Cecilia Gonzalez joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to talk about the ten years she spent in an abusive relationship that started at fourteen, and how she now teaches teens to catch the first yellow flag before it happens to them.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction

About Cecilia Gonzalez

Cecilia Gonzalez is the Human Trafficking Prevention Coordinator at Higher Ground Youth and Family Services in Orange County. Her students know her as Ceci. She is part of a team that delivers near peer prevention in local middle and high schools, teaching from lived experience rather than from a textbook, and she builds her presentations around quotes and stories that teens recognize from their own lives. She entered an abusive relationship at fourteen with an older partner and stayed in it for ten years, a decade she now uses to show students how control can arrive disguised as protection. She left at twenty-four, when her oldest daughter was two months old. Today she is raising three daughters, and she talks with students about la tóxica, love bombing, the silent treatment, and the rights every young person has: to feel safe at home, to be a kid, and to be loved in a healthy way.

Key Points

• Control often arrives in the language of protection, which is why it survives the first look. Ceci's partner came to her soccer practices to walk her home safely, and that became the reason she should stop playing.

• The silent treatment is the first flag most teens miss. Someone who cares will have the conversation about what went wrong; withholding it is a punishment, and it shows up long before anything physical does.

• An apology that arrives as a gift is one more turn of the cycle. He broke her phone whenever he got angry and replaced it within hours with one her parents could not have afforded, which made the next break easier to absorb.

• Time in the wrong relationship is the cost that compounds. Ceci tells students, "If you get on the wrong bus, make sure you get off on the first stop," because she stayed on from fourteen to twenty-four.

• Blame does its damage by moving the rules off the record. Once she was reading his face for permission he never had to forbid anything out loud, and she started deciding for herself not to see her friends.

• A teen's playlist is a way in, and calling it bad music closes the door. Ceci wanted her mother to ask why she loved the sad, heartbroken songs she played loud enough to get told to turn them down.

• Home sets the first model of love, so prevention starts before any relationship does. Ceci grew up without a picture of what affection looks like and assembled one from television, the same gap she now watches teens fill with Euphoria.

• Teens act on rights before they act on warning signs. Ceci says the first two skills would have been lost on her at fourteen, but "Hey, Ceci, you have rights" would have landed: the right to feel safe at home, to be a kid, and to be loved in a healthy way.

Resources

• Higher Ground Youth & Family Services

• Higher Ground's Human Trafficking Prevention Program (HTPP)

• Global Center for Women and Justice

• Safe Communities, Safe Kids (GCWJ, Samueli Foundation grant)

• Lil Wayne, "How to Love" (official music video)

Leanne McCallum Desselle joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore what happens when a hurricane knocks out the very systems built to catch trafficking — from a child abuse hotline down for three weeks after Hurricane Ida to the disaster recovery jobs where exploitation quietly takes hold.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction

About Leanne McCallum Desselle

Leanne McCallum Desselle is a Research Analyst and Training & Technical Assistance Provider at RTI International, a role she has held since August 2022. She spent nearly a decade in frontline anti-trafficking work in Louisiana, coordinating the Greater New Orleans Human Trafficking Task Force for more than three years and later managing a statewide child and youth trafficking initiative for the Louisiana Alliance of Children's Advocacy Centers. In 2018 she was appointed Chair of the Labor Trafficking Committee for the Louisiana Governor's Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board. At RTI, she leads technical assistance for a U.S. Office for Victims of Crime initiative on child and youth trafficking outcomes and contributes to research on labor trafficking prosecutions and the effects of disasters on trafficking vulnerability. She holds a Master of Arts in International Studies, concentrating in Human Rights and Human Trafficking, from the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Linfield University.

Key Points

• Hurricane Katrina's Signal International case, in which hundreds of Indian guest workers were defrauded and trafficked into labor repairing Gulf oil rigs, became one of the largest labor trafficking settlements at the time and helped drive Louisiana's first designated federal anti-trafficking funding in 2007-2008.

