas is that slavery is not only a human rights violation, but also a major contributor to environmental degradation. Bales argues that slavery and human trafficking are driven by the global demand for cheap goods and services, which creates a market for exploited labor. He also shows how slavery affects the natural resources and ecosystems that sustain life on earth, such as forests, soils, water, and wildlife, calling it the “slavery footprint” of consumption. Bales also explores the concept of intersectionality, which is the idea that different forms of oppression and discrimination, such as race, gender, class, and ethnicity, are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. He suggests that slavery is an extreme form of intersectionality, where the most vulnerable and marginalized people are subjected to the most brutal and dehumanizing treatment. He advocates for a holistic and inclusive approach to ending slavery, that takes into account the diverse needs and perspectives of the enslaved and the liberated. Kevin Bales believes that slavery can be eradicated in our lifetime, if we act collectively and strategically.

Key Points

• When analyzing contemporary forms of slavery, like human trafficking, it is imperative that the differences in the rates at which different people groups are affected, and how they are affected, be looked at as well.
• Contemporary slavery affects multiple spheres outside of the social injustice sphere, as it is also aiding in the environmental destruction seen today.
• A global campaign, public awareness, and a willingness to give something up, are needed for a national government to aid in the fight to end contemporary slavery. Education is a start to achieving this global campaign.
• “There are links between slavery and genocide.”

Resources

• Ensure Justice
• Disposable People by Kevin Bales
• Free the Slaves 
• Blood and Earth by Kevin Bales
• UNESCO World Heritage
• TIP (Trafficking in Persons) Office
• Slavery: A Global Investigation
• International Cocoa Initiative
• Tony’s Chocolonely
• Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves by Kevin Bales

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:00
It’s time to register for the annual Ensure Justice Conference at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice. The conference is always the first Friday and Saturday of March. That way you can make it a recurring event in your calendar. 2024, it’s March 1st and 2nd, we’re just a couple of months away. Our theme is Keeping Our Children Safe Online. We will explore the issues: What is happening online? What are the risks for our children at this stage of their development? What can we do as parents, caregivers, teachers, community members? Our speakers include many of our podcast expert guests, and we are partnering with our Orange County Department of Education. Check out our website for more info and don’t miss the early bird rates. Go on over to gcwj.org/ensurejustice right now. There is a virtual option for our global listeners, as well as special rates for college students. Join us to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference at Ensure Justice March 1st and 2nd, 2024.

You are listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode #312: How Does Intersectionality Inform Our Response to Human Trafficking?, and we’re talking with Kevin Bales. My name is Dr. Sandie Morgan. This is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Joining us today is Dr. Kevin Bales, a professor of contemporary slavery and co-founder of Free the Slaves, a nonprofit organization that works to end slavery world wide. Dr. Bales has written several books and articles on modern slavery, human trafficking, and climate change. Kevin advocates for a holistic and inclusive approach to ending slavery that takes into account the diverse needs and perspectives of the enslaved and the liberated. He comes to us now from Nottingham, where he directs the rights lab. Kevin Bales Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast.

Kevin Bales 3:16
Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Sandra Morgan 3:16
I am so excited to have you in our podcast lineup now because for years, I’ve followed you, I’ve learned from you. I remember when the first estimate of how many slaves there are, came from your office, 27 million. How does it make you feel that the current stats that were out this last year, pretty much verified that guesstimate all those years ago?

Kevin Bales 3:49
Well, it’s a bit larger number, the number that’s just come out, they’re not quite doubling it. But I have to say, I know that to be a better methodology. My methodology was in many ways, very weak and it was just the best we could pull together at the time, when nobody else was really trying to do that. While people read about it in my book, “Disposable People” where I put that number out, most people didn’t read the academic article that I published in parallel, explaining all the problems and all the deficiencies of my estimate, because I wanted to be totally honest about that.

Sandra Morgan 4:25
I read that, I read that.

Kevin Bales 4:27
Oh, good on you!

Sandra Morgan 4:28
Yes, yes, I did, because I was taskforce administrator here in Orange County, first grant for federal funding, and people wanted numbers. And it’s like, there’s no one raising their hand, there’s no census, these are estimates, so I read every word of the academic side. Actually, that kind of leads into my first question here because you’ve dedicated your life and your career to fighting slavery and human trafficking. Why did you choose an academic platform as your field of battle?

Kevin Bales 4:29
I don’t know if I chose an academic platform, in the sense that I was already an academic. It wasn’t like I said, “Okay, now I want to take on slavery. So I guess I’ll become a lecturer or a porter professor.” I had already been doing that, I had been very enamored with the life of the mind, as a university student, then a grad student. then a doctoral student, and then on and on like that. So I felt the tools that I had to bring to bear were, yes, I could talk and I could think, but I could also write, and I could also do analysis, and I was used to working in statistics and that kind of thing. It was really just turning the tools that I had to the job at hand, and learning quite a few other tools as well.

Sandra Morgan 6:03
So for young people now, joining in an academic setting, what do you say to them, as they begin to mold their career? We’re going to be handing this off to the next generation.

Kevin Bales 6:24
Oh, we’re very much doing that right now, and I’m so excited about a lot of the handing off I get to do, to the next generation of abolitionists and anti slavery workers. One of the things that I get to say to them is, we’re now at that place where we can really proliferate across technologies, techniques, theories, systems, all sorts of ways of analyzing and understanding, and what I really hope, and what I encourage, is that they just surpass me as quickly as they can. I have to say, I’ve got some colleagues, young colleagues, whose work in for example, Predictive Mathematics and Machine Learning that they apply to satellite imagery and things like that, I get the big picture notion of what they’re talking about, but in terms of understanding how they do what they do, they’ve lost me completely. I think that’s great.

Sandra Morgan 7:18
Oh, that’s inspiring. So you and I started a conversation during this holiday break about intersectionality in the battle to combat slavery and human trafficking, and I think this deserves more exploration. Can you give us kind of a 30,000 foot level concept for intersectionality?

Kevin Bales 7:48
Certainly, and it’s actually a pretty easy thing to talk through. It’s just that if you treat something like contemporary forms of slavery, human trafficking as only itself, and you’re not looking at the impacts, the drivers, the things that moosh it and move it around, you’re not going to understand how it fits together with the other serious and significant problems that we face. One of the things that woke me up, and quite a few years ago, I was sitting down with Vandana Shiva, who’s a very well known environmentalist leader and researcher in India, and we were talking about the same area of India where both of us had worked. She was talking about how environmental destruction was driving local villagers out of their space, out of their livelihoods, and making them incredibly vulnerable to debt bondage slavery. I had been meeting the same, in a sense, people, not exactly the individuals perhaps, but I’d been meeting the same groups of people who had been pushed out, and were caught up in this hereditary sometimes form of debt, bondage slavery. We looked at each other, and it was a funny moment, but we looked at each other, and it was like a big penny dropped in both of our minds. We realized, “Wait, you’ve got the drivers on that side, I’ve got the impact on the other side, and yet, I can also tell you that a number of the people that I’ve been studying who are caught up in slavery, are being forced to destroy the natural world in the same area that we’re both talking about.” Now, that was a true revelation about intersectionality, for me. The idea that we could say, “There are people caught up in slavery who are being forced to destroy the natural world,” but the destruction of that natural world is in fact pushing people into situations of enslavement. Then of course, when you look a little bit closer, it’s not a two handed game, it’s a three handed game. The third hand is all about where did the products go? Where did the produce go, the environmental impacts, what do they have down the line and so forth? Where does it fit into global supply chains? And all of a sudden, it’s everywhere, but it’s all linked back and tied back to the fundamental notions of what happens when you put people in situations of enslavement, and then, of course, use them to destroy the environment, and then use that destroyed environment to make profits, often in a criminal way.

Sandra Morgan 10:24
Can you give us a really simple example, concrete?

