In this episode, Dr. Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak discuss the Biblical and historical story of Joseph and how it relates to human trafficking survivors today. Sandie observes how we can integrate an understanding of this ancient case study into how we fight against human trafficking and respond to survivors in our communities.

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Transcript

Dave: [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 191, Joseph: An Ancient Human Trafficking Case Study.

Production Credits: [00:00:10] Produced by Innovate Learning., maximizing human potential.

Dave: [00:00:30] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie: [00:00:35] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave: [00:00:38] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. And as you expect on each episode of the Ending Human Trafficking podcast, Sandie we’re taking everyone to Broadway today, right? I think that’s what you told me.

Sandie: [00:00:53] Yeah that’s right. That’s right and you’re going to start us off with the theme song.

Dave: [00:00:57] Go go go, Joseph. You know what they say. Hang on now Joseph you’ll make it someday. Sha la la Joseph. That’s the one we’re doing, right?

Sandie: [00:01:06] That’s it. That’s it. Wow. How many of you remember coloring the coat of many colors from the story of Joseph.?

Dave: [00:01:15] Yes of course of course. I remember my brother singing that soundtrack all around the house. He was Joseph in production in our local community.

Sandie: [00:01:23] Oh my goodness. Well you know this month, every year at our church I’m asked to speak on Freedom Sunday. January is our National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. And so, I just came back from Istanbul last week and then on Sunday was able to bring awareness and understanding about some of the issues around human trafficking and use a case study from the Book of Genesis. And that’s where Joseph comes from people. He was not dreamed up in a graphic artist studio. He was a historical figure.

Dave: [00:02:10] And interesting about this story a lot of us are familiar with it either because of our Sunday School curriculum or because we’ve seen the Broadway show and the popularized version of it. But one of the really interesting things about this story is, although it is an ancient story, how many similarities there are with some of the things we see in modern-day trafficking, aren’t there?

Sandie: [00:02:34] Absolutely. And I think one of the things, especially in our faith-based communities, we look at the justice side of fighting human trafficking and we don’t look back at our own historical connection to institutionalized slavery. And when we go back to the very beginning and we’re not actually going to start in Genesis 1, but if we look in Genesis 16 we see a really famous story about a slave named Hagar, who was a slave to Sarah. Sarah was the wife of the patriarch Abraham. And Hagar runs away because she’s been mistreated. And the Genesis 16 says that the angel of the Lord comes to her and says, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?’ And when I first read that, and I am always looking for great stories that illustrate issues around slavery and how we deal with people who have experienced that kind of trauma. And people often talk about how for Hagar to be seen, to be noticed was so, important in her struggle. And the way that that particular phrase is broken down into where have you been and where are you going, is a good way to look at a case study on human trafficking. So, I’m going to use those two questions to look at the story of Joseph.

Dave: [00:04:18] Where have you been and where are you going.

Sandie: [00:04:20] Where have you been and where are you going. Absolutely. And so, many times we hear counselors, we hear therapists say to people that they want to help coach in working with victims of any kind of trauma or emotional distress, don’t ask them what’s wrong with you. Ask what’s happened, what’s happened to bring this to where it is today? So, we’re going to look at Joseph, and unlike the musical, it doesn’t happen in an hour and 30 minutes.

Dave: [00:04:56] Indeed.

Sandie: [00:04:57] In fact, Genesis 37-50 covers a span of 93 years. And it’s so, interesting in the story because we get a lot of detail about Joseph in 14 chapters. It starts off and actually says he was 17 years old when he told his brothers about his dreams. And what you know from either your Broadway experiences, musicals and TV and all of that, or from your studies in your Sunday school class that you were mentioning that Joseph had dreams where he told his brothers that someday they were going to bow down to him. Right? So, you’ve got to ask where did that come from? And one of the things that I’ve noticed about a lot of survivors that I’ve talked to they have had dreams that made them very vulnerable to being trafficked. We sometimes think that it’s the weakest that become trafficking victims. But in the last couple of years in going to Greece and working with refugees escaping violence, what I saw with the 16, 17, 18-year-old young men and young women is they had a mission- they wanted to make something of their lives, they wanted to be important in helping their families. And so, they would take risks because of those dreams. And if someone offered them a position, a job they based on those dreams of success and a future they often took risks and were very courageous that ended very badly. And so, if you really asked Joseph where you’ve been, and we look at his history we can see that there were some family problems that were more than just about the dreams though. He was the first-born son of Jacob’s second wife. And you have to go back, and you read all these stories and you find out that Jacob had worked to ear...