• Housing instability is one of the biggest drivers of post-disaster trafficking risk — when people lose their community, school, and church, they become far more vulnerable to someone who says, "Don't worry, I'll take care of everything. I'll get you a job."

• Disasters disproportionately hit communities already made vulnerable by redlining, the historical practice of confining people of color and poor families to lower-lying land that's more exposed to flooding and severe weather.

• In interviews with 46 disaster and trafficking responders, foreign national day laborers doing disaster recovery work and isolated children in disrupted households emerged as two of the populations most vulnerable to exploitation after a storm.

• After Hurricane Ida, Louisiana's child abuse hotline — the mandated channel for reporting child trafficking — was down for at least three weeks, leaving responders with no way to report what they saw.

• Preparation has to happen before a disaster, not during one: without a plan already tested and rehearsed, coordinating a trafficking response becomes nearly impossible once phones, power, and staff are all unreachable at once.

• Louisiana responders found creative workarounds under pressure, from standing up a mobile forensic interview unit in a neighboring parish within 24 hours to running child trafficking response operations out of a partner's building after their own offices were destroyed.

• Leanne and her RTI colleagues sent their findings directly to the Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board, which is now recommending changes to state labor procurement practices to help prevent forced labor.

Resources

• RTI International

• Human Trafficking in the Wake of Natural Disasters (RTI research project page)

• Human Trafficking in the Wake of Natural Disasters: A Case Study of Preparedness and Response in Louisiana (Violence and Victims, 2026)

• The Intersection of Human Trafficking and Natural Disasters: A Scoping Review (Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 2024)

• Advancing the Field: Human Trafficking and Natural Disasters — Recommendations for the Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board

• Labor Trafficking in Construction During the Recovery and Reconstruction from a Natural Disaster (OPRE Report, Barrick & Pfeffer)

• Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board

• David, et al. v. Signal International, LLC, et al. (ACLU case page)

Dr. Xanthe Scharff joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to explore how displacement, missing documents, and unequal citizenship laws quietly raise the risk of trafficking, and why prevention starts long before a child is ever exploited.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction

About Dr. Xanthe Scharff

Dr. Xanthe Scharff is President and CEO of the Women's Refugee Commission, which she joined in June 2026 after more than two decades spanning humanitarian action, women's rights, journalism, philanthropy, and nonprofit leadership. She previously served as Managing Director for External Affairs and Editor-at-Large at The Freedom Fund, a global collaborative working to end modern slavery, where she helped elevate the work of hundreds of frontline anti-slavery organizations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Earlier, she co-founded The Fuller Project, a global newsroom reporting on women, served as Associate Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, and founded Advancing Girls' Education in Africa. She has raised more than $200 million for social-impact organizations and reported on Syrian refugees in Turkey, with earlier roles at CARE, Save the Children, the United Nations, and the World Bank.

Key Points

• The Freedom Fund gets money directly to the front lines, granting to almost 200 frontline organizations, and this past year 47% of them were led by survivors.

• Birth certificates are a frontline prevention tool: in Bangladesh, mothers believed they couldn't register children without the father's signature, until Freedom Fund's partners socialized a legal provision and registered over 400 children in about six months.

• Twenty-four countries still bar mothers from passing citizenship to their children on equal terms with fathers, and Syria's law can leave a returning mother's child stateless and more vulnerable to exploitation.

• When people lack legal status, they have no one to report abuse to, and fear of deportation keeps exploited workers silent even when wages are stolen or they are assaulted.

• Immigration and refugee are not synonyms; asylum seekers are specifically people seeking protection, a distinction that gets blurred as legal pathways narrow.

• Before larger plans, women's groups like Women of the Sun in Gaza and the West Bank made addressing trauma and supporting one another their first priority.

• A scholarship alone did not change Anesi's future; without cultural support structures, she left school for marriage after one year and later regretted it, showing that prevention takes more than money.

