The Global Center for Women & Justice recently hosted the Ensure Justice Conference, the Center’s annual conference to help people study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in bringing justice to women and girls. Sandra Morgan, the Director of the Global Center for Women & Justice and Dave Stachowiak, one of the Center’s board members, discuss lessons from the conference and how we can best implement those lessons.

Transcript

Dave: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, this is episode number 25 airing on March 30th, 2012. Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, my name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie: And I’m Sandie Morgan.

Dave: And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, we have been certainly working hard in ending human trafficking especially over the last few weeks because just a few weeks ago was Vanguard’s Global Center for Women and Justice annual conference and we are here today to share some of the results and some of the knowledge and some of the conversation and dialogue that came out of that conference for those who are listening across the globe who obviously weren’t able to attend it in person hopefully can get a small piece of what we were able to do at the conference here.

Sandie: I’ll tell you Dave, Ensure Justice 2012 was absolutely amazing, the highlights and the takeaways, we could spend hours talking about it.

Dave: And we had a great turnout this year too.

Sandie: Oh yeah, and they came from a lot of different walks of life, public and private and I think that was the big takeaway, we talk about collaboration, we talk about community engagement, we talk about public and private sectors, but it doesn’t work if the public sector professionals aren’t there, if the community volunteers and community resources aren’t there. So at Ensure Justice 2012, they came. The judge, the prosecutor, the probation officer, the juvenile detention supervisor, the child welfare and social service provider, the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force members and church leaders, after school program directors, non profit directors and everyday people and students of course, at Vanguard. The students are key in the whole process. But they came, and at the end of every plenary session, the conversation was about collaboration.

Dave: Yeah, it’s such an important topic that we’ve talked about so many times on this podcast and in fact one of the sessions I facilitated at the conference was about that fourth key in the ending human trafficking and persons report. And we talked about that fourth ‘p’ and the importance of partnership and we often haven’t talked about our partnership with the business community and really raising awareness around this issue and really partnering from the standpoint of resources and tools and knowledge and because of our ability to engage in that conversation I do think people, I hope, walked away with some new perspective on new ways to engage not just the non-profit world and not just the faith based community, which has been wonderful supporters of fighting this issue but people in the business world who care deeply about this issue, many of them, so that was really exciting to see and  be part of those conversations. I know that you have a tremendous number of notes for us and things for us to take away, so let’s jump in.

Sandie: Oh my goodness, well I am glad that you said that about partnership though, because I think at the beginning of any overview of what we are going to do, we have to start with assessing what is our own expertise and what resources do we bring to the table? We can’t just say oh I want to do that, unless we have the resources to do that. For several reasons, one of course, we are going to end up in big trouble, but secondly, if we say I want to do something and we say I am going to do it and then we don’t have the expertise and we don’t have the resources, we overpromise, under-deliver and we compromise our reputation in the community and we make it less attractive for the public sector to engage with us because oh, we’ve done that before and it didn’t work out so well, they said they were going to do this and they didn’t show up, so we want to keep that in mind in any effort, on collaboration and community engagement, so if you are interested in more details about the conference, if you are interesting in ordering CDs or DVDs from anything we talk about now, that will be available on our website at GCWJ.vanguard.edu.

Dave: And we probably should mention before we get started here, Sandie, is if you do have any questions or comments about anything we do today and of course any questions on human trafficking prevention efforts in general, Sandie of course has tremendous expertise at the Center at Vanguard. You can reach out to the Center for Women and Justice here at Vanguard University anytime at (714) 966-6361, and if you don’t reach us live, leave a message and we will get back to you. We also, if you’d like us to respond to your question here on the show and you can also email out to us at GCWJ.vanguard.edu, and of course that stands for the Global Center for Women and Justice.

Sandie: Great, so we started our day with a panel from Las Vegas that works with this particular population of commercially sexually exploited girls, Esther Brown is the victim’s service person and Craig Christianson supervises the detention facility and they brought with them a considerable amount of expertise based on experience and we kept on hearing over and over again, we need a safe house, we need a better place, we need a way to treat these kids like victims but also keep them in a place where they are safe and se...