Ending Human Trafficking Podcast

By Dr. Sandra Morgan

The Global Center for Women and Justice launched the Ending Human Trafficking podcast in 2011. Our hosts are Dr. Sandie Morgan and Dr. Dave Stachowiak. Our mantra is Study the Issues. Be a voice. Mak... more

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November 25, 2024333 – Bridging Communities: Indigenous Approaches to Combating Human Trafficking
Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Josie Heyano as the two discuss the importance of bridging communities to prevent human trafficking.
Josie Heyano
Josie Heyano, LMSW, is a Deg Xinag Athabascan advocate from Alaska, focused on creating holistic and decolonized practices to serve Alaska Native and Indigenous communities impacted by human trafficking. With extensive experience supporting youth facing homelessness, exploitation, and trafficking, she founded Signify Consulting, LLC, to further her collaboration in anti-trafficking work across Alaska. Josie is a Presidentially appointed member of the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, advising federal policy, and in 2023, she received the FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award for her contributions to prevention and intervention in Alaska. Her work honors her great aunt Linda Miller and others still awaiting justice.
Key Points
Traditional introductions are important as they reflect relationships and community ties, highlighting accountability and cultural identity.
Serving on the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, Josie highlights the importance of humility and listening to voices within her community that are often unheard. She cites a recent visit by the council to Alaska as an opportunity to humanize the data and issues surrounding human trafficking.
Human trafficking is a symptom of broader systemic issues, such as domestic violence, homelessness, and mental health crises. There is a need for a holistic approach that addresses these interconnected challenges within Indigenous communities.
The Alaska Human Trafficking Data Needs Assessment revealed gaps in data and understanding regarding trafficking. Community relationships and collaboration across different sectors (service providers, law enforcement, academia) are necessary to improve data collection and response strategies.
Cultural practices and community care can serve as protective factors against human trafficking. It is necessary to integrate traditional values and practices into prevention efforts, focusing on unconditional care, relationship building, and addressing basic community needs.
A preventative approach that extends beyond immediate trafficking interventions includes ensuring that community members have access to essential resources, support systems, and a sense of belonging from birth, thus preventing vulnerability to trafficking in the first place. Active, compassionate engagement with community members fosters safety and well-being.
Resources
U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking
FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award
277: Navajo Nation Interview, with First Lady Phefelia Nez
Prevention Now
Data For Indigenous Justice
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Girls Report
Ride my Road
Not Invisible Act Commission Report
Federal Indian Boarding Schools Report
ACF MMIP Action Plan
Alaska Native Justice Center
Signify Consulting
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. This is episode #333: Bridging Communities: Indigenous Approaches to Combating Human Trafficking. This is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference. Our guest today is Josie Heyano. Josie is a presidentially appointed member of the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, advising federal policy. In 2023 she received the FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award for her contributions to prevention and intervention in Alaska. Her work honors her great aunt, Linda Miller and others still awaiting justice. I’m so grateful for you to be here with us today, Josie, and I’d like to start with a traditional introduction please.
Josie Heyano 1:30
Thank you, Sandra, good morning. Ade’ yixudz everyone. My name is Josie Heyano. I am Deg Xinag Athabascan. My mother’s family is from the village of Tanana on the Yukon River. My mother is Naina Heyano. My paternal grandparents are the late Paul and Mary Star and Alfred Miller of Anvik. My father is David Heyano from the village of Ekuk in Bristol Bay. And my paternal grandparents are the late Pete and Rosa Heyano, also of Ekuk village. It’s great to be here with you today.
Sandra Morgan 2:06
Thank you. And for some of our listeners, would you please give us a little background on the traditional introductions?
Josie Heyano 2:19
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you giving space for that introduction. It’s a really important part of how I show up, because that’s how I was taught to introduce myself. You’re taught to introduce yourself to explain your relationships, and part of that is culturally, our relationships are how we exist in the world, who we are, how we want to be seen. When I tell you that my grandmother is Mary Star and my grandpa is Alfred Miller, and I tell you about Pete and Rosa Heyano, that means that I show up to this conversation as a representation of them, and that when I introduce myself for people listening to me, they can know who my family is and know where I come from. A piece of that is accountability too, right? I always think people in the audience know my family, know the communities I come from, and it’s really important for me to speak with integrity and to speak clearly and to speak with pride. More importantly for me, is throughout my professional career, you get degrees and letters, and things like that, but the more important thing is not titles that I hold, but who I am and how I came to be here.
Sandra Morgan 3:34
Let’s talk about your degrees and your titles in addition to this, because that is also how you show up.
Josie Heyano 3:42
Yeah, of course. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to pursue some really wonderful academic channels. I am a graduate of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. They have an incredible social work program. I am, first and foremost, academically, a social worker. I practice social work here in Alaska, and I got my masters at the University of Kentucky. I just finished up my clinical hours, so I will shortly be sitting for my licensing exam to be able to be a licensed clinical social worker. I think that’s about it for degrees.
Sandra Morgan 4:23
Oh my goodness. Well, you’re definitely an amazing leader now in this space, and you’re serving at the highest level in our nation. I’m curious what that means to you in the context of how you just shared about showing up.
Josie Heyano 4:48
I think serving at the level of the U.S. Advisory Council has meant having a tremendous amount of humility. Paying attention to the voices in my community that maybe haven’t been heard, to the topics and the issues that haven’t had the attention that they need, and doing my best to voice those, and to bring education, to bring awareness, to help people understand some of the issues facing my community. We were very privileged this year, the entire U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking actually came to Alaska with my first my persuasion. They got to walk on the streets downtown, and they got to be a part of our community and meet the people who live these experiences here. That was a really wonderful opportunity. But I think in my role in the advisory council that was my job, was to bring the members here, have them meet the people that we write about, and to bring a humanness to this work too, and remind us that we are doing really high level federal work. Behind some of those numbers and some of that research, and some of the data, are people and experiences, and that’s been a really beautiful part of being a part of the council.
Sandra Morgan 6:10
My experience, and you may have listened, I interviewed Phefelia Nez, who was leading this effort with the Navajo Nation, and we have partnered. We’ve had conversations about some of the larger systemic issues, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and Human trafficking as maybe an umbrella or a symptom. How do you see that?
Josie Heyano 6:13
Yeah, I definitely see it as a symptom. I think in my federal work, I’ve gotten to have a lot more conversations with leaders and matriarchs across the country who are leading this work in their community. I do think that human trafficking, I do look at it as a symptom. I appreciate you bringing up the missing murdered indigenous relatives conversation, because most of my work has been centered on we can’t talk about human trafficking and then talk about our missing, murdered indigenous relatives crisis. These are the conversations that we need to have together, and it is the conversation that needs to include domestic violence. It needs to include our relatives who are houseless. It needs to include mental health services, substance use services. It needs to include harm reduction. It’s really having a more holistic conversation about human trafficking, so that’s been primarily where I focused my work locally in the community, is helping to bridge that conversation and be able to talk about these issues together.
Sandra Morgan 7:53
One of the things that intrigued me as I read more about your work is you did a fellowship with prevention now, and out of that, you co-created the Alaska Human Trafficking Data Needs Assessment, which seems to fit or have an overlay with your comments just now, with all of these aspects systemically. Can you tell me about that?
Josie Heyano 8:23
I was so excited to talk about that today. My good friend Kristen Harris, CEO and founder of Prevention Now, I had actually just reached out to her as a college intern looking for practicum placement, and said, “Hey, I’m living in Alaska, and I’m struggling,” because I was working direct service, and I was kind of at the point in a person’s life where they had already experienced trafficking, and it was becoming really prominent to me that we didn’t have a lot of prevention, and we weren’t having a lot of conversations in our communities about what trafficking is. So Kristen, being the amazing human being she is, just took me under her wing and allowed me to just research and have the resources with her. That Data Needs Assessment was actually a result of; we first thought we would gather the data that existed to start to see what some of the regional factors were that were causing trafficking, and that we were going to use Kristen’s AI model to find that out. What we realized was: there wasn’t data, or at least there wasn’t data that made sense. There was data that had a lot of different definitions of trafficking. There was data with a lot of different types of people collecting those data, and there was a lot of data that wasn’t talking to each other, so there was duplicated data. There was no real way to get a clear picture of what’s the understanding. And when we started talking to people about data, the other thing that was really interesting about this project is we also got a weariness. We’re talking to direct service providers, and law enforcement, and educators, and healthcare workers who are very often underfunded and under resourced. Then we bring up the data question, which translates to the notes that you didn’t do, or the extra box to check. The Data Needs Assessment really transformed into not only what are you using to track human trafficking related data, but how do you feel about data? How does data impact your work? How do you value or see data as important in this conversation? I think that really opened up a different type of conversation, which was that people did value data and were simultaneously overwhelmed by it, and didn’t necessarily see it as helpful to them in their role. When we started the Human Trafficking Data Summit and we partnered with Data for Indigenous Justice, hopefully we can provide a link to their website, they are a local, nonprofit organization. My good friend Aqpik founded that one as well, and that’s all about reclaiming indigenous data, and they actually curated the first Alaska list of Missing, Murdered and Indigenous Relatives. One thing I’ll add about that too, is the first report that Data for Indigenous Justice released, there were 229 names curated in that report of missing relatives, which is the number of tribes that we have here in Alaska. It was a really powerful number.
Sandra Morgan 11:23
Wow.
Josie Heyano 11:24
But the data Summit, really, above all else, became kind of a gathering of women. This is kind of a strange way to take this conversation, but when I think back on the data summit and how that came to be, we also partnered with ride my road. So my friend Lauren came, has strong connections in Alaska. She came and volunteered her time, and it was a bunch of women who said, “We recognize this is a problem in the community. What are we going to do? How do we start the conversation?” And we recognized that in order to start having this conversation, we needed to have relationship with each other. We needed to have relationship with the people in the work, and this was kind of right after COVID, too. We also recognized, we need to bring people together again, and so we did. We had a very small event. Our very first Human Trafficking Data Summit was in a small community area, and it was wonderful. We had people from multi disciplines come and show up and be a part of the conversation. More importantly, though, I think we just spent time with each other. We got to know each other, we got to know each other’s work, and we invested in the relationships that we had with each other. I think that’s what has developed, for me, into a larger impact, is that we didn’t just come to talk about data, we came to actually care about the work that we were all doing and show up for each other.
Sandra Morgan 12:54
I think we’re moving into a space where we can shift the conversation, shift the narrative from, “Here are all the bad things happening, here’s the vulnerability,” to some kind of approach, strategic plan for how we’re going to do prevention and protect our community. Can you speak to that?
Josie Heyano 13:28
I can definitely speak to that. One of the things that I’m really excited about is just, especially with my my federal platform, getting to meet people across the country. There is so much being done in tribal communities right now that really focuses on our culture, and our culture as a prevention and as a protective factor. I think even if you look in this last four years, what the Biden-Harris administration has done to emphasize work on Missing, Murdered Indigenous People, and to really address that crisis. We’ve seen the Not Invisible Act Commission Report.We’ve seen the the Federal Boarding School Report. We’ve seen all of these reports that are really putting data and information to the things that we have known in our communities for a long time, and so through that we’ve also seen a lot of focus on culture. A lot of focus on combating human trafficking through the lens of ‘we actually already know how to do this,’ and how we know how to do this is caring for our community. And so many people say it better than I do, so many other indigenous leaders across the nation. If we’re going to have the human trafficking conversation, if we’re going to show up and care about combating human trafficking, we have to show up and care about each other. We have to care about every member of our community. We have to have spaces for people to be fed. We have to have spaces for people to be warm, and clothed, and cared for. Ultimately, we have to have spaces for people to experience connection, to be in relationship with each other, and to know that they are valued, and they’re important, and sacred. I think that’s what makes me the most excited right now, is there are so many programs across the country, and more needed here in Alaska, I’ll say, but that are starting to emphasize that the way that we combat human trafficking doesn’t have to look like the checklist that other people, in other places are using. It can actually be the way that we’ve always addressed harm, which is to just unconditionally care for people. There’s so much beauty in that, there’s so much ease when you take the step back and say, “Human trafficking isn’t this complex, unapproachable topic that we don’t know what to do with. Actually, as Native people we do know, inherently, how to care for and protect everyone in our community.” I think seeing the programs across the country that are emerging, that are focusing on culture as the protective factor, I’m thinking about programs in the lower 48 where there are naming ceremonies for trafficking survivors, where they get to be named by their community and really hold the power of that name and learn what that means. I’m thinking of programs where there are sweat lodges, there are ceremony incorporated into the healing process, and the recognition that that might not be right for everybody, so having nuance within that to make sure that we can help whoever is impacted by harm in the best way possible. I think in the Alaska version of this, I’m better at talking about Alaska and my community, that looked like, when I was working direct care, there was kind of this, “Here’s a list of things to do for a trafficking survivor,” and I used to, probably to people’s dismay, throw that list out the window, because it was ridiculous. What I actually needed to do was to sit and have tea. What I actually needed to do sometimes was to just sit, and sometimes just to say, “My door is always open and I see you, and you can be here anytime that you want,” and to have those non transactional relationships, and to just see people and to show up and care about them unconditionally. I think when I think of culture, that’s what I think of, that piece there, where there is no transaction in our relationship. I accept you and respect you and care for you, because you are you, and that’s a really important piece of this conversation.
Sandra Morgan 17:50
Integrating those traditional values and practices in the healing and restoration, I keep going back to, because I find it so amazing, the Alaska Human Trafficking Data Needs Assessment. Now, how do you take that and leverage it in your comment earlier about accountability?
Josie Heyano 18:19
Actually, the Alaska Native Justice Center here in town, is getting ready with a new Data Needs Assessment that I’m excited to see come out, kind of a chapter two of this. But what we did with that Data Needs Assessment was we had another summit, and this one was bigger, and this one was fantastic. We had, well they were both fantastic, last- oh my goodness, that was actually this Spring, I think. Time is so strange lately. We had the Data Summit again this Spring, we had it at the local library, and we had so many more participants, we had so many more workshops and speakers. This time, we really said, “Okay, here’s what we know is missing, how are we going to address these things?” We brought in people from academia, and we said, “Who are the researchers? Who is in programs right now and you’re looking for a thesis? Who needs a question to be asked to our community?” Here are now the service providers who have a problem. Let’s pair the service providers and the researchers together in the same room so that they can actually understand, so that the researchers aren’t just asking the question they think needs to be asked, they’re hearing from the service providers, “Here’s where the gap is.” Then we took the law enforcement and Department of Law, and prosecutors in the room and we said, what is it that you’re struggling to prosecute? What is it that you’re struggling to see and understand? And we took those service providers, and we took those people with lived experience, and we put them in a room to say, ‘where are the gaps?’ Where might someone not want to tell you what their story is because of how some of these laws work? And so we really asked people to come together and to be solution focused in this, and to say, “Hey, from what we know from the data, the data is not great. And why is that?” Well, the biggest reason was that we’re not talking to each other. We’re kind of creating our own data systems, our own methods of combating human trafficking in a really siloed way, which was not unique. I think we’ve seen that across the country, but I think what was really unique about the Needs Assessment leading to the Data Summit is that we really intentionally said, “We’re not going to set up zoom meetings. We’re not going to just continue to be in groups or task force, or whatever you want to call them, we’re actually going to get together in a room, and we’re going to try to solve a few problems while we’re there together.” I think what came out of that was really deep, meaningful relationships and groups of people who historically are not in the same room together, or who have maybe feared being in the same room together. We created safe places where people could come and have the conversations, because we all had a mutual interest, we all had a mutual goal, and because of that, we were able to have conversations with each other that we hadn’t had before.
Sandra Morgan 21:17
I am just so inspired and encouraged by your vision for the future of integrating your own cultural practices with decades of challenges that we’re all facing in this movement. I’ve been in it a really long time, so listening to you is extremely encouraging for me, and I’m going to send this interview to some of my other friends who are also, the word you used at the beginning is weary. We need your generation, Josie, to bring all of your excitement, your energy, and your big questions. I also wanted to work into our conversation a little bit about Savannah’s Act and how that may have influenced the conversation in indigenous communities. Can you take just a couple minutes to speak to that?
Josie Heyano 22:28
It’s a little early, and I don’t have a lot of the dates and facts off the top of my head, but I think most impactful to me coming out of Savannah’s Act was the Not Invisible Act Commission. Most impactful for that, for me, were the listening sessions. Part of the Not Invisible Act Commission’s work in their first report, was going to communities and listening. I think that goes back to the conversation we were just having about the Data Summit, which was really what that was about, right? We need to listen to each other, we need to listen to the stories being told, and we need to understand from those stories, not showing up with our bias, or our anger, or our weariness, but to show up and hear each other. That was really impactful for me. That was actually one of the first times that I spoke or addressed anyone on a federal level about what was happening in my community, and I got to speak for the very first time at a federal level, I got to sit there and say, “Our Alaska Native youth are dying and are being killed, and are going missing and they are being murdered, and human trafficking is a common denominator in so many of these cases, and it’s not anywhere. It’s not in our news, it’s not in our community discussions.” Sometimes for me, that was a lot of anger. I was coming out of years of direct service where I was seeing people harmed. I was seeing a lot of harm because of trafficking, and still, our community wasn’t really having a very high level trafficking conversation, or too high level, you might say. We talk about the weariness. One of the things I always notice is how tired I am of having the Human Trafficking 101, conversation. I really appreciated the Not Invisible Act Commission. I really appreciate the work in Savannah’s Act to help create coordinated community response plans, and to start having more community efforts in our tribal villages, our reservations. Here in Alaska, we are PL280 states, so we don’t have reservations in the same way that the lower 48 does. But Savannah’s Act and Not Invisible Act, really helped to start to tell some of those stories and to create action from those stories. For me, it was a lot of forward momentum.
Sandra Morgan 24:46
You’ve created a lot of interest for me now, to learn those stories, and I’m going to be seeking them out. I’ve already started making a list of people you’ve mentioned that I’m going to ask you to introduce me to, but I I want to go down the path of what you see for the future in prevention. We started out Prevention Now, prevention is one of my heart’s desires. I go into the schools, we equip our students here at Vanguard to go into the schools. What can we do for indigenous people groups for prevention?
Josie Heyano 25:30
When I think about prevention and the human trafficking conversation, I like to ask people to take a step back from just the trafficking conversation. I struggle in this space a lot because I don’t identify strongly with ‘lived experience expert,’ I don’t identify strongly with ‘survivor.’ I don’t know many other Alaska Native women that have not had similar experiences as me. The data, which is terrible, and Alaska shows that we have all survived many things, and we also have these incredible gifts and these incredible protective factors that make us these immovable forces. I think when I show up to the trafficking conversations, my first thing is we have to take a step back. We see the excitement with trafficking, where people want to lean in and they want to do the work, and we know that it’s a problem in our communities, and I ask people to take a step back and look around. Yes, we want to prevent human trafficking, and the way that we do that is what I said earlier. Do people have places to live? Do people have food? Do people have clothing? Are our relatives outside and cold right now? Because if they are, we’re not preventing human trafficking, and we can’t only care about their lives and their value when trafficking occurs, that’s not okay. We have to care about the humanity and the livelihood of every member of our community from the very beginning, not just when a crime has occurred. That’s where I think I find the most heartache sometimes, and balance it with where I do the most service, is we have a lot of members of our community that are struggling and that are not seen as valued or worthy of resources. For prevention efforts, I would ask service providers, what are your policies? Who’s turned away at your door, who is not able to access services, and how can we amend that? Locally here, we have a lot of people who will not be able to access services because they use substances. We have a lot of people that won’t be able to access services because through their lifespan, they’ve never had the access to mental health interventions and services that could have supported a better, safer, and just overall better well being for them. It’s really hard for me sometimes when people say, “We want to fight trafficking,” and it’s the same people who don’t want to fund housing programs, who don’t want to fund community food banks, who don’t want to fund community centers. It goes down even further than that. When we go to our villages, our reservations, our communities, is there clean water? Is there access to healthy, nutritious food? Do young people have a place to go to experience connection, belonging, mentorship? Is there a sense of pride of who you are and where you come from? Is there a way to instill that if there’s not? Those are the things that are prevention to me. I have never met someone in Alaska, in my work, who experienced trafficking, that didn’t have a very long, long story that started far before a trafficking experience occurred. We can’t just show up when it’s trafficking, and prevention means from the day that young person is born, all throughout their life, do all members of our community have safety, have access to community? I think above all else, my grandma Mary Ellen taught me this, and she didn’t teach it because she preached it or she said it in words, I just watched her. My grandma loved people unconditionally. You didn’t have to say the right thing, dress the right way, look the right way, she just loved you. She wouldn’t even say that necessarily, but you could tell in her actions that she would never treat people unkind. She would never snub her nose at people. She would never have judgment. She just knew and understood how complicated it is to be human, and how much all of us need to be seen, to experience connection, and to have another human being look at us with value and respect. When I think prevention, that’s what I try to do in my role. It’s not the big frameworks, it’s not the big systems, those are helpful. Number one, prevention: how do you go out every day in your community and show the people around you that they’re cared about?
Sandra Morgan 26:36
We talk about for kids here, if they have one adult attachment, one person who sees them, and knows them, and cares: that is prevention. I feel like today, I’ve had the opportunity to become a little bit of a part of your community, Josie, and I want my listeners to follow you. How can they find you?
Josie Heyano 30:14
Absolutely. I have a small consultancy. I had to kind of formalize it because I was just going out and talking at people, and then people would want to know more information. I have a website, signifyconsultingak.org. There’s ways to get in contact with me on that website, I’m also on LinkedIn. You can find me under Josie Heyano, but those are probably the two best places to get in touch. Right now, my work is pretty locally focused, especially I think these next few years, I’m really going to turn my attention to my local community to see where the need is and to be more connected in that way. I still do some work in the federal spaces, but my heart is really on the ground, with people still.
Sandra Morgan 31:33
Josie Heyano, what a pleasure to have you with us today. For our listeners, we’re inviting you to go to the endinghumantrafficking.org website, where you’ll find these show notes and links to the things that Josie has talked to us about. It’s also a great opportunity to start subscribing to the newsletter where you’ll get an alert when a new episode drops. Follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram, and I’ll be back in two weeks for our next episode.
...more
33min
November 11, 2024332 – A Community-Based Care Model, with Peter Baynard-Smith
Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Peter Baynard-Smith as the two discuss Hagar International’s Community-Based Care Model.
Peter Baynard-Smith
Peter brings over 20 years of international development experiences across Africa, Asia, UK, Ireland and Australia, working with World Vision, Concern Worldwide, Tearfund, Engineers without Borders, and most recently the Brotherhood of St Laurence. As Asia Regional Director with Concern, Peter managed country programs across South and SE Asia, including in Livelihood Security, HIV/AIDS, Education, Governance, and Advocacy. With World Vision Australia, Peter led technical specialist teams in economic development, WASH, health, food security, gender and child protection, as well as the research and evaluation unit. Recently, Peter has been focused on the employment and community services sector in Australia, in the context of COVID 19 impact. His journey has also included work as an NGO strategy consultant, leading a technology start-up developing an innovative solution to better safeguarding compliance, and a social enterprise enabling refugees and asylum seekers to pursue their professional career journeys on arrival in Australia. Peter has been a Board member for Habitat for Humanity Australia, and a lecturer on International Development Masters programs.
Key Points
The community-based care model focuses on holistic support rather than institutional care, ensuring that survivors are supported long-term. This model includes long-term case management and addresses survivors’ varied needs such as counseling, legal support, education, and livelihood development.
The concept of “the whole journey” involves comprehensive support for survivors that extends beyond immediate assistance. It emphasizes the commitment to work with individuals for as long as it takes to help them rebuild their lives and reintegrate into their communities.
Training for foster families and community partners is crucial. All stakeholders, including employers, law enforcement, and service providers, receive training in trauma-informed care to ensure they understand and can adequately support survivors, reducing the risk of re-traumatization.
The community-based care model challenges traditional institutional care and seeks to engage and strengthen the broader systems in which survivors exist, including legal and law enforcement systems. This shift promotes the idea of creating a supportive community environment for survivors over a purely reactive institutional approach.
Hagar International aims to expand their approach beyond the four countries they operate in, to collaborate with local NGOs and share their successes in building community-based models for care, emphasizing the importance of capacity building and system strengthening in different contexts around the world.
Resources
Hagar International
World Vision International
Concern Worldwide
Engineers Without Borders
45- War, Conflict, and Human Trafficking, with Esther and Camille Ntoto
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. This is episode #332: A Community-Based Care Model, with Peter Baynard-Smith. 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. Our guest today is Peter Baynard-Smith. He has over 20 years of international development experience, working across Africa, Asia, the UK, Ireland, and Australia with organizations like World Vision, Concern Worldwide, and Engineers Without Borders. There’s a lot to learn about Peter, but I want to start with asking about your experience with Engineers Without Borders Peter, because usually on this podcast, we’re not talking to engineers. I’m so excited to have you join us on the show today.
Peter Baynard-Smith 1:27
Thank you, Sandie, it’s wonderful to be with you. Yes, my background as an engineer actually started out at university, and my passion for International Development and Engineering combined together because I believe that people in all sectors and all professions need to understand the challenges of sustainable development and international development issues. Engineers Without Borders is an organization that educates and empowers engineers and engineering students to engage with social development, with sustainable development goals, and I was the CEO at Engineers Without Borders Australia for a couple of years. Engineers Without Borders Australia is part of a global network of EWBs around the world, including in the USA. So yes, it’s unusual perhaps for an engineer to be working in the anti-trafficking sector, but I think that the important thing is that all of the work that every sector and industry is involved in has an impact. If our working on the ground in development agencies of all sorts, whether we’re doing engineering work, technical development, livelihoods, education, it all touches on the significant challenge and tragedy of human trafficking and modern slavery. I’ve been able to bring some of that experience across into Hagar and focus it on the anti-trafficking space.
Sandra Morgan 2:55
I love that my listeners are used to hearing me talk about multi sector collaboration. I often tell the story from my time living in Greece, about the big jars. Pithari, they were called, that the Minoan people, more than 3,000 years ago, carrying down into the king’s pantry a jug that holds 500 liters. To do that, they baked in handles from the top to the bottom, as an engineer, I think you would appreciate this story.
Peter Baynard-Smith 3:31
Yep!
Sandra Morgan 3:32
…All the way around, so then multiple people could grab the handle they could reach. I think you are an amazing exemplar of finding your handle to join us in the movement against human trafficking. I’m eally delighted to have you here today.
Peter Baynard-Smith 3:53
That’s a beautiful picture. I’ll take that one away.
Sandra Morgan 3:56
Yeah, you’re gonna borrow that, huh? Okay, good. Well, let’s start off with trying to understand we have listeners in 167 countries. So the principles are what are most transferable for learning how to create a community-based care model. So let’s start with, what do you think are the key elements of a community based care model?
Peter Baynard-Smith 4:26
Well, I might start by just explaining that Hagar began 30 years ago in Cambodia at the community level. So our roots as an organization, and therefore the approaches we take, is thoroughly embedded in grassroots community. The key elements that we package together in a concept that we call ‘the whole journey,’ is all the holistic elements that are needed to help a survivor of trafficking, or slavery, or abuse, to restore their lives, to overcome their trauma, and to rebuild their lives and their livelihoods and their future. Those elements include being well managed, case management, and one thing that’s very important at the community level is that case management takes time. It’s not something that somebody can have packaged up for a year, and then that’s it. We work with our survivors, clients, what we say is we work with them, do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes. We put no limit on how long we work with a survivor. I think that’s one of the most important elements, is actually not being rushed, not being time bound, not being project bound, but actually committed to working with clients for as long as it takes. The elements we include are counseling, legal support, making sure that they are in a safe shelter environment, safe environment of accommodation, whether that is a shelter or not, usually not actually normally in the community, legal support, also education, skill building, making sure that a survivor is able to get back their livelihood or develop a livelihood despite what they’ve been through and the trauma that they’ve experienced. For Hagar, the community-based model is about a wraparound of all of the provision of all of these areas of need outside of establishing any sort of institution. The important thing is that those in the community that can, whether they are service providers or they are actual community members or extended family, can provide all of those elements. So that’s for us, the most important thing, is being with a survivor for the long term and bringing all of the different elements in a holistic package to provide that support for as long as it takes.
Sandra Morgan 7:02
I love the analogy of the journey, because we don’t know if we’ve reached our destination just based on how long we’ve been walking, or if our- I don’t know even how to express this, but I get this sense that in your community-based care model, when we compare that, let’s do that. Let’s try compare and contrast what a community-based care model offers for that more longitudinal journey approach, as opposed to a victim service provider model that’s based on an aftercare facility or some kind of institutional program.