• Xanthe urges the field to listen to survivors: "Alternative livelihood activities in our community is what's going to protect our children," and "we don't need to wait until the children have been trafficked to do an intervention."

Resources

• Women's Refugee Commission

• At What Cost? Women-Led Organizations, Funding Cuts, and the Price of Survival (WRC & Refugees International report)

• Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights

• The Freedom Fund

• Refugees International

• The Fuller Project

• AGE Africa (Advancing Girls' Education in Africa)

Nina Alvarez joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to unpack a question raised after The New York Times published images from Figueroa Street: was legal consent enough to prevent harm? Together they explore the ethical duty of care journalists owe survivors, the lasting life of images, and why covering trafficking responsibly takes more than good intentions.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction: welcoming journalist Nina Alvarez

About Nina Alvarez

Nina Alvarez is a journalist, documentarian, video photographer, and the CBS Assistant Professor of International Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. She has spent more than twenty-five years reporting breaking news, feature stories, radio reports, broadcast segments, and long-form documentaries around the world.

Alvarez began her career at ABC News, working on the documentary series Turning Point before covering the southeast U.S. and Latin America from ABC's Miami Bureau and helping establish the network's Mexico City Bureau in 1997. Her work has aired on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Good Morning America, Nightline, and 20/20, earning three national Emmy Awards.

Since 2001, she has reported and produced for Univision, NBC, CNN, NPR, MTV News, and Al Jazeera, with work spanning the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She produced, directed, and photographed Very Young Girls, a Showtime documentary following New York City girls who had been sexually exploited and trafficked domestically, and was a producer on the Oscar-nominated Which Way Home.

Key Points

• Nina Alvarez explains that the ethical duty of care means weighing the lasting impact a story will have on the person in it, since a published story is permanent and the subject may not fully grasp what that means when they agree to participate.

• Consent is not the same as a signed release form; Alvarez describes consent as an ongoing process that journalists have to revisit before, during, and after a story is published.

• Alvarez points out that turning 18 makes someone legally able to consent, but it doesn't erase the effects of years of trauma, so journalists still have to weigh whether a survivor's "yes" is solid.

• Morgan and Alvarez agree that "rescue" is the wrong frame for trafficking recovery, since most survivors leave and return to their situations multiple times before they're fully out.

• Alvarez explains that rescue-centered narratives draw more funding and legislative attention toward policing, while recovery-centered approaches that give survivors housing and health resources get less support.

• Alvarez says editors should be asking why minors' first names and identifying details were included in a story at all, and whether a survivor understood that their words to police would end up published nationally.

• Alvarez encourages organizations to set ground rules with journalists, including reviewing the story and images in advance, and warns that survivors who depend on an organization for access may feel pressure to say yes.

• Alvarez reflects that Very Young Girls, made in 2007, didn't anticipate how permanently images would circulate online, and the women in that documentary now say they can never fully escape those images.

Resources

• Figueroa Street and the Ethical Duty of Care (Columbia Journalism Review)

• Very Young Girls (documentary)

• GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services)

• Humanitarian Initiative Bridges

• Columbia Journalism School

Youngbee Dale joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to explain how traffickers run commercial sexual exploitation as a business, hiding it behind storefronts, shell companies, and cash, and why identifying victims often comes down to asking what they're being charged for.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Trafficking Is a Business, Not Just Exploitation

About Youngbee Dale

Youngbee Dale is an anti-trafficking consultant, researcher, trainer, and expert witness whose work focuses on the commercial sex market in the United States, with particular expertise in Asian and Korean sex trafficking, illicit massage businesses, organized crime, money laundering, visa fraud, tax evasion, and financial crime indicators connected to exploitation. As CEO of Dale Consulting, LLC, she trains and consults for law enforcement, prosecutors, financial crime professionals, courts, policymakers, government agencies, and victim service providers. Her clients have included the New York State Human Trafficking Intervention Court Conference, the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists, the FBI Southern District of New York, the NYPD Human Trafficking Case Unit, and several state trafficking commissions and task forces. Earlier she served as an NGO liaison to the FBI Norfolk Office and worked with Gonggam Public Law Office in Seoul, Korea. Her peer-reviewed research appears in Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence. She holds an M.A. from Regent University.