Kevin Bales 10:30
Sure. I mean, one of the areas when I went out to really document this deeply, and I ended up writing this book called “Blood and Earth,” which is about a deep documentation of this, one of the places that I went was down to the bottom of Bangladesh. At the bottom of Bangladesh, there’s a huge area of kind of a swampy, beautiful mangrove forest area, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In other words, it’s supposed to be protected in all ways, it should never be messed with, no one should be living there, it should be kept very importantly pristine, not least for two key reasons. One is that that UNESCO World Heritage site, called the Sundarbans Forest, is the largest carbon sink in all of Asia. In other words, of all the co2 emitted across Asia, this is the most important part of the natural world, which is sucking that co2 out of the atmosphere and putting it back, and fixing it into seawater, which is what mangroves do. But what did I find when I went there? I found big chunks of this protected forest, which is supposed to be protected in all sorts of ways internationally, had been carved out to put in fish processing camps, and children were the ones who had been lured, and tricked, and enslaved, in that horrific exploitative and often violent control, to do all this processing of fish brought every day by fishing boats who didn’t really quite notice, or chose not to notice what was going on in the fish processing camp. In the fish processing camp, these children, these almost all boys, they were dying at a fast rate. They were getting really ill with different diseases, they were often very hungry, and they were always complaining, when I talked to some of them later, about diarrhea. They were constantly having diarrhea. Again, for me, one of those moments when the whole thing started to open up and make something clear to me was when I asked them, “What was your other health problem when you were caught in this fishing camp and enslaved to do all this fish processing?” and they said, “Oh, that was being eaten by tigers.” My jaw fell open and I said, “Wait, wait, eaten by tigers?” and they said, “Yeah, I mean, a lot of people died of diarrhea, but a lot of people died of being eaten by tigers.” I was like, what? How is this possible? Then of course, I learned that one of the reasons the Sundarbans UNESCO World Heritage Site is a heritage site, is because it’s like the last perfect breeding ground that’s protected for bengal tigers. But when the criminal slaveholders go in and cut the woods down, the forest down, the mangrove forest down, the tiger that lives there, and they’re territorial, can’t just like go off and fight other tigers to get their space. What, fundamentally, the slaveholders are doing is driving out little small deer and other animals from the hunting ground of a Bengal tiger, their territory, and replacing those deer and other small animals with small boys who became the prey of the Bengal tigers. It was almost as if, for those criminal slaveholders, that that was just one of those sort of attrition problems that you have when you have a business, that sometimes some of your fish processors will just be eaten by tigers, and they just moved on and didn’t really think much about it. Okay, that’s a horrific story, but you can see where you begin to put slavery, environmental destruction, protected and endangered species, which then endanger small children who are forced to do the the work which is part of the environmental destruction. Then when I asked, “So where does all this fish go?” they said, “Oh, almost all of this is kind of low grade fish. It’s processed into a kind of meal of sorts, a kind of mash of fish meat, which then is shipped off to North America and Europe as cat food.” So usually when I talked about this in public venues, I’d say, “Who’s got a cat?”, the shock of it when it begins to realize that the permeation of this is so insidious, that the cat that you love as your pet, is somehow feeding as well as the yigers did off these poor little kids.

Sandra Morgan 15:27
Okay, so now you’ve painted this very concrete picture for us, and we understand that within the context of intersectionality. But what do we do? Are there best practices? How do we actually do something to counter that?

Kevin Bales 15:48
This is a tough one for that particular situation because yes, there’s a supply chain, and it’s very evident. It’s not a hard supply chain to grasp, but it’s a very hard supply chain to police. One of the key reasons for that, is that as they tell you in Bangladesh, the most powerful organization might be the national government, but it might also be what they call the “Shrimp Mafia,” because the “Shrimp Mafia” exports fish and shrimp, from Bangladesh, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, every year. They ship it all over to Western Europe, and all over to North and South America. For that reason, even when we were able to expose this and work with people, say in the TIP office in the United States, and we got the TIP ambassador to go and talk to them, talk to the government in Bangladesh, and so forth, there would be these minor little changes, and these minor little adjustments, but then pretty quickly, things would go back to normal, and we’ve not really been able to crack it. In other words, of actually getting past the power of what amount to mafias and gangs, who can control this raw and rural area down in a protected national forest. So it’s a tough one, and if anything, I suppose it would have to take a global campaign to make clear that shrimp and fish that come from there is dirty, and bloody, and needs to be inspected to the point that you that you move away from it. And again, that would require quite a large input and a lot of public awareness.

Sandra Morgan 17:40
And a willingness to give something up, that is part of our culture. We think it’s just normal to be able to go to the grocery store and pick up this particular item, and we don’t think about where it was before it arrived.

Kevin Bales 18:03
You know, it’s come on us, you’re right, it is part of our lives, but it didn’t used to be. I think I’m old enough, I remember when, if you ate shrimp, it was like four little shrimps around a special little crystal glass of cocktail sauce or something, it’s really fancy stuff that happened only in fancy restaurants, and the shrimp back then were coming out of the Gulf of Mexico. But when they began to build these enormous ships that were freezer ships, and they could load them with tons and tons of shrimp that have been partially peeled and then put into these plastic bags, all of a sudden the cost of shrimp fell to the floor, but not so far that people weren’t making profits. So in a sense, we just accepted the happy cornucopia of seafood that is not very expensive, that we can buy in big freezer bags, but we’ve done that because we didn’t really know what was going on.

Sandra Morgan 18:59
So one of the things that I love about doing this work from an academic platform is that you measure it, you talked about statistics, and the old adage is: you can’t manage something you can’t measure. So how can we use your research to mobilize an effective response? Who are the actors that need to? So in intersectionality, then, we’re not just talking about government, who else?

Kevin Bales 19:31
Well, it’s got to be a lot of the companies, the companies and then the retailers that would have to be brought on board with this. Yet, what we know is that even if we brought the retailers on site, Walmart suddenly said, “Okay, we’re going to look at every bit of shrimp. We’re going to make sure we don’t get any nasty shrimp imported into our freezers and stuff like that,” they could do that. But it’s ubiquitous, the seafood and it would take a long time to get everybody on board to, in fact, do what’s necessary. Now at the same time, after I uncovered all this, and I was able to start working with other people in the rights lab, where I work, at the University of Nottingham, we have a whole team that just works with satellites, and satellite imagery, and Earth observation. One of the first things that they ever did was, I talked to them and said, “Look, here’s a picture of people on the ground in one of these shrimp processing and fish processing camps, and it’s horrific,” and I told them about the tigers and so forth. I said, “But look, I went to Google Earth, here’s a picture of it from space.” So I knew where I was because I took my GPS coordinates when I was there, so that’s what it looks like from above. I said, “Could you look? I mean, you guys are special satellite people. What do you got? What can you tell me just from this?” and they said, “Let’s get back to you in a week.” A week later they said, “Okay, did you know about the 12 other camps?” and I was like, “No, I didn’t know there were 12 other camps.” They said, “Yeah, well, there are and they’re all operating in basically the same way,” and they said, “Did you know about the movement of camps over the last 15 to 20 years, as global warming has has raised sea level levels, and meant for some of the camps to move?” I was just like, “Amazing, no, I had no clue about this.” I was just pushing around on a boat, down in the swampy area. They suddenly said, “Oh, yes. Okay, so here’s the real challenge. It’s not about one camp, it’s about 12 camps, or at least 12 camps, and then they keep moving them when they find a better place, and so forth.” So if you had the ability to bring in law enforcement say, to bust these camps, it would be a remarkable change, but the situation in Bangladesh has been that law enforcement are very reticent to take on what they call the shrimp mafia, and it’s gonna take a lot, and possibly a change in government to make that happen.

Sandra Morgan 22:12
Wow. So then the strategies that we’re left with are pretty much civil society type strategies. What does that look like?

Kevin Bales 22:24
But in many ways, it’s got to be just about education, education, education. I mean, I think if we could somehow put that story out there in a way that it just kept being repeated and understood, and repeated and understood, and all of a sudden, shrimp started having a really bad taste in your mouth, we can begin to see a diminution of the purchase of these billions of dollars worth of multi zillion tons of shrimp and fish that come over to North and South America and Europe. But it’s a big one, because you’d have to literally be addressing all of the people who eat, in all of the countries that have these food imports from all over the place.

Sandra Morgan 23:12
So let me ask you this question. How successful do you see the chocolate score card and things like that, that we’ve done within the cocoa plantation realm? Is that something we can mirror?

Kevin Bales 23:29
Yes, I think we can. There’s a couple of ways that it’s different. I mean, I was around at the very beginning of this concern about slavery in chocolate and cocoa farming, because it was the film that we made with HBO, based on my first book about this Disposable People, where we went to Cote d’Ivoire, to the Ivory Coast, and we found, we didn’t know we were going to find this because we were actually looking for something else, but we found a bunch of young teenagers from a neighboring country, who had been lured into the Ivory Coast and then enslaved on a cocoa farm. We were able to trace that cocoa and we were able to talk even to the slave holder, and we were able to talk to the young men after they came to freedom, and so we kind of blew up the story. It led to this whole concern about slavery and cocoa slavery, Christmas candy, children having chocolate, and all that kind of thing. Now in many ways, one of the most important outcomes of that was the founding of the International Cocoa Initiative. That was a shotgun wedding. There were Senators in the American Senate, who worked very closely with us, and one of them called all of the presidents of the chocolate companies in the United States together in Washington and said, “Look, I’m just going to put this into a bill that will become a law, that you have to have a label on all your chocolate that says, ‘There is no child slavery in this chocolate.'” They said, “Well, there’s no way we can possibly do that, because we simply don’t know at this point, this is all new to us. We didn’t understand that there were these problems in the actual enslavement in cocoa.” He said, “Well, I don’t know what to do.” So he let them simmer for a little while, and then he said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. If you can’t do that, what I do expect you to do…” and this was actually our Plan A was, “…you each have to put in about a million dollars a year, into an NGO that will be run by anti slavery specialists, who also know about the cocoa world, and who will begin to do the work on the ground, in the Ivory Coast and in Ghana, to go village by village and solve the problem.” That’s what the International Cocoa Initiative does. It’s not very flashy, it doesn’t get a ton of coverage, but when I came off the board of the ICI after 12 years, I was one of the founder members, but I came off after 12 years. At that point, we were up to about 60% of all the cocoa regions that we’d been able to work through and kind of declare clean, and they were now working through the rest of them. Then of course, you get Tony and Tony’s Chocolonely, and all his fantastic work in another way to make it in some ways, a lot more fun than the International Cocoa Initiative ever made it, as he, when he saw our film, he went and bought a lot of chocolate there in the Netherlands, and went to a police station because he had discovered that there was an old, old, old law in the Netherlands, that you shouldn’t buy things made by slave labor. So he bought a bunch of chocolate, went to a police station, and then turned himself in and he said, “I want you to arrest me, I violated the law. I bought this slave made cocoa.” They were like, “What?”, they didn’t know about the law or anything. He called me actually, this is years ago and said, “I want you to come over and testify against me in my trial.”