Peter Baynard-Smith 7:53
Yeah, I’ll use the example of in Cambodia, the number of women that have been forcibly returned from having been trafficked in China, forcibly returned, particularly during and immediately after the COVID pandemic, and returning back to Cambodia and having nowhere to go, and having been also ostracized and not permitted to return even to their families and their communities. In many, in some traditional models, those young women would be regarded as having to be in some form of institutional care, because where else are they going to go? What Hagar’s model has done is identify a home in the community where, at the initial stage, those young women can return to. We call them Homes of Love, and they can return and literally, they will be there a couple of weeks. They’ll be there simply to be able to get started making sure they’ve got a case manager, they’ve got somebody to support them, that their immediate health and well being needs are being attended to, that the counseling and the support can begin, just that beginning of the journey with them. But all along, it is about reintegrating them into their community and starting that process of overcoming the barriers that they feel, that even their families and their communities feel. Often, there’s great discrimination on women that have been ostensibly married off into, in this case, in China, and have have returned having been abused and having in many cases, severe trauma and severe psychological impact. The ‘Home of Love,’ is in the community. So even though it’s a home, it’s not an institution. It is a house mother in her own home in the community, bringing nd allowing those girls to stay with her for a number of weeks, get themselves back on their feet, and then all of the services and the support from Hagar kicks in over that time, so that then the ongoing case management, the ongoing counseling, any legal work that’s required, and any skill building and training, and all of those aspects can kick off, including reintegrating into the community. It’s bringing a natural family and community environment around the individual, rather than placing them in an institutional environment where they don’t have any connections and they don’t have a sense of a future beyond that. And that’s the big risk, and has obviously been the big change over the last 10 to 12 years, has been a recognition that that kind of institutional model does not lead to long term, wholesome, long term outcomes.
Sandra Morgan 11:02
It sort of contributes to some insecurity. And I don’t know how many subcommittees I’ve been on where our topic is “placement,” and “placement,” is is a little dehumanizing. “We’ve got to find a bed,” those kinds of things, but you’re talking about a home environment, and then you’re talking about community integration. I don’t quite understand how to look at that integration piece, because they’re not going to stay in that home. But where are they going now?
Peter Baynard-Smith 11:41
There is a few layers, a few levels of that. Obviously, the preferred outcome is that that survivor can return to their own family, their own extended family, in their own home village. When that’s not possible, we look at a wider circle of kinship care. It might be extended family in a neighboring community, might be relatives or cousins in a different town or a different province, so that sort of next circle out of kinship. Beyond that, we train up, we identify and train up long term foster homes. It’s really replicating almost the kind of model that a lot of developed nations would have around their approach to fostering and out of home care. We identify and train up families in provinces all around Cambodia, so that wherever the survivors have actually originated from, after spending time with Hagar in the home of love, they are then able to, if they cannot return to their family or there is no wider kinship care available to them, there is the foster care and home environment. Now this is young people and adults. Again, it can be children, but many of these young women, by the time they return, they are approaching adulthood, or they are adults. That foster model also is around evolving fostering from purely fostering of children, to actually that fostering and caring for vulnerable adults through that model as well.
Sandra Morgan 13:23
Love that. So this approach then moves the care that is going to stay with this survivor into a wider safety net, if you will. My next question then, is, when that happens, how dothe community partners….is it very prescribed? How do they become woven into this person’s life?
Peter Baynard-Smith 14:03
It’s a very community by community model, so identifying foster families and foster homes and training them up and supporting them, alongside supporting the client themselves through the reintegration process and all the ongoing support, because alongside this, their skill building, their education, their vocational training, their legal work, if there’s a court case going on regarding the broker or the perpetrator of the trafficking crime, all of these sort of things can be going on alongside actually reintegrating and trying to get her life back on track. There’s a multitude of supports alongside, but the foster home is simply the environment where they can live and be safe. The other aspect of the community around all this is related to prevention, because many of the girls that have ended up in these situations have come from situations of vulnerability, whether that’s related to poverty, whether it’s related to domestic violence in their own families or communities, whether it’s related to being susceptible to unsafe employment, the attraction of migration for employment that turn out to be very unsafe migration practices. Built into this model is a whole set of tools available to work with communities, right at the level of the household. One of the things I love in Cambodia, and we have a similar initiative in Vietnam is called The Good Wives and Good Husbands Group. It’s absolutely fantastic because it’s working with, in the case of the Good Husbands Group, actually working with men who mostly, even they themselves have self identified, as enacting domestic violence or not understanding the risks of trafficking, not understanding children’s rights, not understanding rights for women and girls. So actually helping to educate men and husbands around creating a safe home environment that, actually over the years, means that a young woman growing up in that home environment is far less susceptible to being attracted out into a potential migration that turns out to be a very unsafe and indeed a trafficking situation, or seeking unhealthy relationships and this sort of thing. It’s really about building understanding of respectful relationships, the vital role of a healthy and caring home, that that all actually contributes to preventing these situations arising in the first place.
Sandra Morgan 16:56
Building this community-based care model, then you’re actually building the community to be a safer place too. Your description of this reminds me of an interview, and I’ll put a link in the show notes, when we interviewed Esther and Camille Ntoto from Congo. Camille had started a men’s group that sounds just like what you’re doing, and it created a safer community for abused women to return to a normal life. So that’s very exciting to see different versions of the same strategy, I love that, that’s very exciting. When I think about this idea of a foster home, because you could tell I was thinking, “Oh, so they’re only going to take care of kids,” because we think of fostering that way. But this idea that you’re providing that safe space for someone that’s an adult, this is a little bit of a new way of looking at things. How do you train the families? You mentioned training and preparation.
Peter Baynard-Smith 18:14
A number of years ago, around eight years ago, Hagar in Cambodia really led the way in creating a rigorous and systematic set of guidelines around foster care, fostering in the community in Cambodia. So it wasn’t something as you know, the institutional environments in Cambodia had been very established and had been running for a long time, and the last 10 years or so, there’s been a very significant shift away from that, and Hagar has been at the front leading edge of that when it comes to this particular alternative. The community-based Foster Care is a much healthier and a much better set of outcomes, and a much better way of doing this. The guidelines that Hagar has developed, the work that Hagar does with the government, at ministry level and also provincial and district levels of those ministries, ties it all together. You can work on national guidelines, but then you also need to support and train, and build the capacity at a commune, and a district, and a provincial level to ensure that those guidelines are followed. That’s where the training comes in. The training isn’t just with the foster homefamilies, it’s also with the service providers and the duty bearers around them, because it’s a system. We’re very keen on making sure the work that we do is not setting up a parallel system. We want to strengthen the system and improve the system, and that includes and that requires government and duty bearers to be on board, to enforce it, to enact the same principles and standards in care. We want others to pick up the model, and that’s very important for Hagar. We’re not just about doing it ourselves, we’re also about building the capacity of local NGOs, local organizations, not only in the countries we’re working but also in some other countries as well, so that the standards and the principles, and the good approaches, can be picked up and run and have an impact in other places as well.
Sandra Morgan 20:34
If I’m imagining what this is going to look like, because you talked about economic tools and training empowerment, this training isn’t just for the foster families, but say I’m going to employ your survivors in an office building, then the people training the women to be computer data entry people, they have to go through your training? They can’t just start training them for the computer?
Peter Baynard-Smith 21:09
You’ve got it. You’ve got it. The one aspect of training that we do with all stakeholders that we work with, and that our clients engage with is trauma informed care approaches. If I take the example of if we’re brokering an opportunity for a survivor to have a job in, let’s just take that example in a data center, for example, it is vital that that employer understands how to work with and have their their eyes and ears open to the impact of trauma in that new employee’s life. If they’re providing their employment services in a way that appreciates the experience that someone may have been through, understands the impact of trauma, they are going to have a much more successful employee, they’re going to have a much more successful employer/employee relationship, and then the survivor is going to have a much more sustainable, successful, long term employment, placement, and opportunity. The training that we provide around trauma informed care is not purely on the social work side, in terms of the care per se, it’s also on employers and indeed, judicial services, immigration departments, immigration officials, police officials, all of those different services that a survivor comes in contact with has to be trained around trauma and understanding how you manage, and work with, and support, and not re-traumatize an individual through the services that you’re providing.
Sandra Morgan 22:58
You’ve got all these partners, collaborators, everybody working alongside. I like that because we’re doing it together. To me, that means that your language around partnership is really related to your comment at the beginning about systems. You’re talking about the system, not parallel systems, and at the time I thought, “Huh, I want to know more about that.” And now it makes more sense, but can you explain that just a little bit more? I think it’s unique to an engineer’s mind.
Peter Baynard-Smith 23:38
I think there’s three pillars, if you like, that we think of when we think of our work. I’ve talked about survivor care, I’ve talked a bit about prevention. The third pillar is this strength in systems. There are multiple systems, as you say, an engineer’s mind sort of thinks of systems in systems way, that one of the systems that we really want to focus on, and do focus on significantly and increasingly, is the law enforcement and judicial and prosecution system. Because survivors of trafficking are right from the get go, whether it’s in terms of them being identified as a victim, right through to the kind of impact statements that they’re required to give, right through all the evidence gathering process, right through all of the trial, and the legal, and the compensation processes that take place, that whole journey, if you like, that “system,” a victim or a survivor is at the heart of that system, and is highly vulnerable. They are highly vulnerable before they’re even identified. Obviously, they’re in a position of vulnerability in the first place, but they’re also highly vulnerable through that process. We work really closely, particularly in Thailand, our work in Thailand very strongly focused on law enforcement capacity building, victim support through the legal and prosecution process, and strengthening the level to which trauma is understood and factored in to the way that police and investigators, and indeed the legal profession approach and handle survivors of trafficking. That whole system, we’ve got a number of touch points with training, capacity building, building of evidence, and direct support to the survivor through the process and even at the other end. One of the things that I found quite shocking, is the very low level of compensation claims. Compensation may be ordered by the court, but such low levels of compensation end up in the hands of survivors, and obviously, once a court orders compensation, there’s a whole other set of processes involved in actually securing that compensation. Again, supporting a client properly through aftercare, through packages of support, again for the long term, because they can’t rely on a court order to redress and compensate them adequately for what they’ve been through, so you have to bring the ongoing counseling and support, and help with finding work and education in at that end of what is otherwise a judicial and legal process and system, but it’s a system that’s affecting humans, and the individual at the heart of that. Hagar is focused on those individuals and on those survivors, and making sure that all the aspects of the support they need are provided, even while we try and strengthen the systems for the longer term.
Sandra Morgan 26:55
I keep hearing this ongoing language, and that really supports the premise of this is a journey, and we’re doing this with the survivor in a community. As the community begins to function in a way that is very organically supportive, what do you see as a future trend that we can expect from the system changes happening because of a community-based model?
Peter Baynard-Smith 27:34
I think one of the trends is an increased understanding and recognition of the impact of trauma, and more and more stakeholders being trained and having their own system environments, their own institutional environments, let’s say, in the police. In countries where the treatment of trafficking survivors has not always been front and center, even actually taking up trafficking cases and prosecuting them has often been put to the side and been regarded as less important than prosecuting other types of criminal activity. I think an increasing recognition of the terrible impact of trafficking and slavery, the fact that we can identify it, we can support people, and we can restitute and transform, and heal those broken lives. I think that that recognition is growing, so I think that’s one trend. The other is that Hagar works with Hagar International Offices in four countries, Cambodia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and we are with a partner of ours in Thailand. We have that direct working in those four countries, but we also are seeing a trend of being able to bring our learnings, our expertise, and our strengths to other organizations in other countries that are not necessarily going to be a Hagar program country, but a partner organization that can do all the same great work. An example of that is in the Solomon Islands, also in Myanmar, and I think for Hagar, the trend into the future is expanding the impact from all of the 30 years of experience that we have, by building the skills and bringing the expertise to other organizations that are local. All local organizations, local NGOs, and in the case of the work in the Solomon Islands, has actually, over the last 12 months, brought to the law enforcement process the very first cases of human trafficking in the Solomon Islands. They’re not the first cases that existed, but they’re the first cases that are being brought to the courts, and survivors are being supported, and evidence is being gathered. It’s a big change for a country like the Solomon Islands to actually have an organization, a Solomon Island organization, with the kind of skills, with the backing and support of an international NGO like Hagar, to bring that level of capacity to a system that did not have it before at all. So that’s a very big step, and we’d like to see more of that, we’d like to see Hagar’s work, being able to support and inject that skill set and expertise into local NGOs in a number of other countries around the region and indeed, globally.
Sandra Morgan 30:54
Well, I want to help you with that. Can you give our listeners some direction on how to get connected with you to get support on those initiatives? Website, contact.
Peter Baynard-Smith 31:08
Yep! Follow us on our socials, on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. Go to our website, hagarinternational.org. We’re always open to collaborating with more local and indeed, international organizations working with vulnerable and traumatized populations. The evidence is that modern day slavery and trafficking is occurring everywhere, sadly, and so development and international aid organizations working in many, many countries could, I think, really benefit from having a focus on understanding the trafficking risk, being aware of the trafficking context, and also the impact and the trauma that survivors have been through, and actually be able to work with them within the communities that those organizations are working in. We can bring those skills and training, and we would love to hear from any organizations interested in partnering with us in whichever part of the world they are.
Sandra Morgan 32:11
I know when we talk about community based care, we’re thinking of the survivor, but I think part of the outcomes of this strategy is that communities begin to care. Your example of the Solomon Islands, we know trafficking has been happening, but now there is a system response. Peter, I am so grateful that you joined us today. Thank you.
Peter Baynard-Smith 32:40
Thank you, Sandie, it’s been wonderful to meet you, and thank you to all your listeners and all your supporters of your podcast. It’s terrific, thanks so much.
Sandra Morgan 32:50
Thank you. Listeners, we’re inviting you to take the next step. Go over to endinghuman trafficking.org. You’ll find the resources that Peter mentioned, and the link to past podcast. If you haven’t visited our site before, this is a great time to become a subscriber, and then you’ll get a newsletter every two weeks with the show notes of that particular episode. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, and of course, I’m going to see you again in two weeks.
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34min
October 28, 2024331 – Retribution and Restitution, with Daniel Varon
Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Daniel Varon as the two discuss the important of retribution and restitution for victims of trafficking and abuse.
Daniel Varon
Daniel Varon joined the Zalkin Law firm in 2020 bringing his experience as an attorney in the Office of the District Attorney in Orange County. He is an experienced trial attorney, having tried approximately 60 jury trials during his work as Deputy District Attorney. The California District Attorney Investigators Association recognized him as Prosecutor of the Year in 2017. While at the Orange County DA’s office, Daniel worked in the Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit (HEAT). He maintained a full caseload and tried the first human trafficking of a minor case, following the passage of Prop 35. As a Senior Deputy in the DA’s office, he handled pre-trial writs in the California Court of Appeals, drafted and argued appeals in the California Court of Appeal and Superior Court appellate department, and drafted requests for review in the California Supreme Court. During his time with the Orange County DA, he was also deeply involved in developing and presenting comprehensive human trafficking training programs for law enforcement and prosecutors in 12 counties across California. He served as a subject matter expert for California’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and training for development of its human trafficking training video and the Post Institute of Criminal Investigations, advancing human trafficking investigations. Before his work at the Orange County District Attorney’s office, he worked for the law firm of Gilbert, Kelly, Crowley and Jennett in Los Angeles.
Key Points
The vertical prosecution model is essential in ensuring effective outcomes for victims, as it dedicates prosecutors to human trafficking cases, encouraging collaboration with police and law enforcement. The success of the HEAT unit relied on building trust not only among law enforcement but also with juvenile defenders, victim service providers, and the courts, creating a comprehensive support system for trafficking victims.
Daniel now represents victims of childhood sexual abuse and human trafficking, and he stresses the significance of focusing on restitution for victims, highlighting the long-term impacts of sexual abuse.
The criminal and civil justice systems have key distinctions, particularly regarding the representation of victims, with criminal prosecutors acting on behalf of the state. In contrast, civil attorneys advocate directly for the victims.
It is important to balance empathetic support for victims while providing them with the necessary structure for independence and self-empowerment.
Resources
Zalkin Law Firm
Orange County District Attorney’s Office
California District Attorney Investigators Association ‘Prosecutor of the Year’ Award
Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit (HEAT)
California Courts of Appeals
California Supreme Court
California’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training
Southwestern Law School
Interview with Daniel Aaron
112: Juvenile Justice Inspiring Hope: An Interview with Hon. Maria Hernandez
Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma (IVAT)
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. This is episode #331: Retribution and Restitution, with Daniel Varon. 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. Our guest today is Daniel Varon, and he joined the Zalkin Law firm in 2020 but I knew him a long time before that. His experience as an attorney in the office of the district attorney in Orange County was a huge part of the battle against human trafficking in my backyard. He is an experienced trial attorney, having tried approximately 60 jury trials during his work as Deputy District Attorney. He was recognized as Prosecutor of the Year by the California District Attorney Investigators Association in 2017. That’s an amazing honor, and I congratulate you. While at the Orange County DA’s office, Daniel worked in the Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit. Colloquially, we called it the “HEAT Unit,” because they put heat on those traffickers. He maintained a full case load and tried the first human trafficking of a minor case, following passage of Prop 35. As a Senior Deputy in the DA’s office, he also handled pre-trial writs in the California Court of Appeals, drafted and argued appeals in the California Court of Appeal and Superior Court appellate department, and drafted requests for review in the California Supreme Court. Now to my listeners, you know I don’t usually do long bios, but I think this could be like a timeline for those aspiring attorneys that have talked to me, who want to be in the battle as an advocate. So I’m going to do just a little more than usual. During his time with the Orange County DA, he was also deeply involved in developing and presenting comprehensive human trafficking training programs for law enforcement and prosecutors in 12 counties across California. He served as a subject matter expert for California’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and training for development of its human trafficking training video and for the Post Institute of Criminal Investigations, advancing human trafficking investigations. This is really important because we need those who have gone and been pioneers to help all of us reach the same level. Prior to his work at the Orange County District Attorney, he worked for the law firm of Gilbert, Kelly, Crowley and Jennett in Los Angeles. He has done so many outstanding things, and I think learning more about him outside of when he was serving here in Orange County, my favorite new thing to learn is that when he was at Southwestern University School of Law, he received the Best Advocate Award. I think we could all agree that he still qualifies in that area. Danny, welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, and I apologize for that long bio.
Daniel Varon 4:33
Well, thank you, Sandie. It’s great to be here, it’s great to see you. I think I did your podcast, I think seven years ago, while we were in the midst of all of this. Maybe longer, actually. It was great to see you in Orange County a few months ago, and it’s great to do your podcast. Thank you for having me.
Sandra Morgan 4:50
I plan to put the link to that podcast in the show notes, so people, if you want more of the content we’re going to talk about here, you can go back and listen to our previous conversation. Let’s get a little history on what happened here in Orange County and what it was like for you to be on the first HEAT team.
Daniel Varon 5:15
Well, it was amazing. And I have to say, I was thinking over those days, back in 2011/2012 when we were envisioning what the HEAT unit would look like. It’s hard not to feel like I was the Forrest Gump of human trafficking. Honestly, and you remember back in those early days, we were law enforcement led. We had a grant from the federal government, from the FBI. We had a wonderful federal agent, Steve Wrathall, who kind of spearheaded that effort. They created a task force at Anaheim Police Department, I think in 2010, and part of what they were obligated to do as part of receiving that grant was to learn and then train on human trafficking. In 2011 I happen to be assigned to a felony prosecution unit that dealt with the Northern District of Orange County, and that included Anaheim. I happened to get a few piping cases on my caseload, and we happened to get one close to trial, and that’s how I met those police officers. Greg Freeze, Shane Carringer, Paul Delgado, and others, I don’t want to leave anybody out, I probably did. I really followed their lead. I mean, these were guys that were willing to learn and do new things. They were vice officers at the time, and they took a new approach, and I learned the approach from them. It’s embarrassing to hear my bio read like that. Thank you for the kind words and the kind introduction, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that, like I said, I was the Forrest Gump of human trafficking that happened to be in the right place at the right time, and if I was smart on anything, it was I was smart enough to follow the lead of really good police officers.
Sandra Morgan 6:53
Thank you. That’s great. I worked with police officers before we had a vertical prosecutor, and I left the Office of Admin for the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force just as you were coming on. The difference in the outcomes for our victims were astronomical with the vertical prosecutor being available. Can you explain what that means?
Daniel Varon 7:32
Sure, Orange County, I think, is different from a lot of DA’soffices, in that it really does have a vertical prosecution model for the serious felonies. What that means, as opposed to a non vertical prosecution model is, the best way I could illustrate it is the difference between what I would say are garden variety felonies, simple assaults, burglaries, robberies, non gang crimes, non sex crimes, non homicides, those garden variety felonies are handled by different units at different times. So somebody gets arrested, police officers prepare reports, they submit it to a preliminary hearing unit, and they’re the unit that’s just designed to go to court to show the judge that there’s probable cause to hold the defendant to answer on those charges, and then once that happens, it gets submitted to a general felony unit, which is the unit that I was speaking about earlier, that I was assigned to the north team for. Then it’s prosecuted to trial by a trial deputy, and then if there’s a conviction and an appeal, the appeal gets handled by the Attorney General’s Office. Vertical prosecution means, instead of having these two separate units within the DA’s office that handle the first and the second phase of the case, the vertical prosecution teams tend to be assigned to specific crimes. Because they’re assigned to specific crimes, they get very involved with the police officers who investigate those crimes. We get very involved in understanding how the crimes work, how they’re investigated, how they’re prosecuted, and we get involved from the very earliest stage. The moment that a crime occurs, the police officers know who the assigned prosecutor is going to be, they can have conversations to make sure that the evidence is collected in the right way, that all of the elements to the crime are accounted for, it’s the DA who reviews those search warrants, reviews all the evidence as it comes in, and is able to meet the victim at the earliest possible stage. And then it also creates consistency for the victim of crime, because the victim has one prosecutor that she knows is handling her case and as it works through the process. It’s, in my view for serious crimes and for complicated crimes, it’s a much more effective and meaningful way to present a case through the process. It’s more effective for the victims. It’s more effective for law enforcement, and, quite frankly, I think it’s more effective for the courts. If you think about homicide, homicide is very complicated, and you want an attorney on the case who really understands the intricacies of the law of homicide. Human trafficking is no different. Human trafficking is very complicated in many respects. It’s complicated because of the social and the psychological components of it, you really have to understand what makes that trafficking relationship tick. You really have to understand the victimization. We used to call it, in the trainings, we used to refer to it as victimology. How does a trafficker recruit their victims? What are they looking for? What characteristics? How do they manipulate them? How do they bring them in? How do they keep them trafficked? You need somebody that has really immersed themselves in that culture, so to speak. And then you also need somebody who understands how to take that information and apply it to the laws. In our case with trafficking, we also were involved in drafting laws. If we thought things needed to change, we were not quiet about drafting proposals to send them to the legislature as well, and I think over time, that vertical prosecution model gave us a lot more credibility with the courts. As we got more and more cases through the court system, the judges knew that we were the trafficking attorneys, that we understood the law. It felt like, at times, since I’m not in the the DA’s office anymore and I don’t practice criminal law in Orange County, I could say it, but there were many times that we felt that we were educating the bench, and that was a really, really important facet of what we felt our role was and what we were doing.
Sandra Morgan 11:31
That speaks to one of the elements we talk a lot about on this podcast, is collaboration and federal grants, for the last decade or so, have focused on an enhanced collaborative model. Without building trust, it is not possible to really collaborate, and that’s what I observed with the HEAT unit. I worked in the juvenile courts, and could see the trust between all of the partners supporting one youth who was now involved in this case. So kudos for the emphasis on including the folks on the bench, the law enforcement, the victim service people. I always felt, as a part of the task force, that I was personally part of the victories that we then had with the convictions.
Daniel Varon 12:34
Actually, if I can just add one crucial component there, which is that the way that the task force was structured at the beginning, and that I think it’s still supposed to be structured, but I haven’t been there for four and a half years, is it wasn’t just police, and that’s to your point, right? It wasn’t just police and law enforcement. The trust was absolutely crucial. We had to earn the trust of the juvenile defenders, the attorneys who were representing minors who were going through the juvenile court process, we had to earn their trust that if there was a minor that we recommended for detention in a juvenile facility for a short period of time, we had to earn their trust so that they understood that we were doing it to protect the minor from being trafficked, from being abused, from being victimized further. There were some wonderful juvenile defenders who understood that, and we were able to work with them to figure out what’s really in the best interest of the minor. That’s the crutch of California’s juvenile delinquency program. Really, the obligation is for everybody to look at it from the perspective of what’s best for the minor, and we did that, and I’m really, really proud of the work that we were able to do through the juvenile court system. As you know, we had an amazing judge during my time there, Judge Maria Hernandez. She was somebody who was just so dedicated to trying to figure out how to use the courts in the proper way to try to help the minors. She was instrumental in that process. The public defenders who were assigned there that we worked with, some of them were really, really terrific as well. The trust that you’re referring to, it has to go much further beyond just law enforcement and prosecutor, it has to go system wide.
Sandra Morgan 14:16
Absolutely. Thank you for that, and thanks for the shout out for Judge Hernandez. We’ll put her interviews in the show notes too, because she has some great comments to add to this. But now you’re not here in Orange County, and you’ve moved from criminal law to civil. What is that about?
Daniel Varon 14:38
You know, it was just the right time for me. I had a very long commute, and that wasn’t the only thing, certainly. But the work that we were doing in human trafficking is very taxing. We really, like I’ve alluded to, we really made it our business to be involved. It was never a nine to five job for us, in the unit. Brad, Shane, Laban, who you know obviously, and the others, Julia and the others that we worked with, Brian who is now a judge, we worked a lot. I think when we each came in, the entire emphasis of the HEAT unit and what we were doing was the victim centered approach, that we were taking the perspective of the victim and really trying to do what was in the best interest of the victim, and to achieve justice. Our jobs as prosecutors, fundamentally, were to achieve justice, and we were dealing with crimes that, by their nature, are recidivist. They’re not crimes that, they’re not one-offs. Somebody commits an assault in a bar, a lot of times that could be a one-off offense. Somebody steals a car, you hope that’s a one-off offense. The very nature of human trafficking is that it’s a crime that continues, it’s of a continuing nature. They recruit and victimize somebody so that they can sell them over and over and over and over. And every time they do it, it’s the money maker for the perpetrator. And so we know that when people get out of prison in this arena, they reoffend. I don’t know what the percentages are, but I venture to say it’s in the high 90s. We saw recidivist offenders over and over again. From our perspective, achieving justice meant that if you had an offender, it was our obligation, within our ethical bounds and ethical constraints, to use admissible evidence to ensure that they were convicted and that they were sentenced appropriately. We were focused on it, and we knew that learning and understanding and growing was key to that, so we went out with our law enforcement partners on ride alongs a lot. I spent many, 12:00 till 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning on Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana to learn. I’ve been out to Anaheim’s tracks on Harbor and Beach Boulevard a lot. There were times when juveniles werelocated, where I’d go in at five o’clock in the morning so that I could interview her with the police officer. Those are things that we did, and so it’s very taxing. It’s taxing our families, it’s taxing physically and emotionally, obviously, the subject matter is very difficult. After my time in the HEAT Unit, around 2019, I was moved into the writs and appeals unit, which was a welcome change of pace for me. At that time, I kind of started to reassess where I was at. I did sort of a mental check in, because I don’t share this very much, but in my mind, as a prosecutor, every three or four years, I’d sort of reassess where I was at. I did that because I felt like it was my obligation to either recommit, mentally and emotionally to what I was doing, or find something else that I would commit to. Because if you’re just going along like, “Oh, it’s going to be a 30 year career,” you get stale. You don’t bring the same passion to your work, and it’s not fair to the victims that we try to achieve justice for. It’s not fair to our colleagues. It’s not fair to the office. It was 2019, I was kind of going through that mental check in, sort of, to see where we were. I knew Irwin’s Zalkin and I’d actually given a presentation. He asked me to give a presentation at IVAT down in San Diego, which is – you’re nodding. I think you know what IVAT may be, right?
Sandra Morgan 18:20
But for our listeners.