Key Points

• Traffickers treat commercial sexual exploitation as a business model where the goal is profit, so disrupting it means following the money back to the person actually running the operation.

• Because anti-trafficking work has centered on victims, there is far less research on the financial crime, immigration fraud, and business structures traffickers rely on to operate.

• Networks tend to follow their own cultural business patterns, so Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese operations launder money and handle payment differently, such as cash-only Chinese parlors versus credit-and-cash Korean ones.

• "Know your customer" (KYC) analysis helps investigators recognize trafficking transaction patterns, which look different for domestic minor sex trafficking than for Asian illicit massage businesses tied to grocery stores, real estate, title agencies, or restaurants.

• Following cash often means tracing it from the parlor through couriers to a profiteer who deposits it into business accounts or shell corporations, sometimes linked through shared addresses or property owned by family.

• The questions that surface exploitation today focus on deductions, hidden fees, fines, wages, and debt bondage, since traffickers have moved past older controls like passport confiscation and forced on-site living.

• A South Korean trafficker told Dale that operators fear the Department of Labor more than vice units, because wage and deduction questions can make a woman realize she is being exploited.

• Stronger cases require offender-focused research, updated training, forensic accounting, and collaboration among prosecutors, the US attorney, and local law enforcement, who often lack funding for complex financial investigations.

Resources

• Dale Consulting – Youngbee Dale's consulting firm and primary website.

• Money Laundering in the Commercial Sex Market in the United States

• Visa Fraud in the Commercial Sex Market in the United States: An Overview

• Tax Evasion and Fraud in the United States Sex Market

• Beyond Massage Parlors: Exposing the Korean Commercial Sex Market in the United States

Derek Marsh joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to reflect on what they learned inside refugee communities in Greece — where Sudanese survivors of labor trafficking, and mothers rebuilding after violence, reveal how trust, disclosure, and practical support can change what people are able to name, ask for, and access.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Welcome and What Made This Year's Greece Trip Different

About Derek Marsh

Derek Marsh is Associate Director of the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University, where his work centers on education, prevention, and labor trafficking awareness. A longtime collaborator with Dr. Sandie Morgan and a recurring voice on the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, he helps lead the Global Center's annual study-abroad program in Greece, returning to refugee-serving communities there many times over the years. He came to anti-trafficking work through law enforcement, founding the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, and brings that frontline perspective to questions of victim identification and case development. On this trip, his expertise in labor trafficking — and his ability to connect man-to-man with male survivors who are often reluctant to identify themselves as victims — created space for Sudanese refugees to disclose exploitation they had not previously named.

Key Points

• This year's student group was strikingly independent, and a visit to the Young Diplomat Academy — hosted by Greece's National Human Trafficking Rapporteur — opened the door to a possible future partnership.

• For the first time, the team entered a refugee camp in remote Kyllini, where Sudanese men who had been labor trafficked lived three-and-a-half hours from Athens, making access to paperwork and services extremely difficult.

• Survivors were hesitant to disclose their trafficking — partly because earlier promises of help had gone unfulfilled — and when they did open up, Derek was struck by how violent and physical their labor trafficking had been.

• Having a man speak man-to-man with male survivors lowered their barriers, and they revealed that exploitation was continuing right near the camp, where local actors had quickly learned to target new arrivals.

• Greece's EKKA reported 891 identified victims — an admirable number for a nation of under 11 million on the front line of the Mediterranean migration crisis, where authorities must prioritize saving lives before investigating crimes.

