Rabbi Diana Gerson joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as the two discuss how faith-based communities can play a critical role in protecting children online and building a network of trusted community leaders.

Rabbi Diana Gerson is the Associate Executive Vice President of the New York Board of Rabbis. She represents the organization at the United Nations and leads interfaith initiatives focused on child welfare, community resilience, and violence prevention. She is a member of the Child Dignity in a Digital World initiative and serves as Senior Advisor for Partnerships and External Relationships at the Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities. She co-founded the Global Advocacy Hub for Children and Families and is the USA Country Coordinator for the Global Network of Religions for Children. In 2024, she was appointed to the UNHCR Multi-Religious Council of Leaders.

[00:00:00] Sandie: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice right here in Orange County, California. This is episode number 340 Building a Network of Trusted Community Leaders with Rabbi Diana Gerson. My name is Dr. Sandie Morgan.

[00:00:23] 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 am so delighted to have Rabbi Diana Gerson with me today. She is the Associate Executive Vice President of the New York Board of Rabbis. But she is so much more.

[00:00:49] she represents the organization at the United Nations and leads interfaith initiatives focused on child welfare, community resilience, and violence prevention. I want to just list, the organizations that she is involved as members or serving on in some way. Just to highlight the value of that connectedness and overlapping networks, She’s a member of the Child Dignity In a digital world. She was appointed senior advisor for partnerships and external relationships at the interfaith Alliance for safer communities. She co founded the global advocacy hub for children and families. And she’s the USA country coordinator for the global network of religions for children. She was also appointed in 2024 to the UNHCR multi religious council of leaders. Wow, that is a mouthful. I had to take several breaths. Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, Diana.

[00:02:08] Diana: Thank you, Sandie, so much for having me. It is wonderful to be back.

[00:02:12] Sandie: That’s right. That’s right. You’ve been on here before and I imagine we will find time to do this again. you’re going to be at Insure Justice this year and the aspect of how we keep our kids safe online in a brand new digital world, there is a role for faith based communities to play that we often don’t talk about.

[00:02:38] We talk about parents need to do this, schools need to do that. So tell us how the faith based community can join.

[00:02:47] Diana: It’s an amazing thing that happens when we talk about children, because children intersect. And pull together all the threads of community. Children go to school, children are at home, children have networks of friends, they belong to the Girl Scouts, they go to, Cub Scouts, and they’re in Little League, and soccer, and art, and dance.

[00:03:08] But they’re also essential members of our faith communities. In fact, if we think about it for a second, faith communities and religious institutions, faith institutions, whether they’re houses of worship, community centers, the YMCA, the JCC, et cetera, they are all youth serving organizations. We don’t often frame it that way.

[00:03:30] We don’t think about it in those terms, but they are. And every single faith based institution has computers. We have computers, we have Wi Fi, we have digital footprints, we have access to educational opportunities, we intersect online all the time, with those institutions. So we have a really important role in the safeguarding of children and being a resource in actually building global citizenship and digital literacy.

[00:04:05] If we’re not part of the conversation, we’re part of the problem.

[00:04:09] Sandie: Okay. So. Let’s sit for a minute in what digital literacy actually means, because I’m pretty sure there are communities of folks my age, the grandmas and the grandpas, who feel totally out of sync and unable to engage with their grandkids, because digital literacy is such a looming mountain to climb.

[00:04:37] Diana: Oh my goodness. What does it even mean to be digitally literate? I, I meet people all the time and they’re like, I’m really good on my desktop computer, but I can’t quite figure out my iPad. I’m really good on my phone, but it doesn’t really coordinate with my laptop. And what I have found is if I ask a seven year old, they can tell me how to figure all of it out.

[00:04:59] Children today don’t see the world in that way. So understanding a few basic things about your, your device, right? Digital literacy means understanding the device itself. This is a supercomputer. The cell phone today is no longer a telephone that’s attached to the wall in the house.

[00:05:16] It’s no longer a place where it’s a conversation just between two people. This is a supercomputer that connects you to anything in the world. It is the most extraordinary gift we have given to our children. And it is the greatest threat that we have put in their very hands. We have such a responsibility to understand the device and the programs that The child is using and who they are communicating with through that device every single day.

[00:05:47] we see these apps. And I remember once talking to a parent, Oh, my child can download anything that’s free.

[00:05:54] Sandie: Oh,

[00:05:55] Diana: I’m like, Nothing is free. So what does that exactly mean? So the parent is saying, Oh, my child could buy anything that, you know, download anything out of the app store so long as it doesn’t cost me, the parent, anything.

[00:06:09] And I’m like, you do understand that if you’re not paying for something, you, the user, you are the commodity. They are buying and selling your information. Now, you go and you download an app. We’ve all done it. We download an app. Now what? Terms and conditions. How many of us have read all the terms and conditions, and I, I dare anybody to read them out loud.

[00:06:33] It’s like watching paint dry.

[00:06:36] Sandie: hmm.

[00:06:36] Diana: It’s a lot of legalese, and we have absolutely no idea what is embedded in there. I’ll give you a small example. Bitmoji. Bitmoji, you go into the terms and conditions, you click yes, okay, you didn’t pay much attention. But if you actually use Bitmoji, and go directly from the app, into your text messages, and send it, Bitmoji now owns all of your text.

[00:07:00] Yes, indeed, that they now have access to all the information on your device. So think about it, the terms and conditions are actually quite important to understand how your information is being used.

[00:07:14] Sandie: Hmm.

[00:07:15] Diana: This is part of digital literacy. We have to understand what’s inside the actual applications, because that’s what they are, they’re applications, the websites we are accessing, how our information is being used, misused, safeguarded, or not.

[00:07:33] So we have to look at all of those aspects when we’re looking at anything that’s on one of these devices. Whether it’s our cell phones, whether it’s the iPad, the laptop, you name it, anything that connects to the internet today is a potential threat. Through the internet, we give our children access to the world.