Daniel Varon 18:22
Well, I’m going to get the acronym wrong, but it’s an institute that focuses on violence against women, essentially sexual abuse and domestic violence. I gave a human trafficking presentation there, and we had remained in contact. By early 2020, we were in touch, and I ended up here. This is really, it’s a perfect progression for me. What we do in our firm, the vast majority of the work we do is representing victims of childhood sex abuse. Some of that overlaps, obviously, with human trafficking. What we had seen, we never actually got deep into the statistics, but it was very obvious to us that many of our human trafficking victims have been sexually abused when they were minors. Whether they were adult or child victims, when we got them in human trafficking, we learned that a lot of them were abused early. You’ve heard me say this before, Sandie, but we wanted to learn From traffickers and traffickers themselves talk about targeting young women who have been sexually abused when they were minors, it’s one of the risk factors to getting trafficked. The damage that’s done to a child who’s sexually abused is incalculable. It’s a lifelong, life lasting impact, and obviously it impacts everybody differently. For some people it made them more vulnerable to sexual abuse beyond the initial abuse. For others, it made them more vulnerable to human trafficking. For others, it makes them more vulnerable to alcohol abuse or drug abuse, difficulty with relationships. I mean, the manifestations of harm that are done when a child is sexually abused you really just can’t put to words the lifelong impact. For me, this is like the perfect place to be, it’s really where my passion is, is helping people who have been victimized in that way. The natural progression for me was, when I came here, is to look at, well, what about the civil component to human trafficking? And it’s something that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about and looking at, and researching. That’s an area that we’re certainly open to as well, it’s trying to find restitution for people who are victimized in that way as well.
Sandra Morgan 20:31
In some of my focus groups with victims of human trafficking, one of the consistent themes that comes up is what justice looks like. It began to concern me that their response was more about restitution so they could build a new life, and they really didn’t care if the sentence was five years or 25 years. If they were out of the system and independent, self reliant, it was a new life. I began watching restitution. I watched some restitution cases in the civil courts in Los Angeles, and I talked to those victims. Can you compare criminal justice with civil justice?
Daniel Varon 21:32
There’s a lot of misconceptions, I think people don’t fully appreciate what the role is of a prosecutor. I alluded to it earlier, that as much as we felt that we were trying to achieve justice for the victims, the main distinction between civil and criminal law, I think, if you wanted to just pick one, the main one is that as a prosecutor you don’t represent the victim. In civil law, if you’re a plaintiff’s attorney and you represent somebody who’s been trafficked or been sexually abused, you represent that person. So everything you do is geared towards achieving some result for that person. On the criminal side, you represent the people of the state of California. That might sound a little cheesy. When you look at a criminal complaint, it says the people of the state of California vs., and then it names the defendant. When we would stand up in court as prosecutors, we would say, “Daniel Varon for the people.” Some people might say, “Well, that sounds a little bit strange or a little bit cheesy, or hokey, or whatever,” but it’s not. Every individual in California has an interest in the Fair Administration of Justice, and part of that means that when somebody commits a crime against society by victimizing another member of society, it’s up to a prosecutor to stand up on their behalf, to ensure that justice is done for what happened. We know that there are many, many crimes out there, human trafficking oftentimes is one of them, where the victim, like you said, has no interest in their perpetrator going to jail there. How many domestic violence cases do we know about where the victim goes sideways and she doesn’t want her partner or spouse in jail? It happens over and over again, but the role of a prosecutor is, we can take into account what a victim tells us, but at the end of the day, it’s not a victim’s decision whether a case is brought or not brought. On the flip side to that is, a victim can yell and scream that she wants somebody to be prosecuted, but again, we have ethical obligations to represent the people, and if we don’t have admissible evidence of the crime, we don’t get to bring case, right. One of the hardest things that you ever do as a prosecutor is, a crime that you know was committed against a victim who you know was victimized, but you know that you don’t have admissible evidence to prove it to 12 people beyond a reasonable doubt. That was our burden, and so you have to decide not to file the case. It’s an agonizing decision at times, but it’s one of the most important decisions that you make as a prosecutor, is the decision whether to file or not to file. On the civil side, obviously we have ethical burdens on when we bring a case or file a case on behalf of a client, but we represent the client, and we try to achieve an outcome for the client. You make recommendations to the clients, but there are certain things that only a client can decide. It’s not the same on the criminal side.
Sandra Morgan 24:31
In your work, on the civil side now, how is that impacting justice for victims?
Daniel Varon 24:40
Well, our justice system is, I would argue we have the best in the world, in my opinion, but it’s not perfect. We can strive for perfection, and I think the fact that, as a society, I think we’re always moving the ball forward, but we’re not there yet. One of the imperfections, I think, is that there really is no way that I have found, to achieve full restitution for victims on the criminal side. That doesn’t mean that in all cases you’ll never get restitution, but in the vast majority of cases that I’ve seen, it’s really difficult to get full financial restitution for victims. We’re not talking about somebody stole your car and you lost $5,000, and then you got $5,000 back and got a new car. Okay that, fine, you get restitution. But when you talk about sexual abuse of a child, or you talk about human trafficking, which involves obviously sexual abuse of a child or a young woman, and I know I’ve been very gendered, by the way, but in my time at the DA’s office, I hadn’t prosecuted any cases where they were male victims. I don’t mean, at all, to suggest that there are not male victims of human trafficking, we know there are, but in my experience that I had dealt with, it was always female victims, and so that’s why I keep using ‘she,’ so please don’t take anything by that. But, you talk about the lifelong needs of somebody who’s been trafficked or sexually abused as a child, the cost is astronomical. The impact to that person is potentially lifelong counseling. Which estimates show that somebody who’s sexually abused as a child could cost anywhere from 250 to $400,000 over the course of their lifetime, just in therapy costs. What about their ability to go to school, housing, change in their employment outlook? What about all of the things that we really don’t talk about a lot, like sexual dysfunction? I’ve dealt with a lot of cases with male victims of child sex abuse, and there are ramifications for them that a lot of people don’t like to talk about. Sometimes we’ll question sexuality. Sometimes we’ll have sexual dysfunction. These things interfere with relationships. There’s no criminal court that will look at an 11 or 12 or 13 year old child who’s sexually abused and say, “Well, I’m going to award $500,000 or 600,000, or a million or 2 million, or ten million dollars to account for all of these things that we expect you to be impacted with over the next 65 years of life expectancy.” It just doesn’t work that way. The side note to that, Sandie, is that even if it did in the perfect world, where the abuser is caught and prosecuted and sentenced under California’s laws, they’re going to be away for a while. So, if they don’t have money sitting around, they’re not going to pay any kind of judgment. Even if a judge ordered hundreds of thousands of dollars of restitution on a criminal case, what happens from a practical standpoint is the victim gets a restitution order, then he or she can go in and try to enforce the restitution order. It becomes a judgment, and then it’s enforceable as a judgment. So go and enforce the judgment against somebody that doesn’t have any assets to speak of, and doesn’t have any prospects for future earnings. It’s just a piece of paper.
Sandra Morgan 28:05
So with the civil approach, how does that overcome that hurdle?
Daniel Varon 28:11
The civil approach, what we really emphasize in our cases is, whether there are other entities that are responsible for the abuse that happened. If there was a school or a church, or a business or something that was aware that somebody was a risk to abuse, and they turned a blind eye, they covered it up, or what have you, they didn’t follow their own policies and procedures, things like that. If there’s an entity that’s responsible, then you can bring a lawsuit against the entity and you can achieve restitution that way. A lot of the entities are insured, for example, for negligence. If they’ve negligently failed to protect somebody from a known abuser, or they negligently fail to supervise their agent, their teacher, their priest, whatever, then that’s something that they can be held accountable for, and that’s a way to achieve restitution for a victim of some of these offenses.
Sandra Morgan 29:10
I’ve worked in the public, non-profit sector for decades, and this is always, in my job description, under ‘risk management,’ because we know that we need to follow certain guidelines. For me, I’m curious if you feel that this approach supports maybe transferring some of the, I can’t really find the right words, but I’ve gone into hotels, to hospitals, to churches, and done training, but it’s always been- not always, I don’t want to say always- it often feels like I’m just checking a box. But when you hit the bottom line, it’s more than checking a box. Can you give me your understanding of that aspect on restitution?
Daniel Varon 30:15
Yeah, well, that’s 100% right. The reality is that there are, in our society, there are institutions that we put our trust in all the time, and we trust them with our most precious also. We’re talking about schools. We trust the school to supervise our children, we don’t even think about it most of the time. You have a kid, kid’s in second grade, you go to the first day of school, you drop them off at school. If it’s a private school, maybe you looked at the school, you interviewed there, and you looked at the facilities and all of that. But how many of us are going into the personnel records and checking to see if somebody’s had a prior complaint of abuse? We don’t get to do that, even if you wanted to, but most of us wouldn’t even think to ask that. And we kind of take for granted that these schools that have, really by having a name on the door, we trust them. If it’s a public school, it has the added credibility of being a government institution, and we trust them. We just drop our kids off, and then we come back six hours later and pick them up. And that’s it. If you want to make sure that institutions are doing what they’re supposed to do when you entrust your most precious things in the world, your children to them, then you have to hold them accountable when they fail to do it, because, like you said, the last thing that they want to do is lose funding. Whether it’s a private or public institution, they don’t want to lose funding. Most of these institutions are insured, and insurance companies are in the business of managing risk, and if you can’t follow the insurance company’s guidelines on managing your risk, you’re not going to get insurance, which means you’re going to be exposed as an entity to the liability. Some insurance policies have exclusions. One of the exclusions they have is that they don’t insure things that are expected or intended. So think about it this way: you get in your car, you get into an accident, god forbid, you’re insured. Because you had an accident. It’s negligence on your part or somebody else’s part, or both your parts. That’s what insurance is for. We buy it and hope we never need it, that’s what it’s for, it’s for those accidents. You drive your car and you see somebody you don’t like on the sidewalk, and you decide to intentionally drive your car up on the sidewalk and run them down, that’s intended. Now, insurance company is going to say, “Sorry, we have an expected or intended clause, you’re excluded. We’re not covering that. You’re on your own.” Well, let’s say you had a teacher in a school that was continually accused by students of sexual abuse. They keep reporting it, and the school investigates it, and then they don’t really do much about the teacher. Well, at some point, an insurance company could look at that and say, “This is expected or intended, we’re not covering this,” and then the schools on the hook. They don’t want that. It’s a way of giving them a negative incentive to do what they should do anyway, and how it translates into trafficking is, ou’ve got civil laws that specifically allow a plaintiff who’s been trafficked to hold institutions, the one that always comes to mind is hotels and motels, accountable. If they’re not doing their part to prevent human trafficking on their premises, and that’s another avenue for victims to achieve restitution, is through those institutions that were in a position to help, had an obligation to help, and didn’t.
Sandra Morgan 33:44
I have so much hope in how this translates in our communities to more corporate responsibility, more government responsibility. Because even if the initial response is not because I presented a passionate cry to protect our children, but because the board of directors is expecting that the bottom line is met. This is like a new tool, maybe not so new, but certainly you’re fine tuning the approach so that it actually is, like you said earlier, a progression in your work. In our final moments here, I’d love to hear, what have you changed your mind about since you started this journey as an advocate fighting human trafficking?
Daniel Varon 34:45
You know, I’ve given that a lot of thought, and it’s a complicated question. Because I feel like I’ve gone through this evolution, not only as a prosecutor, not only as an attorney, but as a human being, and as a father, as a husband. I mean, I’ve learned so much in the process. I started my life as a prosecutor in Orange County, which we always refer to it as being ‘behind the orange curtain.’ We said there was such a difference between the way they prosecute crimes in LA and Orange County, and we really prided ourselves on what we viewed as the relative safety of Orange County, and we felt that we were an integral part of that, and that meant that our job was in seeking justice, to hold people accountable for what they did. We believed very strongly in personal responsibility, and so that’s how we approach the job. As a young and naive prosecutor in the mid i2000s, let’s say 2006/2007-2010, if you saw a young woman come into court with prostitution charges, you would see the same thing. That she had been in three or four, or five different jurisdictions. She got arrested and then failed to appear in each one of those jurisdictions. I would look at that, say, “She’s thumbing her nose. She’s giving the big middle finger to the courts. She’s just saying, ‘I don’t care about you. Your law doesn’t matter. Whatever.'” You would say, “Well, Judge, she needs 90 days of jail. She’s got to be in jail,” and that’s the only tool we thought we had, right. When we get to 2010/2011 and I start working with the guys I mentioned earlier, started to learn the victimology component and what it was that was driving this set of crimes. We didn’t stop to think, ‘How does this young woman, who’s been to five different places to get arrested, how does she get here? She doesn’t live here, but she’s got no phone and she’s got no wallet, she’s got no money.’ We never stopped to think about that, right. Part of it was learning that in 2011 let’s say, and understanding the bigger picture to the crime, and understanding that these were victims that were being brought there, that were being exploited. That changed everything. What it gave me was a sense of greater empathy and understanding to the human trafficking world, and I think that we try to operate,as much as we can, with that empathy and understanding and victim centered approach. But I say it’s an evolution because empathy can be great, but empathy can go too far. I know that in today’s day and age, that might be a very controversial thing to say, and if my wife listens to this it may be controversial in my own house, but it can be. I think where I’ve come today, through this evolution, is that what we do needs to be informed by an empathetic approach and an understanding of both sides of an issue and who we’re dealing with, but blind empathy can also be very dangerous. It can remove from us skepticism, which can be very important, especially as an attorney, you have to have a skeptical eye about a lot of things. But it’s also counterproductive for the person that you’re empathetic towards. You can kill somebody with kindness, and I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it with an approach to victims sometimes, and I’ve seen it with an approach to clients sometimes, where you want to do everything for a person because you care so deeply about what they’ve been through, and you want to help them, but you remove their ability to learn to help themselves. If somebody doesn’t learn to help themselves, they’re never going to get out of the human trafficking life. They’re never going to heal from sexual abuse. They, I think more than anything, what I’ve seen is that people who’ve been victimized, just like the rest of us, they need empathic understanding from people around them, but they also need structure and guidance, they need to have confidence, and they need to know that they have the ability to stand on their own feet and walk forward. Sometimes empathy can be an impediment to that.
Sandra Morgan 38:51
Wow. Okay, a little choked up here. I’m going to spend some time thinking about that, and I’m so grateful, Daniel, that you came to the podcast today. I’m probably going to call you again once I process all of that. Wow, that was not what I thought you’d say, but really valuable. And I ask listeners to maybe go back and listen to that part again, just hit your rewind button. As we’re winding up here, I want to tell our listeners thank you, and go to the endinghumantrafficking.org website, and in the show notes you’ll find previous interviews and interviews with the people that Daniel mentioned here. Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and I’ll be back in two weeks. Danny, thank you so much.
Daniel Varon 39:49
Thank you, Sandie, it’s such a pleasure to talk to you.
...more
41min
October 14, 2024330 – Fast Fashion Meets Justice, with Live2Free Students at Vanguard University
Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by the Live2Free president, Delaney Mininger, as the two discuss the upcoming Fair Trade Fashion Show at Vanguard University.
Delaney Mininger
Delaney is the president of the Live2Free club at Vanguard University and the Global Center for Women and Justice. Delaney is a third year student at Vanguard and a sociology major. She says her passion for preventing human trafficking started at just 11 years old when her mom went with a team to Italy to help women involved in trafficking there.
Key Points
The Fair Trade Fashion Show promotes self-expression through fashion while encouraging consumers to consider the ethical implications of their clothing choices and the production processes that affect the dignity of workers.
Fast fashion contributes to overconsumption and supports exploitative labor practices. The culture of buying cheap clothing leads to waste and supports industries that profit from modern slavery.
The podcast emphasizes the importance of supporting Fair Trade items and thrifting as ethical alternatives. Fair Trade ensures that workers receive fair wages, while thrifting helps reduce waste and is often more accessible for budget-conscious consumers.
The Live2Free club, through initiatives like the Safe Kids, Safe Communities Program, aims to educate youth about human trafficking, healthy relationships, and online safety, filling an educational gap often overlooked in traditional school curriculums.
Human trafficking is a global issue, not just a problem in the U.S. The Fair Trade Fashion Show aims to encourage audiences to recognize their role as consumers and to make informed choices that can contribute to reducing demand for exploitative labor practices.
Resources
Live2Free
FairTrade International
Fair Trade Fashion Show
Goodwill of Orange County
Fiet Gratia
Tony’s Chocolonely
Fair Trade Fashion Show Tool Kit
Transcript
Sandra Morgan 0:14
You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode #330: Fast Fashion Meets Justice, with Live2Free Students at Vanguard University. 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. I am so happy to have Delaney Mininger here in the studio with me for today’s podcast. Delaney is the president of the Live2Free club at Vanguard University and the Global Center for Women and Justice. Delaney is a third year student at Vanguard and a sociology major. She says her passion for preventing human trafficking started at just 11 years old when her mom went with a team to Italy to help women involved in trafficking there. So Delaney, thank you for coming in today.
Delaney Mininger 1:25
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Sandra Morgan 1:27
How long have you been president of the Live2Free club?
Delaney Mininger 1:31
I have just become president this year. I’ve been fully onboarded. I did some work over the summer, but officially starting at the beginning of this school year I became president.
Sandra Morgan 1:42
So maybe I should be addressing you as Madam President.
Delaney Mininger 1:45
Perhaps.
Sandra Morgan 1:46
Perhaps, oh my goodness. Okay, so one of the first things that happens every fall is we dive right in here at Vanguard with the Live2Free club for a Fair Trade Fashion Show. How did you get involved with that?
Delaney Mininger 2:05
Yeah, so my first experience with the fashion show was actually during Welcome Week. I was walking through the campus mall, and I walked up to a booth that was talking about human trafficking. Like forementioned, my mom had been working with victims of human trafficking since I was younger, and so I had an interest, and I just saw that there was a fashion show, and I thought that was such a fun way to get involved and to get some experience with clubs and different activities on campus. I signed up for that fashion show. I signed up to volunteer as a model, and that year was so fun. I met a bunch of people. I made a lot of friends. It was a really great experience. I love fashion, I love thrifting, it’s a big passion of mine, and has been for a couple years now. So I thought it was just so me, and it fit so well. The next year, my sophomore year, one of the interns asked if I would take on a management level position for the fashion show, still volunteer, and just help out with the other models since I had experience from the year before, so I just helped out there with the fashion show, leading some models. As the year went on, I got closer with the interns and they were telling me that I should interview for the positions and get more involved with the club, and I just had a big passion for it, so I got more involved, and that kind of just led to me being here.
Sandra Morgan 3:27
And now we’re just days away from the fair trade fashion show. So tell us about your theme for this year’s show.
Delaney Mininger 3:36
Our theme for this year is Fashion with a Passion, and Fashion with a Passion is all about considering the individual. In one aspect, fashion is something that the individual can use to express who they are and what they love. I have a lot of people tell me, “Your style is so cohesive, it’s so you. How did you figure this out? You’ve got it all together.” And I usually tell them, “Yes, my style is me, and the reason why it fits is because it’s just everything that I am and everything that I love.” You would point at something and say, “Oh, this looks like something you would like,” instead of, “This is you, you are this and you’re in this box.” It’s like, I have curated my style just to be me and a collaboration of everything that I love and I am. And so I encourage that other people do that, and I love to tell other people that your style should be you, and you should make your own choices of what that’s going to be. We want to make sure that when we’re considering those choices and we’re making those choices for ourselves as the individual, we’re not forgetting about the individual who is allowing us to make those choices, and who’s making it possible for us to express ourselves in that way. We want to make sure that we’re not getting self centered, we’re not thinking about ourselves in a way, but we’re thinking about those who make it possible for us to do that.
Sandra Morgan 4:56
Let me ask a question here, because I love this idea, and even though I’m a few generations removed from the students here at Vanguard, I get put in boxes. I get messages on social media that tell me what to wear for my age, and I don’t like that. I’m really leaning into this Fashion with a Passion, but my problem is, how do I do that? Fit my budget, number one, well, maybe number two, because number one is, how do I make it fit my values? People all know how strongly I believe that we have to be part of the solution to ending labor trafficking. So how do I make this fit my values?
Delaney Mininger 5:49
A big part of making sure that something fits your values, especially when it comes to fashion, is that you have the opportunity to shop Fairtrade, and a lot of us have the opportunity to do that. Fair trade basically just means that it’s a trading partnership that aims to improve the trading conditions for marginalized producers and workers in developing countries. It’s based on principles of dialogue, transparency, and respect, and seeks to create a greater equity in international trade. The great thing about fair trade is that we have so many different options of what fair trade items we can buy, and then for those who can’t afford fair trade as it does tend to be more on the expensive side, because we’re making sure that every step is taken to ensure that people are getting paid fair wages and what they should be, and treated properly. It does tend to be on the more expensive side, but there is alternative options, such as thrifting or second hand shopping.
Sandra Morgan 6:46
Let me ask you about that, it’s more expensive. Because people have complained to me about that, and I’ve challenged that thinking because I’m not sure that we need so much stuff.
Delaney Mininger 7:02
Yeah.
Sandra Morgan 7:03
Maybe it’s better for us as consumers to think about how much we really need, versus what we want, while at the same time we’re thinking about how it impacts someone else. Is it expensive if someone is getting paid a fair wage? if I’m contrasting that, and here’s my question, if it’s less expensive and it costs someone their dignity, their freedom, is that too high a price for us to pay so that we can save a few dollars?
Delaney Mininger 7:50
Yeah, I think that’s really important, is to consider the cost and the trade off. I think the term Fair Trade really well represents what it is, because yes, you are making that trade. You are getting this item, and you are knowing that it is not at the cost of somebody else. You’re knowing that it’s not at the cost of their dignity and who they are, and the value that they have as a person. It is a fair trade that you are getting this item for yourself and that they are getting treated with the dignity and respect that they deserve. I think that’s such an important part of this. Talking with older generations, especially, they’ve kind of gotten a lot better at decreasing their consumption and, talking to one of my advisors, they talked about a capsule closet, I think was the term they used, which is like investing in pieces that are going to last longer and going to be better quality. I think that when we’re factoring in the treatment of the people who make them, that just adds even more to it. It’s not just something that you’re going to buy one week and get sick of and throw out the next because it didn’t cost you much, so it doesn’t matter, but it’s something that you are investing in for yourself and for the treatment of others. So it’s going to last long, you’re going to love it for a long time, and you’re going to know that the values that were made to make that item are something that you agree with.
Sandra Morgan 9:17
Wow, I love that, and I love that you’re having conversations with your professors, with staff here at Vanguard. It reminds me of one of the co-founders here of the Global Center for Women and Justice. When she first started mentoring me, we had this conversation, that’s a lot of years ago I’m not even going to say how long, and I asked her what she did. She said, “I have a simple rule. If I’m going to get a blouse, I have to decide what blouse I’m getting rid of that is already in my closet.” And I lived overseas for several years, and one of my best friends and I love to travel together. When I’m with a group of Americans, I feel like, okay, I’m doing pretty well because my suitcase is only this big and their’s, I can’t even lift it. But then I’m with my friend in Greece, and we’re going on a three day weekend, and I said, “Do you want me to help you get your bag?” “Oh no, I’ve got it.” Everything. She’s got everything in a backpack for three days. I think it is part of a mentality, and we can do a better job with less.
Delaney Mininger 10:43
We’ve definitely become more accustomed to thinking that we need more things than we do.
Sandra Morgan 10:48
We could have another conversation about the difference between need and want. Okay, back to the fashion show, because you and I could chat about this, we agree so much. How does the fashion show impact global slavery?
Delaney Mininger 11:05
A big aspect of the fashion show is decreasing over consumption, like we were just talking about, as it’s one of the main drivers behind the fast fashion industry and other unethical businesses. For anybody who doesn’t know, fast fashion is basically industries that benefit from people who buy so much, so many pieces of clothing, and they buy them at very cheap prices so that they can throw them out, or they can do whatever, and it doesn’t really affect them because they didn’t pay too much for those items.
Sandra Morgan 11:36
Is that like the the culture of ‘I have to have an entire new spring wardrobe, and then a fall wardrobe, and then a holiday wardrobe.’
Delaney Mininger 11:44
And it’s not just seasonal. I mean, with social media, we see so many trends come and go within months, and it becomes this huge thing that everybody’s doing. So then everybody thinks, well, “everybody’s doing” so then everybody thinks that they have to be doing it, and then they buy all of these items, and then all of a sudden they see something that says, ‘this is out, this is in.’ Then everybody’s like, “Oh, well, now I got to throw all that away, and I got to get all this,” and they want to buy them cheap, because if trends are going to come and go like that, then you want to be able to dispose of the items that are out and buy the items that are in. And so social media has definitely increased that over consumption.
How does the Fair Trade fashion show counter that?
Well, I mean, just in general, if there’s a profit to be made, there are always people who are going to do whatever it takes to make that profit, and they don’t care how it’s going to disparage somebody else or how it’s going to affect somebody else. So we want to make sure, at the fashion show, that we’re encouraging others, that it is important, that we do care, and it is important that we don’t support businesses that profit off of labor trafficking and what we would consider modern day slavery. We encourage, like we said, second hand shopping, thrifting, buying fair trade items. We invite vendors who are fair trade vendors, and we’ve reviewed all of their practices and made sure that they are employing ethical practices. And then we ask them to advertise their clothing and their food, their jewelry, whatever it is that they have, we ask them to advertise those to our audiences so that they know how many options there are to shop Fairtrade and how many choices that they can make that are ethical and that they are not forced into encouraging this negative behavior that leads to disparaging others.
Sandra Morgan 13:30
When I go to the fashion show, I can shop?
Delaney Mininger 13:32
Oh yeah, we have so much shopping. No, we don’t want to encourage over consumption. So yes, shop responsibly, shop what you need, but also you can walk away knowing that the things that you did buy are going towards a good cause, and they’re not something that is against your values.
Sandra Morgan 13:53
If we’re shopping responsibly and we want to have a great fashion show, how are we going to get clothes that university students with student debt can afford?
Delaney Mininger 14:08
That’s definitely a big thing. I would say it is a big privilege to shop Fairtrade. It’s a privilege to be able to afford those more expensive items, and we want to make sure that nobody feels like they don’t have an option to also support ethical businesses and ethical practices. We have partners like Goodwill of Orange County who get their clothing donated to them, and then they sell them for much cheaper than the retail prices that you’re going to be seeing. Most stores, I’d say shirts are like 30, 25, at the lowest right now, and Goodwill does like 7, 8, 9, so you’re having a way lower price range, and then it’s just more accessible and more affordable to those who want to shop ethically and want to make sure that they’re not going against their values, but also are on a budget, like us college students. I mean, for me, I even have to be careful about how much I’m thrifting because I am on a budget, and I need to make sure that I’m not over consuming and also that I’m not overspending.
Sandra Morgan 15:16
What I love about thrifting, and I’ve been a big fan since the Fair Trade Fashion Show first started here, and I learned how to do that better, is number one, it doesn’t go into a landfill, it gets recycled. So in many ways for me, thrifting is like recycling bottles and bags and all those things. Yeah. It seems like it disrupts the economic cycle of buy, buy, buy, by giving an item of clothing another life. At first I kind of struggled, but I know this brand that I just picked up at the thrift store, and I know they don’t have good practices, so it really became important for me to study what it meant to disrupt that cycle, because that is another aspect of the ethics. I think I also wanted to commend your leadership team for vetting the vendors who will be at the fashion show. Who are they representing? How are they demonstrating that their supply chain is clean of exploited and trafficked labor? So when you’re thrifting, tell me what your experience is, how you take your values into the thrift store with you?
Delaney Mininger 16:51
Well, like a lot of people my age and even people older, I started thrifting because it’s all my bank account could handle at the time. I probably started thrifting my sophomore year of high school, and being a younger sister, I just wanted something other than hand-me-downs, because that’s what I had had for most of my life. I just wanted to have more freedom over my expression of self and I couldn’t afford anything other than thrifting, so a couple friends and I started thrifting, and it very quickly became an activity that we all loved to do together, because not only is it more affordable, but it’s fun. I mean, it’s definitely different than your average shopping experience. Every single item is unique, and you’re not going to find two of the same thing, but it’s just really fun. It’s a fun activity for me, and so that’s originally why I had started thrifting, is because it’s what I could afford, and it was a fun activity. But as I learned more about the impact that the fast fashion industry was having and that overconsumption was having, on not just our society and our people, how we treat people, but also our environment. I like that you said that, that you were saying these clothes get recycled. That’s such a big part of it, because the fast fashion industries, they toss out those clothes and they end up in landfill, and the textile industry contributes to so much of the pollution that we’re experiencing in our environment right now. I loved that it had an environmental impact, it had a societal impact, that was something that was so important to me, and so I very rarely shop retail anymore, because of how much I love the experience of thrifting. It’s also a great way to bond. When I meet new people and I tell them that I like to thrift, and I found out that they like to thrift, it’s a great activity to do together, because it’s something that is just so unique. It’s different than other shopping experiences.