• At a separate camp for single mothers near Pyrgos, the team hosted a respite event with childcare, art therapy, and resources; the women had walked 45 minutes carrying their children to attend.

• A student caring for a three-year-old watched him duck and cover at the sound of a passing plane — a vivid reminder that reaching safety is not enough, and that building resilience is key to a child's recovery.

• The closing challenge: you don't need to visit a refugee camp to help — meet displaced people where they are, understand their context, and "look for the handle close to you," whether abroad or in your own community.

Resources

• Global Center for Women and Justice

• Humanitarian Initiative Bridges

• A21

• EKKA — National Centre for Social Solidarity (National Referral Mechanism)

• Ending Human Trafficking — Episode 371: Dr. Heracles Moskoff

Christa Wiens joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore why the answer to online exploitation isn't the perfect parental control — it's helping young people recognize manipulation, build critical thinking skills, and know who they can safely turn to when something feels off.

About Christa Wiens

Christa Wiens is the Executive Director of the Central Valley Justice Coalition, a California-based nonprofit focused on preventing human trafficking through education, outreach, and community collaboration. She has spent over a decade in the anti-trafficking field, beginning her career with the Justice Coalition as an Education Coordinator, where she developed and delivered training programs that reached thousands of youth and adults across the Central Valley. She stepped into the Executive Director role in 2022 and has continued to expand the organization's reach and impact.

Christa is the author of the Understanding Human Trafficking series and has contributed to multiple publications on trafficking awareness and prevention. Her work frequently intersects with faith communities, education systems, and local stakeholders, where she advocates for proactive, trauma-informed approaches and stronger preventive frameworks. She holds a Master of Arts in Ministry, Leadership, and Culture from Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary.

Chapters

Key Points

• Traffickers have adopted the exact same cross-platform influencer model that legitimate brands use — and parents who don't recognize it are missing how exploitation actually operates online.

• Looking for the "right app" or "right setting" to protect kids is chasing the wind; what's actually needed are better relational tools for conversation, not better technical controls.

• Social media platforms are engineered to maximize engagement, which makes our kids the product — and platforms like TikTok deliberately change what they show users the moment they turn 18.

• The most effective protective posture isn't imposing rules but asking open-ended hypothetical questions ("What would you do if...?") so kids see parents as safe, curious allies rather than authorities who will punish them.

• Building agency means using the language of "when you make a mistake" rather than "if" — signaling that mistakes are expected, that kids won't be abandoned when they happen, and that they can always come back to a trusted adult.

• The driver's permit is a powerful analogy for devices: we don't hand teenagers keys and say "best of luck" — we graduate access gradually, narrate the dangers, and teach them to recognize the red flags, like content that makes them feel big, urgent emotions.

• Youth in foster care and system involvement are especially vulnerable online because they often lack a trusted adult — equipping care providers with conversation tools and connecting youth to resources like NCMEC's Take It Down are critical protective steps.

• Young people who receive trafficking prevention education report a profound sense of relief — they knew something was off but had no language for it — and once equipped, they become peer educators and advocates in their own communities.

Resources

• Central Valley Justice Coalition

• NCMEC Take It Down

• National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

• PACT 2025 Reignite Convening

Dr. Heracles Moskoff joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to explore what happens after a country builds the laws, shelters, and partnerships meant to protect people — and why outcomes still depend on whether someone, somewhere, recognizes what others overlook.

Chapters

About Dr. Heracles Moskoff

Dr. Heracles Moskoff serves as Secretary General for Vulnerable Persons and Institutional Protection at Greece's Ministry of Migration and Asylum, a role he assumed in July 2023. He previously served as Special Secretary for the Protection of Unaccompanied Minors (2021–2023), overseeing the implementation of Greece's National Guardianship System and frameworks for the accommodation and protection of unaccompanied children. With over two decades of experience in migration policy, human security, and anti-trafficking efforts, Dr. Moskoff has held roles within Greece's Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 2001, including as Expert Counselor on Human Security. In 2013, he was appointed National Rapporteur on Combating Trafficking in Human Beings, coordinating Greece's National Referral Mechanism and National Action Plan (2018–2022). He represents Greece at the EU, United Nations, Council of Europe, and OSCE. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics.