[00:07:53] We saw during COVID kids could go online, they could do their education, they could take a digital virtual trip. and explore the world, history, culture, music, art, nature. However, we’re also giving the world access to our children. And we have to be conscious of that because we have no idea who’s on the other end of that conversation.

[00:08:16] Sandie: Okay. So, when we started, and you ran through a list of youth facing, faith based organizations, names that are household names for me, I’ve been focused here at the Global Center on educating parents and working with schools and teachers. But when I talk to parents, I realize they feel a sense of safety if they drop their kids off at their, faith based organizations, youth activities.

[00:08:54] It’s so much safer, or there’s just this sense that, I don’t need to worry right now, even to the point of, maybe even oversimplifying this, but sending them to a faith based school because it will be safer. And so I’m curious how, how we can hold those. organizations to the same level of accountability that we do, for instance, to our public schools.

[00:09:26] Diana: Well, they should be following the same rules and regulations, that’s to start. And that means when they’re doing hiring, they should be doing background checks, including the registry for,for child abuse. We should be checking references. We should be training them. And then we need to monitor.

[00:09:47] So that’s from the start. That’s who they employ. It should also carry over to who volunteers. Not every person is a safe person. Not everybody who’s ever perpetrated has been caught, held accountable. They’re not on a registry.

[00:10:03] Sandie: Mm.

[00:10:04] Diana: we have to be mindful of where we leave our children and to understand that there is no one place that is going to 100 percent be a safe place.

[00:10:13] And I don’t say that to create a sense of panic, but a sense of ownership, that I have a responsibility in these spaces as well. That all the spaces where children are should be observable and interruptible. Everything should be out in the open, their child protection policies. Just like the school, the public school, it should be online, it should be visible, that we know that every one of our institutions where a child will be is a safer place.

[00:10:45] We’re mindful of our responsibility. So we have those policies, the training, it’s all available for people to understand, to see, and we welcome parents to participate in those trainings as well. I think it’s really, really important to think. even in those spaces that they’re following the same rules and regulations.

[00:11:06] I’ll give you an example. There was a JCC camp, summer day camp. Oh, the JCC is the Jewish community center.

[00:11:16] Sandie: Oh, okay.

[00:11:17] Diana: It’s like going to the YMCA. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s a community center. It’s faith based. You get kids from every religious background. It’s like the summer camp in the neighborhood. And everybody, whether they’re Jewish, not Jewish, they take their kids there.

[00:11:32] And there’s a JCC and they, this is in the days, gosh, late nineties.

[00:11:39] Sandie: Mm.

[00:11:40] Diana: And there’s a situation where, you know, the counselors are there, they’ve been hired. There’s hasn’t been a lot of, background checks and other things that we’re supposed to be doing to by today’s standard nineties was a different time and place.

[00:11:53] So thinking roughly 25, 30 years ago. And what they find later on after the summer is over that one of the summer camp counselors had been taking Images, pictures of boys changing after swim in the locker room

[00:12:12] Sandie: Mm.

[00:12:13] Diana: and has sold those pictures to a website.

[00:12:17] Sandie: Mm.

[00:12:18] Diana: So here we have CSAM, child sexual abuse material that has been taken, by an adult.

[00:12:26] In a youth serving faith based organization that has now been sold and posted online. So now we have online sexual exploitation, in its very early stages of that online space. Once upon a time, these images were taken and shared as digital files, or printed files, and they were traded in a lot of ways, dare I say, and it kind of gives me, makes my hair on the back of my neck stand up to say it, but traded like baseball cards.

[00:13:00] Sandie: Yeah.

[00:13:01] Diana: Today, these things are flying across the internet, so quickly that it’s hard to believe that How we can even get it back? How can we contain it? How many images are being, traded online? How many are uploaded daily? How many are uploaded yearly? How many reports go to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to the cyber tip line every single year?

[00:13:28] Sandie: Oh, and the report that came out, a year ago showed a 300 percent increase in two years.

[00:13:35] Diana: Uh huh. and really so much of that increase was fueled initially by the pandemic, because everything was happening at online and no one was watching.

[00:13:45] Sandie: so when we’re talking about equipping faith leaders as part of our network, holding them to the same levels of accountability seems to be an important policy for a community to adhere to.

[00:14:02] Diana: Absolutely. You need to be holding them accountable in the same way that the policy should be the same. The procedures for hiring, volunteers, training, monitoring, and reporting.

[00:14:17] Sandie: Mm. Oh,

[00:14:19] Diana: communities. You see this in even the public schools that the institution kind of closes around.

[00:14:24] We’re going to do our own investigation and you go state by state. You can see what the rules and regulations are, but generally speaking, you’re not supposed to be doing your own internal investigation before you report out. That’s not a good practice. And in most cases, it’s It’s not the policy, it’s not the regulation, and it’s not the law.

[00:14:44] So we actually have to be thinking about how we adhere as we not only want to be part of policy makers and change makers, but actually we then have to follow those rules too. It’s not just good for them, it’s good for us. And we need to lead by our example.

[00:15:01] Sandie: I

[00:15:02] Diana: we want to make our, we need to make our houses of worship and our faith spaces the safest places.

[00:15:08] We have to do everything we can do so that every adult is empowered to protect a child.

[00:15:15] Sandie: So let’s, let’s move over to the other side of this equation and see some of the incredible opportunity for those youth facing faith based centers and works. Because what I’ve experienced when I talk to parents and our students here at Vanguard are live to free peer educators go into the public schools, but parents sometimes say, well, I don’t want my children to get all of that content. I want to do it at my church, at my synagogue, at my temple. this is, this is going to be. safer to assure that the content is what I as the parent prefer. So when we want to do community outreach with young people and faith based, how do we equip those faith based youth facing,centers?

[00:16:21] How do we actually help them use the best possible digital literacy training, teaching kids to resist grooming, all of those kinds of issues so that we can, we can break through theresistance of the parents on behalf of those children.