Sandra Morgan 18:43
I think I’ve watched our Vanguard community, our students, really institute thrifting as an activity that is socially aware, at the same time as socially beneficial to creating strong relationships. And this was epitomized for me when I took a team in 2023 to Madrid, Spain. We were working with a group called Fiet, who works with victims of human trafficking, identifying, restoration, now they’re moving into prevention, and we’re taking another team there in 2025, and our student team said, “Dr Morgan, we’re going to go shopping. When do we have to be back?” When they came back, they had all these bags. They found the thrift store in Madrid, and so they took what they’ve been doing here, on their trip internationally. I think this is a growing trend here,
Delaney Mininger 19:52
I think it is one of the better trends, because we are seeing a lot more influencers who aren’t just shopping at these, I mean of course, we see a lot of hauls that are just crazy amounts of things, and they are a lot of the time from businesses that we wouldn’t necessarily want to support, but a lot more influencers and just popular people on social media are encouraging thrifting, and I think that’s a great trend. I think we should be encouraging that, and even if you are buying more of those items, you know that you are not directly supporting businesses that don’t match your values.
Sandra Morgan 20:27
And disrupting that cycle is just one piece of the big picture. We also are focusing on asking businesses to follow supply chain transparency best practices. We’re asking businesses to look at the workers along that supply chain and how they’re caring for that. We’re asking our communities to actually learn about how this works. Yesterday, I had a dear friend here in the office. She’s been a mentor for me, and so we’re talking about another generation, she could probably be your great, great grandmother.
Delaney Mininger 21:16
Oh, wow.
Sandra Morgan 21:17
And I gave her a Chocolonely bar, and she asked me all about it. Chocolonely is the chocolate from the Netherlands where the founder actually had himself arrested because he contributed to labor trafficking. Of course, they dropped the charges, but he made the issue on the front page, so people realized that his choice to eat chocolate enslaved a child in Africa. That’s the kind of awareness that we want to create here. And as my friend was leaving and she picked up the remains of her chocolate bar, she said, “Well, now I have to buy chocolate that doesn’t use any slave labor.” It changed her life. and I think we are hoping that the Fair Trade Fashion Show will make that kind of impact right here in our own community. Let me ask you one more question. Rnding human trafficking has listeners in 166 countries. Why does this matter to them? Isn’t this just a problem in America?
Delaney Mininger 22:39
I think that’s probably a question that a lot of people have. I, as we talked about earlier, know that human trafficking is not something that just happens in America. Labor trafficking is not just something that happens in America. Modern day slavery happens all over the globe right now, and it’s a huge problem that people are facing everywhere, in countries like Venezuela, in countries like Chile, Brazil, there’s so much labor trafficking going on, whether it be for our clothing or for our food, and though it might not be right in our backyard, we might not be the ones with slaves who are asking them to do these things, if we’re supporting businesses that are asking that of people, that are asking people to live with no wages, asking people to work with no wages, or in bad living conditions, then that’s not right. That’s just as bad as being the problem, contributing to it, letting people benefit from that unethical practice, it’s not something that we want to be doing. So it’s important to people in all these different countries that are listening to this podcast to know that it is happening all around you. And even if you are not the one that has a slave, you’re not the one that’s directly contributing to it, you’re still being a part of the problem if you aren’t checking yourself and checking what you’re buying, checking the practices behind. It’s not enough to just not be the problem. You have to make sure that you’re taking every effort you can and in every choice that you have, making sure that it matches your values and it matches what you want to do and who you want to support. We really want to encourage people, at the Fashion Show, to check their options, check what they can do. We know that it’s all around us. It’s something that we’re going to run into no matter what, and it’s difficult. It’s definitely harder not to be a part of the problem, but it is possible, it’s possible to not contribute to that. I think we should have that conversation of what is a want and what is a need? What things do we need? Those things that we do need, how can we make sure that when we are buying them, we are buying them in a way that represents who we are and represents how we feel about people and what they deserve? That’s such a big part of Live2Free and our mission. The fashion show is not only a great opportunity to mix people’s passion for fashion and passion for social justice, but it’s a great way to encourage people to check themselves, check their choices and when they’re expressing themselves, which is a freedom and privilege that they have, to also think about the individual behind that. Think about the individual who is giving them the opportunity to do that and the freedom to do that. At Live2Free, I just want to give our mission statement, we challenge a generation to make personal choices that recognize the dignity of the individual, the responsibility of consumers to slow the demand that drives modern day slavery, and to network with others, to rescue, rebuild, and restore the broken lives of victims. That’s our mission, and that is just a huge part of the fashion show and something that we really want all of our attendees to see and feel and relate to, and then take that and act on it.
Sandra Morgan 25:51
Delaney, your passion comes across so well in that and I believe you are living that mission statement. This is another generation of Vanguard students from Live2Free that will go out into the world and end up in some of those 166 countries, making their passion, living, and useful, hands on. Let me ask you how people can connect with Live2Free.
Delaney Mininger 26:25
With our Live2Free club, you guys can connect with us. If anybody’s on campus listening here at Vanguard University, you can come up to us, any of the cabinet members. There’s Kevin Arciga as our vice president, Chloe McLeroy as our communications chair, and me, Delaney Miniger as president. You guys can come up to us, ask us questions, get involved. For anybody listening anywhere else, our social media is @_live2free_ on Instagram, and we also have our email, [email protected] that you guys are able to contact if you guys have any questions, if you want to find out how you can get involved, how you can support us on our mission, even if it’s from a distance. We would totally appreciate that, and we’re always looking forward to hearing from anybody who has questions or wants to get involved. That’s some ways that you can reach us.
Sandra Morgan 27:17
I heard that if you are a teacher in Orange County, you can ask for a Live2Free team to come to your school. Is that true?
Delaney Mininger 27:27
Yes, that’s going to be our Safe Kids, Safe Communities Program, which was originally peer educators, and that’s also a way that I got involved with the club, originally. Before even becoming president, I became a peer educator, and I got to have the experience of going to these different high schools and teaching kids things that I certainly was never taught in high school. We’ve had a lot of other people on the team say very similar things, that it’s just so great to be able to share this experience with them, share this information with them, because it’s something that we lacked when we were in high school. It totally would have been helpful for us to have somebody older than us but still in a similar age range, somebody that could still relate to us, just let us know that they care about us, and they care about our well being and who we are, and what we are going to do with our lives, they care about what happens to us. I mean, that would have been so life changing for me to hear at that age, and I think it really is for a lot of these kids, important to hear that somebody, anybody, cares about them and their well being, and the choices that they make. We talk about different things like healthy relationships, online safety, we do overviews of human trafficking, and it’s just something that the health programs at schools, especially when I was in high school, were totally lacking, and it’s vital information. We want to make sure that we’re getting out there and sharing that with kids and sharing that with teachers too, so that they know how to help kids the best that they can and recognize signs of kids who are in danger or kids who are at risk. We want to make sure that they are aware of those things so that they can help them, and it’s just so important to us. I love the peer educators team and I would definitely recommend, if you guys are on campus, any Vanguard students, getting involved with that, it’s a really great opportunity. We have a good team lined up, and we’ve been doing so much to prepare to go back to these high schools. If you can get involved, highly recommend it. If you can support this in any way that you can, we definitely recommend.
Sandra Morgan 29:27
Thank you so much your passion, like I said, your passion is contagious. For our listeners who aren’t in Orange County, reach out to us. We would love to give you some resources, get you connected, because you can raise up an army just like this in your own community. Thank you for being here. Have a great day.
Delaney Mininger 29:53
Thank you for having me. I will have a good day, you have a good day too.
Sandra Morgan 29:57
Okay, bye, bye.
Delaney Mininger 29:59
Bye.
Sandra Morgan 29:59
Listeners, we’re inviting 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. Check out the Fair Trade Fashion Show Tool Kit. If you haven’t visited our website before, a great first step is to become a subscriber, then you’ll receive an email with the show notes with each new episode every two weeks. Of course, I’ll be back in two weeks for our next conversation
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31min
September 30, 2024329 – When Violence, Gangs, and Incarceration are Part of the Culture, Where Does Restoration Begin?, with Madeline Rodriguez
Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by her friend and colleague, Madeline Rodriguez, as the two discuss the importance of restorative practices.
Madeline Rodriguez
Madeline Rodriguez is the Director of Programs at Project Kinship, where she leads and works alongside teams dedicated to supporting and training individuals impacted by incarceration, gangs, community violence, and trauma. She has a strong background in community intervention, clinical leadership, and restorative practices. Madeline is passionate about providing culturally competent, community based, behavioral and mental health services.
Key Points
Project Kinship aims to provide a sense of home and community for individuals impacted by incarceration, gangs, violence, and trauma. The organization’s approach fosters a judgment-free environment where individuals can feel safe to express their pain and experiences.
To ensure an individual feels heard and supported in their healing journey, it is important to use trauma-informed care. One aspect of this is empathic accuracy, which involves understanding and responding accurately to the emotional state of an individual.
Restorative practices play a crucial role in addressing community violence and individual trauma. These practices focus on repairing relationships, building community, and cultivating leadership while maintaining the emotional safety of participants.
Project Kinship engages with community partners and employs “live handoffs” rather than simple referrals, ensuring vulnerable individuals receive the support they need and foster meaningful connections to promote healing and stability.
Consistent, supportive relationships and interventions can help facilitate healing and personal growth in both youth and adults. With dedication and the right support, healing is possible for those affected by trauma.
Resources
Project Kinship
International Institute for Restorative Practices
Project AWARE
268: Rebuilding the Brain, with Dr. Anne Light
Alternatives to Violence Project team
Intraconnected by Dr. Daniel Siegel
Neuro Sequential Model of Therapeutics
Transcript
Sandra Morgan 0:14
You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode #329: When Violence, Gangs and Incarceration are Part of the Culture, Where Does Restoration Begin?, with Maddie Rodriguez. My name is Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is a show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. I’m recording in my office at Vanguard University, and Madeline Rodriguez is in the office with me, I call her Maddie. She is a dear friend and respected colleague. She is the Director of Programs at Project Kinship, where she leads and works alongside teams dedicated to supporting and training individuals impacted by incarceration, gangs, community violence, and trauma. Maddie has a strong background in community intervention, clinical leadership, and restorative practices. She is passionate about providing culturally competent, community based, behavioral and mental health services. There is so much more to learn about Maddie, and we’re going to dive right into our conversation. Thank you so much for being here with me.
Madeline Rodriguez 1:46
Thank you for having me. Dr Morgan, it’s such a privilege and honor to be here with you this morning.
Sandra Morgan 1:51
How long have you been at Project Kinship?
Madeline Rodriguez 1:55
I’m going on four years. Four years at Project Kinship.
Sandra Morgan 1:59
I would love to know how your life has changed in four years of working in this community.
Madeline Rodriguez 2:12
Well, using some humor, I’d say I got my first gray hair.
Sandra Morgan 2:17
Oh, well, that’s kind of fun.
Madeline Rodriguez 2:20
But I’d like to think that it’s wisdom that now is being imparted to me, and now growing from within and out. No, it has been a phenomenal journey getting to this place and really embracing what we call at Project Kinship, the heartbeat of Project Kinship.
Sandra Morgan 2:41
I love walking into Project Kinship, the sense that for so many, this is home. Can you just explain what that means when you see that on the wall?
Madeline Rodriguez 2:56
Yeah. So for those of you that haven’t visited our office, we welcome you to come visit. We love having individuals come by to tour. But as Dr. Morgan is mentioning, we always say you get two welcomes when you come into the doors at Project Kinship. The first, we have a wonderful gentleman named Carlos, and he will greet you with a big old smile and say, “Welcome to Project Kinship, I’m glad you’re here,” and the second welcome is that quote on the wall that you’ll see. And Steve often tells a story of how he came up with that, because when we first received the building and knew that Project Kinship was going to be moving into that facility, Steve was nervous about putting a quote on the wall. He tells his story all the time. He spent eight hours, candles lit, eight hours of Mariah Carey on the background to try to help him with his Writer’s cramp. He ended up coming up with something to the effect of, “In your darkest hour, let hope be the light that sees you through.” He went the next day to the office, and was there with one of our community members and great friends, his name is Ruben. He asked Reuben about this quote and when he told Ruben the quote, he was like, “Oh, it’s okay.” He was like, I spent eight hours, Mariah Carey, candles lit, how is it just okay? And he said, “Well, if you have something to say, what would your words be on that wall?” Ruben said, “Well, I’m a lot more humble than you, so my words would not be on the wall, but if they were, it would say something like, ‘Welcome to Kinship, where judgment and pain are left at the door, you are home.'” Steve’s mouth dropped and said, “How did you come up with that in 20 seconds? I spent like eight hours trying to figure something out.” He goes, “Steve, it’s simple,” and he’s a very tall gentleman, tattoos on the face, “When I’m in the community, people look at me like they bit into a Sour Lemon. But when I come here, I feel like I’m at home. I’m not judged, I’m received, and I can leave my pain at the door.” That’s the welcome, and that’s the sentiment. When people see our brand, they see the logo, whether we’re in the community, behind glass at a facility, or at our home base, we want people to feel like they’re at home.
Sandra Morgan 5:12
I love it. I absolutely love it. And for my students, who have got to have the opportunity to be there, have partnered with you in schools, it is a life changing experience, because there is a certain amount of skill that is necessary to create that judge-free, and yet structured and safe community. We’re going to talk about that right now, with the hope that for many of our listeners, you’ll pick up some new vocabulary, you’ll find links to new resources, and begin to consider what does this look like in your community? Because this is necessary for every community, to have the kind of resource that Project Kinship has. So my first question is, how do you approach and integrate trauma informed care and mental health support, specifically for youth at risk of exploitation?
Madeline Rodriguez 6:31
Thank you for that question, Sandie, and it goes back to something that you just mentioned about, the skill sets that are required to create that environment. When you ask this question, the first thing that comes to mind is being still. When I say that, it means that oftentimes in the community service, social work field, we feel like we’re always making momentum or moving with, or journeying with, and often it’s forgotten that one of the key components in even starting is just being able to be still and stand with. Standing with individuals that are at the margins and those that are most impacted by trauma, violence, exploitation. This requires cultural humility. It requires empathic accuracy.
Sandra Morgan 7:25
What is empathic accuracy?
Madeline Rodriguez 7:28
Glad you asked. I’ve been doing a lot of research on empathic accuracy and coining this term. We know that it’s important to empathize with individuals, but I would like to say empathy is not enough. Empathy with accuracy, and accurate tracking, and standing and sitting with, is what’s required to mirror, model, shift with that person, to really attune and be with them. So, that empathic accuracy means I’m not only here sitting with this emotion and feeling, but I’m also making sure that how I’m presenting myself with you, with what you’re bringing into the room, is what you need in this moment.
Sandra Morgan 8:11
So the accuracy is measured in what way?
Madeline Rodriguez 8:18
How the individual feels when you are mirroring, modeling, tone of voice, body language. An individual, for example, I hear practitioners all the time say, “Yeah, I’m empathizing. I can really feel that emotion, but I didn’t know what to do with myself,” when they were saying or bringing that thing, that emotion or that situation in the space. That accuracy part is being able to hold, and yes, I’m empathizing with that person, I’m also being able to maneuver and knowing what to do with what’s being brought into the room.
Sandra Morgan 8:59
Okay, this takes me back to being a pediatric night charge nurse and being empathetic was part of the job. I mean children in pain, and in your case, we have young people who are in a great amount of pain, but it’s not going to help them if I burst into tears and can’t help them with the next step. So when I think about this concept of empathetic accuracy, I’m remembering how important it was for me to demonstrate that mirror and then model a safe and confident response to their pain. I can just give you lots of incidents where, when you show up and you have to give a child a shot, and they’re like screaming and everything, I learned how to be empathetic and at the same time, help them manage the fear, the anxiety, the pain, and dial it back so that it didn’t completely unhinge the situation. You’re going to have to send me some guided reading. Maybe we’ll put a link to something, because I think this is a great term.
Madeline Rodriguez 10:41
Absolutely, and you hit the nail on the head with those examples. That’s exactly what that would look like when we have youth that are coming in and sharing some of the deepest wounds of their own pain, oftentimes not even physical, emotional. For our staff, it’s being able to, just as you said, being able to sit with, feel it, but manage and again, attuned in a way that they can support that youth in an appropriate manner, to help them regulate and provide what’s needed for them to also put the lid back onto the container so that they can still continue forward with their day. We can’t move or shift what they’re bringing with them right now. What we can hope to do is help them hold, regulate, and allow them to know that there’s a safe place for them to contain that, and allow us to walk with them when they’re ready to walk.
Sandra Morgan 11:43
Okay. Can you explain about how you address the kinds of challenges that you encounter when you’re trying to create that trauma informed safe space?
Madeline Rodriguez 12:04
Yeah. So even when we talk about how we approach situations, how we approach our community members, it really is a comprehensive approach, and we have to look at all the different pieces that an individual is bringing with them. Because oftentimes, it’s not just one thing that’s happening. There is an array of different barriers or challenges. I am thinking of an incident with a young individual from one of our school sites, probably two years ago at this point. This individual initially was struggling on campus and was referred to the restorative practice specialists that they had at the school, only to find out that there were challenges that were going on at home with caregivers. There were challenges in the community of where this individual lived, a lot of violence that was happening. When you have this young person, we had a look at all of the different pieces. I think one of the other things that we’ll get to later on today is talking about that collaboration, and how imperative that other stakeholders and other community partners come in to wrap around the individuals that we’re working with as much as we provide. When we look at things comprehensively, we understand there are things that we can support, and then there’s things we need others to help us with, because to carry all of these other challenges that come with the one individual and their story, we need other champions to help support us, to really help the individual thrive.
Sandra Morgan 13:42
Okay, that’s so significant, because when I’m sitting in my office, I have a student here who has really high anxiety levels, isn’t able to go to class, some of those things. I’m looking at, how do I fix the situation right now? When I learn that they are not in a living situation that is safe and secure through no fault of their own, they are exposed to substance use, they’re exposed to violence, they are living in compromising housing where sleep is not easy. I mean, can you imagine trying to sleep when people are coming and going and you don’t know who the people are, and those are some of the situations that our students have. So I’m teaching my student a nice breathing exercise. Well, that doesn’t help them in the middle of the night, when they feel so afraid and unsafe. So we have to have partners. You mentioned restorative practice practitioner in the school. Let’s talk about restorative practice. Is this another phrase we need to define and figure out how to measure? I think I’m going to keep hitting on this idea, we can’t manage what we don’t measure. That’s an old, old adage. We need to understand what we’re measuring, but we have to have a way to do more than guess. We have to have a way to do more than be positive, optimistic, and carry this aspiration. We have to actually have some structure for what that’s going to look like,
Madeline Rodriguez 15:54
Absolutely. So restorative practices comes from a framework of restorative justice work, and it comes from the social sciences that really focuses on three main goals. And those goals include repairing relationships, building community, and helping shift mindsets by building leaders. It is a practice, and as we receive training on restorative practice, we are extremely grateful for the International Institute of Restorative Practices that does a phenomenal job in trainings nationwide, actually, to support individuals and understanding the fundamentals of what Is restorative practices, and how do we integrate this. Understanding that even previous generations, and even indigenous cultures showed how imperative it was to form a circle, to come together as a community, to share with one another, to maintain positive relationships, because it meant survival for that community, in those indigenous times. We have fallen apart as a society, as a community, by not being connected. Going back to even that first question that we talked about, the importance of standing with restorative practices allows us to form intentional moments with individuals, to be seen, to be heard, to be felt, to be reminded that they’re cared for. There’s something really profound with that consistency, that consistent touch point. I know that in other conversations, we’ve talked about the importance, especially with youth and individuals who are experiencing trauma, having that consistent touch point. And so as a practice, even at Project Kinship, whether we’re in a staff meeting, an interview, or a circle, we always start our meetings with our name, how we’re feeling, and then a question of getting to know you, in honor of the intention of helping individuals be able to verbalize what they’re bringing with them. But also, we have a great mentor and friend, his name is Reginald Washington, and he is the founder and CEO of Project AWARE in San Diego. Now he was a 16 year old facing a life sentence, and at his time it was in an adult facility, and he was in his four by four cell. He shares with us that even in that cell, he was still full of all the rage and anger that had led him there in the first place, and as he started to do his own internal work, he realized that in all of his journey, there was a lot of pain and no safe adult had ever stopped to ask him how he felt or what was happening. He talks about restorative practices as well, and leads with how important it is to help young people, individuals, to verbalize and have safe spaces to verbalize how they’re feeling. What restorative practices guides us to doing is creating spaces, building healthy relationships, enhancing awareness and education, promoting accountability and empowerment. So if I caused harm, I need to take responsibility for that and I need to repair with the individual whom I’ve caused harm to, providing support networks, addressing underlying issues, and really encouraging positive identity and purpose.
Sandra Morgan 19:34
I can’t help it, but I just keep going back to my identity as a pediatric nurse. Alot of the problems that children have when there’s no strong attachment is, and when we think about attachment theory, I think the most important aspect of attachment theory for people generally to know is that when a baby cries, someone comes and relieves whatever the situation is. Startling, a wet diaper, hunger, whatever somebody comes. When a child is raised in a situation where no one comes, then there is no relief from whatever the distress was. What you’re talking about now with restorative practices, actually looks like building a new pathway that someone is coming. When you said consistent, I am like, okay, so this is how we build attachment when it didn’t get built when it was supposed to get built. It is possible.
Madeline Rodriguez 20:57
It’s possible, it’s absolutely possible. Dr. Bruce Duncan Perry’s work, he leads the Neuro-Sequential Model of Therapeutics. I truly appreciate his breakdown of the different regions of the brain and what is literally happening in child and adolescent brain development, and how that ties with why it’s so critical to help young people, and even adults who didn’t have that, form new neurological pathways to heal and provide opportunities for them to respond versus react. Because from very early on, from infancy until they say age 25 is when our brain stops developing, when that’s happening, we’re absolutely operating from a higher survival state from infancy, and then the executive functioning is that lasts to grow. So if we’re looking at things and if individuals are constantly in a survival state, then that executive functioning is stunted in a way, if trauma, adversity, challenges, are exposed to that child, to that developing brain, an individual. Restorative practice is format, is a tool that allows us to stop, regulate, relate, so that these young people can then reason. And this follows that neuro sequential model that Dr. Bruce Duncan Perry talks about. How am I going to expect a young person, an adult that’s distressed reason if their behaviors and how they’re presenting, what their body is telling me is they are in a survival state and they are reacting. I need to first be still, help them regulate, relate. I’m making eye contact, I’m a safe adult here with you, I’m a safe person with you. Then we can sit and get to that reasoning when we’re thinking, and talking, and processing, what just happened, what was the trigger? Help me understand, and how do we move forward? That follows the 3 E’s of restorative practices as well. It talks about we would need to engage, we need to explain, and then we need to set an expectation, so past, present, future.
Sandra Morgan 21:52
And you do this like once a quarter with a kiddo?
Madeline Rodriguez 23:29
The circles?
Sandra Morgan 23:31
Yeah.
Madeline Rodriguez 23:31
So currently, with our youth transformation program, we’re actually doing circles every day. We have 14 units that we are in, and every unit gets a circle at least once a week. In our schools program, we’re in 39 campuses now, six different school districts. Some of our RP staff have circles running weekly. Some of them, again, may have it every other week, so depending on the climate, they’re really accurately attuning with their youth and what their needs are. Absolutely, we have circles running every week. And in our adult programs, we have circles almost every other day as well.
Sandra Morgan 24:19
I think that was my point in asking that question, this requires frequency. You can’t go to the gym once every quarter, every 90 days, and expect to build muscle. You have to go regularly.
Madeline Rodriguez 24:34
Yes.
Sandra Morgan 24:35
And that lack of attachment that is so critical to development, but it’s not going to be a one time shot. It’s going to take repetition to grow those new neurons. I love that our brain is plastic, and in the show notes we’ll add links to Dr. Anne Lights’ interviews, because I know there are people who are listening to this and they work in populations where there is violence, and gangs, and incarceration, and they’ve said to me, “Oh, Dr Morgan, you just have so much hope.” It’s like, no, I don’t think I’m unreasonable. I really believe that we are designed to heal. Just like if you get a wound, it begins to heal. It’s going leave a scar, but you’re designed to heal physically, and you are designed to heal mentally, emotionally, and this is going to take time, though. You don’t have a wound, and tomorrow you go to the doctor, they sew it up, you still have to go through the healing process. I love Dr. Anne Light, in one interview, told us that your body, which includes your brain, produces 1 billion new cells every day. Maddie, your body produces 1 billion, with a B.
Madeline Rodriguez 26:17
With a B.
Sandra Morgan 26:18
Yes, so we are not stuck with what we’ve got.
Madeline Rodriguez 26:22
We’re not.
Sandra Morgan 26:23
We can change, we can grow. So, all right, I’m going ask you another question, although you look poised. I love doing in-studio interviews instead of online, you look poised to tell me something, really wise.
Madeline Rodriguez 26:38
I was going to mention when you were mentioning individuals, I don’t know. They’ve maybe given up on individuals. They’ve lost hope because a certain individual is more challenging, or appears to have more challenges than others. It’s important to remember that when humans are in a need state, there’s a priority in helping them discover what is their need. We just finished a training with the Alternatives to Violence Project team, and they have some fundamentals, and I’m going to read some of their priorities in their circle of transforming power. Here they have listed you always want to expect the best, think before reacting, ask for a non-violent path, caring for others, and respect for self. We were going through this needs list. When a need is not met, then what is the emotion that’s paired with that? We talk about cognitive behavioral therapy, which asks us to look at how our thoughts impact how we feel, and how we feel impacts how we behave, and looking at that sequence of consequences that result, and helping individuals look at that part. So if I can help individuals change that narrative, oh my gosh. What is wrong with this person, to what happened? Help me understand, then we can get to the root of what’s the need? What is happening internally, at the root for this individual? And if we can shift our approach to say, “I can see that you’re frustrated, I can see this is not working. Help me understand what that need is, because I can see that there’s something and we need to get to that root.” When we do that, then we help stabilize individuals, where they’re feeling safe, they’re feeling secure, and then we see progress.
Sandra Morgan 26:55
Another really important aspect of this is the role of the community. I mean, they can’t live at Project Kinship. They have to go out, they have to work, go to school, services that are required because of their mental health that are challenging. How do we engage, and I’m thinking like I’m part of Project Kinship.
Madeline Rodriguez 29:19
You are.
Sandra Morgan 29:21
How do we engage the community? Okay, I’m back to night shift in the hospital in pediatrics. I have a baby that has been admitted for pneumonia three times this winter already, and every time, I spend a lot of time with mom, who is probably someone who needed to go to Project Kinship. I know that my kiddo is not going to be okay unless I engage with her and give her the tools she needs. But my baby keeps coming back, so I don’t know how I can change things. And the third time when it’s in ER, middle of the night, and her cap says it all. It says, “Party till you puke,” and I know that if the culture, the environment I’m discharging this baby to isn’t supporting all the therapy and care I’ve delivered, I’m not going to be successful. So give me some tips on how Project Kinship engages community collaboration, cultural humility. Tell me what to do please.
Madeline Rodriguez 30:49
You know, it’s interesting that you have that example. One of the things that we’ve learned from Father Greg and even Steve, Kim, our founder, they’ll always highlight this notion of serving and not saving. Because we often might feel obliged or responsible to save a life, to save this person, but as you mentioned, we can’t go home with community members, we can’t be with them 24/7. So we have to trust that, as Maya Angelou would say, “People forget what you did for them, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” The hope is that what we’ve provided and how we have made them feel in that moment will stay with them, so that one, when they go out into the community, back to their daily lives, and they’re doing all their other responsibilities, that they know there’s a safe place they can always come back to if there’s a challenge or there’s a disruption in the plan that maybe they have created with us, for themselves. When we talk about partnerships and collaboration, we’ve shifted our language from ‘warm handoffs’ to ‘live handoffs.’ The reason for that is for a lot of individuals, if we call and say, “Hey, we’ve got an appointment set up for you at this place and they’re going to take care of you.” Chances are, they might not find their way there, or chances are, maybe they make their way there but have a lot of anxiety or don’t feel comfortable, and end up leaving or not following through. But when we go with, some of our community members that say, “I don’t know, let’s go with you. Let’s make sure you get to that appointment. Let’s make sure we’re also consulting and collaborating with that other community partner so that you feel safe and welcome there too.” That increases our success rate with them following through, and then that collaboration with that other community partner enhances our work and ensures that continuity and consistency of care. I’m reminded of the story of the forest and how the forest, I learned recently and it was so beautiful, that in the center of a particular forest there’s this circle of trees. They call them the elder trees, or the motherhood trees, and these trees roots are the deepest and most expanse in the forest, and they end up creating this interconnected system of roots. I said, ‘Oh, my goodness, Lord of the Rings, had it right. These trees are talking to each other.’