Sandra Morgan 27:09
I love that.

Kevin Bales 27:10
Yeah, I loved it too, but I did say, “I don’t think you need me, Tony, I honestly don’t. Plus, I won’t understand anything, everything’s going to be in Dutch. So I think you’ve got all the facts and figures you need.” He started out in a consumer way that has been super powerful. Then there are some chocolate companies that haven’t done too well. There are some American companies that were superb on it, like Mars, and like Hershey’s, but they were also companies that then later went public, so they were bought out by investors and not the family run companies. When I first met people from Mars, I met old man Mars. He was the elderly man who still owned the company and ran it with his sons, and he had very clear feelings that this was a moral problem, not an economic problem, and that you had to solve the moral problem. But of course, in time when the world began to let investing, and hedge funds buy up whole companies like that, he began to lose a lot of the of the moral direction. So we’re not done yet with with slavery and cocoa, but we’re a lot closer than we might have been, and we’re a million miles ahead of any questions about shrimp, or fish.

Sandra Morgan 28:30
One of the things that you said in the beginning of this part of the conversation, you use the word “luring” these kids here. I’ve seen a lot of, and I’m using air quotes, “prevention strategies” that are aimed at putting the responsibility on the child not to fall victim to being lured, and here are the red flags. Can you address the problem with that?

Kevin Bales 28:56
Oh, well, I mean, it sounds like a lovely idea. I think if you’re a middle class American, who’s got a good bit of education, but if you’re talking about the families like those kids in Bangladesh, their parents are illiterate, they live in fear, often, of just the big wigs around them in the countryside, and then there’s the fact that the kids are often hungry in the families who are doing this agricultural work not that far away. When somebody comes along, and seems to be educated, and nice, and friendly, and says, “You know, your son, he could come and work for a few months, and here’s an advance, we can give you an advance on his pay, and he’ll be back within three months and so forth.” It’s one of those really tough choices, isn’t it, that any parent would have to face? If they said, “I could get a situation where my kid could earn some money, actually get enough to eat, and maybe open some opportunities, but I can’t really be certain.” So they give in because they think maybe they’re doing the right thing, and that’s when I think, possibly, some of that preventative work that you could do on the ground could help, but you’d have to find them. You’d have to work your way up and down the riverbanks, you’d have to work your way all over the agricultural part of lower Bangladesh, for example. I mean, it would be quite an enormous task, and lots of different languages as well, which is not a reason not to do it, but it would also be about how you make that penetration, and how you could convince them there was something else. Then essentially stand in the stead of this tricky way of luring somebody into exploitation, and you could give them an alternative, which could be a school. I work with a group that does a lot of building of schools in villages in India, in northern India, up in Uttar Pradesh. Villages that are in hereditary forms of collateral debt bondage, slavery. The process, it takes about three years to take the whole village from slavery to freedom, but it always begins with the insertion of a school, which is actually a Trojan horse. Because the school teachers, the people who come to cook at the school, they’re all themselves ex-slaves, who have been through the same process of liberation and education, and they slowly begin to work with these people who have been in slavery for many generations, so they have no sense of freedom. They have no sense of what it’s like on the outside world, they’ve never left the village for generations. So it takes, like I say, two to three years to finally reach that moment when someone who’s been caught in lifetime of debt bondage slavery to say, “Wait, so your life wasn’t like this. How do we do that?” That’s, of course, when the door opens, and things begin to be possible.

Sandra Morgan 31:58
Wow, there are so many things we could keep talking about, but I’m looking at the time. I’m going to put links to everything we’ve talked about in the show notes for our listeners, but I was struck years ago, with the cover of one of your books. I think it was the “Ending Slavery” book, because it had an Oprah Magazine quote. “Tempers horror with hope.” Can you leave us with what are some of the emerging opportunities that give you hope now?

Kevin Bales 32:37
I think one of the most powerful facts is that whether it’s 27 million people in the world, or 35 million people in the world or whatever, within a global population, which is now over 8 billion, we’re actually dealing with a minority small problem. It’s horrific, it’s horrendous, it’s ancient, it’s deadly, but in numerical terms, it’s a fairly marginal activity. That actually does give me some hope, because I realized that if we can bring people to really commit to the idea that we don’t have to live in a world with slavery, we can actually get rid of this because it’s actually so small in global terms, then we could do so. Of course, that flips back to the whole question of notions of intersectionality. There’s a link between slavery and genocide, for example, which we’ve been exploring very strongly, and it’s absolutely there. There are links between slavery and child and early and forced marriage, and there’s a link between slavery and certain religious groups, which used religion to take people and enslave them, or justify slavery and so forth. There’s a whole series of ways that this fits together into our highly complex, but also highly human cultures, and I say multiple because it’s all these different cultures, and all these different peoples and ways of being, but nearly all of them are okay with the idea that freedom is a better notion than slavery, with some bad actors. I think when we begin to understand the warp and the weft in the woven fact of enslavement around us, we’ll be able to unpick that and help people see the right way out, whether it’s through economics or through faith and religion of a better type as it were, or if it’s about ending that environmental destruction and then giving ex slaves the job of replanting forests, or rebuilding environmental systems. I mean, that alone would provide enormous amounts of work for people who have come out of slavery, and it would also be reducing our co2 load, day after day, time after time, to the point that we might not have the global warming that we’re all a little worried about. So if we think big, and if we think optimistically, which is hard occasionally, but I think that way, I don’t see why we can’t do this. I’ve been at this for what, 35 years, or something like that? The people in the past, they were on it for 100 years, or 150 years when they were confronting things like transatlantic slavery. I hope, and I’d like to think, we’re just getting warmed up.

Sandra Morgan 35:38
I totally agree with you. Years ago, I read James Davison Hunter’s book “To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World,” and he took a look at how Wilberforce addressed that transatlantic slavery you just mentioned, and really focused on overlapping networks. So when we started talking about intersectionality, it reminded me of the Wilberforce overlapping networks observation. I feel really encouraged that what you’re projecting is a call for those overlapping networks with the Eco-dpecialists, and the business people, and government, and the faith based community, and civil society, we have to have a lot of overlapping networks to create a safety net that no child is going to slip through.

Kevin Bales 36:43
Exactly right, and I would throw in a lot of other networks. We’ve just done a lot of work for the US military, about educating soldiers that are sent all over the world so they will recognize this type of abuse, and exploitation, and slavery, and trafficking, and be able to report back and understand how to address them. We have thousands and thousands of US soldiers all over the planet, and it sort of goes on not just from them, but from people who are concerned about child marriage, and certainly the situation of slavery that explodes whenever there’s a conflict. 90% of the conflicts in the world today have slavery as part of how they’re being prosecuted. It’s fundamentally tactical slavery, and often strategic slavery as well, which actually takes you to the situation of genocide and slavery, and their linkage. think the more we understand how this all fits together, it begins to teach us: which thread do we pull to unravel this nasty knot?

Sandra Morgan 37:43
Well, we are going to be following you to see which thread you’re going to pull next.

Kevin Bales 37:50
Yeah, I wish I knew too.

Sandra Morgan 37:53
Oh, my goodness. I’m always inspired by the the flow of ideas and challenges, and I’m grateful for your leadership, and the fact that you have been doing this for 35 years. We’re gonna keep doing that. I think we have to have another interview because we ran out of time, to go a little deeper, but thank you so much, Kevin.

Kevin Bales 38:20
It’s been great to be with you, Sandie, I really appreciate the opportunity.

Sandra Morgan 38:25
We’re inviting you to take the next step to go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. That’s where you can find resources we’ve mentioned in this conversation, and so much more. The anti human trafficking certificate program here at the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University, has new classes starting every eight weeks. If you haven’t visited our website before, this is a great first step for you. Become a subscriber, and you’ll receive an email with the show notes with every new episode. Of course, I’ll be back in two weeks for our next conversation.