Key Points

• Most countries have robust anti-trafficking legal frameworks, but the real gap is “national ownership” — the capacity of frontline professionals to recognize indicators when victims do not self-identify.

• Faith communities and faith-based NGOs are essential partners because they reach both potential victims and the demand side at an existential level that law enforcement cannot.

• Greece's National Emergency Response Mechanism — a 24/7 hotline with mobile units — has helped recover more than 10,000 unaccompanied children over the last five years.

• A culture of impunity persists worldwide: only a small percentage of victims are identified and only a small percentage of perpetrators face justice; the identification chain has to extend beyond police to medical, migration, and public administration professionals.

• Trafficking is not only the textbook case — the “gray area” of dirty, difficult, dangerous informal work for unaccompanied minors is its own form of exploitation, often tolerated by enforcement.

• Consumer demand and corporate supply chains require regulation with real teeth; well-intentioned laws like the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act remain under-enforced, and Greece faces the same gap.

• A new presidential decree authorizes new departments dedicated to anti-trafficking and gender-based violence, including planned shelters for male victims and victims of forced labor.

• Survivors of forced criminality carry trauma alongside extraordinary resilience; with proper mental health support, integration can produce what Dr. Moskoff calls “a miracle of integration.”

Resources

• Global Center for Women and Justice

• Greece Ministry of Migration and Asylum

• Greece National Emergency Response Mechanism (for unaccompanied minors)

• EU Pact on Migration and Asylum

• United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime

• California Transparency in Supply Chains Act

Martha Trujillo joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to ask what changes when communities stop seeing vulnerable youth as problems to be managed and start seeing them as young people in need of support.

About Martha Trujillo

Martha Trujillo is the founder of Full Circle Orange County, an organization dedicated to supporting risk-impacted and at-risk students through mentorship, education, and community. Her work is informed by lived experience: she grew up in Orange County and faced significant challenges as a young person, including foster care, gang involvement, expulsion from school, juvenile detention, substance use, and victimization. She now uses her story to guide and empower students facing similar obstacles. Trujillo holds a master’s degree in criminology from UC Irvine and a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from California State University, Fullerton, and is preparing to pursue a doctorate in education at UC Irvine. Through Full Circle, she practices “diversion through mentorship,” combining workshops, re-entry support, and one-on-one guidance for youth in schools, group homes, and detention centers across Orange County and beyond.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction

Key Points

• Full Circle Orange County’s mission is preventing youth incarceration in adulthood by helping kids be identified early as victims rather than written off as criminals.

• Martha’s “feeding before teaching” approach — breaking bread with youth before any workshop — builds trust and recognizes the unmet basic needs that often shape kids’ behavior.

• Lived experience is one of three pillars (alongside academic training and direct work with youth) that shapes how Martha builds rapport with students no one else has been able to reach.

• Early human trafficking prevention should begin between ages 9 and 14, in language that’s age-appropriate but not avoidant — and not reserved only for kids in poverty-stricken environments.

• “Dual status” youth (both foster and probation-involved) need support that recognizes them as children first, not as labels — and the juvenile justice system has resources to help them, if we use them well.

• Mentors who share appropriate pieces of their own story give kids something to relate to; without that connection, real rapport is rarely possible.

• Survivors going through religious rites of passage may be carrying hidden trauma; faith communities have a vital role in trauma-informed prevention conversations.

• Coming full circle: Martha was expelled from Nicolas Junior High in eighth grade — and years later returned to receive an honorary promotion certificate alongside its current eighth graders.