Sandra Morgan 33:44
That’s right.
Madeline Rodriguez 33:46
And they send signals. These linchpin trees are responsible for sending signals, or receiving signals when one, another tree in the forest is sick, and they send nutrients to help nurture that tree. If there’s a new sapling growing, they’ll send nutrients to the new sapling to help it grow. And I said, ‘How fascinating that in nature itself, nature is showing us the importance of a community that is interconnected.’ Dr. Daniel Siegel, I have to give him credit in his phenomenal work, he has a book called Intraconnected. He talks about the science of me+we=mui. He says the self cannot be healthy unless I am also thinking of the other and taking care of those around me, because that means it enhances my wellness. Again, going back to restorative practices, it’s this fundamental principle that humans are hardwired to be connected. We receive hormones in proximity when we’re with each other that enhance and reduce cortisol. Hugs, I’m a believer in hugs. I prescribe hugs all the time.
Sandra Morgan 34:57
Yes.
Madeline Rodriguez 34:58
We need 12 hugs a day!
Sandra Morgan 35:01
Twelve?
Madeline Rodriguez 35:01
Twelve for optimal living, and the science is that we have the vagus nerve. When we hug and embrace each other, heart to heart, it stimulates that vagus nerve, and it actually releases oxytocin, which is that hormone that allows us to feel connected, and it also reduces stress. How beautiful is that? So there are these fundamentals of human connection, and I say all that to highlight again, yes, we do a great job at Project Kinship, and we are so grateful for the Dr. Morgan’s. We’re so grateful for Vanguard, we’re so grateful for all of these beacons of community partners that allow us to work together to optimize the whole person, care for the individuals that are coming through our doors.
Sandra Morgan 35:56
I want to kind of land back at the beginning of how I see a child. For me, an 18, 19, 20 year old still looks like a child to me, and wondering what happened that your sense of safety and security didn’t develop that attachment. Now listening to you, and this intervention of connection, someone sees me, someone is responding, it is going to take a while to believe that, to actually grow the neurons so that your response is in the context of ‘someone’s coming.’ If my car breaks down, I know someone’s coming. I’ve got a wonderful husband, two daughters, someone will come. I’ve got AAA. If you have nothing, and your whole life no one has come, it’s going to take a long time to trust and we cannot step in and say, “Well look, I’ve got this, this and this, choose that, and we’re done.” It’s a commitment to relationship,
Madeline Rodriguez 37:18
Absolutely, and as you said that I thought of a gentleman, may he rest in peace. We actually had a funeral recently for him, he was involved in a tragic car accident, thank you. This gentleman had worked with us for a while, he was a middle aged adult, and one of the things that he would say when he would come to the office, I always greet everyone, I would say, “Good morning. I’m so glad to see you. I’m so proud of you.” He would look at me and he would say, “Maddie, why are you so nice to me? I’m not a good person. I’ve done some really bad things in my life,” and I would look him in his eyes, and I’d give him a hug. I said, “Because you are worthy. Because you are doing the best you can, and you’re stepping into your purpose, and it’s important for you to know that you are worthy, that you are loved, that you are cared for, and there’s people that believe in you.” And he would say, “Thank you,” he’s like, “I haven’t had that very much in my life.” If he were here to tell his story, even though he was, again, being middle aged, his childhood was wrought of so much trauma, so much pain that he was still carrying with him as an adult. He was giving an opportunity for himself to work through finally, and he was always so grateful for the progress and for the healing that he was able to receive with the incredible work of the entire team and other community partners that wrapped around this individual. I’m reminded again, as much as we’re there to stand with people, we’re constantly reminded and gifted with that opportunity to also receive reminders of the importance of connection, the importance of compassion and love, and connectedness. Yes, we have these fancy strategies and evidence-based practices that we abide by, but at the principal foundation, if we do not start with just stopping and seeing people, then we’re doing it wrong.
Sandra Morgan 39:28
This week, my good friend Dick Foth was on campus, and he said there are two kinds of people in this world. There are people who say, “Here I am,” and there are people who say, “Ah, there you are.” Maddie Rodriguez, you are a ‘there you are’ person, and I’m so grateful for you.
Madeline Rodriguez 39:52
And so are you.
Sandra Morgan 39:54
I wish we had more time. I just love this conversation. Okay, tell us, how do we connect with Project Kinship?
Madeline Rodriguez 40:03
Yes. So we are very active on our social media. On Instagram, if you follow @projectkinship, you’ll find us, and we’re very lively on our social media there. Facebook, just projectkinship, LinkedIn projectkinship, or you can go to our website projectkinship.org. If you’d like to learn more about our programs and services they’re listed there. If you have a young person that might be in one of our school sites and you feel like you would like to have them refered to one of our staff, or if you have a young person that happens to be on probation or in juvenile custody, or an adult, an adult that has been formally incarcerated, all of that referral information can be found on our website. There’s a smart link, it’s just one smart link. You put in the information and it’ll help you navigate with putting in the appropriate information to get to the right program and service, and our team will do the rest.
Sandra Morgan 41:06
Wow okay, so we’re going to put links to the things you’ve talked about here in our show notes. I am just so grateful that you came today, and I want to assure our listeners that you will be back. Project Kinship has been part of Ensure Justice, partnering with us for years, and you’ll be back in March, right?
Madeline Rodriguez 41:31
Yes, absolutely, if you’ll have me.
Sandra Morgan 41:33
Oh, thank you. All right. Well, listeners, we’re inviting you to take the next step and go over to endinghumantrafficking.org to find the resources we’ve talked about here. If you haven’t visited the site before, take time and become a subscriber. I want to grow our podcast, so what I’d like to start asking you to do is, when you meet someone and you think, ‘Oh, I heard that on a podcast, invite them to be a subscriber.’ You can find us on Facebook and LinkedIn at endinghumantrafficking and of course, we’re going to be back in two weeks for our next conversation. Thank you so much, Maddie for being here.
Madeline Rodriguez 42:28
Thank you, Dr. Morgan for having me. It was a pleasure.
...more
43min
September 16, 2024328 – The Intersection of Art and Healing in the Brain, with Dr. Harriet Hill
Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Dr. Harriet Hill as the two discuss the power of art as a therapeutic tool for healing trauma.
Dr. Harriet Hill
Dr. Harriet Hill was born to Dutch parents in Los Angeles. Her art is a unique fusion of her Dutch Heritage and Africa’s vibrant colors, where she lived for 18 years. For over 20 years, she has worked globally with survivors of war and violence, using the power of art to unblock emotions and facilitate healing. Those who experience her art are brought joy. Now, Dr. Harriet Hill advocates creativity as a tool to enhance perosnal flourishing.
Key Points
Art serves as a therapeutic tool for healing trauma, particularly in communities affected by war and violence as it has the ability to help individuals express emotions that may be difficult to articulate verbally.
It is important that ordinary people have access to trauma healing exercises and resources, especially in communities with limited mental health professionals. Dr. Harriet Hill’s work includes development of materials that allow non-professionals to facilitate healing through art.
Dr. Harriet Hill emphasizes that experiencing beauty, especially in nature or art, is essential for mental health and nourishment of the soul. Engaging with beauty is not a luxury but a necessary part of self-care and overall well-being.
While individuals have different cultural backgrounds, the experience of suffering and the need for expression through art are universal. Art transcends language barriers, allowing for shared healing experiences across cultures.
Resources
325: The Cost of Burnout, with Dr. Alexis Kennedy
Healing Invisible Wounds by Richard F. Mollica
www.harrietspaintings.com
Transcript
Sandra Morgan 0:14
You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode #328: The Intersection of Art and Healing in the Brain, with Dr. Harriet Hill. 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, 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 Dr. Harriet Hill. Dr. Hill’s art is a unique fusion of her Dutch heritage and Africa’s vibrant colors, it brings joy to those who experience it. For over 20 years, she has worked globally with survivors of war and violence, using the power of art to unblock emotions and facilitate healing. She now advocates creativity as a tool to enhance personal flourishing. Welcome to the podcast, Harriet,
Dr. Harriet Hill 1:36
Thank you, Sandie. Thank you.
Sandra Morgan 1:38
When I first met you, Harriet, you were introducing me to materials on trauma that were designed to use with children, with families, with people outside the clinical arena. I was so impressed with how accessible you made brain healing to every person, and it wasn’t just something locked away in a clinical textbook that you could use for weightlifting. Tell us a little bit about your current work.
Dr. Harriet Hill 2:23
Okay, my current work. I have been working full time as an artist, painting for the last four years now. I had always painted a bit and used art in life, and in the trauma healing work I was involved in. But in the last four years, I’ve been painting full time and having a ball. I worked in minority languages for most of my career, in verbal communication, how we get an idea from one person to the other, through words. I’m very interested and excited to have time to explore how we communicate through visual images, because there’s similarities and differences, and I’m liking it a lot.
Sandra Morgan 3:13
Well, just for our listeners, I subscribe to Harriet’s newsletter and it pops up in my inbox, and I open it, and there is a blaze of color, and I can feel my response lifting. The more I thought about that, I thought, ‘I need to have her come on the podcast.’ A couple of weeks ago, we talked about burnout, and we talked about ways to avoid it, and why it’s so important. But how do we start building in practices that maybe we haven’t used before? Instead of being cautionary about things, ‘don’t do this, don’t do that,’ how can we build in positivity and maybe even a newsletter from Harriet Hill once in a while? Harriet, one of the things that I want to understand better is how your focus on the intersection of art and mental health can be used as a therapeutic tool to aid in healing the brain. Talk to us about that.
Speaker 1 4:35
Yeah. I lived for 18 years in Africa, and then was in and out of Africa for another 15 or so, and came in contact with people traumatized by war. I was actually working in language development, in Bible translation, but whole communities were rendered dysfunctional by the violence of war and the trauma they’d experienced. With some other colleagues and mental health professionals, we put together some materials that could be used by ordinary people in communities to at least help with mental health, because in many places in the world, there’s very few or no mental health professionals. So in countries that have war and trauma, there may be one or two psychiatrists in the entire country, at the time, this was in the 90s and early 2000s. We developed materials to help people with trauma, and then about four or five years in, we decided to try an art exercise, and I was appointed as the one to introduce it. I was with a room full of men, primarily men, some women, but primarily men in Ghana, and I was to ask them to do an art exercise, to express their pain through their drawing. We had clay, and markers, and paper. So I first did it myself to see what it would be like, and shared it with the staff, like what happens? How does this work? And then I shared it with the room, and I had never seen men in Africa, I’d lived in Africa a long time by that time, and I’ve never seen them really drawing, that was something kids did. It was with a bit of fear and trembling that we introduced this exercise to these people straight out of war zones. They took to it like it was their native language. We were very cautious about would you want to share this? You can, if you would like to share it with your small groups. They did it in small groups, and then they had some time to draw or do stuff with clay, and then if they wanted to, they could share it. They all wanted to share. They shared so long they missed dinner. We were at a conference center, and they helped one another to see what was going on and talk about what they had experienced. Because sometimes when we’ve experienced trauma, your brain goes offline, and your frontal lobe, your ‘thinking brain’ goes offline, and that’s the part that has the language. This emotional impact goes in and you don’t even have words for it. You can’t express it in words, it didn’t go in in words, your thinking brain was offline. Sometimes, your ‘feeling brain’ can let that out through art, and then you can look at it and say, “Oh, that’s how I feel. I didn’t know.” Being able to see it and put it into words, and talk about it, gives you a sense of control, a sense of agency, a sense of ‘I can handle this.’ It’s not just this vague, icky feeling, it’s sadness, it’s anger, it’s bitterness, it’s whatever feeling you might have expressed. That’s where I got started with it. I am not a psychologist. I love working with psychologists and psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, but what we did was especially for ordinary people in communities, whether they be churches or other communities, we worked a lot with churches, just what ordinary people can do to heal from trauma. It was amazing. That, I was involved in for about 20 years, and that ministry continues. I just got a message from a colleague in Australia, in Darwin, who is working with women, Aboriginal women who are incarcerated, and they’re doing art with clay and with drawing, and finding the same experience. I mean, it is so basic, it’s amazing how helpful it can be and how universal it is. Because these men in Africa, grown men, took to it like it was their natural language, found it extremely helpful. Because sometimes words fail us.
Sandra Morgan 8:56
Words fail us. Let’s go back to what you said about why they didn’t have language to express. We really promote talk therapy a lot, and often realize that there are no words to express. Explain that a little bit more, how that process happens with the prefrontal cortex.
Dr. Harriet Hill 9:29
I just did a skit with adults and with kids here in Pennsylvania, on our brain. It was sort of like that movie Inside Out, where you don’t see the main character, you see inside his brain. We had a thinking brain, we’re just using ordinary language. You could call it prefrontal lobe, etc., but we just call it our thinking brain, our feeling brain, and our reflex brain. The thinking brain is analytical and it uses language, and when it is overwhelmed by horror, by trauma, it goes offline, nothing goes in. Those experiences enter into you on an emotional level, but you might have struggled to put them into words, unspeakable horror. It was unspeakable, you don’t have words. Those things can just be a nebulous force inside of you, and you don’t understand it, and they come back in unexpected times. Because your thinking brain is chronological, it puts everything away in words, in your memory labeled with words and in a chronological order. That’s great, but when your thinking brain goes offline, that trauma goes in, and it’s not put in order. Things are just popping up, here, there ,and everywhere. You can’t make sense of it, and that’s where the art can help, because you are not thinking, you’re just making something, you’re making marks, you’re shaping clay. It can be dance, it can be song, it can be any sort of art. I’m more involved in the visual arts, but those things can come out. And then, your thinking brain can look at it and say, “Oh yeah, that’s how I feel,” and then you can start talking about it a little more. But there are things that are very hard to get out with words, because they weren’t put in with words. They didn’t enter you with words.
Sandra Morgan 11:30
This idea, it didn’t come in in words, then there’s no words to come out as a result. Let’s hear the rest of the skit, what did they do?
Speaker 1 11:46
Well, this was not a war skit. This was just a skit of an ordinary guy who was stressed, and then he saw a shooting, there was blood everywhere. He didn’t get hurt, but he was traumatized by that, and then he also took an art class, and as he drew, he was able to express his pain. We had the thinking brain, the feeling brain, the reflex brain, which just keeps all of your hearts and lungs and everything functioning, and that takes over with freeze, fight, flight when there’s no time for feelings or thinking, you just got to get out of danger. We had good chemicals, and we have good words for those. What are they? Endorphins and all of those wonderful chemicals that are released, and there’s a whole field of study called neuroesthetics, that when we see art or make art, those good chemicals are released, and our brain starts to feel better, and over time, we can really heal from those bad feelings, those stress chemicals. We have good chemicals, and then we have stress chemicals, so we had people acting out these parts. The stress chemicals are good when there is a crisis, they get you out of danger, adrenaline, etc., but sometimes they are triggered when there is no danger. There’s a loud noise like the sound of the gun being shot, but it really was just a drawer slamming shut. But that can release those stress chemicals in the same way as an actual trauma. The other thing that the stress chemicals can do that’s not healthy is they can just stay on. I think in your earlier podcast, talked about the pedal going down and getting stuck, and that can just wear out your body really quickly. So the skit that we did was trying to see how our brains work, how we respond to art, it does make us feel better. It releases the chemicals, and this is proven by a very careful scientific study, and how it can also help us express in visual form what we may not be able to express in words. I think of the New Mexico artist with her flowers, Georgia, O’Keeffe. She said, “If I could have said it in words, I would have,” and that was just about art and beautiful things she drew. But it also works for trauma. If we can say things in the talk therapy and get to the bottom of it, great, but there are things we can’t express in words. The idea is, if we can use some sort of artistic expression to get those things out and see them, then we can bring our thinking brain around it and say, “Okay, now let’s integrate this so that we have one story and we’re not in bits, not divided into strange things happening, flashbacks, triggered, etc.”
Sandra Morgan 14:50
My response to following your art and then beginning to see how you integrated healing the brain in your public presentations of your art, in gallery presentations. I don’t know art world language, but I started really being interested in that, and I’m curious, because of our listeners, we’re predominantly working in the area of anti human trafficking and aftercare for trafficking victims. So how do you see art therapy as a way of healing brains that have experienced the continual assault on dignity and personal agency?
Speaker 1 15:42
I see it in two ways. One is even early in Boston, Dr. Mollica published his book, which was “Healing Invisible Wounds,” I don’t know if you’ve read that, Richard Mollica, but he found with refugees, they need beauty. They need art. They need to be in beautiful places that are ordered and not chaotic, and not destructive. Beauty releases good things in us, and if we release those good chemicals often enough, we actually began to feel better in a in a more permanent way. It’s not like you’re going to look at something beautiful, a beautiful painting or something that calls you and be changed instantly, but little by little, we begin to get a handle on, we begin to have more and more of an experience of feeling good inside and remembering what that felt like. Beauty is really important, beauty and order, not chaos and destruction. The second way, I think, is when we are engaged in art, it engages us. We don’t have to be artists. We don’t have to be professional artists, even. Any class or any group that I’ve been in where people are making things, making art especially, there is a hush that falls over the room. People get so engrossed and so present, and they’re able to put things out and look at it and say, “Wow.” That experience also can help trauma victims, and the trauma that you’re talking about with trafficking, you have to tell your story lots. You have to tell it over and over again, it’s not just a one time thing. The art may give you some tools to express things you don’t even know are inside of you, until it comes out, and you talk about it and look at it and say, “Wow.” When I do art, what’s coming out of me a lot is happiness, joy, beauty, celebration, and it makes me feel happier actually. I just feel that, that’s what comes out. It’s very interesting. Every person has a story, every person’s art will look different. You can tell if you’re in a group, who did what without them signing it.
Sandra Morgan 18:07
As I’m listening to you, I’m in my mind, because my prefrontal cortex is fully engaged in this conversation, I’m processing this, and I’m starting to analyze and prioritize where, if I’m making a list of things for my budget and taking care of victims, making sure we have food and shelter right up there, the beauty piece, the flowers, the art, that’s if we have resources “left over.” Can you convince me that I have to do beauty on my budget, just like I do food? Is it that level?
Speaker 1 18:53
Yeah, I worked with Diane Langberg, who’s a psychologist who’s worked with trauma victims her entire life. She says you have to get out and just be in a beautiful space, whatever that is for you. Often it’s outdoor spaces, it depends what people consider beautiful, but it nourishes your soul. Beauty is nourishing and we need it. It gives us hope, it’s not an extra. I don’t think so. I would say art can help us through the trauma, but it also can help us flourish in normal life. I mean, you don’t have to be carrying around a lot of trauma to benefit, because we can all improve and become more alive. I think in America, we feel like, “On our budget we can’t afford time for art. We can’t afford art. Let’s just keep it all to the absolute essentials,” and I would say no, art is an essential for well being, for really being well, which I think is what we’re all after anyway. Not having more stuff, we’re after being well.
Sandra Morgan 19:56
I think I started putting two and two together after interviewing Dr. Alexis Kennedy about burnout, and realized that every time I opened your newsletter, I was a little lighter for the day. The aspect of vicarious trauma in this line of work is something that caregivers and activists, abolitionists, advocates, we often do not do that well, and this is such a call to engage beauty as a way of keeping our brain healthy, just like we would eat our greens and make sure we get enough vitamin C, etc., all of that.
Speaker 1 20:52
Exactly, it’s part of a self care diet, really. It is as important as your green vegetables.
Sandra Morgan 20:57
That’s it. Now we’re going to tell everybody, “Sorry, I’ve got to go to my art class, and it’s just like eating my broccoli.” All right, so what are some challenges that are pretty unique to using art therapy? I would start with guessing that it’s not part of the program because of budget.
Speaker 1 21:29
You can have an elaborate art program if you have the resources, but people are doing art exercises with children and adults, teens, with nothing but a pencil and a piece of paper. If you can have markers with color, that really helps. But one of the most compelling art exercises I did was with a guy who had a folded piece of paper, he unfolded it and a blue pen, and it was an incredible experience. I don’t think budget is necessarily a barrier. In the trauma healing work we did around the world, we’re very committed to making it affordable to local communities, because otherwise it’s not sustainable. So you don’t need a kiln, you don’t need a lot of paint. You can do it simply, if that’s what is appropriate for you. Of course you can do all the bells and whistles too.
Sandra Morgan 22:27
Yeah.
Dr. Harriet Hill 22:27
We even have children’s camps where it goes on for a week, and some places are able to work with the kids for a very minimal budget.
Sandra Morgan 22:37
The other thing that I observed in your work is the cultural diversity, and maybe I could even use the term relevance. How do you build that into the healing aspect?
Speaker 1 22:54
Well, we all are different as individuals, we’re different culturally, but we’re all the same in some ways as well. The experience of suffering and expressing our pain is pretty universal. We might do it with different sorts of designs, but it gets out there. I have found it to be more of a universal kind of experience, rather than being distinctive by cultures like here, you have to do it this way, there, you have to do it that way. I mean, there are some things like that, who could be in a small group together, for example, how the group is conducted. But the art itself is more universal than language, that’s for sure. When you get to language there, you have a lot of differences. Oh boy.
Sandra Morgan 23:42
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 23:47
One of my colleagues and friends, Robin Harris, leads the Center for Excellence in World Arts at Dallas International University. They work more in music than they do in the visual arts, but they also work in visual arts. They have an MA and PhD programs in world arts, so they are actually documenting, studying, identifying all the differences, cultural differences. Music, for example, is a universal language to a certain extent, but then there’s differences in it. I would say the visual arts, I just find there’s a lot of similarity in how this art exercise works. I have not found it to be nearly as different as I expected.
Sandra Morgan 24:33
We will make sure to put links to these resources that you’re mentioning, because I’m sure people are going to want to study this more. Can you give us just a little bit more around the role of neuroplasticity in the healing process through art therapy? I think sometimes people get a diagnosis of PTSD, and now they’re in that straight jacket for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1 25:06
Yeah, and you can feel very stuck because things are happening that you don’t feel like you have much control over. I remember one of my colleagues was a genocide survivor from Rwanda, and I remember in the late 90s, she said, “I will never heal from the trauma,” that she experienced during the genocide. She was pregnant, she gave birth to a baby that died right away, she fled. Everything was, as you know the story, it was horrific. I would say in recent years, I have found that she has healed to a great extent. We will always be impacted by any of the experiences we have. So if you have lived through trauma, it’s going to be part of your story, but it’s not going to be the defining part of your story. You can heal little by little, not overnight, but little by little, with these positive experiences, with telling your story over and over again, until you find that light inside of you, until you find your way out of it. But Diane Langberg talks about healing from trauma is the 3 T’s: talk, time, and tears. As long as that trauma is inside you and you have no way of getting it out, it’s going to be in control, pretty much, in ways that you you don’t like. You don’t recognize yourself, “I’m not that kind of person. I don’t blow up, I don’t get angry. I don’t insult people. I don’t do drugs, alcohol. I’m a good person.” You’re acting in ways you don’t even recognize. We do an exercise, we started with adults. We take water bottles and get a bucket, and fill the bucket with water, or the basin with water, and then ask the kids or the adults to try to hold down one bottle. An empty water bottle just filled with air, try to hold that down. Now, another, now, another, now, another, and before long, of course, the bottles are popping out of the water and they can’t control it, and that’s what those emotions are like. They’re in there, and it takes a lot of energy to keep it all down. I mean, I’ve seen people go through horrific experiences and try to minimize it. “Well, it wasn’t as bad as the other person. Well, it’s just part of life,” but actually, those wounds are in there, and they need to come out. They need to come out and get out where you can see them, and work with them. Just by telling the story and finding the hope that is there. What I found is when people feel safe, they want to tell the story because they can’t stop thinking about it, but they don’t want to think about it, but they can’t stop thinking about it. But when they’re safe, they can come out and then get out there, and then they can begin to heal. The tears are, I’ve read different things on tears, but I think they do carry some of the pain away. They’re a good sign, they’re your friend. When you start thinking of something, and people say, “I couldn’t cry, I felt nothing.” Well, when you start crying, it means those feelings, you’re feeling them finally, and they’re coming out, and it’s a good thing. The time, the talk, the tears, and the talk can be around a painting you’ve done or a drawing that you’ve done. It doesn’t have to only be the words initially, but those things reshape your brain, and the more charged it is, the better. In the trauma healing, people remember a 10 minute conversation when someone was really listening to them, and they can remember it like it happened yesterday. I’ve had people bring up things that happened in their childhood. Their sister died, and they talked to somebody about it for the first time, and they remembered, because it was a time when their brain was like recasting, reframing the story into something of beauty. There’s always beauty in the ashes.
Sandra Morgan 29:21
I love that.
Dr. Harriet Hill 29:22
But it might take you a long time to find them.
Sandra Morgan 29:23
I think you really have identified one aspect of moving it from trauma to a controllable memory, not something you have to keep pushing down so that it doesn’t suddenly erupt. This idea that in the healing, you’re left with a scar, so you have a reminder, but you don’t live in that open wound. You’re not constantly caring for it. I love that metaphor, because it shows that we are designed for healing, and I have scars from childhood and some from adulthood that are just reminders that I survived something. I’m going to reframe that. Not, “I went through this, but I got through this,” is my new story.
Speaker 1 30:30
Yeah, and you know when the healing is happening, because you talk about it and feel about it in a different way. You don’t have to badmouth people anymore, suddenly you maybe forgive people who hurt you. You can tell when it happens. A wound has to heal from the inside out, I had a granddaughter who had to have surgery as an infant. Her intestines were on the outside of her body, and they had to put them in. So she had a gaping wound across her abdomen, and it was hard to look at. I was like, “Can’t they sew this up?” They said, “Oh no, no, no, no, no. This has to heal from the inside out. Sewing it up, you’re just going to trap all the infection in there. It has to heal from the inside out.” That’s, I think, what we have to do with trauma. It will heal. Our bodies and our minds are meant for healing. The neuroplasticity that you you mentioned, our minds are changing all the time. We can have a hand in that by surrounding ourselves with beauty, by expressing ourselves in some sort of art. It doesn’t have to be visual art, it could be something like cooking, it could be dancing, it could be theater, it could be any of these things, but something where we are expressing ourselves and being creative is like your brussel sprouts.
Sandra Morgan 31:55
Oh my gosh. Harriet, what I saw during COVID in my community, is everyone was posting pictures of their latest charcuterie board. They’re showing you how to make little flowers. Instead of clay and markers, they literally are playing with their food, just like when you were 18 months old in your high chair. It feels like we’re designed to be creative, and we want to create opportunity for people to integrate that into their healing process.
Speaker 1 32:35
Yeah, and so we’re designed to be creative when we have trauma and other grief, loss, but also in ordinary times, it helps us be alive. It really does help us flourish.
Sandra Morgan 32:49
I think your guide in this art experience, you are particularly experienced. When you talked about your granddaughter’s healing from the inside out, and how hard that was to look at it. I have seen victims of trauma who have produced not beautiful, colorful, vibrant pictures. People have said to them, “Oh, don’t draw that.” What would you advise someone supervising an art program?
Speaker 1 33:28
Let it out, let it out. All of the ick, just let it out. In Africa, so often it’s pictures of airplanes dropping bombs, people with machetes, villages burning. I mean, really let it out, let it out, let it out. Do not shove it down, it’s not going to dissolve. I mean, there are some things we recover from, just in the normal process. If it’s not too serious, and we’re in a position of feeling resilient, we can heal. But those things that are lurking deep down inside us, and sometimes we have shoved them down for so long we’ve forgotten they’re even there, what life would be like without those things rumbling around deep in the dark, inside of us. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, what might come out is pain, but under that pain, there might be something really joyful that’s being trapped. What happens when you have trauma is, you want to avoid feeling the pain because it hurts so bad, trauma or grief, but when you avoid feeling the pain, you also avoid feeling happy emotions, and so you just become pretty much numb to any emotion, very flat emotionally. You’re not feeling the pain, but you’re not feeling happiness either. Once you can draw that picture of that horrific scene, great, get it out, that’s wonderful. And maybe now, what will come out after that might be something you never imagined was being held under it.
Sandra Morgan 35:07
Harriet, I am going to keep following you. Can you tell our listeners how to find you online?