Dr. Sandra Morgan is joined by Kaitlyn Zedalis as the two discuss the role of forced criminality in labor trafficking.

Kaitlyn Zedalis

Kaitlyn Zedalis is the associate director of research, learning, and advocacy for the Covenant House Action and Research Tank (CHART) at Covenant House New Jersey, where she oversees agency initiatives related to research, program evaluation, and advocacy. Kaitlyn has assisted organizations across North America on the topics of human trafficking, screening and assessment, trauma informed care, and best practices for serving victims of human trafficking. She has a master’s degree in social work from Stockton University, where she currently serves as an adjunct professor, and is a licensed social worker and licensed clinical alcohol and drug counselor.

Key Points

• The Covenant House Action and Research Tank, or CHART, is an initiative of Covenant House New Jersey that conducts research, develops evidence based strategies, and seeks solutions for complex problems such as homelessness and human trafficking.
• Labor trafficking by forced criminality is when the labor a person is required to perform is a crime, heavily intertwining criminalization and victimization.
• Covenant House New Jersey’s research found that a supportive adult relationship in an individual’s life serves as a protective factor from trafficking.
• In many cases, a victim is forced or coerced to remain in an unsafe situation for fear of getting in trouble with the law, as they see themselves as engaging in criminal behavior rather than a victim.

Resources

• Ensure Justice 
• Covenant House New Jersey 
• CHART
• QYIT Journal Article
• Labor Trafficking by Forced Criminality
• 306 – Survivor Voices Leading Change, with Jerome Elam
• Trafficking in Persons Report 2023
• Caring Adult Relationships Journal Article

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:00
It’s time to register for the annual Ensure Justice Conference at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice. The conference is always the first Friday and Saturday of March, that way you can make it a recurring event in your calendar .2024, it’s March 1st and 2nd, we’re just a couple of months away. Our theme is Keeping Our Children Safe Online. We will explore the issues: What is happening online? What are the risks for our children at this stage of their development? What can we do as parents, caregivers, teachers, community members? Our speakers include many of our podcast expert guests, and we are partnering with our Orange County Department of Education. Check out our website for more info and don’t miss the early bird rates. Go on over to gcwj.org/ensurejustice right now. There is a virtual option for our global listeners, as well as special rates for college students. Join us to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference at Ensure Justice, March 1st and 2nd, 2024.

You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode #311: Youth Labor Trafficking and Forced Criminality. My name is Sandie Morgan and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Our guest today is Kaitlyn Zedalis, and she is the associate director of research, learning, and advocacy for the Covenant House Action and Research Tank (CHART) at Covenant House New Jersey, where she oversees agency initiatives related to research, program evaluation, and advocacy. Kaitlyn has assisted organizations across North America on the topics of human trafficking, screening and assessment, trauma informed care, and best practices for serving victims of human trafficking. She has a master’s degree in social work from Stockton University, where she currently serves as an adjunct professor, and is a licensed social worker and licensed clinical alcohol and drug counselor. Kaitlyn, welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast.

Kaitlyn Zedalis 3:15
Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Sandra Morgan 3:17
I’m so excited about our conversation today, our theme around labor trafficking by forced criminality. I follow the research out of Covenant House closely so tell us just briefly, for our listeners who don’t know Covenant House, tell us about Covenant House and CHART.

Kaitlyn Zedalis 3:41
So Covenant House New Jersey was established in 1989. We’re a subsidiary of Covenant House International, which is the nation’s largest nonprofit organization serving youth facing homelessness. Covenant House New Jersey operates shelters with onsite supportive services, including legal, mental health, and case management services in Newark and Atlantic City. We offer additional programs throughout the continuum of care. Since October 2020, Covenant House New Jersey has also served as the single point of entry for individuals who have experienced human trafficking to access services in New Jersey, and in 2017 Covenant House New Jersey’s research on human trafficking among youth experiencing homelessness, led to the creation of the first scientifically validated brief screening tool for human trafficking, called QYIT or Quick Youth Indicators for Trafficking, which has been published in peer reviewed journals. The Covenant House Action and Research Tank or CHART, is an initiative of Covenant House New Jersey that conducts research, developed evidence based strategies, and seeks solutions for complex problems such as homelessness and human trafficking. Our approach rests on three core pillars: training and advocacy, research and services. We provide training and technical assistance and advocate with outside entities to improve services for victims and youth, we conduct research that is geared toward developing best practices that serve as a model for service providers, and developing innovative practices that we integrate into our own services.

Sandra Morgan 5:18
Okay, wow, that is a lot and it is really important, to my perspective, that research based advocacy is a pillar in what Covenant House does, in my experience, and it’s why our tagline for the podcast is study the issues, be a voice, make a difference. Lots of times people are horrified when they find out children are being labor trafficked, but they start talking before they’ve done their research, and sometimes the things they say, may not actually be beneficial, it may not help us move this forward, so that research is critical. I’m also a big proponent of participatory action research, our listeners have heard me talk about that in the past. We’re going to put links in the show notes to the 2017 study that you mentioned as well. But can you talk about your research design and what you mean by action tank?

Kaitlyn Zedalis 6:30
Yeah, so really, our goal is to contribute effective evidence based and client centered program approaches to local and national dialogue. So when we say action tank, what we really mean is seeking change through the simultaneous process of taking action while doing research. So this is really different from the traditional research model where a researcher sort of swoops, in conducts the research, and then leaves. We really focus our research on developing evidence based, client centered approaches that can serve as a model for other service providers. We use that information to drive, improve, and disrupt traditional models of care. So this really targets the research we select, and we don’t do the research and then not utilize the information we gather. We use the information we learn to improve our services, to help improve the services of other providers, and to advocate for policies that serve in the best interest of survivors of human trafficking and young people experiencing homelessness.

Sandra Morgan 7:35
You and I could spend a lot of time right there, but we have a mission. Today we’re going to talk about labor trafficking by forced criminality. Can you give me an example of what that looks like for our youth?

Kaitlyn Zedalis 7:49
Yeah, so labor trafficking by forced criminality is really any labor trafficking where the labor a person is required to perform is a crime. So with that, the criminalization and victimization are really intertwined. So the most common crime is drug distribution, but we’ve also seen other crimes like shoplifting, theft, assault, and battery. Some of the cases that we highlighted in the research, one of them was the case of Aiden, who was 12 years old, took a job delivering food products, and later learned he was actually delivering drugs. He only received a portion of the money he earned and the trafficker told him if he didn’t do what he was told, or told anybody, he would be hurt. Or the case of Emily, who was 17 and was homeless with an older romantic partner, and the romantic partner began arranging for her to have sex with men for money, shoplift, and steal, and would beat her if she refused. So it’s really anytime that what the person is being forced, frauded, or coerced into doing is a crime.

Sandra Morgan 8:55
And I think when we see these youth in our juvenile courts, or even when some of them age out, and now they’re in an adult court, we aren’t seeing them through the lens of coercion, that this was not actually a choice that they made to be part of a criminal activity. So when I’m thinking about this, I want to think about the characteristics of the victims, the survivors, as we think through your findings, and for some of my listeners that are in academic settings, we will put the methodology links in the show notes, but you can tell by Caitlin’s conversation, they’ve been very thorough in how they do this. Let’s talk about the survivors and what made them more vulnerable, their characteristics.

Kaitlyn Zedalis 9:59
Yeah, so I do think as we’re talking about some of the results in the findings, it is just helpful to frame that, you know, basically what we did was a case series analysis. We looked at 18 cases of labor trafficking by forced criminality among young people experiencing homelessness at Covenant House, New Jersey. So one of the first things to highlight that we found is that 64% of the labor trafficking survivors among our young people experiencing homelessness were forced criminality survivors, so it was the most common type of labor trafficking among the young people we serve. We found that it was more common among males than females, so 67% male versus 33% female. The demographics of the victims were very similar to the demographics of our young people at Covenant House New Jersey, overall, 44% of the victims were African American, 28% Caucasian, 6% were multiracial, and 22% identified their race as other. 10 out of 18 were a minor at the time of their trafficking experiences, and when I say a minor, we were overwhelmed by the young ages at which the trafficking experiences had occurred. So four of those 10 were under the age of 12, at the time of their trafficking, and five were between the ages of 12 and 15.

Sandra Morgan 11:26
Wow, and this makes me think back to a podcast interview a few weeks ago with Jerome Elam who was a CSEC victim, but also experienced forced criminality, and so his experiences in the juvenile justice system, identified his delinquency over his victimization. That started for him very young as well. We could do another conversation about the characteristics of the survivors, but digging a little deeper, can we talk about childhood experiences that they may have had in common?