[00:16:43] Diana: I think when we talk about partnering, and it really is about partnership, it’s partnering with our faith based institutions. So if it’s going to the YMCA, it’s going to the local church, it’s going to, the faith based youth organization, we start by offering a training to their staff, executive level.

[00:17:04] Let’s get them trained. Let’s have them buy in to the work, the mission and the urgency, because this isn’t a problem that’s going to be a problem in 10 years from now. This is a problem that’s going to be with us for the next. I can’t tell you how many years and it’s only going to exponentially get worse.

[00:17:24] One image of a child is going to be shared hundreds of thousands of times over the course of infinite years.

[00:17:32] Sandie: Hmm.

[00:17:32] Diana: Taking down a photo off, off the internet is near impossible. So we want to get in front of that, right? We want to, we want to change the trajectory for these children. We want to make sure that no one’s grooming them and taking photos.

[00:17:46] And we certainly don’t want them self generating these materials either, which is an increasingly large problem. It just, the numbers are staggering. It’s up over 25 percent amongst, you know, boys in a small age bracket. This is Every year I’m reading, it’s only, it’s up by this much, it’s up by this much, it’s 20 percent here, it’s 50 percent there, it’s 100 percent there, the numbers never cease to amaze and terrify me at the same time.

[00:18:15] so we want to get ahead of that, we want to change the narrative. So offering programs at the executive level, getting faith leaders in particular, who are tremendous advocates on these, in these spaces. So if you have a rabbi, a minister, a priest, an imam, a sheikh, somebody of faith, who’s respected in the community, who’s willing to come with you in helping to open that door and then asking, once you do an initial training and say, we’d like to bring this training to your community.

[00:18:47] Whether it’s to the parents or the rest of the staff and volunteers or to the children directly that you offer to actually, once you’ve worked with the religious leader, whatever their title is, invite them to co teach with you.

[00:19:05] Sandie: Hmm. Hmm.

[00:19:06] Diana: I often do this. I offer stewards of children, which is, developed by darkness to light.

[00:19:12] I was Charleston, South Carolina, and I’ve been training. I’ve been an authorized facilitator doing this since 2007. And I have trained hundreds of churches and synagogues and mosques. And for anyone who’s ever been resistant, the first thing I say is, come teach with me. I look at the minister, the priest, the imam, come co facilitate with me.

[00:19:34] I want you to help put the religious framework around this. This topic is hard. We need faith as part of this conversation. It’s what helps build resilience. So we need to have that to help bring us comfort in very uncomfortable conversations, and also helps to give us a moral pathway. So if I invite them to be part of the conversation, we work together to develop how we’re going to do this.

[00:20:02] And then we co facilitate. Appreciate it. Then we create opportunity. Now, the parent is going to be comfortable who said, I’m not doing that in the public school setting, but my minister’s involved. Oh, okay. Now this is different. Now this speaks to my moral obligation. It speaks to my faith and my faith in action.

[00:20:23] So, I think that’s really where we, we really use our relationships to really build the matrix that we need that safety net under our kids.

[00:20:35] Sandie: I just feel like we’re done. That’s what we needed to communicate, but we’re going to keep going anyway. so this idea of having a trusted faith leader as part of what of the outreach and the training, the equipping and digital literacy, all of that. can you give me some examples of how that’s been successful, how I might Approach it right here.

[00:21:05] I, you know, it’s been a while since I’ve been had lunch with the local Imam. I did several years ago, but I know that those kids are often not part of the community trainings that are then restricted because of faith practices. I talked to the leaders in that community and they want their kids to have this kind of resilience training. And so it is. For me, this is a super important conversation, and I loved how you framed this as a moral pathway. Instead of becoming oppositional and saying, well, they don’t want this, or they are this, or I’m not, I want to find out how to do this better. So I’ve already taken a few notes. I’m going to intentionally look for ways to co facilitate. What could, parents do when you’re all in the same, maybe soccer team or whatever, and you see that there are kids who have not had digital literacy training to resist grooming? What are some steps along that pathway?

[00:22:28] Diana: Part of it starts with conversation, right? We need to be talking about it. We need to be talking about it all the time. When I talk to faith leaders in particular, I will tell them. you need to get up on the pulpit. I, I don’t care which day of the week you pray, you know, when, the day when your community is together is that’s the day you should be talking about these issues.

[00:22:49] Sandie: not in a separate classroom for just those people that are interested. Oh my gosh, that makes me crazy. No, okay,

[00:22:57] go ahead, call them to the front.

[00:22:59] Diana: call them to the front, but what I always remember, when I started my work almost 25 years ago, I, I remember I would get to a synagogue and they put on the billboard outside, like, Domestic Violence Shabbat. And I was the keynote speaker. So I was the, I was the, giving the sermon that night and it’s domestic violence Shabbat.

[00:23:20] There is no faster way to make sure nobody shows up

[00:23:22] Sandie: Ha, ha, ha, ha, oh

[00:23:25] Diana: So what I started to do back in the day was I focused on once a month, once a month was family Shabbat, family Shabbat was like kids and I would do a story and I would integrate some of these lessons into, into. You know, Family Shabbat into the storytelling about what we do and what we don’t do, how we navigate difficult conversations, difficult places, and one of the interesting things is that children do a really great job, you know, interpersonal communication because that uh oh feeling,

[00:23:57] you know, kind of like perks up and it still works as adults like that uh oh feeling.

[00:24:01] It’s like, that person doesn’t make me feel comfortable, doesn’t make me feel safe. I’m going to go in this other direction, but we don’t get that feeling online. So that, it’s a, it’s a teaching kids how to do this. So if we could put it into storytelling, then we start to build a framework. But then at least once a month, the, the teachings of our sacred texts, our scriptures, whatever scripture text your faith uses, has stories about vulnerability

[00:24:32] Sandie: mm,

[00:24:33] Diana: and human frailty and things we’ve done really great and moments we really missed the mark.