Resources

• Full Circle Orange County

• Know More, Do Better (OC Human Trafficking Task Force)

• Global Center for Women and Justice (Vanguard University)

• CASA of Orange County

Dr. Sigrid Burruss and Dr. Adrienne Schlatter join Dr. Sandie Morgan to explore what human trafficking actually looks like in healthcare settings, why safety matters more than rushing to the rescue, and how hospitals can build responses that help patients feel seen, supported, and safer -- with a close look at California's new SB 963, requiring emergency departments to screen every patient for trafficking.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro + SB 963: The New California Law

Dr. Sigrid Burruss & Dr. Adrienne Schlatter

Dr. Sigrid Burruss is a board-certified surgeon at UCI Health specializing in trauma surgery and surgical critical care. She earned her medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, completed her general surgery residency at UCLA Medical Center, and a fellowship in surgical critical care at UC San Diego Medical Center. Her professional interests include trauma prevention, reducing trauma recidivism, and understanding the relationship between mental health and physical trauma. She is engaged in connecting patients and families with community support systems to promote long-term recovery, and serves on the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force Healthcare Subcommittee and CSEC steering committee as a leader in clinical response to child sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

Dr. Adrienne Schlatter is a board-certified pediatrician at UCI Health, with dual board certification in Pediatrics and Child Abuse Pediatrics. She earned her medical degree from Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine, completed her residency in pediatrics at Los Angeles County USC Medical Center, and a fellowship in child abuse pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Her clinical work focuses on the care of children who may be affected by abuse or neglect, including evaluation and coordination within multidisciplinary systems. Dr. Schlatter also serves on the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force Healthcare Subcommittee and CSEC steering committee, bringing her expertise in child abuse pediatrics to the intersection of clinical care, consent law, and trauma-informed practice.

Key Points

• SB 963, effective January 1, 2025, requires all California emergency departments to screen every patient for human trafficking and adopt formal policies for doing so -- regardless of whether risk factors are present.

• Trafficking survivors may come to the ED for reasons that appear unrelated to trafficking: physical assault with an inconsistent history, recurrent STIs, or chronic conditions like hypertension and diabetes that go unmanaged because the trafficker controls whether they can follow up with a primary care provider.

• The triage nurse and check-in staff are often the first point of contact -- not the physician -- making it essential that everyone who encounters a patient, from reception to security to cleaning staff, knows what to look for and how to escalate.

• When a potential trafficking survivor arrives with a companion claiming to be a family member, clinical policy and common procedures -- like a separate exam, an X-ray, or a trip to the bathroom for a urine sample -- can create a private moment to ask sensitive questions.

• The sticker method gives patients a covert way to signal for help: bathroom posters invite patients to place a sticker on their urine cup if they feel unsafe, prompting staff to create a private conversation even when a trafficker is in the room.

• Healthcare providers need to manage the impulse to rescue immediately; many survivors, especially teenagers, may not recognize that they are being trafficked, so the goal is to plant a seed of safety -- not to expect immediate disclosure or departure.

• Discharge paperwork can carry covert resources: embedding youth housing, counseling services, and hotline numbers in a generic "age-appropriate resources" sheet means a survivor leaves with something useful even if they are not ready to act on it today.

• California consent law gives minors over 12 the right to consent to STI testing, mental health care, and substance use counseling without parental permission -- and anyone can consent to forensic evidence collection after sexual assault -- giving clinicians important tools for trauma-informed care without putting young patients at greater risk.

Resources

SB 963 -- California Hospital Human Trafficking Screening Law

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB963

Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force -- Healthcare Subcommittee

https://www.ochumantrafficking.com/committees/healthcaresubcommittee

Quick Youth Indicators for Trafficking (QYIT)

https://resources.rhyttac.org/resources/screening-tool/quick-youth-indicators-trafficking-qyit

CSE-IT -- Commercial Sexual Exploitation-Identification Tool

https://www.westcoastcc.org/cse-it/

National Human Trafficking Hotline

https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en