Kaitlyn Zedalis 12:15
Yeah, so other research had already shown a relationship between traumatic experiences and trafficking experiences, though there is less research available on traumatic experiences among victims of labor trafficking. But often, victims have multiple long running victimizations that they’ve experienced over the course of their life. So the average ACE score, among the forced criminality victims was 6.66. That average ACE score was very similar to our average ACE score among all of our youth who experienced trafficking, but it is higher than our average ACE score among our young people experiencing homelessness overall, which was 4.69. We also found that 90% of the victims had at least one absent parent during their childhood, including 30% with a deceased parent. And more than half were in foster care at some point in their life. This is higher than the rate of foster care experiences among all trafficked youth, we looked at in our analysis, which was at 46.5%. Again, this is in line with other research that showed a relationship between a history of foster care experiences and human trafficking.

Sandra Morgan 13:34
So the history of foster services was not as significant as I expected it to be because it feels like in this sector, we talk about the foster system as being more of a main place that victims are recruited out of, and I’ve heard, particularly in CSEC conversations, numbers in the 90th percentile. So seeing this around 53%, made me wonder if we aren’t asking all the right questions about that. I’m really surprised about the number of absent parents who are deceased, and so much of the common understanding, there’s this almost blaming the parents for not being more active in their child’s lives, and there may be other areas that we can be identifying for strengthening when we’re looking at prevention strategies. That’s my take on reading and being really inspired by your research. So correct me, jump in any way you want to Kaitlyn.

Kaitlyn Zedalis 15:02
Yeah, I think we thought those findings were really related to some findings in Covenant House New Jersey’s previous research on trafficking experiences among young people experiencing homelessness, where having a supportive adult relationship was found to be a protective factor for trafficking experiences. What we really found was that these findings supported that research as well, that caring adult relationships do really play a key role in the prevention of trafficking, and so I think ensuring in children who are engaged with the foster care system, trying to find ways to make sure that there are caring adult relationships in their life. I think it really highlights the importance of finding ways to get young people who are vulnerable because of foster care experiences, or deceased or absent parents, you know, really supporting those young people and wrapping around them from a young age is important.

Sandra Morgan 16:09
I really appreciate that and one of the questions that I want to pursue after listening to this, I want to talk to some folks in our foster system here, because that number being so close to 50%, I’m looking at the other side of that coin in thinking, “So about 50% of those in foster care, are in situations that have demonstrated that one caring adult that’s been protective for them.” I’m just starting to wonder how do I find out more about that as well. Let’s go on though, because I get bogged down in these little details, and you have so much data, I love all the data. Let’s talk about the types of exploitation that you identified.

Kaitlyn Zedalis 17:08
What we found is that in 12 out of the 18 cases, it was labor trafficking only, and six out of the 18 cases, it was labor and sex trafficking that the person had experienced. Four of those six cases, it was a situation where there was labor and sex trafficking happening simultaneously, and two of those six had unrelated sex and labor trafficking experiences, so two separate episodes of trafficking. The most common underlying crime, as I mentioned, was drug distribution. This has been shown in other research of labor trafficking among youth experiencing homelessness. One of the things that came through was that there really wasn’t a pattern in terms of the relationship to the trafficker. This is important to highlight because this really creates challenges for law enforcement in being able to know what or who to look for, among those who are experiencing forced criminality. I do want to point out, though, that there almost always was some sort of co-occurring relationship with the trafficker. There were some cases where it was gang related trafficking, some cases where it was a family friend, familial trafficking was something that we saw, romantic partners, a landlord, a person who offered housing when someone was homeless. There was very commonly another relationship with the trafficker, and that relationship can often play a role in why the victim will remain in a trafficking situation and doesn’t report the crime. That secondary relationship can really create some additional challenges.

Sandra Morgan 18:48
Are some of those youth actually dependent on those relationships for their housing?

Kaitlyn Zedalis 18:56
Yeah, so there were definitely cases where the trafficker was providing that person shelter in the case, and in the familial trafficking cases, especially when the victim was very young at the time of the trafficking experience, they were dependent on the trafficker for their basic needs.

Sandra Morgan 19:14
And the other question here, when we’re talking about the most common underlying crime was connected with drugs, there’s kind of this perception that, “Well, the kids are taking drugs, and so they’re doing this to get their own drugs.” What did you see in that area?

Kaitlyn Zedalis 19:32
We didn’t have enough reliable data in this area to make any conclusive findings, in terms of substance use challenges among the young people who we looked at. You know, there’s also just challenges in this situation where young people often don’t feel comfortable reporting their substance use history. So unfortunately, it’s not something we had a lot of data in, but based on the narratives that we were reading, we didn’t get the impression that substance use was the most common form of coercion really being used to keep young people in their trafficking situation.

Sandra Morgan 20:14
Okay, thank you for commenting on that. I appreciate that. So then how did they control the victims?

Kaitlyn Zedalis 20:23
We saw a lot that was around threats of harm and physical abuse. We also saw situations where they felt like they had to stay because they were seeing other people hurt if they tried to leave, or threats to harm family members, and we saw a few situations where there was the withholding of identification documents. I think the other thing that’s kind of key to highlighting forced criminality, is that there’s always this underlying fear of getting in trouble. This fear that if they were to go to law enforcement for help, since the criminalization and the victimization are so intertwined, the victim often doesn’t see themselves as a victim, and doesn’t think what’s happening to them is a crime because they see themselves as engaging in a criminal behavior. So that makes it even harder for a victim to go to law enforcement for help.

Sandra Morgan 21:19
And I really identify with that after a lot of conversations with survivors over the year, when we asked them, “Why didn’t you ask for help?” It’s like, “I thought I was the problem, I thought I was going get in trouble.” So that’s really helpful to see that, it’ll change how we have these conversations. Moving along in the findings, because I can never believe how fast our time goes, but were there some surprises?

Kaitlyn Zedalis 21:50
Yeah, so one of the surprising findings, and the reason we were able to come across this, is because of this action research model, we’re able to look at client’s entire records of their time with us. We have access to information that, in a more traditional research model, isn’t necessarily something that we would make a research question. One of these surprising findings was that 47% of the forced criminality victims identified as having at least one child by age 22. Just to really highlight how sort of staggering that number is, it’s compared to 18% of other youth who experienced any type of trafficking, and 14% of all the young people we serve. In most cases, they became a parent after the trafficking experience, and we know that because of the age at which the trafficking occurred. So this is something that, as far as we can tell, doesn’t occur in the literature anywhere else right now, so there’s really more research that’s needed. There’s some other research that’s been done, that’s shown in our research that we conducted at Covenant House New Jersey in 2017, parenting classes were identified among young people experiencing homelessness, who had also had a trafficking experience as a common need. There’s been other research that’s shown a relationship between high ACE scores and male involvement in teen pregnancy, between parenting young mothers and legal problems, between conduct disorder and adolescent pregnancy. So there’s enough research out there that suggests that this is more than an incidental relationship and that there may be similar root causes, but there really is a need for more research in this area, and we’re glad that because of our methodology, we were able to find something that maybe wouldn’t have otherwise been found.

Sandra Morgan 23:48
I love the fact that we’re casting vision for future research, because I know lots of students listen to this, and they don’t know what direction to start studying. So hopefully, someone’s going to pay attention to that. Okay, a few more of the findings. I didn’t quite understand the use of the word temporality of victimization and arrest. Can you expand on that and what you found?

Kaitlyn Zedalis 24:16
Yeah, so in the other research that had been conducted in 2017, and this is part of what helped frame this research project, was that we found that there was a relationship between history of arrest and trafficking experiences, but all we knew was that there was a relationship between them. So we didn’t know if the trafficking was coming before or after the arrest, and we felt that that was important to know, because it could really offer some opportunities for prevention, if we could learn more about that. There was information about the timing of the arrest in relation to the trafficking experience for 12 youth who had experienced arrest and forced criminality. None of those 12 were identified by law enforcement. So none of them were identified during their trafficking experience, and none were identified as a victim by law enforcement after their trafficking experience. Only three of those 12 were even possibly charged for the underlying forced crime, we don’t know for sure, but based on the timing, it’s possible. But nine had experienced force criminality before their arrest, and at least eight of those nine, as I said, it was unrelated to the forced crime. There was one who had a juvenile charge that was likely related to the forced criminality, but because of sealed records, we couldn’t know for sure. All nine were between the ages of seven and 15 at the time of their trafficking, including four who were under the age of 10. So really, what we learned is that the forced criminality was occurring before this person was interacting with law enforcement. They weren’t being identified by law enforcement as a victim during their trafficking experience, or after their trafficking experience. They were just remaining kind of undiscovered by law enforcement.

Sandra Morgan 26:20
Wow lots more to unpack there, but let’s go into how homelessness was an entry way to criminalization.