[00:24:39] There’s stories about humanity. It’s about raising us up and challenging us to do better. So I would take those stories once a month and talk about, pick one, and talk and frame that conversation in, you know, on that holy day to talk about the issues. People knew that I was going to be talking about issues one, you know, one Shabbat a month.

[00:25:03] That’s what I talked about. I had the most number of people coming to synagogue, and that’s what I did. And I challenge us to do that, that we need to pick the tough topics, and we need to talk about them, not once, not twice, but often, to the point that everybody at the supermarket, when they say, do you know somebody who you could talk to about X, Y, and Z, they go, oh, go talk to Rabbi Diana,

[00:25:26] Sandie: ah, that’s so

[00:25:27] Diana: right?

[00:25:28] They, they, it doesn’t matter if they’re from your community or not.

[00:25:32] Sandie: Okay, so you are inspiring me so much because I have been online. I’ve listened to at least 100 podcasts and I’m not exaggerating about the incredible value and absolute necessity of talking to your kids about technology regularly. One, one group at Screenagers, they have Tech Talk Tuesday and just so much of that, but from the, uh, let’s take a 30, 000 foot perspective and our faith families also need to talk tech and whether that’s Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, or Sunday, we have to normalize that it’s okay to talk tech and to talk about the risks for sexual exploitation. And That means modeling it, and I really believe that interfaith leaders are trusted thought leaders that can model that in their position of authority and influence. I

[00:26:45] don’t even know where else to go with that, but I just, if you, as a listener, are thinking, Oh, this is kind of a new way. I’m going to have to go talk to my rabbi, my mom, my pastor, my priest, go and have that conversation and start to crack through the tradition that Doesn’t include that kind of conversation because our kids are important and we need to normalize the family coming together and talking about the risks.

[00:27:25] Um,

[00:27:26] Diana: agree more. And I do remember back, if you can think back through the course of life, in your lifetime, in my lifetime, there was once upon a time we used to sit around the table and everybody would whisper the, about the things that we didn’t talk about in polite company. You know, somebody’s got cancer, there’s, somebody got a divorce, somebody has, there was domestic violence, there was child, all these things, it’s like we, we would whisper at the table because it was as if we said it out loud, something bad would happen.

[00:27:58] And over the decades. These things have been normalized, right? We, we talk about cancer, talking about cancer. My goodness, men are wearing mustaches in November. Women are out and wearing pink in October. Like we couldn’t be talking about it more. And it’s a community that rallies around and has changed the trajectory,

[00:28:19] right?

[00:28:19] The,how we treat. treat cancer, prevent cancer, how we work together as a community to support one another. divorce. Divorce was something everybody whispered about. Now 52%, I think it is, of Americans are divorced, right? And so talking about divorce has become very normalized in our communities.

[00:28:39] We started talking about child abuse. Child abuse became illegal in all 50 states. Domestic violence became illegal in all 50 states. All these things took time, and all of these things took time for us to normalize in conversation.

[00:28:56] Sandie: Hmm.

[00:28:57] Diana: Technology and its risks are the same. We need to start to normalize the conversation.

[00:29:04] That it’s not something that, oh, we have to talk about in the back room at the congregation when, when no one else is listening. Look, we’ve had policies in, that have been required of us for a really long time. Since the 80s and 90s, we all have liability insurance in our congregations and our youth serving organizations.

[00:29:22] They all mandate molestation insurance. Those require certain policies, protocols, and training. We now need to live up to those standards and we have to talk about it.

[00:29:34] Sandie: Hmm. Wow. Okay. How do people connect with you and which way should they connect? I’m looking at, Child Dignity Alliance, Partnerships, Hub for Children, UNHCR, GNRC. Tell us, how do we connect?

[00:29:54] Diana: The easiest way to find me, LinkedIn and of course, Instagram, I Instagram at Rabbi Diana. So it’s not hard to figure out R A B B I D I A N A. I certainly work with my partners all over the globe. Uh, GNRC today is in over 80 countries and regions around the world. The Global Network of Religions for Children.

[00:30:17] We were just together in Abu Dhabi in November for our sixth global forum. and we had 52 teenagers from 30 countries. Who are participating and it was one of the most incredible fixed days with these young people that inspired and uplifted me to the point that I know we’re going to be okay because these young people, they held our adult feet to the fire.

[00:30:42] It was faith leaders from around the globe, senior, you know, religious leaders, government leaders, civil society partners. And they were like, but you’re not doing enough for us. And I was so blown away by their, by their challenge, by their spirit, by their energy, by their focus and by their candor.

[00:31:03] These children are not afraid to speak their mind.

[00:31:06] Now they were chosen to be there by, by their country, uh, committees. So obviously they were there with purpose. But they came prepared, and they really saw their role as not just the generation of the future, but the generation of now. We have to stop thinking about our children as just, oh, their future, their future, their future.

[00:31:30] No, no, no. It’s right now.

[00:31:32] Sandie: They’re walking on that road.

[00:31:34] Diana: They are on that road, and we want them to have a childhood.

[00:31:39] Sandie: Hmm.

[00:31:39] Diana: We want to safeguard that childhood. But to do that, we have to empower them and their parents. Their community around them because a child’s not necessarily going to tell you their own parent or their own teacher They may tell somebody else’s pastor when they’re sitting there at the end of services because they went to somebody’s you know, somebody’s Whether it was confirmation or some other event all of a sudden they may disclose something that they may be discovered

[00:32:08] Sandie: Hmm.

[00:32:09] Diana: And so we have to be there for each other across faith.

[00:32:14] And that’s why I think this is so important Is that faith leaders who learn together, grow together, we see each other as our partners. So if the Global Center for Women and Justice started with a advisory council of faith leaders and brought together all the faith leaders from all the different communities, then it’s an incredible opportunity.