Dr. Harriet Hill 35:14
Yeah, I have a website: wwwharriet’spaintings.com., and the same on Instagram. That’s Harriet’s Paintings, and it’s on Facebook as well. At the website, you can sign up for my newsletter, which I’m so happy to hear that you enjoy it, and I’m so glad that it brightens your day from time to time.
Sandra Morgan 35:41
Thank you. Thank you. I’m so grateful that you joined us today, and I’m going to be looking for ways to add just as much beauty as broccoli to my day. Thank you, Harriet.
Dr. Harriet Hill 35:58
Yes.
Sandra Morgan 35:59
All right. To my listeners, we’re inviting you to take the next step and go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. That’s where you can find resources that are often mentioned on the show. You can find out about the anti human trafficking certificate, and if you haven’t visited before, it’s a great first place to become a subscriber. And then you’ll get an email with the show notes when a new episode drops. Of course, I’ll be back in two weeks.
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37min
September 02, 2024327 – Labor Trafficking and Forced Criminality, with Anabel Martinez
Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Anabel Martinez as the two discuss the challenges of labor trafficking through forced criminality, particularly affecting youth and undocumented individuals.
Anabel Martinez
Anabel Martinez currently works as a Senior Policy Counsel for the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative at Loyola Law School. She is a committed social justice policy advocacy professional, with over a decade of experience in advocating for marginalized communities through direct legal services and using trauma-informed and culturally responsive practices. Anabel Martinez transitioned to public policy advocacy to seek system changes that are intersectional and inclusive. She’s highly skilled at looking at real-world issues from a nuanced, analytical lens that aids in the development of comprehensive and equitable policies.
Main Points
Labor trafficking by forced criminality involves individuals being coerced into performing illegal activities as their form of labor. This can include tasks like drug cultivation, shoplifting, or other illegal acts. The labor they are forced to do is illegal according to local laws.
Anabel emphasizes the need for better systems to support youth who are trafficked into forced criminality. Many young people in juvenile detention may be victims of LTFC but are not always recognized as such. This misidentification can lead to punitive measures rather than supportive interventions.
There are similarities between the experiences of child soldiers and youth involved in gangs or forced into criminal activities. Both groups often join or are coerced into their situations due to a lack of options and are subjected to severe coercion and manipulation.
Immigrant youth, particularly those from Latin America or Central America, face heightened risks of being trafficked for criminal activities. There is a need for improved recognition and support systems for these vulnerable youth, who may be caught between the juvenile justice system and immigration proceedings.
Effective screening tools for identifying labor trafficking by forced criminality are currently lacking. It’s important to have training and tools for professionals who interact with youth, such as those in juvenile justice and social services, to better identify and support victims of labor trafficking by forced criminality.
Resources
Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative
306: Survivor Voices Leading Change, with Jerome Elam
Freedom Network USA
Unaccompanied Refugee Minors Program
California Department of Social Services
Covenant House 2023 Impact Report
259: Which Screening Tool Should I Use?, with Dr. Corey Rood
315: Keeping Our Children Safe Online, with Susan Kennedy
NCMEC
National Human Trafficking Hotline
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. This is episode #327: Labor Trafficking and Forced Criminality. 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. I am so glad to have Anabel Martinez with us today. She currently works as a Senior Policy Counsel for the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative at Loyola Law School. She is a committed social justice policy advocacy professional, with over a decade of experience in advocating for marginalized communities through direct legal services and using trauma-informed and culturally responsive practices. She transitioned to public policy advocacy to seek system changes that are intersectional and inclusive. She’s highly skilled at looking at real-world issues from a nuanced, analytical lens that aids in the development of comprehensive and equitable policies. So Anabel, welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast.
Anabel Martinez 1:51
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really happy to be here with you today.
Sandra Morgan 1:54
Well before we dive in, I have a personal question, because your bio says that you transitioned to public policy advocacy. Can you tell me a little bit about how and why you have done that?
Anabel Martinez 2:10
Sure. I feel like in some ways, as a direct client, when I was doing direct client services within the legal context, or whether that be social service, you’re always doing a little bit of policy advocacy in the sense that you’re letting your supervisors or your co-workers know, “Hey, this is a policy or an issue that doesn’t work for my clients or is causing me issues.” I noticed, as I was doing my work, that the people making policies were not folk who have experience providing direct client services, so oftentimes there’s policies are created with good intentions, but if you don’t have that understanding of how it looks on the ground or how that will be carried out, then you later on, you have to come back and fix those issues. So I was like, okay, why isn’t someone like me, who has this experience, providing this direct client service? Also, the person making the policy? Because then, I’ll be able to see those issues before they arise and be able to hopefully work around them or plan around them. It’s not possible to identify all the issues, but I do think we need more folks who have their client service experience, and be part of the people who are making the policies
Sandra Morgan 3:14
I love that. It’s so important for us to begin to figure out how to get further upstream in designing solutions.
Anabel Martinez 3:23
Yes. Unfortunately, sometimes we know nonprofits have limits on how much policy they can engage in, which is a lot of the folks providing those direct client services, work with the nonprofits. I’m very lucky to have found a job where I’m allowed to do that full time, which is very rare to find a job that’s full time policy.
Sandra Morgan 3:39
Well, let’s dive into our topic. What is labor trafficking by forced criminality? We even have an acronym, LTFC. Can you explain what that is?
Anabel Martinez 3:53
Essentially, within human trafficking we have sex trafficking, we have labor trafficking, and labor trafficking by forced criminality essentially means that the labor that is being asked of the person to do, or the person is being coerced to do, is an illegal activity. Whether that be cultivating, transporting drugs, deaths, shoplifting, sometimes even being the person who recruits people into sex trafficking, or being the person who arranges the dates for the person who’s being sex trafficked. That is what it is, the labor is the illegal activity they’re being asked to do.
Sandra Morgan 4:26
Okay, so when they’re given a job, a task, like go shoplift five necklaces or recruit somebody to be part of a brothel, those are considered labor trafficking examples?
Anabel Martinez 4:47
Yes, and it’s within the context off what is illegal within the state and city that you’re in, right? If that’s considered an illegal activity, then yes. For example, herein California it’s legal to cultivate, and grow marijuanaarijuana and sell marijuana.marijuana. But Then there’s also illegal farms that are doing that, and then they’re recruiting people into labor trafficking for that specifically. That’shat’s also another form of labor trafficking byby forced criminality becausecause they’re working at an illegal marijuana farm, doing the cultivating. Thehe growing, that might be considered legal if it was in a form that was actually permitted to do that work, if that makes sense.
Sandra Morgan 5:25
For our listeners, I want you to remember the interview in episode #306 with Jerome as he explained during his exploitation, first in commercial sexual exploitation of a child, he was very young, and then as he was older, he was required to do certain things, drop products in places, collect money, whatever. And when he was arrested, picked up, and put in juvenile detention, he was labeled a delinquent, even though it was all part of the trafficking experience. In your study at Loyola, you have used Los Angeles data. Let’s keep in mind everybody listening in other parts, I think a lot of this is a place where you can begin to ask questions in your area to see if there are parallels. I believe there are a lot of parallels. Let’s look at why you did focus on the youth in Los Angeles.
Anabel Martinez 6:41
I wanted to focus, because my policy work is Los Angeles city and county, and so that’s one of the major focuses. Also, right now we do have a movement to essentially close down all the juvenile detention centers, but they’re still open right now. Also because LA itself has done a lot of work to help survivors, youth, survivors of sex trafficking, and being able to provide them with services and identify them, but we have not done as much to also support youth who are experiencing labor trafficking by forced criminality. And we just wanted to bring to light to the county, and people within social services within the county, who are helping CSEC youth that those services that you’re providing to CSEC youth can also be provided to kids who are experiencing labor trafficking by forced criminality. Further, there’s probably a crossover because if a youth does not choose their exploitation, and more than likely than not, they might be experiencing more than one form of exploitation, kind of like you talked about Jerome. They experienced sex trafficking, and then they were being forced to do other criminal acts. That could also happen to other individuals, and maybe they’re not arrested for the sex trafficking, right? Because they’re not supposed to be now. Now in California, there’s a safe harbor law that protects them from being arrested if they’re youth. If they’re engaging in what is perceived as prostitution, they’re automatically seen as a survivor of sex trafficking so they shouldn’t be prosecuted, they should be sent to social services. But if a youth who is being sex trafficked could potentially also be asked to sell drugs and be arrested for that, but is there an assessment being done there, for that youth? And if there’s not, then you’re putting that child into the criminal legal system and sending them down a path that could potentially give more control to their trafficker, in terms of forcing them to do more things.
Sandra Morgan 8:37
When we think about our juvenile justice system, as opposed to our criminal justice system, this is very problematic. In many parts of the world, there is not as clear of a division between juvenile and adult, or criminal justice. But here we have that advantage, and there should be another pathway. This re-emphasizes that we have to look further at why is this child, literally under the age of 18, and may be already six foot tall, but has not finished school, many times doesn’t have the same resources, and may have been involved in some kind of gang activity that has increased that vulnerability. One of the things that really drew my attention to your presentation was linking this to child soldiers. We hosted one of the Sudanese children that were child soldiers, for a semester here at Vanguard, and we learned so much about how their forced labor, forced soldiering experience, was built on coercion and force. We glibly say, “There are three elements of human trafficking, force, fraud, and coercion,” but for a child with no resources, in a country at war, so that all the systems that might exist are broken down, then you begin to see the desperation, and nobody argues that. That’s why I loved moving from this focus on youth in forced labor to this parallel. Can you flesh that out a little bit more for me?
Anabel Martinez 10:50
Yes, and I also want to touch on one point you said earlier. These are youth who are under 18, under 21, and there’s been many studies done that show that the brain is not fully developed until 26. I think when I did my data, the youngest person in juvenile hall was 13 years old. So how is a 13 year old being held in a juvenile hall without there being any assessment as to what happened? But in terms of the child soldiers, when I started doing my research for my white paper, that’s something that I started to think about. There’s very much a parallel between child soldiers and youth who are involved in gangs. The more that I looked into it, the more I could see those parallels in the sense that, child soldiers are considered a form of child trafficking because the acts required of the child soldier are dangerous, they interfere with their fundamental human rights to education. And if you see the reasons for why a child soldier becomes a child soldier, and why some youth decide to join gangs or are in gangs, they start to look the same, in terms of that they’re looking for a sense of belonging, they’re looking for protection, they live in an area where that might be the only choice, or they didn’t have a choice, it’s either you join or your life is in peril. And then, forcing kids to stay both within an army or in a gang, the same the same tactics are used. Other eople are punished in front of them to instill fear upon them, they’re manipulated, they’re brought in very young. They’re they’re made to feel like that’s their only choice. I think the more you look into those issues, the more you look into the reasons for why that happens, the more you start to see that. I see the US recognizing this outside of our country, but we’re not willing to look inward and see the same dynamics are happening within certain areas of our country, and we really need to start looking at that, from that perspective.
Sandra Morgan 12:41
So you mentioned gangs, and we’ve seen a lot of evidence of that in many, many municipalities here in California and in other states. But for youth that are coming across the border, escaping violence and then find themselves here, exposed to further violence, is there a parallel in labor trafficking, forced criminality, and the prevalence of immigrant youth being victims?
Anabel Martinez 13:19
I’m part of Freedom Network USA, which is like a lot of different nonprofits or service providers that work with human trafficking survivors. They recently released their, every couple years they aggregate the data of who’s being served, and their service providers have seen an increase in youth who are undocumented seeking out services from them. We are seeing an increase in just undocumented youth in general, needing help because they’re being trafficked. Something that we’re seeing, which right now is anecdotal because we need to collect more data, that’s something we’re always asking for, is data. But there does seem to be an increase of youth who are from Latin America or Central America, being forced to sell drugs, and that being the labor trafficking that they’re being forced to commit. Some people are recognizing it as such, but other people are still not connecting the dots that that’s what’s happening there.
Sandra Morgan 14:15
When these youth are picked up, where did they take them? Do they take them to juvenile detention, where do they take them, an what kind of court do they end up in?
Anabel Martinez 14:29
Essentially unless there’s an assessment made, yes, that’s where they would end up, is juvenile detention. Potentially, if they have an immigration case open, or if they don’t, that could be the next step, is that they’re then referred to immigration court or immigration proceedings, depending on what the issue is. That’s something that puts them severely in danger of them being sent back to a country that they were fleeing in the first place, because they were probably facing similar threats back in their home country.
Sandra Morgan 14:58
Do we see any remedies in the unaccompanied minor resources?
Anabel Martinez 15:05
If there’s an uaccompanied minor, essentially, when they get here they should be able to apply for CDSSf if they don’t have a parent or another parent. But in terms of being able to qualify for that, you have to have, when immigration is called, good moral character. You have to show that you’re someone who’s worthy of being allowed to be in this country. So any crimes that you commit sometimes weigh against that. You then have to apply for a waiver to see if they would be willing to forgive whatever it is that is in your criminal record, even if you were never arrested for it, those are crimes that they look into. That’s the risk right there, that maybe they might qualify for this remedy, but then they won’t be able to get that remedy because their trafficking experience was not recognized as trafficking, and they were charged with that instead of it being something like, “Hey, this is actually a victim of labor trafficking by forced criminality, let’s not put them through this criminal legal system that’s going to maybe x them out of this opportunity.”
Sandra Morgan 16:07
That’s why vacature and similar movements are so helpful because they were wrongfully charged. I just don’t like using the word charged for a kid, but I don’t know any other way.
Anabel Martinez 16:25
There’s also the T-Visa, so they could also apply, essentially, for a T-Visa, it just doesn’t seem to be the way. But again, you also have to be asking for this waiver. I would even take it a step further and say that, I mean for everyone, I think people are more open since we’re already doing it for youth who are survivors of CSEC. We have the safe harbor law in California, where they’re not supposed to be charged for anything related to prostitution, they’re supposed to be recognized as a survivor of trafficking. I would ask that the same Safe Harbor law also be extended for youth who identify as being victims of labor trafficking by forced criminality, because even putting them through that, to the point where they’re where they’re potentially being charged for something they were forced to commit by the person who’s causing them harm or trafficking them, I don’t think should happen, so we should be able to stop them from even entering the system in the first place.
Sandra Morgan 17:18
That’s wonderful. I love that. Okay, so let’s shift to another population of really vulnerable youth. On this podcast, we’ve discussed the Covenant House study findings a couple of times back in 2016 and a few different approaches. Let’s talk about labor trafficking, forced criminality, and homeless youth.
Anabel Martinez 17:49
Thank you for mentioning the Covenant studies, because they have been super helpful, the 2016 and the 2023, for me in providing data that, like I said, data is always really hard to find, specifically on this topic. We are seeing more and more data coming out, but still, not as many as we have related to sex trafficking or CSEC. I believe the 2016 study showed that of the youth who were experiencing labor trafficking, 81% of those youth were experiencing labor trafficking by forced criminality in the form of being forced to sell drugs. We’re seeing a high percentage of homeless youth who are being labor trafficked, who are experiencing labor trafficking by forced criminality by selling drugs. I think that’s an indicator, ideally, we would be screening all youth who come through the criminal legal system for labor trafficking by forced criminality, but even if that’s not possible or whatnot, at least if you’re seeing a drug crime, or a drug charge, or anything related to that, that raises like, “Hey, maybe this is a youth that I need to look further into and not just automatically label as a criminal or as a delinquent.”
Sandra Morgan 18:56
So what kind of screening tools are available?
Anabel Martinez 18:59
Right now there are a few that are trying to develop more concise screening tools. I’ll send you some of the links that we have to them, sorry, I can’t remember them off the top of my head. But there is a study being conducted by a researcher from NYU who’s working with public defenders to do a study, to flesh out a study, a research-based screening tool for labor trafficking by forced criminality. I believe it’s adults only so hopefully from that, we’ll be able to get one that’s more youth-specific. It has been hard to find one that we’re able to recommend to people. One of the things we always say is, the simplest thing you can ask a youth when you encounter them when you suspect this is happening, is, is there someone else who’s benefiting from from you doing this? Is there someone else who is getting your money? Is the money, or whatever the benefit of the crime was, is there another third person, a third party who’s benefited from it as well? I think just asking that question in the terms that that youth is going to understand, and when the youth feels ready to talk to you about it, that would open up so much. That whenever people ask us that question, even just that simple question, should be able to give you so much information.
Sandra Morgan 20:11
It’s so complicated to create screening tools. We interviewed Dr. Corey Rood here, just about the process and then I talked to people in administration, in juvenile justice and probation in schools. I think these are issues that school counselors and resources, they can all see and identify if they have the tools, but creating those screening tools take time and resources. It’s easier to raise funds to provide direct services because the stories are so compelling, but if we don’t put more value on how to identify, they just keep passing right by us, and their situation gets more and more dire, and then they age out of the opportunity to take advantage of resources. You can tell I’m getting a little passionate about this, so we have to figure out how to identify earlier. How do we maybe just add one question, the one you just gave us, to an existing screening protocol in whatever your department is? In your local youth programs, whether you’re here in the US, or in Europe, or in Africa, or Asia. This is so important for the future generations, that they don’t actually get pretty much disqualified from pursuing the future of their dreams, from education, from becoming entrepreneurs. In another interview we did with Susan Kennedy from NCMEC, we talked about other forms of coercion through sextortion online. And then, “Okay well, if you can’t pay me, then you have to go make this drug delivery,” which falls into this same labor trafficking, forced criminality. Can you talk about what you learned from the Harvard Medical School study? That was fascinating.
Anabel Martinez 22:34
Yeah, I think one of the things that stood out to me the most, which I think we already know, but just to have the data, is that over half of the kids who were identified as having experienced trafficking, have been involved in the child welfare system at some point in their lives. I feel like that shows that that’s a missed opportunity, or maybe a factor into why they found themselves in the situation that they found. If we are able to train child welfare agencies throughout the nation or throughout the state on labor trafficking by forced criminality, imagine how many kids we’ll be able to identify and help. It also shows that one of the other issues was that 90% of the children lack adult relationships, just showing how important it is for a child to have a connection to an adult who’s able to guide them and provide them the help. Sometimes because they lack that, they think they found someone else who’s going to be able to provide that for them, but it’s not that, it ends up being an exploitative relationship. Another interesting fact was that 83% of labor trafficking victims faced arrest before the age of 22, so this is happening to them at a very young age. 56% of them were under the age of 18 when they were being trafficked and the youngest person, I believe, was seven years old.
Sandra Morgan 23:53
The key word, I want everybody, if you’re driving don’t do this, but when you’re at your desk, write down the word “missed opportunity.’ Start a little notebook about the missed opportunities, because this data shows how young they start down the path where they have fewer and fewer options. How can we find ways to leverage the opportunities when they’re there? We are often overwhelmed because we have way too many tasks, we have too many, but is there a missed opportunity today? Is there one kid, 18 or seven that we can send on a different path to provide those options? In our juvenile justice system, rehabilitation is built in. It’s baked into how we define justice. It’s not about how to put them in prison, it’s about how to make things more right for their future. I think we have a lot of missed opportunities. When you said this in the presentation I attended recently, that was one of my big takeaways. How do I find those missed opportunities? And honestly, systemically, it’s going to take us, I’m very pragmatic, a long time to get those screening tools in place. They have to be evidence-based. Go back and listen to Dr. Rood. I don’t have time for that but I’m trying to be very patient, and I want all of our healthcare professionals, and our social workers, our educators, to be partnering on those kinds of tools so that everyday people can do this. But in the meantime, we are really depending on individuals, those adults who see a child and say, “We need to look at this a little bit more,” and it changes their whole life. If you’re in the US and you see that, and there is nobody in your community, nobody in your department, just call the hotline and they’ll connect you to somebody. There’s always a way, and we’ll put links to that as well. Anabel, I do know that there are amazing examples in your research. Can we have just one story?
Anabel Martinez 26:47
Yes. Some of the stories that we highlighted within our white paper are actually from the Covenant House studies, that we felt really brought home the issues that we were talking about. One of them is a quote from the 2016 study, which is, “It’s like a job where you have a schedule and you have to meet a quota, you have to sell a certain amount in a certain amount of time, or you get threatened and smacked around, or whatever. There’s times where they freak out and spaz, and they scare you and stuff, smack someone else around in front of you, show you that they’re powerful and stuff, just mentally, you can’t go anywhere. I’ve seen it happen to other people, where you can’t get out, and if you get out, you end up in the hospital for a while.”
Sandra Morgan 27:30
Wow.
Anabel Martinez 27:31
So it’s like stories that we have heard from probably youth who are involved in the delinquency system, but we’re not really being like, “Hmm, what is going on here?” We’re not recognizing it for what it is, which is, there’s some coercion going on here, there’s some psychological tactics going on here, that we’re able to see within the context of maybe CSEC youth, but we can seem to recognize it within this context.
Sandra Morgan 27:53
And what happens to the youth in some of my conversations, is when they are recovered from that situation, they have this sense, “Now there’s someone, the good guys, and they’re going to help me,” and instead, they’re put on probation, they have all kinds of restrictions, and they’re put into rehabilitation programs. For me, you all have listened to me for years, talk about if these are children who have found themselves in our systems where we’ve already identified that they have had a very challenging, early start to life, and now we’re talking about rehabilitation. But they often have attachment issues and suffered malnutrition, suffered trauma from abuse, and so they need building from the ground up. We can’t just hang pictures on a wall that does not exist. Lots of our rehabilitation programs assume they learned that self-control, they learned self-regulation, they have the ability to imagine that if they’re in trouble, somebody’s going to come and help them, which is a key element of attachment. I want to remind us that there are opportunities that we are missing, that are right here and don’t take a huge program, they just take individuals to do that. I want to ask you one more question, Anabel, what have you changed your mind on?
Anabel Martinez 29:50
Well, I grew up in southeast LA. I don’t know if people are familiar with LA, but a lot of my family lived in Compton and south LA, so there was always this bias and perception of folks who were involved in gangs, even if they were young, this negative perception, right? You were just like, they’re bad, or they’re just people you don’t want to hang out with. You just automatically, any kind of tie to a gang, any tie to criminality, you’re just like, “Okay, I’m staying away.” And I think through my work, I have really been challenging those biases that I grew up in, and I understand that maybe back then that was a way my family was trying to keep me safe. But I think as I’ve gone into my work and learned more about this, I learned that you can’t assume or automatically label someone. You have to first see their humanity and question what made that person, or how did that person get to that point where they felt that that was what they needed to do or where they needed to be. I’ve learned to challenge my own perceptions and biases when I when it comes to this issue, and to help others within my family and within my work, and within my communities, to also do the same. Because I think we really have to take accountability for ourselves and the biases that we allow, to sometimes prevent us from helping people that really need our help.
Sandra Morgan 31:10
I’m going to sit in that for a while and take some time to check my own biases. Thank you for that. Wow. So much to dive into here. Anabel, how can people connect with you? How do we add our voices to support this passion you have?
Anabel Martinez 31:31
Well, definitely. I would love it if you all could read my White Paper, and if you have any questions or you want to have a conversation, I’ll make sure that my email can be shared so you are able to contact me, and you should be able to follow our Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative on both Instagram and X. We’re just trying to grow our social media base, but we are trying to be more active and post more. You can find us on both with the same handle, which is @sunitajainlls, meaning Loyola Law School, so you can definitely find us there. I think a way to help is, if you are someone who’s in charge of providing trainings on human trafficking, that you include labor trafficking, and that you include labor trafficking by forced criminality, even if it’s just one or two slides. I think that will make all the difference because we want to make sure we’re acknowledging all the spectrum of human trafficking that exists, and the fact that usually, the person does not experience just one form of exploitation. There could be many forms of exploitations, and we need to recognize that and not just focus on one specifically, because then we’re not helping them with the other issues that they’re also facing.
Sandra Morgan 32:40
Thank you so much, Anabel, we’re going to put links to everything you just mentioned in the show notes. I also want to ask our listeners to take this interview and pass it on to someone else. Let’s help the Sunita Jain Initiative grow. We need to be voices for our youth and make sure that we are not missing opportunities to change the trajectory of their lives, which changes their communities. Thank you, Anabel.
Anabel Martinez 33:19
Thank you so much. I really had a great time with you today, and thank you for allowing me to talk about this topic. As you can see, I’m very passionate about it and I just really appreciate being here.
Sandra Morgan 33:29
I’m grateful you came today. And for our listeners, if this is your first time, please go to our website, endinghumantrafficking.org, sign up for the podcast as a subscriber, and every two weeks, you’ll get the show notes. Go to gcwj.org to learn more about opportunities to take our anti-human trafficking certificate, and get involved in learning how you can become part of the solution as we study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference. I’ll be back in two weeks.
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35min
August 19, 2024326 – Reading Between the Lines of the 2024 U.S. TIP Report, with Ambassador John Cotton Richmond
Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Ambassador John Cotton Richmond as the two discuss the 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report.
John Cotton Richmond
Ambassador Richmond is an attorney and diplomat focused on ethical business, human rights, democracy, and rule of law. He served in the country’s highest position dedicated to combating human trafficking as a U.S. Ambassador where he led U.S. foreign policy in the global fight for freedom. As a Partner at Dentons, Ambassador Richmond helps companies keep their supply chains and workforces free of human trafficking. He was named one of the federal “Prosecutors of the Year,” after a decade successfully trying complex police misconduct, cross-burning, neo-Nazi hate crimes, forced labor, and sex trafficking cases across the country. Ambassador Richmond is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, frequent expert for the United Nations, and frequent speaker on justice, freedom, leadership, faith, and vocation.
Key Points
The TIP Report evaluates 188 countries on their anti-trafficking efforts, including prosecution, protection, and prevention, and ranks them based on their progress compared to previous years.
The rankings influence U.S. foreign policy, with tier three countries facing sanctions. Victim identification has improved with 133,943 victims identified this year, but this number represents less than 0.5% of estimated global victims.
The TIP Report notes a rise in identified labor trafficking victims (31% of the total), highlighting a shift from primarily sex trafficking cases. The report does not specify industries, but labor trafficking occurs in various sectors, including domestic work and agriculture.
Although prosecutions have slightly increased to 18,074, they are still below previous highs. Convictions remain significantly lower compared to past years, indicating insufficient accountability for traffickers.
Despite regulations, victim identification remains low due to unfunded or underfunded mandates. Improved funding and strategic resource allocation are necessary to increase victim identification and support.
The TIP Report emphasizes both the challenges and opportunities technology presents in combating trafficking. It also highlights the importance of including survivors in anti-trafficking efforts, recognizing their unique perspectives and contributions to the fight against trafficking.
Resources
267- The Intersection of Business and Human Rights, with John Cotton Richmond
241 – Ambassador-at-Large John Cotton Richmond: Looking Forward
137 – Interview with Prosecutors: John Cotton Richmond & Victor Boutros
2024 Trafficking in Persons Report
Atlas Free
Libertas Council
Everfree Freedom Life Map
U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking
UNODC
Transcript
Sandra Morgan 0:14
You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode #326: Reading Between the Lines of the 2024 U.S. TIP Report, with Ambassador John Cotton Richmond. 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, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. I am so glad to welcome back John Cotton Richmond. His career has taken him to the front lines in the global battle against human trafficking. He’s been on this podcast more than anybody else. His three previous podcasts will be in the show notes, in case you want to go back and listen. Welcome back, Ambassador Richmond. Let us know what you’ve been doing these days.
John Cotton Richmond 1:24
Sandie, it’s so good to be back with you, and I’m really excited to talk about this year’s Trafficking in Persons Report. I’m currently working with an organization called Atlas Free, and they gather anti-trafficking organizations together in a network centered around a strategic framework to improve everyone’s efforts in the battle against trafficking. It’s been a delight. I’m also working on a special project I started with some friends, called the Libertas Council, which is really trying to help leaders move from just agreeing that trafficking is wrong and become champions who take action to make sure that we can do something about this crime.
Sandra Morgan 2:02
Wow, I’m actually intrigued with this idea of how we become champions that bring about action, not just aspirational motivation. Go get them. So I’m looking forward to hear more about that, but right now I know our listening audience, our community, is really interested in your take on the 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report. We’ll start with, can you give me an overall summary of your response to this year’s report? Something that you really identified.
John Cotton Richmond 2:44
I think it’s important for people to know that Trafficking in Persons Report is put out annually by the State Department, and it does many things. It includes a narrative report about 188 countries around the world and how they’re doing on combating trafficking, looking at both prosecution as well as protection and prevention, and then make some prioritized recommendations for each country. It also gives every country a ranking, tier one, tier two, tier two watch list, and tier three. Those rankings are how a country is doing compared to its own previous efforts the year before. It’s not comparing countries to each other, it’s actually just comparing a country to its own prior efforts. So if a country is improving, if they’re doing more, their ranking might go up, and if they’re doing less on this issue, it might go down. I think this year’s TIP Report captured a great deal of interesting information about how governments are doing on trafficking.