Kaitlyn Zedalis 26:30
So the average age that the victims of forced criminality first left home was about 14 and a half, and 67% had had periods of unsheltered homelessness. What we found is that of the victims who experienced forced criminality before their arrest, their initial arrests, were predominantly for low level crimes of poverty. So things like loitering, fare evasion, theft, trespassing, disorderly conduct, simple assault, driving offenses. It was very often low level crimes of poverty that we’re resulting in their first interaction with the legal system. However, these charges lead to an accumulation of later charges and warrants with increasingly severe consequences and unresolved warrants that resulted in increasing consequences. So they were kept being criminalized and the poverty was really their entry into the criminal justice system, while they were remaining undetected as a victim.

Sandra Morgan 27:33
Wow. Okay, so all of this is a lot to process, but if you can give us a capsule of how to look at this for how we might practice now, some recommendations, because we want to use this action research as a way of improving, in real time, what we’re doing right now.

Kaitlyn Zedalis 28:02
So I think one thing that we found is that when victims had access to free, high quality legal representation, which they received at Covenant House, New Jersey, their charges were largely dismissed. All of them had their charges dropped or significantly reduced. So this is really evidence of the importance of high quality legal representation for those who are charged with low level crimes of poverty. It’s also important, I think, that we really think of increasing the awareness of labor trafficking by forced criminality. The crime is often undetected, victims don’t see themselves as victims and often don’t report their experiences, especially to law enforcement. This is definitely a type of trafficking that doesn’t get as much public or media attention, though we were very excited forced criminality was mentioned in the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report this year, which we thought was great, so it is moving in that direction, but just continuing to increase awareness of forced criminality. I also think that screening is a really important tool in the work against forced criminality, if we can identify victims and connect them to services before they enter the criminal justice system, we can really make it a big impact there. As well as, the other thing we think about is how can we increase our identification of unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness? I mentioned the average first age they left home was around 14 and a half, so how can we identify young people who are experiencing homelessness? We know that students experiencing homelessness in schools, identification among that population is often low. By identifying those who are experiencing homelessness, we can really try to prevent some of these experiences and connect young people to the services they need. The other thing I just want to highlight is there’s really a need for additional research in this area. As far as we can tell, this is one of the only research articles about labor trafficking by forced criminality, that’s been done domestically, and it is such an important area to get more research on.

Sandra Morgan 30:22
I totally agree. I love that, and I’m going put a link to the screening tool that you mentioned previously, here, the QYIT tool. So those of you listening, there is something to start with now. Then as we wrap up, how can we be more positioned with our policy recommendations?

Kaitlyn Zedalis 30:46
So I think making sure that victims have access to victim of crime compensation is important. Forced criminality and poverty are really linked, so if we can connect victims to funds, we can maybe prevent some of that criminalization process that can be happening. We want to make sure that there’s not barriers to accessing victims of crime compensation, like open warrants, creating barriers, or sometimes even requiring disclosure to law enforcement as a barrier to accessing victim of crime compensation. I think ensuring access to those funds in a way that really simplifies the process is important. We also really highlight the importance of safe harbor laws for labor trafficking. There’s been good work done in this area for Safe Harbor laws for sex trafficking, but making sure that someone can’t be prosecuted for a crime that they’re forced to commit in a trafficking situation, and I think the other one is creating diversion programs for low level crimes of poverty. We know there are other things going on underneath those crimes of poverty, and so creating diversion programs and getting people to the services that they need, rather than prosecuting them is important.

Sandra Morgan 31:00
And that is so relevant to how our juvenile justice system is designed to be rehabilitative, not punitive. Finding ways to build that and strengthen that in our communities and our separate systems is going to help with the entire landscape for our youth who are so vulnerable to this. Kaitlyn, I just want to keep talking but our time is up, and I am so grateful for your work. This won’t be our last conversation. I’m going to follow you. Any links that you have, we’re going to share in our show notes, and I just cannot thank you enough for the work that you’re doing.

Kaitlyn Zedalis 32:57
Thank you so much, Sandie, and thank you again for having me.

Sandra Morgan 33:01
Thank you so much, Kaitlyn. Now, we’re inviting you to take the next step to go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. That’s where you can find resources that we’ve mentioned in this conversation, and so much more. The anti-human trafficking certificate program is here, and if you haven’t visited the site before, that’s a great first step. Become a subscriber and you’ll receive an email with the show notes when a new episode drops. Of course, I’ll be back in two weeks for our next conversation.

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Kirsten Foot and Kenneth Andrew as the three discuss the role of Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking (BEST) in equipping businesses with the tools and resources necessary to end trafficking.

Kirsten Foot

Kirsten Foot, PhD, is the CEO and Executive Director of Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking (BEST) which equips employers to counter human trafficking, and provides pathways to safe employment for trafficking survivors. BEST offers employers video based and in-person training services, consulting on anti-trafficking strategy, and advisement on communicating about human trafficking with employees, customers, vendors and the public. Kirsten Foot was also a guest on Episode #111 of the Ending Human Trafficking podcast.

Kenneth Andrew

Kenneth Andrew, is Vice President for global, small, medium, and channel partners with Microsoft Advertising, and his career has taken him to many parts of the world. He seeks to leverage his abilities to drive positive change in the business world and beyond. As a member of BEST Board of Directors since 2018, he helps businesses interrupt and prevent human trafficking.

Key Points

• Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking (BEST) plays a critical role in equipping employers to counter human trafficking, providing training through both video-based and in-person training services.
• BEST aims to prepare employers to not only identify and understand trafficking, but interrupt it safely.
• Employers are also provided with communication strategies for discussing trafficking in the workplace.
• Situational awareness is an integral part in the process of interrupting trafficking. BEST strives to encourage employers to take effective action and ask those who might be victimized the important questions that allow them to disclose what they might be facing.

Resources

• Ensure Justice
• BEST
• Episode #111 – Collaborating Against Human Trafficking
• Uyghur Anti- Human Trafficking Prevention Act
• California Supply Chain Transparency Act
• BEST Training Center

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:00
It’s time to register for the annual Ensure Justice Conference at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice. The conference is always the first Friday and Saturday of March, that way you can make it a recurring event in your calendar! 2024, It’s March first and second, we’re just a couple of months away. Our theme is Keeping Our Children Safe Online. We will explore the issues; What is happening online? What are the risks for our children at this stage of their development? What can we do as parents, caregivers, teachers, community members? Our speakers include many of our podcast expert guests, and we are partnering with our Orange County Department of Education. Check out our website for more info and don’t miss the early bird rates. Go on over to gcwj.org/ensurejustice. Right now, there is a virtual option for our global listeners, as well as special rates for college students. Join us to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference at Ensure Justice, March 1st and 2nd, 2024.

You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode #310: What’s the best way to equip business leaders? My name is Sandie Morgan and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. It is so great to have Kirsten and Kenneth from BEST with us today. Kirsten Foot, PhD, is the CEO and Executive Director of Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking (BEST) which equips employers to counter human trafficking, and provides pathways to safe employment for trafficking survivors. BEST offers employers video based and in-person training services, consulting on anti-trafficking strategy, and advisement on communicating about human trafficking with employees, customers, vendors and the public. She was also my guest on Episode #111 of our podcast. Her colleague Kenneth Andrew, is Vice President for global, small, medium, and channel partners with Microsoft Advertising, and his career has taken him to many parts of the world. He seeks to leverage his abilities to drive positive change in the business world and beyond. As a member of BEST Board of Directors since 2018, he helps businesses interrupt and prevent human trafficking. I am so glad to welcome both of you to the show today.

Kirsten Foot 3:46
Thank you, Sandie.

Kenneth Andrew 3:48
Glad to be here.

Sandra Morgan 3:49
Kirsten, it’s been quite a while since we’ve been together, but we used to hang out a lot, maybe not in person, but particularly online and on the phone. I especially remember when we recorded episode #111 because your amazing research and book on collaboration came out at that time, and I’m just curious how you moved from writing and research in the academic world, to being a nonprofit CEO.

Kirsten Foot 4:30
It’s a recent change, it’s one I’m still catching up in all different levels psychologically, but I am motivated to be leading BEST of all things, because BEST does what I have been advocating through my research for over 15 years now. BEST works across sectors, across the private sector, public sector, the nonprofit sector, to catalyze much more strategic, effective interaction between organizational leaders, against human trafficking. So after months of hearing about BEST’s search for a new CEO, literally three invitations in I realized, I really should consider applying, and so I did. Kenneth could tell you more of the story since he’s on the board, but I realized through a very rigorous interview process that BEST was incredibly well organized, and highly effective, and that I would really have joy in helping multiply its efforts and lead it in its new stage. I’m just four months in, but I’m loving it, and I see all kinds of potential for the kinds of things that BEST can do, and I want to help that happen.

Sandra Morgan 5:40
I’m eager to see the application of the principles in your book on collaboration, which we still use in our anti-human trafficking certificate courses here at Vanguard. So we appreciate your knowledge, your insight, and now we’re going to watch you as you lead in this new sphere, so congratulations.

Kirsten Foot 6:06
Wow, thank you.