[00:32:39] And I think that’s, that’s, that’s the pathway. I used to say that all the time. You know, local communities, they had a, they have the Crime Victims Board, they have this board, they have this organization, this district attorney’s office has a domestic violence thing, child abuse thing. Where are your faith leaders?

[00:32:56] They shouldn’t be in a separate room.

[00:32:57] Sandie: No, no, because they have incredible influence because they are trusted leaders.

[00:33:05] Diana, I can hardly wait for you to be out here in person for Insure Justice. And I’m looking forward to some of those really great conversations in person. So thank you for being with me today.

[00:33:21] Diana: I cannot thank you enough for having me. This has always been my, one of my favorite conversations is any conversation with you,

[00:33:29] Sandie: Oh, and The same to you. for our listeners, we’re inviting you to take the next step and go over to endinghumantrafficking. org and find the resources Diana and I have been talking about. And if you haven’t visited our site before, take some time and become a subscriber to receive a newsletter with the show notes and whenever a new episode drops.

[00:33:54] And if you’re already a listener, write a review so other people can find us, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and even Facebook. So I’ll see you back here in two weeks.

Jeremy Davis joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as the two discuss the role of schools in online safety and how educational leaders can foster digital resilience among students.

Jeremy Davis is the Assistant Superintendent for Innovation and Instructional Support for the 12,000-student Fullerton School District in California. He also serves as the Vice President of the California Ed Tech Joint Powers Authority. Jeremy’s role includes overseeing technology, libraries, student data, cybersecurity, and IT networking across the district. His position on the cabinet allows him to lead cross-departmental efforts on online safety, integrating technology and educational support for a comprehensive approach to student well-being.

Sandie Morgan: [00:00:00] 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 number 339, The Role of Schools in Online Safety with Jeremy Davis. My name is Dr. Sandy 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. Jeremy Davis is the assistant superintendent for innovation and instructional support for the 12, 000 student Fullerton school district in California. And the vice president of the California ed tech joint powers authority.

I am so glad to welcome you, Jeremy. I love your job description, innovation, and instructional support. [00:01:00] Tell me what that means? What’s in your job description?

Jeremy Davis: You know what? I’m very blessed to work in Fullerton. and the, where the TKA is part of Fullerton. we’re one of the few districts in Orange County to actually have my role at the assistant superintendent level. So, I do run the technology department, but that includes educational technology. It also includes the libraries.

All the student data, cybersecurity, all the devices, IT, networking,things like that. So in a lot of districts, it’s, it’s like a director of IT or, if you’re lucky, a chief technology officer, but then there’ve been a couple who’ve elevated it to cabinet. and I think it’s super important because of, of things like what we’re going to talk about today, where.

where I, I’m leading a cross departmental effort on online safety, because it really doesn’t just live in the tech department. It lives in all departments. so I, I’m very appreciative that my, my job. Includes all kinds of things that might not normally be considered I. T. but yeah, so that’s so director of our assistant super [00:02:00] innovation puts me over over a lot of things, but also being on cabinet gives me the ability to, really work well within the other departments and sort of set some vision for the district.

Sandie Morgan: Wow. I love that. And I want to thank you again for being a speaker at last year’s Insure Justice Conference and agreeing to do it again this year. So we’re looking forward to that. Our last interview was with a survivor, Alia Azariah. During our conversation, we learned that Ventura’s district attorney’s office gave her an award for resilience. Tell me what your take is on resilience as an element of a youth being protected from online predators.

Jeremy Davis: sure. you know, it’s it’s so interesting how, how many of the children who fall pray, it’s the online predators. Are in need of [00:03:00] attention,you know, are sort of seeking that attention somewhere and sadly they sometimes find it, online. the resilience piece is understanding how amazing they are as human beings.

and, you know, it’s, it, for me, it goes back, honestly, to faith a little bit for me too, but it’s helping these kids understand. that they’re just great people and they don’t need this outside, piece online, but also helping them understand you have no idea who you’re talking to online.

You know, we’ve done a lot of work around the differences between an actual real life relationship and an online relationship and how to determine who you’re even talking to online and do you even know who they are.

Because the resiliency comes from standing up for themselves, from being able to say no. You know, we talk about, we even go into the sex ed curriculum, where there, where, where, or the drug curriculum. Because if the, if the say no to drug curriculum works really well for say [00:04:00] no to someone asking you for a nude photo.

Right? So you know, if you have negotiation skills and you have the ability to say no, because you’re confident in yourself, that resiliency transfers to everything we do within digital literacy or with digital wellness or online safety. can you say no? If someone asks you, can you say no to pressure?

do you know if the person’s a peer? Like, maybe it’s not even peer pressure. Maybe it’s a, 60 year old trying to get you to this, pretending to be a 12 year old or a 10 year old. So, Knowledge gives you power, but knowledge gives you confidence, and confidence breeds resilience, because having that confidence to say no or to say this doesn’t seem right.

we also do a lot of work around trusted adults. and who are your trusted adults on campus, who are your counselors, who are your mental health people, but even who’s your custodian. You know, we have, we have, we have one of our lessons where there’s a slide of every single trusted adult on your campus that if something wrong happens to you and you’re embarrassed, you can go to any of these people and talk to them.

Or you can go to [00:05:00] NECMEC, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and talk to them if you’re not comfortable with anyone on campus. Like we, we try and build up a confidence of it’s okay to say no. And then who can I talk to if I’m concerned about something? So resilience, I think, comes from confidence, and confidence is what we try to breed through knowledge.

So it’s sort of that constant drumbeat throughout the year of, of this being taught over and over and over,

Sandie Morgan: Wow. Okay. So, so many things are buzzing in my head, but I’m going to try to stick to this 30 minute podcast. We’ll have to have you back. So you are unique. You’re a unicorn. Actually, I looked for other people like you, and I didn’t find your job title like everywhere. So how have you been? Can we help people outside of Fullerton and Orange County [00:06:00] and other schools that are facing these challenges?