Sandra Morgan 3:43
I have a question. Those rankings, are they just for on paper, or do they have some sort of consequence, impact?
John Cotton Richmond 3:53
The rankings have a significant impact on how we carry out our foreign policy related to human trafficking around the world. Countries want to be ranked higher. That can create an incentive for them to take up the recommendations that we’ve given, but they can also act as a stick in a sense. The tier three rankings come along with sanctions. That is, a country who’s on tier three is not going to get any non humanitarian funding from the US government. Now the president, each year gets to give full or partial waivers to some countries that might be on tier three, but those waivers have not been decided yet, that will happen at the end of September. One of the encouraging things in this year’s TIP Report has to be around victim identification. We’ve been deeply concerned that victims are not getting identified, and if a victim goes unidentified, they’re not getting access to services, their traffickers can’t be held accountable. Really, we all start with can we identify the victims that are around us? The estimate from the United Nations is that there’s 27.6 million victims of sex trafficking and forced labor around the world. And this year, we got a new number from governments about their ability to identify victims, and it was 133,943 victims were identified during the reporting period. That’s the most it’s ever been. It’s up from 115,000 last year, which was our previous high. I think we can celebrate the good incremental progress that we are identifying more victims, but I think we have to do that in the context of realizing how many victims still go unidentified. Although 133,000 is an improvement from where we’ve been, that still means that we’re identifying less than half of 1% of all the victims that we estimate to exist. It’s actually .48% of the victims. So it’s incremental progress, but I think we have to look at that in light of there is so much more to do, and we need governments to do it, we need NGOs to do it, we need communities to come together and make sure that victim identification is prioritized. One thing that is also notable is that of the victims that were identified, 31% of them were labor trafficking victims. That’s much higher than we’ve normally seen. We spent a lot of time talking about the hidden crisis in labor trafficking, whereas sex trafficking victims, those cases get more attention from from prosecutors and governments, but labor trafficking victims often get left behind, and so we’re seeing an increase in the number of labor trafficking victims that are being identified.
Sandra Morgan 6:35
What industries? What does that look like? And can you parse out for us the differences in some of the labor trafficking terminology?
John Cotton Richmond 6:49
The TIP report doesn’t break that down and disaggregate the data so we know what industries that 31% of identified victims came from, but in the narratives, they talk about different forms of labor trafficking all over the world. We see forced labor as domestic workers who are isolated from communities, often far from home, and their housing, their food, and their work is all controlled by the house owner. We see it in factories, farms, front businesses like massage parlors or nail salons. You can have forced labor in virtually any industry, it’s really the traffickers decision where they want to exploit people and where the trafficker chooses to engage them in commerce. And if they’re doing that in a business, if they’re doing that in a field that’s that’s growing, agriculture, if they’re doing that in a factory that is making things, the trafficker has taken the agency away from the victim, and is choosing to engage in this economically motivated crime in virtually any industry that’s out there,
Sandra Morgan 7:50
Just locally, within two miles and 19 miles, we’ve had labor trafficking cases in the poultry processing industry, in illegal cannabis growing in empty warehouses, or at least they look empty, and yet people are sleeping there and being forced to work, and don’t even realize that there are people that would help them. I’m encouraged by the growing number of labor trafficking identifications, but I’m pretty discouraged that we’re at 0.48%.
John Cotton Richmond 8:34
Yeah, less than half of 1% are being identified. So we’ve got a long way to go, a long way to go. Another thing that was interesting this year is that we saw prosecutions rebound a bit. They’re still not up to the high of 2015 when we had 19,127 prosecutions, but we’re at 18,074, so we’re getting back up. Convictions, overall, are still way off their high of 2020 by about 25%. We’re seeing less energy put towards holding traffickers accountable, and that impunity that traffickers enjoy only means that they’re going to harm worse, more victims.
Sandra Morgan 9:16
So how are we going to light a fire under our court systems?
John Cotton Richmond 9:22
I think it’s political will. When people decide that this is an issue they care about and they let policy makers and funders know, people will pay attention. We need to make sure that police, investigators, prosecutors, social workers, victim witness specialists, everyone that’s involved in the criminal justice system, that they have the resources they need, and they have the bandwidth to go in and take care of these cases, and make sure they do it in a trauma informed and victim centered way. If we prioritize it, it will be done. And if we don’t prioritize it, we’ll continue to get the type of numbers that we’re getting. I say all that with the caveat that of course, prosecution is not sufficient. It’s not the end all, and it will not fix all the problems, but without holding traffickers accountable, we’re not going to get to a place where we’re making a dent in this issue.
Sandra Morgan 10:16
We talked before we started this interview, about the great mandated regulations, laws, but we aren’t seeing a big bump in victim identification. What needs to happen in order to see that happen?
John Cotton Richmond 10:40
I think there is a challenge of unfunded mandates, or underfunded mandates, where governments have said, “We’re tasking agencies with this responsibility to go and do something significant about caring for survivors, about doing trainings, about holding traffickers accountable,” and then they don’t have the resources that they need in order to carry out the mandate they’ve been given. I think we need to make sure that every time we ask folks to do things, that we’re giving them the resources they need to go and get it done.
Sandra Morgan 11:11
Do you have some ideas about how we can move the needle forward on funding? What is mandated? I work with a lot of students. I just came back from taking a student team to Greece. Spent four days working with our US Embassies, met wonderful people doing great work with very limited resources, and yet, then when they read about their their tier levels and things, they want to make it to a higher level, but resources are a big piece of that. How are we going to turn the tide there?
John Cotton Richmond 11:53
I think we can do it by focusing the monies that we have out there, and deciding that we’re not going to be able to prioritize everything simultaneously. There’s going to have to be some trade offs. So which things are we going to put at the top tier priority? I think human liberty ought to be at that very top tier, and say, “We’re going to fund these things,” and actually take take a significant step towards combating human trafficking, and making sure that everyone who’s trapped has a chance to become free and live out their life, and flourish in whatever their talent and desires are. But when we try to do everything all at once, we find ourselves really restricted and unable to do many things well.
Sandra Morgan 12:34
So if a task force in a big city like Los Angeles wants to make a big difference, where would they start with refining how they allocate resources?
John Cotton Richmond 12:54
I would encourage them to think through, how can we identify more victims? What would be two or three interventions to focus on where we can increase victim identification, whether it’s from hospitals or schools or through engagement with the criminal justice system, perhaps people that are already detained, figuring out where are victims? How do we have a screening mechanism that would help us identify more people, then we can give them help? But I would focus in on a couple of different interventions and push energy and resources towards them. So instead of funding 10 projects at 10% a piece, focus in on funding one or two projects at a much healthier percentage.
Sandra Morgan 13:33
That’s so wise, but so hard to do because there’s so many different voices clamoring that “My group needs this” and, “My group needs that,” and so I think it’s going to take really strong leadership that develops those goals. I do think that the TIP Report does give us some guidance in that area. One of the areas that’s become much more visible here in the US, and when I was in Europe recently, a lot of conversation was around recruiting online and the exploitation happening online. The UN, our Congress here in California, we’re all talking about technology. It’s like no one has a plan for how we’re going to consistently identify victims and do prevention. How do you feel that the TIP Report may have informed that or do you have a solution in your back pocket?
John Cotton Richmond 14:39
Well, the theme of this year’s TIP Report was technology and trafficking, both looking at how traffickers are using technology, as well as how people of goodwill who want to come alongside and help can use technology in this way. One thing that I think is important for us to realize is traffickers have always used cutting edge technology throughout the years. As soon as they can get ships’ hulls sturdy enough for Trans Atlantic travel, they were using ships to move people into slavery. When the printing press came and they begin to use printed materials in order to find and coerce victims, phone, internet, everything is the same. Traffickers are going to be using each iteration of technology to improve their illegal business model as they try to trap people, we just have to be equally responsive and find technological ways that we can disrupt traffickers work, how we can identify more victims, and how we can hold more traffickers accountable. Technology, I think, is going to be used by both sides in this battle, we just have to make sure that the people of goodwill are taking advantage of the technological opportunities out there.
Sandra Morgan 15:48
So along with technology, I’ve been privileged to sit at the table with my academic colleagues, and they are just so excited about the data that is available to mine, so it’s like the other side of the issue. I have this sense that we’re sitting in a place where research and data can inform exactly what you were talking about. If we have limited resources, how can we target two or three goals? Well, if we have more data around labor in poultry factories, then maybe we’re identifying and training people in those industries. I think that’s what I’m looking for.
John Cotton Richmond 16:51
I think it’s a great example of how data could be used, as we’re seeing other groups use technology to gather data, just about how victim services work. Everfree is developing a tool called Freedom Life Map that allows caregivers to determine, what does a survivor believe the greatest needs that they have are, and how can they tailor the care towards that? And they’re using a piece of technology to help facilitate the moving of that information. There are other examples like that, but as we gather better data, we’re going to be able to detect themes, we’re going to be able to see the trends, and we’re going to be able to help more people.
Sandra Morgan 17:29
How are we going to fund all of that research to be able to focus? Because this scarcity mentality is part of our challenge and the strategies of prioritizing and getting things moving towards one direction is helpful, but if we can’t fund the research, how do we reliably direct the limited resources that we have?
John Cotton Richmond 18:02
I’d love to think that we can have an abundance mentality instead of a scarcity mentality, and that we want to see funding come into this space, and not just from government leaders. We want to see private philanthropy step in and foundations step in, and continue to take a bigger and bigger swing at this issue. There’s a lot of opportunity to engage, tell the story of what is possible, and encourage private philanthropy to step up, as well as trying to get more appropriations through Congress.
Sandra Morgan 18:36
I like that. Okay, let’s talk about how you perceive the inclusion of survivors in this particular report. I love the survivor stories, personally, I always love those. But can you give us a little bit of insight?
John Cotton Richmond 18:55
I think this TIP report continues to prioritize survivor engagement and centering survivors in this fight. We know that people who have experienced trafficking and have had a trafficker actually take away their liberty, and control not just when they wake up, but where they work and who gets to touch their bodies, ghey look at this differently. We want to honor their experience, we want to honor their insights, we want to honor their opinions about how this work could be done. One thing that I appreciate is we obviously have the US Advisory Council, which is a group of survivors. Many other organizations have created survivor councils, have employed survivors, have moved them into leadership in the organizations, and what this gives is incredible perspective. The TIP report highlights different ways that governments around the world have tried to include survivors with a seat at the table. One thing I appreciate is whenever we get multiple survivors together, we also get disagreement. They’re smart. Their opinions vary sometimes, and they have different approaches just like the rest of us. I think it’s important not just to have one or two survivors, but to get many survivors involved and appreciate all the different perspectives that they’re going to bring
Sandra Morgan 20:09
I love that. The idea of so many different stakeholders, though, is also a lot more work for those trying to make a significant difference on the ground. What you talked about with getting us to focus on two or three priorities, we spend a lot of time trying to decide what those two or three priorities are going to be, and then we also end up with a government. We have a federal strategic plan, a state, and a county, and they may not actually converge, they may actually collide. My recent conversations, particularly with victim service providers, they’re looking for some encouragement in how we do this in this next iteration. Before the next tip report or UNODC report, how are we going to see the number of victims identified increase? What can I say to those NGO and service providers that will encourage them, because what I’m starting to see is burnout and compassion fatigue. Is there something in this report that gives a glimmer of hope?
John Cotton Richmond 21:44
I think there are glimmers of hope out there, but I do appreciate that burnout is real, compassion fatigue is real. I think people are willing to draw near to difficulty and pain if they believe that they can do something about it. And I think what we have to do is make sure we’re giving people hope that there is a possibility, there is success. I think the increased victim identification number is definitely a step in the right direction. If we can just keep increasing year after year, that will be better. I think the increased numbers on forced labor that were in this year’s TIP Report are also encouraging, that we’re identifying more people in different types of sectors. That represents a lot of work that people have put in over the last several years, and I think we can take some encouragement from that. I also think that we’ve got lots of different options for victim identification. Whether we think about education programs in schools, hospitals and staff being trained on these things, but we need to create that funnel where more and more people are doing an analysis, conducting a screening, making sure that they are engaging with people to determine if they might have indicators of human trafficking, and then they know what to do when they see those indicators. There are more and more opportunities. I think one big aspect of victim identification is to include law enforcement in that, in terms of the trainings, in terms of the funnel of victim identification.
Sandra Morgan 23:12
in your experience globally, do you have a sense that law enforcement training for victim identification has increased, or if there are things that we as a community can drive more of the will for that.
John Cotton Richmond 23:33
There have been lots of police trainings on trauma informed investigative techniques of human trafficking indicators. We need to keep doing that. Obviously, like in any government agency, people get transferred, positions change, there’s a consistent need for training. But it’s not just training about the issue, it’s training on what could specifically be done, and what do you do if you see indicators of trafficking? And how can we make sure that where we see vulnerable communities, we’re paying particular interest about seeing if people are being trafficked in those industries?
Sandra Morgan 24:07
What are some industries that we are neglecting, particularly in the labor trafficking realm,
John Cotton Richmond 24:16
I think you would have to include the agricultural industry. It’s a very difficult industry to do traditional surveillance on and gather information. The work is by definition, seasonal, and so people move very quickly. So I think agriculture presents lots of challenges for victim identification. I think domestic work also presents lots of challenges, because it is such an isolating job to do. I think you would also have to say that anytime commercial sex is being sold, there’s a huge overlap with sex trafficking, and identifying children as well as adults that are being sold for commercial sex is something that more attention should be paid to.
Sandra Morgan 24:57
Ambassador John Cotton Richmond, here’s my final question today. You’ve been on the front line of this battle for a few decades. What have you changed your mind about?
John Cotton Richmond 25:12
That’s such a good question, Sandie. I think when I first started working on this I was living in India, it felt so over whelming. When I finally got my mind around the scope and the breadth of the problem, and how complicated it was, it just felt over whelming. I think what I changed my mind about is that I no longer feel like it’s overwhelming. Instead, having seen survivors shift away from their traffickers, stand up for themselves, recover from their trauma, thrive into independence, I’ve realized that we don’t need to be tormented by the overwhelming nature of the problem, we just have to be consistently working to do something about it. I’ve seen this happen with NGOs around the world that are truly changing people’s lives. I’ve seen policy advocates trying to change systems, and making progress. We’ve seen massive changes in the law. I mean, just since 2000 we’ve seen every country in the world now, put together some sort of law that says human trafficking is illegal. What I want is, I want traffickers to feel like the wave of people coming who are committed to freedom, feels overwhelming to them. That their trafficking crime, which they’ve enjoyed as a high reward, low risk crime, shifts and becomes a high risk, low reward crime. But it’s going to take a community that is committed to doing that, that decides we’re not going to be overwhelmed by the amount of exploitation, but instead we’re going to be overwhelmed by the amount of hope that is coming into the world.
Sandra Morgan 27:01
Drop the mic. Perfect. Wow. Okay, so with that, I’m just going say thank you so much. Now for our community, our listeners, we’re inviting you to take the next step and go over to the endinghumantrafficking.org website, and you can find the links to the episodes that we mentioned. Episode #267: The Intersection of Business and Human Rights, episode #241: Ambassador-at-Large, John Cotton Richmond Looking Forward, and way back episode #137: Interview with Prosecutors. I also want to mention that you can look up the Freedom Lifemap map that Everfree is doing. We did an interview that Ambassador Richmond just mentioned as well. I hope you’ll become a subscriber, so that you’ll get an email with the show notes every time a new episode drops. We’ll be back in two weeks. Thanks, everybody.
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29min
August 05, 2024325 – The Cost of Burnout, with Dr. Alexis Kennedy
Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Dr. Alexis Kennedy as the two discuss the importance of self care within the parameters of professional careers.
Dr. Alexis Kennedy
Dr. Alexis Kennedy is a forensic psychology researcher, and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has led federal and state grants to study violence against women and children, and as an expert with more than 30 years of working with human trafficking victims, she knows intimately the risks of developing burnout and compassion fatigue. Dr. Alexis Kennedy works with first responders, health care workers, attorneys, and other helping professionals throughout the US and Canada to stay in important but difficult work without sacrificing their own health.
Key Points
Burnout and compassion fatigue can take an emotional toll on professionals working with human trafficking victims, that can lead to significant mental and physical exhaustion.
Dr. Kennedy emphasizes that self-care is crucial for maintaining effectiveness in high-stress jobs. Professionals must recognize the need to recharge and manage their well-being to avoid burnout. This includes developing healthy routines and taking breaks.
Physical and emotional signs of burnout include changes in sleep patterns, appetite, digestive issues, and chronic pain. These symptoms are indicators that stress is impacting one’s health and should be addressed proactively.
Vicarious trauma can affect individuals who work closely with trauma survivors as the secondary exposure to trauma can be as damaging as direct trauma, leading to symptoms similar to PTSD.
Dr. Kennedy provides practical advice for managing stress, such as maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, creating a calming bedtime routine, and avoiding blue light before sleep. She also mentions the importance of finding balance and avoiding overwork.
Peer support plays an important role in recognizing and addressing mental health issues, including suicide risk. Tools like the Columbia Lighthouse Protocol can help identify individuals in need of support and facilitate appropriate interventions.
Resources
Compassion Recharge
Alexis Kennedy
The Columbia Lighthouse Project
Trauma Recovery Yoga
Transcript
Sandra Morgan 0:14
You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode #325: The Cost of Burnout with Dr. Alexis Kennedy. 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 and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. I am so excited to welcome Dr. Alexis Kennedy to be with us today. She is a forensic psychology researcher, and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has led federal and state grants to study violence against women and children, and as an expert with more than 30 years of working with human trafficking victims, she knows intimately the risks of developing burnout and compassion fatigue. She works with first responders, health care workers, attorneys, and other helping professionals throughout the US and Canada to stay in important but difficult work without sacrificing their own health. Dr. Kennedy, I am so excited to have this conversation today. Welcome.
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 1:52
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Sandra Morgan 1:55
So you can call me Sandie, can I call you Alexis?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 1:58
Absolutely.
Sandra Morgan 1:59
Okay. So when I first heard about you, I had been in Las Vegas meeting Judge William Voy who had started a CSEC court, commercially sexually exploited children, and he was really on the cutting edge of looking at these kids with a different lens. You’ve been there from the get go with him, it’s like you’ve been swimming in trauma for decades. Can you give us a very tiny glimpse of that?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 2:36
I actually started working in this area before it was called human trafficking, it was simply prostitution, exploitation through prostitution back then, and I’d been doing it for a decade before I even moved to Las Vegas. I was really shocked when I got to Las Vegas, how different the kids were being treated than you see in other countries. They were being criminalized and treated very differently. So of course, I jumped in to try and make a change. The thing is that these are really difficult stories to hear, these are really difficult situations. People who want to learn about it, want to help, we do it because we care, but there’s a cost to hearing these difficult stories, a cost to trying to change systems that are very slow to change, and that does take a toll on your mind and body, whether you notice it or not.
Sandra Morgan 3:24
When I started talking to you recently, you used a phrase. It captured my attention and I am sure there are going to be people listening, that have been with us for decades in this, and you use the phrase “getting out and handing it on?” Why do you need to get out?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 3:47
Well I’ve been, 32 years now, hearing these stories, interviewing, taking information, and even if you have the best sort of reset button or way to process and hold all those stories, eventually you’re going to fill up how much you can take and how much you can handle. But it’s hard to leave when we feel like we’re the one with the answers, which is a problem with ego. I mean, that’s the exciting thing about education and the growing awareness around human trafficking, when there’s more people at the table, then we’ll be able to say, “Here’s my knowledge, here’s my expertise, here’s my suggestions, I’m going to step aside and hand the baton off to you.”
Sandra Morgan 4:31
That’s so healthy because burnout, what are some of the risks for burnout?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 4:38
Burnout is something that can happen in any career and any job. It really is the idea that your body and mind and emotions are overwhelmed, and we can’t really address it if we don’t know where the source of stress is coming from. It’s a lot more complicated, once I started researching it, then people realize. It’s different than just simply stress. You had your daughter on, the other Dr. Morgan, and she framed stress really well, because it is something that we can use as a tool and have something that energizes us, but we also don’t want to have our foot to the gas pedal at 100 miles per hour, for year, after year, after year. For those of us that are working in fields with an urgency, like helping human trafficking victims, we’re not really good at turning it off when we go home. We don’t do this nine to five job where we stop thinking about the people we see that we’re trying to help as soon as we go home, on our vacations we’re completely relaxed, we’re very bad at helping ourselves. We’re good at helping others and not very good at helping ourselves. Burnout really can be addressed if you understand where all these sources of stress are coming from, and figuring out ways that you can take a break, or give yourself a little more kindness, give yourself that chance to recharge, that we don’t when we’re gas pedal to the floor, changing the world, doing everything for everyone.
Sandra Morgan 6:01
I call this episode The Cost of Burnout. For me, after our first conversation, I started looking through your website, you’ve got recharged.how, and of course, your alexiskennedy.com. I began to really look at the cost of burnout from a personal perspective, but then from a network perspective. I have friends and listeners in 148 countries, we need every one of you to keep doing what you’re doing, recruit your replacement so you can hand things off at the right time. The cost of burnout is we drop the baton. We aren’t there for that child in the courtroom, or in the brothel on a side road. So your ‘why’ for making this transition, can you give us a little of an understanding of how, number one: this addresses burnout for you, personally, and how you envision this for the rest of us?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 7:19
The interesting thing about the compassion fatigue research, it actually came out of the world of nursing where a lot of ER nurses were saying, “You know what, when I’m at work, I’m amazing. I give it all,” and by the time they get home, they flop on the couch and they don’t move for another 48 hours until it’s time to go back for the next shift. They said, “I like being good at my job, but I don’t want to leave 100% of everything at work,” and in contrast, the doctors they were working with work really similarly, at 100 miles per hour. They didn’t want to take those breaks and build that self care, and it was considered weak or too woowoo. What will happen with them is they’ll go 100 miles per hour for their career, and then when they finally do retire, a week into their retirement, they drop dead of a heart attack. So we can burn the candle at both ends, but there’s a cost to it. If we want to stay in a difficult job like human trafficking, advocacy, or any kind of research, we have to slow down and build in self care, and build in times to recharge. Because the people who go and say, I actually had students make me a t-shirt at one point that said, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ It was kind of cute. but actually now in retrospect it was a big, red flag.
Sandra Morgan 8:32
I always say, “I’m going to sleep on the plane. Don’t worry, I’ll sleep on the plane.”
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 8:37
I realized, I want to retire. I mean, I want to have a period of my life where I can work at a less furious pace, even though the social issues continue, and the stuff that needs to be solved is still there. But not everybody even makes it to retirement. A lot of people if they are giving 100% at work, and all of a sudden something else happens, a home crisis, a sick parent, a sick child, they’ve got no reserve left to handle that. If they’re trying to handle the stuff outside of work, and one of the best ways to recharge is social connection and friendship, a lot of our jobs are very socially isolating. I know that if I go to a dinner party and people ask what I do, and I talk about human trafficking, I instantly get that glazed look where they’re like, “Oh no, please don’t talk to me.” We don’t have that social recharge, that people don’t necessarily want to talk about what we’re doing at work. That means that we’re putting everything into work, and if you don’t have outlets and don’t have brakes, when you do collapse which you will if you’re going 100 miles per hour without that balance, you can take down not just you, but the people around you, and the entire program. And that’s a problem because there’s such an urgency to help the victims, the clients, the people that we’re advocating for, it’s almost ike we don’t want to feel sorry for ourselves or give ourselves any sympathy, because what they’re going through is so much worse. But it’s not a competition of victimization. The reality is, even if you come from a completely idyllic background, and have an amazing friend group and have amazing homelife, the stories we’re hearing start to weigh down on us, and that that weight is going to take stress on our body, on our nervous system, on our digestive system, all of these things are interconnected. When the body starts to break down, then we don’t have as much empathy, it affects the way we thinkm it’s all interconnected. In medicine, we tend to look at just the body in isolation, but it’s holistic. When your body breaks down, it’s often the warning sign that you’ve got too much emotions that you haven’t been able to process. Often it’s when we stopped sleeping, we realize, “Wait, maybe it’s not just about my bed, maybe it’s about all the stories I’m trying to process while I’m sleeping.” So we have to take the physical warning signs as an indicator that maybe we need to look at, holistically, our whole life, balance, stress, and what other things that we’re trying to juggle.
Sandra Morgan 11:16
For people like me, because I’m going to just own this, this is my private, pre-therapy, education appointment with you. For people like me, I need more than feelings and ‘how are you on a scale of one to 10?’ I can’t measure that, really. I need more physical, tangible signs. If I track my sleep, that could be an indicator, what other kinds of physical health risks can I look for?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 11:54
Changes in appetite or the way you digest things, if you’ve always got an upset stomach. Most of our stress hormones are actually made in the digestive system. That’s one of the things, I’ll see my students during exam period, those that have irritable bowel syndrome, when the stress goes up, their ability to eat goes down. We don’t think about digestion but how regular are you, how’s your system running? That’s a really important one. We carry a lot of stress, we hold stress in different parts of our body. If you wake up with a neck that won’t turn all the way around, or you’ve got this pain in your hip, that’s often a sign that you’re not stretching, that you’re holding a lot of things in your body, so those aches and pains are a warning sign as well. I actually got called out by my dentist, and he said, “Are you really stressed?,” and I’m like, “I teach stress medicine.” He’s like, “Well, you’re clenching your teeth at night to the point that they’re starting to crack.” It was interesting because I didn’t notice it. I knew that my jaw was stiff, I guess sometimes waking up, I can’t control what I’m thinking about when I sleep. A lot of trauma victims have that as well, where they have teeth problems because they’re just clenching or grinding their teeth at night. So, trying to get everybody educated. If you go on vacation and you’re the person that on the first day of vacation, you get sick and you’re sick for the rest of vacation, that means that you’re not in balance during the rest of the time, and we want our vacations to be fun, not sitting in bed trying to get over the latest cold. Stress depresses our immune system, so if you catch a cold that’s going around, that’s another indicator that you might be out of balance and pushing too hard.
Sandra Morgan 13:39
You mentioned listening to the stories. How does vicarious trauma show up in this situation?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 13:48
It actually can be the equivalent to primary trauma. It can manifest in terms of PTSD. A lot of people who’ve been in this field end up developing PTSD from not just the stories that we hear, but our bodies mirror the emotion. When you’re sitting across from the victim who’s talking about a life or death situation, our body picks up on that, and it turns up our fight or flight system because our brain has the amazing ability to make these stories real. We see someone reliving when they were in danger, life or death, and our body’s alarm systems rev up, going, “Oh, danger!” Even though we may be sitting in an office and we’re just hearing a story, that constant turning on of your fight or flight system is something that ends up burning us out a little bit. But with the PTSD, even if it’s not PTSD, a lot of times when we hear a really upsetting story, also in the moment we’re calming the person down or trying to reflect to them that they’re safe now, we’re presenting positive outcome future, that’s what we’re trying to help them get to, when we go home, have those quiet moments, that’s when it goes through. I would notice I’d be at my kid’s soccer game and instead of watching him, all of a sudden my brain went back to the story I heard and my body, all of a sudden, gets into this busy mode of, “What can I offer?,” and, “Did I do enough?,” and, “What are their resources?” So, just recognizing that that gas pedal gets constantly pushed when we least expect it. Where it’s most obvious is in sleep, when you’re sleeping restlessly, or you’re dreaming. Sleep is so important, it’s the single most important medicine that we have but of course, because nobody can patent it, there’s not a lot of conversation around it. What happens when we sleep is just incredible. Not only do our bodies flush, our muscles reset, our digestive system resets, our whole brains flush because we have to get rid of the neurotransmitters that are lingering around that we didn’t use. If you’re not getting a good sleep, and not getting the different sleep cycles, you’re not processing the stuff you saw during the day, because at night is when we sort the stories. It’s when we come up with our creativity, where we make connections we might not have otherwise done, it really is the most important part of our day in a lot of ways. But if you are overworked, overwhelmed, not finding a way to decompress from the stories that you’re hearing, that lack of sleep is going to make you eventually unhealthy physically, but it also depletes your ability to do your job the next day. We’re not as sharp and we don’t sleep, we’re not as good at handling emotions, we’re not as good at hearing difficult stories. So it’s not selfish to prioritize sleep, it’s actually the best tool you can use and engage to be able to be the best version of yourself at work.
Do you teach us how to sleep?