Sandra Morgan 6:07
Kenneth, as a board member of BEST, you’ve been in this for a while, you also represent the business community in many ways. Can you give us a little better idea of the mission and vision of BEST?

Kenneth Andrew 6:28
Yeah, absolutely. First, I should also say how delighted we are as a board to have Kirsten on board really helping us lead through this next chapter, because this really is a pivotal moment for us, as this is one of the fastest kind of growing crimes we have in society today. So it was really important for us to find a leader that could kind of champion the cause, and really drive our mission forward. Really, when we think about our mission, BEST’s role is really to align and equip leaders to use the power of business to prevent human trafficking. So what that means is, how do we leverage the business community? How do we partner with them, train, enable, drive awareness, of this as a societal issue? And how do we equip them to be able to not just sort of observe or sort of understand the issue, but to be able to interrupt, and to do that in a safe way? That’s really what BEST is trying to do, is look at ways to equip the business community with the tools, and resources, and training to be able to identify, interrupt, and then take action to really support these victims.

Sandra Morgan 7:46
So why do you believe that businesses need to be proactive?

Kenneth Andrew 7:54
Look, fundamentally, human trafficking is an abuse of human rights, and it’s happening in many places hidden in plain sight sometimes, and business leaders have a number of options. They can ignore it, and therefore, potentially, unwittingly enable it. Or, they can aim to interrupt in a way that can lead to preventing it. I think businesses have that sort of responsibility to take action. I also think, sort of ignorance and complicity, even unintentional, could be costly to businesses. There’s financial costs, due to fines or lawsuits, of people who have been victims through their services, or product, or their business. There’s also revenue impact that could come from reputational harm or lost businesses. Imagine, do you want to stay at a hotel that you know, that has been somehow unwittingly involved in some form of human trafficking challenge or issue? Would that not question their security, their measures, their morality as a business, honestly? In a world of social media, and how information is so pervasive and so quickly shared and spread, businesses need to form a position on injustice and how they can manage and mitigate potentially negative sort of situations. I work at Microsoft and one of the reasons I work at Microsoft is I am proud of their mission, and I am proud of the social stance and position that Microsoft takes on a number of issues facing our society today. So integrity, social responsibility, equity, and the well being of employees and customers and clients, is a reason why people come to work at a company and it’s also the reason why they stay at a company. So I think it’s really important for businesses to show up as a leader, and encourage people to see that they have principles, and they have ethics, and they have very clear measures in place to prevent issues like this. So I think people want to align to organizational practices with stated values, they want to improve employee morale and loyalty, and by taking a stance and being very clear on their social responsibility area, I think is another reason why businesses should care.

Sandra Morgan 10:39
Well, I just wanted to jump in here because about a year and a half ago we had Ambassador John Richmond here, at Vanguard, and we had a business forum. He gave us sort of a look into the future of what was emerging, and this sense that the movement is beginning to place the onus on business leaders, you know, with the passage of the Uyghur Anti-Human Trafficking Prevention Act, now you’ve got guidelines that are legislated. Instead of investigators, law enforcement, department of labor, having to have all the burden on them, businesses have a burden of proof on them as well. So how do you see best intervening, or actually enhancing that transition within the movement? Maybe both of you could give an answer.

Kirsten Foot 11:47
Well, I’d say to that, that with the passage of the California Supply Chain Transparency Act,

Sandra Morgan 11:53
I love that yes, back to 2010.

Kirsten Foot 11:57
And the recent revision, right, that is strengthening that, states across the US and many other countries are recognizing, of course, the the original version of that act required a declaration of whatever a business was or wasn’t doing, but that is changing. With the act that you mentioned, Sandie, businesses are now increasingly going to be expected to take responsibility. I would say most business leaders, from my perspective, want to do the right thing, and BEST assumes good intent when businesses come to BEST with interest in and ideas about what can be done. There are a variety of ways that BEST can equip businesses to engage proactively, safely and effectively in countering human trafficking, and it begins with thinking about what a business’s overall strategy is going to be. So it is really not sufficient to just say, “Oh, we’re going to do a supply chain check through some third party vendor and just check a box.” And it is also not sufficient to say, “Well, we’re gonna pop and play this brief curriculum for our employees, and they’re going to watch it once and that’s it.” There really needs to be an overall organizational strategy of what is this organization’s risk, what are its opportunities? Basically, a SWOT analysis. What are our strengths, our weaknesses, our opportunities or threats in relation to human trafficking, and what will our organization strategy be, whether independently as a unique organization, or as part of an industry? Because increasing their industry level efforts that are underway, and I think the legislation is helping with that. Certainly the hotel industry, some other types of of industries, transit, there’s some really exciting things happening as industry leaders, not just individual businesses. Consider what our overall strategy needs to be. But that also then immediately calls into question, how are we going to communicate about this? Because training employees or equipping employees to recognize indicators of trafficking, all of which BEST does, all of that are are forms of communication. So again, Sandie, back to why did I leave a discipline of communication and academic to join BEST? Well, because countering human trafficking is about communicating about it, and business leaders really need help thinking through “How are we going to communicate about this in a constructive, effective, equitable way? How are we going to advance our core values as a business in how we communicate, regarding human trafficking? And how are we going to do that with employees in particular ways, with customers or vendors in other ways, and with the various aspects of public audiences that are listening to us, that are accessing our property, that are buying our goods or services?” Those are all external audiences for organizations for which communication needs to be carefully crafted. So one thing BEST does in the beginning point, helping business leaders plan a strategy and think through how they’re going to communicate in that strategy, to each of these different kinds of groups of people that are core to their business or external members of the public that are really important. For example, sex trafficking can be really difficult to talk about while in the work environment, because of taboos, because of sensationalism in the media, because of all different kinds of things, but other aspects of trafficking, labor, trafficking and exploitation that’s been historically grounded in a particular region of the world, or a particular type of work, type of industry that also can be very sensitive, very difficult to talk about, and BEST can help with a communication strategy, and some actual guidance on how to do that communicating. BEST also offers a really fantastic set of training opportunities for businesses, and I get to brag about it, because I didn’t build any of these. I’m stepping into it and helping improve them, and help get them out better. But BEST’s video trainings are a core piece of what it does, embedded in in-person, multi level trainings, whenever possible. Those video trainings themselves though, are really distinct in the field of trainings for businesses, because they’re story based. They’re first-person narrative based, they’ve drawn in multiple voices, diverse people that are experts in, are affected by human trafficking, sex trafficking, and labor trafficking in any industry and in specific industries, and that makes them really memorable and very impactful for the people listening to them. The purpose of all those training videos and the larger curriculum that goes around, and the kinds of in person events that BEST’s staff hold for businesses, to help train trainers, and answer questions, and help businesses advance beyond just introduction to human-trafficking, is all about equipping people in their workplace, to be able to identify indicators of trafficking behavior, not racial profiling, not gender profiling, but indicators of possible force, fraud, or coercion, as they may be encountering in the context of their work, and then know how to report that safely and effectively, to interrupt it with the intent that enough interruption is going to actually prevent it for that business, in that workplace. That’s the essence of what BEST does for businesses and it’s really, really impactful. There are awareness raising materials, there are other pieces of communication that all go around that, but I’m trying to convey the core of it.

Sandra Morgan 17:30
Right. So we’ll put a link directly to the part on your website, about “Train Your Staff,” I think that’s brilliant. I’ve heard you say safety, or safely, three times since we started this conversation. Why is that an important aspect of any kind of anti-human trafficking training?

Kirsten Foot 17:55
I’ll let Kenneth take a first point talking on that from his perspective within business, and then Kenneth, I’ll elaborate around that. But let’s hear what you have to say about those things in relation to to businesses being proactive about trafficking.

Kenneth Andrew 18:12
Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. So to my point around, how do you equip your staff to be able to deal with, to be able to observe, interrupt, and then take action, you have to do that in a way that it not only protects the brand, or the company, the business that you’re working for, but also that you are protecting the safety of that individual. So that person who is stepping in, if they see something happening, they see something that isn’t right, they have been trained upon this, BEST helps provide a very clear sort of set of next steps, in order to actually take action in a safe way for that employee, for that safe way for that business that they represent, but also the safe way for the victim as well. I think those are the three elements that we need to make sure of, is we often feel like we should jump into a situation and we feel we’re doing the best thing, but sometimes our actions have unintended consequences if we don’t follow the right steps and procedures, particularly in the sex trafficking space. There are people who are often controlling the victims. These people can be dangerous, these people can be armed, there can be all sorts of challenges and issues and if you as an employee step into that situation, you need to be equipped with the knowledge to know how to act. Safety is really really, really important.

Sandra Morgan 19:48
I recall being in a rideshare, recently, this last summer when I was traveling, and the driver listened to me and my colleague as we were debriefing on the conference we’d just spoken at, and he had so many questions. Safety was at the core of that, because we told him “Don’t put on your cape and become the hero.” So Kirsten, how do you intervene in that and what would you say to people who are gig drivers?