What do they need to be able to develop digital resilience and as educators more effectively address these issues?

Jeremy Davis: I think every district has the ability to do this. I mean, my, my job title is relatively unique. there’s a handful of us around, even around the state. There aren’t that many of us at this level. However, Someone can always pick up the mantle of this, whether it’s ed services working in conjunction with their I.

T. department, because, there’s so many roles here when I when I brought this group together to sort of say, Hey, you know, we’ve been doing it pretty well for a number of years, but we’re going to now crank it up to 11. Um, you know, we’re going to go even even further. when we, we had a new board goal, and I’m like, this is great.

We have a board goal focused on this. So now we can pour even more resources into it more focus. But really. Anybody who, your ed services department can get together with IT and can get together with human resources or with, [00:07:00] you know, if you have someone in charge. So there’s always someone in charge of social emotional learning somewhere on your campus or district office.

So you have sort of your key players who’s in charge of the digital citizenship aspect, right? Of, of, that sort of online piece who’s in charge of the sex ed piece because we can tie these together. Who’s in charge of social emotional learning. Great. California, healthy kids, like that kind of piece should play a role here.

Who’s in charge of the actual curriculum because you want to see, okay, where, where does this fit into the curriculum? and even honestly, teachers unions get involved because it’s like, Hey, I don’t want to put too much more on your plate, but this is super important for keeping our kids safe and for some of your classroom behaviors.

You know, where does this fit in? So it’s not just one more thing, but it’s more integrated into the curriculum. So really anybody can lead this, this, this role. It’s just in this case, here in Fullerton, it, it fell on my plate, which is great because I, I’m a big advocate for a lot of these pieces. I think information literacy is a huge part [00:08:00] of what we do, and it’s very important for the kids, too.

And, and I was lucky enough to, to help, Not be, I want to say an author though, that’s taking too much credit, but I got to help with a California state model library standards when those were written about 12 years ago. And the literacy part was that, yeah, I don’t know if you’ve seen those standards that came out right

Sandie Morgan: the library has literacy standards for,

oh, that’s great.

Jeremy Davis: Yeah. Every library in America and every school library is supposed to be following these state model library standards. and they’re almost all based on information literacy. which is a huge part of digital wellness. It’s understanding what’s like misinformation. What is not misinformation?

What is, when do you see bias in news online? Like all that is covered, that, that’s all in the, in the state model library standards. But again, they came out right before common core. So they were a little blip because there was a bunch of news that was about to happen on them. And then, Hey, common core and the model library standards didn’t get a lot of play, which is too bad because they’re really [00:09:00] amazing.

Sandie Morgan: I’m, I’m going to be looking that up and I’m sure there’s a link and we will put it in the show notes. That’s great. so that makes me think about being very proactive in my strategies. And I really hear you when you’re talking about we do not want to put something else on a teacher’s plate. And my Thing is, instead of adding something, how do we? introduce some of the, introduce some of the skills to existing content that must be teached. It’s in core. And one of the conversations I had probably a decade ago was about what would this look like in a social studies class because you’re talking about equipping students with critical thinking skills.

And to your point, when they have more confidence, they’re more resilient. So let’s [00:10:00] like imagine, uh, typical social studies class, where would you introduce this scenario as just a part of maybe changing some illustrations? I don’t know. What do you think?

Jeremy Davis: So, I think there’s a number of ways just to backtrack a second. A lot of what we did was we already had, you know, you have to teach these three digital citizenship in the beginning of the year.

We already had that in place going over to the, to the SEL group, the social emotional learning group. They said, Hey, we have this program purchased where the teachers are doing 21 lessons a year, a little bit at a time throughout the entire year. I said, can I can I change some of those lessons?

can we can I look at your whole curriculum and can I make them more digital? Like, like, if you have a lesson on here’s when we changed, it was, the, the, the final performance task was basically, make a chart of like healthy relationships in real life. And so, you know, like I said before, we turned it [00:11:00] into, you’re now going to do a Venn diagram On how do you know a real life relationship is healthy?

How do you know an online relationship is healthy? How are they different? How are they the same? Right, so we took a lesson that was already being taught manipulated it a little bit to give it that online flair and give more knowledge to the students to make it a digital wellness lesson, not just an SEL lesson.

So that’s how we did it across the district was we, we changed the performance tasks on the SEL curriculum. But looking at like a social studies class, the way I would do it in this case, it wouldn’t so much be A resilience piece. This would be more an information literacy piece as a social studies teacher.

I would be pulling multiple articles about the same topic and I’d have the kids identifying bias. So I’d be saying, okay, we’re going to take a highlighter, you know, yellow is for adjectives because why are there adjectives? Like, honestly, any adjective is a potential spot for bias, any [00:12:00] adverbs. But let’s look at our describing words.

Let’s see if they’re describing a person. Okay. Or describing a decision, instead of just saying, this decision was made by the president, this, this, um, impactful decision, okay, that, that, is that a bias word or is that just an amplifying word? This horrible decision, oh, gosh, well, maybe we got our news from the right or from the left.

So if I had three articles, all about a similar topic, but I could have the kids Pick out the bias and then have them go find a good, a good, source. Okay, you find out more about this, but I want you to show me the bias. So, for me, that gives the kids confidence and the knowledge that just because they see something on their phone on a news site doesn’t mean it’s valid.

You know, there, there are lots of news sites that have tons of bias in them. So why not show the students, you have to know, you have to be able to find it multiple places. You should, you should actually look at news [00:13:00] from the right and from the left, because the, well, where’s the truth? You know, if you just get, and even teaching them confirmation bias, and how when they go searching for something online, that the algorithms actually push them farther towards the extremes.

very quickly. So if you go looking for a news article, some of those clicks will push you farther and farther away from the middle and towards an extreme based just on your searching, whether it’s YouTube or anything. you know, you go searching for the first amendment and suddenly you’re, you’re in some extremist website or you go searching for something else and you’re way over on Antifa.