Actually, it’s kind of amazing, we all have the answers. The best thing I love about teaching about stress management is it’s all common sense, I don’t have to convince people. The research is now showing us that we really need a routine. If we go to bed one night at nine and the next night at midnight, we’re messing up our circadian rhythm, we’re fighting our basic biological instincts. We also mess up our bedtime routine because in the old days, the light would go down, your candle would get dim, you’d blow it out, your body would know it’s time to sleep. When we’re in bed at midnight, scrolling through our Instagram to look at some funny dog or cat videos to try and decompress, that blue light from that phone is is going straight into your eyeballs, straight into your brain saying, “it’s still light out, don’t go to sleep.” So the things that we do before bed that we think are calming us down, are actually sending all these contrary messages to our brain. The latest research shows that even if you can only get six hours of sleep a night, you want to go to bed and do the same six hours every night. Because if you’re on the weekend saying, “Well, I’m gonna go to bed at 5pm and just get a 12 hour night’s sleep,” that’s not going to work because you’re fighting the way that our body is set up to respond to light and rhythms and basic systems.
Sandra Morgan 18:10
Are there any guidelines for this routine that include what I eat? Some people medicate, they take things like melatonin, magnesium, all of those. Should I be paying attention to those ads that pop up when I’m scrolling on Instagram to calm down?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 18:31
Well, North Americans are very addicted to having a quick pill to fix things, but the research shows that it’s more holistic than that. Going to sleep at a regular time, turning off the electronics and the blue light and maybe listening to an audible book as you’re trying to fall asleep, or putting a red light in your bedside table and reading a paper book, those are all things that will…
Sandra Morgan 18:58
A paper book?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 19:00
They exist still.
Sandra Morgan 19:01
Oh, wow. Okay, go ahead.
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 19:03
Something without blue light so that we are sending that message to our brain, through our body, that the sun is setting and it’s time for us to calm down, then our body produces melatonin. Melatonin is a thing that gets everything ready to say, “Okay, it’s time to sleep.” Melatonin gets us to sleep, it doesn’t really keep us asleep. A lot of that can be done through our own strategies. Making sure your room is really dark when you sleep, that’s something some people are always sensitive about and have to have blackout curtains. But there is a real truth to the fact that your body, even through the skin, will absorb light and take in that information and say, “Oh, actually, it must be daytime so we should get up.” If you ever go to a hotel and it’s an unusual alarm clock, and you open your eyes in the middle of the night and think, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s like the power of the sun it seems so bright,” we do sleep better in dark environments. We also need cooler environments. 65 to 68 degrees is the right temperature to sleep, because one of the systems our body goes through is that when our temperature drops at the end of the day, that’s what signals the melatonin and the rest of things to start sleep. So people that are trying to sleep in too hot of a room, that’s sort of difficult. Even if you go to sleep under the sheets, you’ll notice you wake up with your arms out and your feet out, that’s because your body needs to have a certain temperature to stay asleep. Changing your temperature is another one that’s really powerful.
Sandra Morgan 20:30
So it’s not selfish of me to say no because I need to go to bed?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 20:37
Correct. It’s your best practice to be the most efficient person you are the next day. People want you to be good at your job, they want you to not be cranky, and impatient, and just really emotionally depleted, and sleep is the thing that allows us to reset. I’s the first thing we give up but it’s actually the most important thing.
Sandra Morgan 21:01
I’m going to definitely think of you as I develop better routines for regulating sleep, because I think you’re absolutely right. I’m looking at some more questions that I have here, we may have to have you come back, but you are coming for Ensure Justice in March. I want to talk about screening tools, especially in areas where we’re talking about peer support and suicide prevention. We talked a little bit about people in high risk professions, in law enforcement, in military, can you tell us about how those kinds of tools might help us?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 21:49
Often we don’t see our red flags, but our co-workers will see the red flags on a minimal level. We have those colleagues who we know are hangry that when they’re hungry, you don’t want to talk to them, so sometimes you’ll bring them a muffin before you have to ask them something difficult. We don’t always notice when we’re really out of balance and really toppling over, whereas our colleagues will. That’s particularly true for when people are at very low points and feeling suicidal. We have this myth that talking about suicide will cause it, but all of the research is showing it’s the exact opposite, that we need to be open about the fact that people who are going through depression, anxiety, difficult emotions, suicidal thoughts are kind of normal. What we want to do is figure out who are the people who have moved beyond suicidal thoughts to actual suicidal plans? And by asking them and doing a warm handoff and saying, “You know what you seem like you’re really struggling right now. Let me walk you over to our counselor, let me call the suicide hotline, pass me your phone and we’ll do this together.” People are afraid to talk about suicide because they think, “Well I can’t diagnose it, I can’t fix it.” We don’t need to do that, we just need to notice it, identify it, and then give a handoff so that we can take people to the resources that they need. It’s difficult to do when you see someone in crisis, we’re afraid to doing the wrong thing, but doing nothing is going to be the wrong thing. So one of the tools that’s being promoted throughout the United States is the Columbia Lighthouse Protocol, and it’s a peer to peer screening tool that gives people a simple six questions about suicide ideation and whether or not people are making plans. If it’s yes to any of those questions, to then help them get in contact with the the suicide hotline or a resource that you have at work. We know that because of stress and trauma, the rates of suicide have been very high in the military. The groups that have implemented this tool have seen a reduction in their suicide. When I do it with firehouses and working with them, they’ll often say, “Well, I don’t need it personally but I know some colleagues who need it.” They also say, “I wish you would train my wives, or my partners and spouses, because they’re the ones that know when I’m really struggling.” So it’s something that the more widespread we get, the better equipped we’ll be to have those hard conversations.
Sandra Morgan 24:22
Wow, okay. One of the things in our first conversation that shocked me, was our conversation about meditation and yoga. Because wellness practices are commonly recommended for stress relief, but this idea that this can be unsafe, I need you to unpack that for me.
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 24:49
It’s interesting because we think that meditation is a complete, blank mind and that that’s what we’re trying to get to. Meditation is more about being present and noticing what’s going on. And for a lot of the victims that I’ve worked with, meditation is not safe. When they sit still and let their brain run wild, they go back to revisiting the things that they’ve tucked away, the traumatic life or death situations. So just sitting in silence can actually be very triggering, and can be very traumatizing. There are groups like the Trauma Recovery Yoga Group that was started in Las Vegas, where what they do is they worked with the, again the VA hospital and traumatized people there, and if you do a guided meditation where you’re being talked to the entire time and asking you to turn your mind to your feet, now think of your ankles, or going through specific positive meditations, that is safe, but just putting on a bit of music and asking people to sit still can actually be incredibly triggering. It’s true of a lot of treatment modalities, like even if you’re in a yoga class, it’s not always safe to touch people in a yoga class. If you’ve got someone who’s got a history of sexual victimization, and the instructor goes over and grabs them by the hips to readjust them, that can be incredibly triggering and traumatizing. It’s understanding how trauma affects the nervous system, and how we have to provide that extra guidance and support, is going to be the healing modality, but you can’t just tell someone to go on YouTube and watch any old video or any old meditation, you may be setting them up for a really rocky ride and a really difficult experience.
Sandra Morgan 26:36
So can I find more on your recharged.how website?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 26:41
Yes. I’m constantly putting out little videos when people sign up, I do newsletters, and I do free training webinars. I have one that I love doing, which is ‘Why You Should Go On Vacation.” In North America, we’re terrible about taking our vacation time. It feels like the world is still burning, wherever we’re leaving, how can I possibly take a break from that? But it’s critically important to take that break or you won’t be able to go back to your job. There’s only so many years you can burn the candle at both ends.
Sandra Morgan 27:13
As I look at the things on the website, and I consider the risk of not prioritizing this self care, this health agenda, it can take down an entire agency, there is a cost to burnout. It’s not something glorified, you’re a hero because you never take a day off. What would you say to someone who is having a hard time taking that time?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 27:13
It’s really a question of, gosh that’s a tough one. Well, I guess the simplest way to put it is if you want to continue to help people and take care of other people, you have to take care of yourself. There are no prizes for sleeping very little and being a martyr, that’s not going to make you an efficient worker, it’s not going to make you a patient advocate, it’s not going to make you a good colleague, it’s not going to make you a nice person to live with. Look at all of those relationships and say, “How can I be the best version of myself?” Self care isn’t selfish, it’s actually critical. But self care has been couched with this idea that it’s just pedicures and kale salads, some people will say, it’s much more complicated. It’s the idea that we are athletes, we’re in this marathon of helping people. Athletes, they prioritize sleep, they know that when they eat better, they’re going to feel better the next day, they know that if they push too hard, they’re going to get injured the next day> We have to think about how do we keep our bodies and minds in peak performance? And that is by taking care of ourselves so that we can get up and run that marathon the next day.
Sandra Morgan 29:06
Alexis, you are just amazing, and you already gave us decades of amazing research for the people we want to serve. But you said to me in our last conversation, I feel called to teach the things I need to learn. What do you want people to do? What are the action steps they can take now to get the kind of training to make the changes that you’re recommending?
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 29:40
I think they have to realize that you’re part of the solution, and if you want to celebrate that and pat yourself on the back and say, “Look at me, I’m making a huge difference in people’s lives,” you also have to pay attention to yourself and that means taking care of yourself. It’s hard because when we do a hard day’s work, have really hard situations, you’re tired on the way home, you don’t want to stop and make a salad, you’d rather get fast food at the drive through. The reality is, it’s a gift to yourself every time you eat healthy, sleep well, drink enough water. We have to reframe it. It’s not “I have to go on a diet, I have to stop doing this, I don’t want to be bad.” We really have to reframe it into the positive that “I want to keep doing this important work so I need to fuel myself in the best possible way.” And that also includes surrounding yourself in your off time with the right people. Often as helpers, and I see this with all the first responders and therapists that I work with, we have a really high tolerance for crazy. We are often the person that’s friends with someone that nobody else wants to be friends with. If your phone rings, and you see it’s that person who’s gonna talk for an hour and not ask you a question, and your stomach drops and you think, “Ugh, I have to take this,” don’t take it. No. Choose to be with people who energize you and make you feel really good, and you don’t have to fix everyone, you don’t have to be everyone’s solution.
Speaker 1 29:40
Oh my goodness, Alexis, I’m going to listen to this podcast over and over again, it’s like you give me permission. I think that’s a gift, I think that’s a gift. We will have you back on, we’ll do some deep dives in some of these practices. I do want to keep sending people to your website. Tell us again, the website.
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 31:14
It is www.recharge.how.
Sandra Morgan 31:23
I love that the ending is ‘how’ because that’s what usually we need to know. We need to know how to do something. As we are closing here, I just want to take this opportunity, Alexis, to thank you for your decades of service and how you have turned your own journey into teaching things the rest of us really need help with as well. As a psychology researcher, I want to be one of your test subjects for helpers in this work, so thank you so much for being with us today.
Dr. Alexis Kennedy 32:25
Thank you so much for letting me share this information I’m really passionate about.
Sandra Morgan 32:29
And I’m looking forward to having you with me here at Ensure Justice, March 6th and 7th, 2025. Now’s the time to put this on your calendar. We’re inviting you also, if you have never been on the endinghumantrafficking.org website, go on over, find the resources, links in the show notes to things Alexis and I have talked about, the anti human trafficking certificate, all kinds of resources. If you’ve never become a subscriber, just click that. You won’t get a bunch of email but you will get show notes every two weeks when there’s a new conversation. We’ll be back in two weeks.
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34min
July 22, 2024324 – Role Models and Mentors, with Rachel Thomas
Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Rachel Thomas as the two discuss the importance of role models and mentors for vulnerable youth.
Rachel Thomas
Rachel Thomas is a survivor, advocate, and educator. She is serving her second term on the White House Advisory Council, co-founded Sowers Education Group, and speaks all over the country. Rachel Thomas will be the Amplify 2024 Keynote speaker to support the work of the Global Center. She has previously been a guest on the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast on episode #196: Ending The Game and episode #272: The Cool Aunt Series.
Key Points
Role models and mentors have a significant impact on youth, particularly black youth and those in the foster care system. They are crucial in providing guidance, stability, and positive examples that many youth may lack.
Many youth look up to hip hop artists who may embody success and empowerment in ways that resonate with them, although there are potential pitfalls of hyper-sexualization and dysfunctional themes in the genre.
When it comes to mentoring youth, challenges may arise surrounding the idolized figures in hop hop culture, however, it is important to have conversations around these influences without dismissing the artists or their influences.
As a mentor, it is important to build rapport, understand the youth’s perspectives, and gradually introduce alternative ways of thinking and aspirations.
It is important that adults get involved in mentoring programs, such as through organizations like Big Brother Big Sister, or creating internships for youth within local communities. One committed mentor can make a significant difference in a young person’s life.
Resources
#196: Ending the Game
#272: The Cool Aunt
Sower’s Education Group
Coaching for Leaders
Transcript
Sandra Morgan 0:14
You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode #324: Role Models and Mentors, with Rachel Thomas. 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 and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. I’m so happy to welcome back our good friend, Rachel Thomas.
Rachel Thomas 0:58
Hi Dr. Morgan, thank you so much for having me back. This is an honor and a pleasure, always.
Sandra Morgan 1:03
I just love having conversations with you, Rachel, I learn so much. You’re an amazing survivor, advocate, and educator. You’re serving your second term on the White House Advisory Council, you co-founded Sowers Education Group, you speak all over the country, and in fact, I’m really excited that you’re going to be our Amplify 2024 Keynote, to support the work of the Global Center. We’re really excited. You’ve been a frequent flyer on the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. I’d like to recommend that people go back and listen to episode #196: Ending The Game, probably one of the best discussions on psychological coercion, and your episode #272 with The Cool Aunt Series. I’m happy to have you back, Rachel.
Rachel Thomas 2:08
Thank you, honored to be back, and glad that you’re still doing this important podcast. This is such a great resource and service to the community.
Sandra Morgan 2:17
I just love it. I got an invitation in the mail yesterday, an email, to go on a talk show in Dublin, Ireland.
Rachel Thomas 2:27
Wow.
Sandra Morgan 2:29
I just love how international our community is, and people care. Hopefully because of that, other people will get a chance to listen to our conversation today. We’re going to talk about the theme of Models, Role Models and Mentors for Black Youth. When I think about role models, when I was a young person, I wanted to be like my teacher, I wanted to be a professor. One of the people I wanted to be like, I had eye problems from the time I was very small I started wearing glasses, they looked like little baby lenses, so my optometrist, I was like, I want to grow up and be an optometrist. What were some of your role models?
Rachel Thomas 3:19
Oh, good question. My role models, I did have several teachers that I adored. My parents really were some of my main role models. I have family members, I’m from a family of entrepreneurs, so older cousins. I had some career role models, basically teachers, I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. Then some some other types of role models for how to walk, how to dress, how to carry myself, how to show up in a room, and that was a lot from my mom and aunts, and family members.
Sandra Morgan 3:23
I think today’s youth have a lot of different kinds of role models, especially in that social space about how to dress and all of that. And from you, I’ve been learning that the role models in our hip hop culture, in rap culture, are really pretty different. So can you talk to us about some of the impact of role models on black youth?
Rachel Thomas 4:32
Sure. This is something I’ve always been aware of having taught high school, but now that my organization has a contract to work with foster youth directly, we’re two years in and we just got renewed for another two years so that’s a blessing.
Sandra Morgan 4:49
Yay!
Rachel Thomas 4:50
Yeah. We are tasked with reaching 50,000 California foster youth with the message of Human Trafficking Prevention, but we also are afforded the great, honestly it’s an honor and a privilege, to do mentorship. It’s not like a one time, teach them something and go, we are able to have ongoing relationships with these youth. I am intimately aware of a good handful of our foster youth and who really they are looking up to, who they are patterning their lifestyle and their goals after, and when it comes to our black youth. And I know this conversation is about black youth because I’m black and we do work with a lot of black youth, but really, hip hop is the most pervasive teenage youth genre, so it definitely goes beyond just black youth. It’s really all youth, different socioeconomic status, different regions, that’s just the number one genre of music that you’d like. I think when we’re talking about with black youth, it’s even more impactful, especially with our foster youth, because they may not have other role models that are playing a leading role. It’s the hip hop artists, it’s the rap artists, it’s the ones who have millions of followers and millions of dollars and fans, and all of the accolades and things that they would love to have. That’s who’s really leading them.
Sandra Morgan 6:32
You gave me a homework assignment before this episode, and I have a list of just female rappers, not even the whole. I went and looked at this, and it gave me a little more context for when I’m talking to students, when I’m talking to young people in some of our drop in centers that are more vulnerable and may have already been trafficked. They dress like what they see. What ways do these artists who are very successful, they are entrepreneurs, inspire or influence what our youth want to be, their aspirations?
Rachel Thomas 7:24
Sex. It’s all about hypersexuality, it’s all about using what you got to get what you want. It’s all about “I’m prettier than the next one,” “My body is nicer than yours,” “My body feels better in bed than yours,” and I’m saying it all very nicely.
Sandra Morgan 7:45
You’re translating for my audience and me.
Rachel Thomas 7:47
Right.
Sandra Morgan 7:48
Thank you.
Rachel Thomas 7:50
It’s all hypersexuality and the sense of, definitely competition and sexual prowess, and also, it’s just glorifying dysfunction on many levels, from dysfunctional interpersonal relationships. There’s a huge push on being the “baddest bitch” is a big term. In some ways it can be spun as empowerment, there’s a strength to it, there is some power in it, but it also verges on just glorifying not having friendships, and being able to be self sufficient, and not needing anyone. All of it is like if you have one traumatized youth, and they went down the path of what we would not want someone to do after they’ve been traumatized. If they didn’t go to therapy, and didn’t have healing, and didn’t have any resources, this is the music that they would create. They’ve taken being sexually abused and instead of looking at it as a trauma, they’ve looked at it as, “I’ve been put in this category, and I’ve learned the skills, and I’m going to be the best at it. Instead of it being done to me for free, now I’m going to make money out of it and be proud of it.” That’s one example, and for the most part, I think they really are rapping and talking about their actual held beliefs, but I think others, it’s because they’re in such that climate, and such sales that they’re not even like that in real life, but in order to be popular, that’s the lane for black female artists. You have to play that game and you have to lead with sexuality and just attitude.
Sandra Morgan 9:51
Wow. That kind of brings us back to the Ending the Game content that you’ve been so instrumental in. I think as I’ve watched how you have impacted the lives of young people, survivors from our program, not limited just to black youth and minor victims of trafficking, but adults as well, I’ve seen you use your real life, you’ve got grit. You can say the words that are really challenging for me to say, and I’m in shock, I don’t even know how to have a conversation, which I don’t need to because we’ve got you, and you have that conversation. How do you engage a young person who is modeling their life after these hip hop figures, and begin to impact them to make different choices?
Rachel Thomas 11:03
My approach, and mind you, I’m someone who, in my teen years, that was the music I liked also. In retrospect, I think that was a vulnerability into trafficking for me, that it desensitized pimping and actually glorified pimping. I didn’t look at it as a destructive, dangerous reality, it looked more like something cool that the women signed up for and the men were smooth. My approach is never to trash talk to artists that they like, because they’re people too. I think first is to just have a casual, curious conversation about why they like these artists. Sometimes it’s the beat, sometimes it’s the lyrics, the sound. They have that grit and empowerment to them, and if they feel powerless in certain areas, then they want to hear from someone who is just uber powerful, even if it’s talking about how sexual they are, or whatever. It starts with a curious, non- judgmental conversation, and then after some rapport is there, or when it’s not going to feel like an attack, then just talking about having more of a critical lens on some of the lyrics, some of the lifestyle. If it’s what they relate to, and it’s what makes sense to them, then accepting that and also just introducing other ways of thinking, introducing other alternatives for how to have success and respect, and feel powerful in life. I think so much of it is about walking the journey and it’s not just telling people that the path they’re on is wrong, that’s not helpful at all, you have to help them walk it, you have to help them actually see and believe that there’s a different alternative for their life. A lot of times for black youth, they have to see something else. Dr. Morgan, so you had mentioned your optometrist, and your teachers, people around you who have poured into your life that became your role models. A lot of our black foster youth they want to be social workers, they want to be foster parents, they want to be teachers, they want to be coaches, and that’s beautiful. It’s the exact same thought behind it, that some of them want to be the positive people that have poured into their life. But for those who don’t have that, or maybe they just have their eyes in a different direction, then they want to be the nearest rapper or rap artist, female, sometimes athletes. That’s their version of dreaming beyond a regular nine to five, if they want stardom, if they want something more than being a teacher or a social worker, then it’s “I’m going to be a rapper.”
Sandra Morgan 14:04
I’m listening to you and I don’t think I ever saw you, because I’ve known you as an advocate, you’d already finished your masters when we first met. I knew your story, but this idea that this genre of music was part of what made you a little more receptive to people reaching out to you and offering you opportunities that looked really amazing to a young college student, that part of your story helps me see where we might be able to be more intentional about mentoring. I’m curious how you have moved your advocacy into more mentoring. I know so many of the young people that you are mentoring, and I don’t know how you do it, because there are so many lives that you’re speaking into. Maybe tell me what it means to you to be a mentor for someone?
Rachel Thomas 15:20
I definitely have to give a shout out to the Cool Aunt Team, we have Teyanna. We have a team of Survivor Leaders who are also available for mentorship, and our lead youth mentor is Teyanna, and she is absolutely amazing. She’s now a wife and a mother, and an equestrian and just slaying all of her goals. But she was trafficked from the ages of 11 to 22. She went to prison for her trafficker for a while and has really just had a hard road, and has earned every bit of the wisdom and joy and resilience that she exudes. It’s not just me, we do have a team of seven mentors, actually. I think what that looks like is just being available. Some days we’re talking about their upcoming history test, some days we’re talking with them, crying about why their mother doesn’t want them or love them, or why they choose drugs over them. Letting the youth lead the conversation, and you know, having lessons prepared, so if they just show up and they don’t have anything to say, then we have plenty to talk about. But really, it’s being available. I think since I am blessed to have healthy, loving, involved parents, I just go off of that. If I fill in as a parent role for this kid, for this time that we have together, that’s all I’m doing. I’m listening, I’m being helpful, I’m providing resources, I am being empathetic, I’m giving advice when warranted, and when not, I’m doing it in a way that is palatable and not too judgmental. That’s really, that’s what it is, it’s what a parent would be doing, that these kids just don’t have access to that
Sandra Morgan 17:20
I’ve followed some of our foster youth and many times I get to kind of feel like I’m part of an extended family. One time, I started asking questions like, how do you define family? Because I began to see that they had skills for creating a community around them that was supportive, that resembles what you’re talking about with growing up with so much family support, like I had. I’m curious how you’ve experienced this informal family model?
Rachel Thomas 18:10
That was a lot of our reason for naming this work that we’re doing with youth, The Cool Aunt. That goes in line with the feeling of family, and I think for youth, especially our foster youth, they are starving for that. They want someone who sees them, who cares, and it’s really just been an honor and a blessing. They’ll say things like, “Wow, nobody’s just like sat with me before, and listened.” So many people in their lives are work and goal oriented, it’s, “I have to find your next placement, and get you enrolled in this, and do the tasks,” that sometimes they don’t have someone to just sit and talk about whatever they want to talk about. It’s not rocket science, it’s not something that is super strenuous for the mentor or for the adult, it’s really just availability and showing up. I tell everyone to become a mentor, there’s Big Brother, Big Sister, there’s so many different avenues to get involved. Creating an internship at your place of work and opening it up for foster youth to come shadow for maybe a day or something. It’s not hard work, but it’s life changing, important work. I just find that it’s something that youth are receptive to, and you don’t have to solve their problems, you don’t have to be a therapist, you don’t have to be someone that’s going to take them out of the system and save them at all, it’s really just showing up. You can’t be what you can’t see. If they don’t know of any kind, healed adults, then it’s not a great possibility that they’re going to turn into that. If they’ve never met an attorney, if they’ve never met a chef, if they’ve never met all of these other careers that they have not had interaction with at that point, then that’s not even something they know that is a possibility that they can aspire to be. Whether it’s different career choices, or characteristics, or any part of the identity that makes up a person, they have to be exposed to it in some intimate way for them to even put that in their realm of possibilities.
Sandra Morgan 20:35
Mentors help with creating dreams.
Rachel Thomas 20:37
Mm hmm.
Sandra Morgan 20:39
I think I’ve been listening to a podcast this week. Every time I get in my car, I turn on somebody’s podcast, and I was listening to a podcast about mentoring this week. I think I’ll put the link, it’s from Coaching for Leaders. One of the most important aspects that helped me was what you’ve been talking abou. It discriminated between mentoring and coaching. Coaching is telling you what to do, run to this bass, hold, watch for my signal, whatever. But mentoring doesn’t tell you what to do. It requires a lot of listening, and I think it’s hard for us to create formal mentoring paths. Being organic is part of this concept of a community that’s a family. I have people around the world who call me aunt or auntie or auntie, depends on what part of the world they’re from, and I feel that sense of family. That is this informal opportunity to mentor, but I don’t require them to fill out reports or any of that. I do think, though, that some elements of being a mentor, and I’m curious if you agree, do require availability and continuity to communication? How do you foster that with the Cool Aunt series.
Rachel Thomas 22:25
Of course, that’s ideal. Going back to that idea of a parent, that’s someone for life. We aim for weekly check ins, and the kids, they have our number, so they can text us if they need to outside of our weekly scheduled check ins. The the more time, and the more consistency you can provide, the better. But just setting those expectations in the beginning, if you’re not able to, if it’s like, “You will be on my heart, and on my mind right now, with our schedule, we may check in with you every other week or even just once a month. But if something happens, something comes up, you can text us, you can look forward to telling us about it the next time we talk.” Just setting expectations and letting them know that even when you’re not available, it’s not because you don’t care, or you’re not thinking of them, it’s, “I’m human, and I have a schedule.” We’ve gone about that in different ways and some youth, there’s seasons where they want to talk more often because they’re going through something heavy, and then it’ll be less frequent, which is a good thing too. They’re more stable at that point. It’s all just individuals, looking at each person as an individual, and just catering to what’s in front of you on that day, with that person, and what they need in a mentor.
As we look at the future of mentoring our youth and the resources with the Cool Aunt series, which I absolutely love, we have it in our child welfare program here in Orange County. How do you advise people who want to become involved to be mentors, to develop their skills? Can they go to your website? What what would be the best way for them to on ramp to become a mentor?
I love that. Well, we only hire survivor leaders as mentors and we are a tiny drop in the bucket. I would recommend getting involved with a local organization like Big Brother, Big Sister, just going through the website for your local child welfare, they are probably begging for mentors and foster youth. Find what is in your community locally, because I guarantee there are children in your community that don’t have available, healthy, loving parents, and they would love to have a mentor. Whether it’s through Boys and Girls Club, the YMCA, creating an internship, and just calling a local youth club or DCFS and saying,” Hey, we’re open to this internship opportunity…” There’s so many ways to create inroads there.
Sandra Morgan 25:26
I love how you always are so good at sharing with other organizations, not always just with one, meaning yours. Before we wind up here, though, how do people find you on the internet, and your program?
Rachel Thomas 25:46
The Cool Aunt Series is thecoolauntseries.com, and my personal website is rachelcthomas.com.
Sandra Morgan 25:58
Okay, so people can find you. And last, do you have a final thought, or message that you want people to leave with today?
Rachel Thomas 26:12
I do. I think that, to whom much is given, much is required. I believe that more adults need to be involved with, in some level, doing more for our disadvantaged youth. I had no interaction with the child welfare system, it was so far and foreign to me. I could not imagine that there are kids who are being raised by people who are on a paycheck, and they’re bounced around from home to home, and they’ve never had any adult pour into them. It was a problem I didn’t need to deal with and I would say just wasn’t part of my reality. I think if every healthy, well meaning adult would just take on one child, I think our world would change dramatically. That is the call to action, is to become a mentor. Even just mentoring one youth will make a huge difference.
Sandra Morgan 27:14
That’s my take away, just one. All right Rachel, we love you, we want to keep on having great conversations, and I’m excited that you’re coming to join us for Amplify in September.
Rachel Thomas 27:31
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, excited.
Sandra Morgan 27:35
If this is your first time to join the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, go on over to the endinghumantrafficking.org website. You’ll find more resources, you’ll find a link to the show notes for this conversation, opportunities to learn about the anti-human trafficking certificate program here at the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard. If you haven’t visited the site before, it’s a great first step to become a subscriber and every two weeks, you’ll get an email with the show notes for the new episode. We’ll be back in two weeks for our next conversation.
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29min

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