Kirsten Foot 20:32
Well, and not just gig drivers, but anyone interfacing with the public, who is witnessing a situation where there may be a controller presence. In BEST training we use the term “controller” to refer to that person who is perhaps controlling someone else for the purpose of exploiting them. What may be apparent to an employee of a rideshare, or for hire, or any other type of industry, is that they may see an instance where there’s behavior actions being taken that are indicators of exploitation unfolding right in front of them, things that are threats, or actual physical violence, or a really overwhelming surveillance or power dynamic. A number of other things, I’m not going to go into all these indicators, but when someone in the context of their work observes that, the first question that BEST trains them to ask is, “Is there a controller present?” and if there is, BEST’s practice is to not insert oneself in the situation, but get out of the situation as soon as possible to alert law enforcement with the best information possible of the who, what, when, where. What cars were involved, what locations were involved, and if possible, in the situation if it is possible to communicate directly with a potential victim, apart from the controller. An important fundamental starting point question is just “Are you okay?”, because the answer to the question, “Are you okay?”, if asked when a potential victim is alone, could be “Yes, I’m just fine.” In which case, there’s not much that the employee can do, but if there’s any answer like, “I feel afraid,” or, “I don’t want to go back,” or, “Please don’t drop me off there,” or anything else, then that opens up a number of other questions and other options for the employee to take action on. But it is really, really important for the safety of the employee and the potential victim, that there be a situational awareness regarding the presence or proximity of a controller, and that there’s a different process of action needed if a controller is present, versus if a controller is not. I will put the caveat here that if it appears to an employee that a minor is involved, that the person who might be being victimized might be a minor, that requires an immediate call to 911, as soon as it’s safe for the employee to do that, or somehow communicate to someone else to call 911. There’s a variety of ways that an employee can think through how would it be possible to get a hold of 911, with a minor involved, without endangering oneself as the employee or that minor. So these are some things that BEST gets into in more advanced training and in question answer sessions with employers, because it depends on the industry, on the type of workplace. Is someone in a vehicle and moving, are they stopped, are they in a store location? There’s lots of different scenarios there. But I hope that starts to give you an indication of the priority of safety for employees as they move from being bystanders because unfortunately, the evidence over decades here is that in many cases, human trafficking has played out under the watch of people at work, in various industries, just doing their job, not necessarily recognizing what they’re seeing, or if they recognize it, having no idea what to do, how to respond effectively and safely. That’s what BEST is trying to turn around and again, there’s a lot of different situational awareness components to that. But fundamentally, it’s about taking effective action in the moment, with someone who might be being victimized by asking them in private, “Are you okay?”, and of course, the follow up question, “Is there a need that I could help you with?”, if they express that need.

Sandra Morgan 24:25
Okay, and Kenneth, do you want to add anything there?

Kenneth Andrew 24:29
No, I think Kirsten covered the main points.

Sandra Morgan 24:33
Then let me go just a little deeper with this. You talked about an employee deciding what to do in the moment, and I know from way back when I first started working with women around safety issues and reducing violence against women, we taught them to be prepared. They had to practice what they were going to do. I think all of us girls, we all learn to walk with our keys between our fingers. Now we’ve got a fob, I don’t know what to do about that, but my understanding with your training is that this actually feeds in to having policies in place. When we operationalize our intent in a policy, that takes the onus off of the employee, because this is what my employer has laid out for me. I think that’s an important element and I see, Kenneth, you’re shaking your head yes. Do you want to comment and how you see that from a business perspective?

Kenneth Andrew 25:54
Yeah, I mean, I’m just reflecting because only last night, I took my standards of business conduct training at Microsoft here, which talks very much about the ethics of doing business, how you need to show up, and how we all have accountability as employees to live the values and brand of the business that we work for. We’re all representatives, and therefore, our actions matter, and they mean something. We do have to take actions, and so yes, I think by influencing policy and guidance, employee handbooks, all of that work makes a very clear statement to the employee. We expect you to uphold these values, and we expect you to take action, so I think it’s really important.

Sandra Morgan 26:42
So we mentioned sex trafficking, I want to address labor trafficking. More and more, we’re seeing unaccompanied minors that are in poultry processing factories, or hotel cleaning, or office business cleaning, and labor trafficking victims are often doing things that are legal, so you’re not going to interrupt it because it’s something that is a real job. Identifying people who aren’t happy in their job, I have to tell you, when I’m traveling, I don’t see a lot of hotel cleaning staff whistling, “Oh, I’m happy to be at work,” but that doesn’t mean that they’re trafficking victims. So how do we address interrupting labor trafficking from the business perspective?

Kirsten Foot 27:40
So there are a common set of indicators that can point to, or help us recognize, when we’re seeing instances of force, fraud, or deception, or coercion, playing out in worker interactions, right in front of us, and that’s true across industries, but it is the case that people engaging in work where they’re interfacing with the public, are more likely to encounter situations where they get to observe that firsthand. So there’s all kinds of stories, Sandie, as you know, of an individual who’s been compelled to work without pay, without freedom to move, finding a way to let somebody know and ask for help. But BEST training is helping employees notice that proactively and ask the question, “Are you okay?” So just one recent example from an organization BEST partners with, a transit employee was in a transit station, saw a person looking confused, bruised, and very distressed. They asked the question, “Are you okay?”, and the person said, “No, I have no idea where I am, how I got here, or what’s going to happen.” That led to a conversation in which the person disclosed exploitative labor over many weeks, had left them completely unsure of everything, hungry, exhausted, no idea where they are, and the transit worker knew enough to report that well, which connected the person with services in the language that’s their home language, and gave them access to a whole bunch of resources to help them find a path out of that exploitation. Thanks to that transit worker who recognized the signs of distress that could have indicated a lot of things, but could also have indicated, in fact did indicate labor trafficking, and knew what to do to respond and connect that person with the services that they needed to find their way out of the exploitation and literally out of that transit station, into a safe place.

Oh my goodness, and that story brings us back to why. When you who were introducing the mission and vision. Kenneth, I loved that you landed on a victim centered approach. That’s why we’re doing this, because people do not deserve to be exploited or become slaves. I wish we had more time, we’re going to have to do this again, Kirsten, I love this new direction in your leadership. Kenneth, it is a delight to meet you, and as we wind up, I want our listeners to go to the show notes, and click on the link, and look around yourself. Then I’m going to give you each 30 seconds for your parting words, and Kenneth, you get to go first.

Kenneth Andrew 29:56
Well, thank you, and thank you to your listeners, because by listening to this, you’re also increasing your awareness and you can potentially be that person that steps in to interrupt and intervene, and be that voice. What we hear most often from victims is “People think I’m invisible,” and that moment of connection with another human is so important. Looking at someone who you can see is clearly suffering and saying, “Are you okay?” matters, it really, really matters. That’s our mission, BEST’s goal is to enable you all and employees of businesses to be able to observe, interrupt, and take action safely.

Kirsten Foot 31:30
So I will add to this, that BEST exists to equip businesses to not just comply with whatever regulation their industry faces, or whatever a minimum standard is, but to actually lead and shine in their industry, as a leader, in doing the right thing for the right reasons, and to reap all the benefits of that. To reduce their employee turnover, increase their employee loyalty, to reduce their risk of liability, and to do it because it’s the right thing to do and this is a moment for businesses to differentiate themselves as leaders in a way that is going to accrue all kinds of benefit to them, and they’re doing the right thing as businesses within their sector, as well as to the members of their local community and their international community that matter to them. We believe business leaders want to act with integrity and do the right thing, and we want to equip them to do that. There’s all kinds of great examples of business leaders already doing that, and there’s room for many more. So BEST wants to be available to any business leader that wants to help its organization lead in this area.

Sandra Morgan 32:41
I’m delighted to have had you both here today and I’m looking forward to following you. I believe that this is a concrete approach to more than awareness for businesses, who are literally poised in the workplace where rrafficking victims are often, as Kenneth said, often feel invisible. So thank you both for coming and I will hope to have you back. Thanks.

Kenneth Andrew 33:17
Thank you so much.

Kirsten Foot 33:19
Thank you, Sandie.

Sandra Morgan 33:20
I’m so grateful that Kirsten and Kenneth joined us for this conversation. There were so many points that made me think of questions people have asked me about how business leaders can become part of the solution, how they can join the movement in meaningful ways, not just writing a check. So if you are like me, and you think of someone, please invite them to join our community by sharing this podcast episode, either through an email or on your social media. Recently, several of our community of listeners have posted their favorite episodes on their social media so their community can also learn with us, from the experts and field practitioners that are our guests on this podcast. If you’re new here, go on over to endinghumantrafficking.org. You can find resources, links to things mentioned in this conversation, and learn about our anti-human trafficking certificate program here at Vanguard University. Please join us again in two weeks. See you then.