It’s like, how did I get here in three clicks? The algorithms try and push you. One way or the other. So teaching the kids that helps them understand and be more confident in their own knowledge.

Sandie Morgan: Um,so you’re making me think about, I’ve started going to the gym this year and I’m being pretty faithful to it, but I am, I am strengthening muscles that have [00:14:00] not been used a lot. And then when I find myself. self in a situation, those muscles are much more responsive. So even though this content about bias and confirmation bias is not directly related to an online predator, when that online predator shows up and starts grooming and uses adjectives that Oh, that’s, that could be misconstrued. this kid is going to push back on that and be what we want more resilient to that. Okay. I. I am a pediatric nurse. First foremost, it’s been part of my life for decades. And I still remember when I would discharge a baby with pneumonia. I looked at the family situation. Where are you living? Is the child getting everything they need, the medication? I mean, they were in the [00:15:00] hospital with pneumonia, but I’m sending them home. So, the bell rings and you send these kids home. What is the partnership? between the schools and the parents and community and caregivers that is going to assure a stronger resistance to digital risks.

Jeremy Davis: You know, um, we do a lot with, parent classes, whenever we can. Sadly, they, we don’t always get the greatest attendance. but like recently we did a, a parent university, for, one of our Title I schools, where we had a number of parents come way back. We’re doing five of them right now at five different schools.

but I came in. to that class for an hour and talk to them about digital wellness at home. you know, told them, look, my devices in their homes aren’t the problem because my devices are filtered no matter where you go. So every child in our district has an [00:16:00] iPad. Third grade and up go home. So when they’re at home with my iPad, number one, parents can control them at home.

So we show parents how they can take control of the iPad. They can turn it off at 8 o’clock. They can lock it so it’s just on like Sora, so they can only read books. They can feel more comfortable if it’s out of sight. you know, we do that kind of work. But I also talked to them about how. Really the problem is unfiltered internet at home and student and like a phone if they’ve given their their students a phone or their own device and they’re letting them be in their bedrooms with it or have it overnight.

So we try and do that education, but we’ve also Turn that education into a video, online, and we’re translating it using some AI. It’s really crazy. It’s my voice and my lips move and I’m speaking Korean. It’s crazy. It’s really cool. So we’re about to launch that. We made sure our translators looked at it to say, yeah, this, this is fine.

but really cool. But, but that way any PTA group could take my. My [00:17:00] presentation that’s normally an hour. It’s we sort of turned into about half an hour because there’s no, no Q and a, but Anybody, any PTA could use it and just send it home and say, Hey, please watch this at some point. So it’s not, you know, if we did it on a five o’clock on a Monday and that’s during soccer.

And we only had five parents come, the rest of them could watch it and still get the same information. we also try and send letters home during the beginning of the year. Um,when our teachers are doing very specific topics on digital safety, there are letters that go home to the parents saying, Hey, this is what we talked about there.

Here’s where you can go on common sense media and get more information. And here are some questions you could talk with your kids about. you know, and I don’t actually know how many parents do,follow up with that at home, but I know we try and get that information out. So the parents know, Hey, this is fresh in your kid’s mind.

If you want to have a discussion.

Sandie Morgan: Okay, so here’s the question. I’m thinking back with my own kids and I would be the [00:18:00] person in the room at the half hour mark with my hand raised and I’ve got more questions. I think I don’t feel confident in responding to this. I’m, they’re better at this than I am. So as a parent, I’m actually a little vulnerable to being told by my own kids that, oh, no, no, that’s not right.

And they take the device away from me. And then, Now that I’ve studied this, it’s like kids can manipulate their parents. And so who do parents go to? Who is, who is their trusted advisor? obviously, I’m not going to give out your cell phone number so everybody can call Jeremy. Although that would make a great hashtag, call Jeremy. where do they go when they don’t feel confident because I think creating a community around our kids that has more resilience and you identified confidence [00:19:00] in this. I think parents are not confident.

Jeremy Davis: I agree. Um, you know, it’s one of the first things I talk about when I’m doing these parent meetings is, hey, whose phone is it, because I talk about, if at 9 o’clock at night, you’ve put the phone in your room and the child now has their phone at 9 o’clock at night. That tells me your lock is broken on your door or your safe isn’t working anymore because, it’s not the child’s phone.

I don’t care if the child, even if the child has a job and pays for the phone, if unless they’re paying for their mortgage out of the house and they’re paying for their insurance and their clothes and their food and their car. Then, no, it’s your phone. And, and so I even have parents, I even say it like three times during my presentation.

Whose phone is it? My phone. Yes, it’s your phone. You’re the parent. It’s your phone. Take it away. turn it off. Call Verizon. That, that phone’s off now. and, and that’s the thing. There, I, I always tell people YouTube is amazing. [00:20:00] It has some stuff on it we don’t love. But at the same time, it’s also the most educational website in the world, right?

So if you want to learn How to deny your child’s phone Wi Fi at home. You go on YouTube and say, How do I turn off the Wi Fi just to one phone? Because you can go onto your home internet, and you can turn it off just for that phone, and say, Nope, you don’t get internet anymore. So, there are a lot of these things you can do, where you go to YouTube and ask the questions, but a lot of what I do, and that you don’t just go print a contract online.

There’s a ton of them, but maybe you get three or four of them. You read through them as a parent, and then you sit down with your child and you say, Hey, before you get this phone, or if they already have a phone, you say, Hey, give me your phone for a minute. You take it back and you say, okay, now, before you continue using this phone, we need to talk about some things.

We need to talk about your behaviors. When you talk about social media, if you’re going to be allowed to have Things like if you’re going to be on social media, number one, I will be your, your friend, you know, and, and the moment I find out you have a [00:21:00] second social media account, the phone’s gone for a month or whatever it is, but, but you work with the kids on this.

If you make a fake social media account and I’m not a part of it, what will the punishment be? And you help the child helps you come up with these punishments. Right? And tweens and teens are different. But, but if you come up with the, with, with the punishment, really consequence, there’s cause and effect here in the world.

So when the child, when you say, Hey, give me your phone, I want to look at your search history and it’s blank and your contract says, if they ever delete their history, they lose their phone for a week. Then you can show them the contract and say, Oh, you did number two. So what’s the consequence? Oh, I lose my phone for the week.

Yeah, gosh, you really made a bad decision, but remember, we decided together as a family, here’s your signature right here on the bottom of it, that if you do number two, if you delete your search history, or you delete your texts, or you delete your emails, then you lose your phone for a week. First offense.

So this is first offense. So I guess we have to go by the [00:22:00] contract. And that’s where the parent has to have the confidence. Because if the parent bends and says, Oh, but you know, um, I need to pick you up from school tomorrow. So, no, you have to have that phone. So, I guess you’ll just lose it for a couple hours tonight.

No, no, no. You figure out how to pick up the kid. Look, you figure out how to deal with not having a phone for a week. Even if it, even if it causes you some kind of problem too. You know, or you go and buy one of these safe phones where it’s just a flip phone. And say, here you go. You can have a backup phone.

We bought it for five bucks and we paid for a hundred minutes. We’re only going to use about three minutes this week, but you get a flip phone. It doesn’t even text. Good luck.

Sandie Morgan: my gosh. You’re tough. You’re, that’s tough parenting,

but it does take confidence,

to be able to do that. A few episodes ago, we interviewed Dr. Delaney Rustin, who, started the Screenagers response. Just fascinating. And she talks about contracts. So go back and listen to [00:23:00] that if this is new conversation for you.

Jeremy. Jeremy. I’m, I’m really concerned about kids who really are more tech savvy than their parents. And this is, this is, this is an area where I think schools can help us by giving out little maybe, here’s some once a month tips. that are constantly reminding parents that their kids are figuring and it’s part of their job.

Once you hit adolescence, your job is to become an independent adult. So you’re not disobeying just because, Oh, I want to disobey and disrespect my parents, but I’m supposed to be learning. It’s my developmental goal, how to be a healthy. independent adult. So they are [00:24:00] constantly working around and on YouTube, you can search and find some ways to work around.

Like a kid whose parents said, no, you can’t have Snapchat, deleted it, and then found a way to go and secretly downloaded again. And so I’m looking on YouTube and I find out, I can find as the parent where the downloads are happening and go and look and see what my kid downloaded. This is a learning Experience, I started to say opportunity, I need some coaching from the school.

And if I were a parent in the, your district, I think that kind of communication beyond events, is is what we’re looking for. It’s like, I need a trusted advisor, just like the kids need a trusted adult.

Jeremy Davis: [00:25:00] Sure. we do social media campaigns as well. pretty consistently around digital wellness. It’ll be things like, Hey, parents, do you know about thorn? And have you subscribed to their blog? Hey, parents, do you know about the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children? You need to subscribe to their blog.

It’s great. Hey, parents, do you know about screenagers? Are you getting their tech talk Tuesday? Emails to have conversations with your kids, right? So we’ll broadcast that out across our Instagram, our Facebook, our Twitter, pretty regularly. And then our schools will pick it up and amplify those as well.

And then part of what I do when I do my talks at the schools, but also what we’ve put online are a lot of guides for parents on potential contracts on some different software that they can download. And that’s all on our internet safety page, which we’re constantly pushing out as well that on the parent side on the parent page.

mainly because one of the, one of the talks I do have with, with when I do my talk is. Hey, you probably need some kind of software on [00:26:00] your phones, depending on your level of trust with your kids, because number one, it’s all about building relationships with your students, with your child. So if you have a great relationship, you have trust, and you can talk to them, then you might not need the software until a certain time.

I always use my kids as examples when I’m doing my talks. One of my kids, is 16 and has never needed the software. I’ve never once put tracking software on a device. One of my children, on the other hand, at about, about 16, also had a significant issue where suddenly I felt the need to put tracking software on every device that, that, you know, that they were connected to.

So we had our consequences. They lost their phone. They lost their gaming computer. They also lost the door to their bedroom. So

Sandie Morgan: Ha! Ha!

Jeremy Davis: okay. We’re gonna be, uh, you know, we know there was a behavior, there’s a consequence to that behavior. You made a bad choice. And just like in life, when you make bad choices, things happen.

and then we put some software on. And so there is software you can get. I always tell the parents, do not put it on [00:27:00] without talking to the kid. do not just put this tracking and spring on. Hey, I’ve been tracking you for three months. Look at all you downloaded snapchat No, you tell them my device my phone my plan I’m putting software on there because you’ve made this decision or that decision And again, everybody gets a parent their own way.

You could start off the first moment you give them a phone and have it being tracked. There’s some really cool software out there. We as a district don’t say, go buy this software. But we instead show people how to search and how to find multiple software. Because some are better for Android, some are better for iPhone, some are better for Xbox 360, some are better for a PC.

So. Maybe you need to track a phone, a gaming PC, and an Xbox 360. So there’s software that’s good for those three devices, whereas a parent, you’re getting alerts. If they’re, if they’re downloading, you’re getting alerts. If they search for certain keywords, that might be,linked to sexuality or whatever it is.

So you can get these alerts and you can sit and have a conversation with your, with your [00:28:00] kiddos around that. But,

and you’re right, the kids will hack them all.

The kids will figure out ways to do some things, but not all.

Sandie Morgan: but we, we still do our best as parents.

Okay. Last question. What about schools? What lessons have you learned that other schools could learn from? Like give me three tips before we sign off.

Jeremy Davis: Number one is it’s everybody’s job. It’s not, I mean, it’s not the IT’s department job to do digital wellness. That’s not, that’s not. It’s everybody’s job. And, and, and when you see how it all really fits together in my presentation, I have it all mapped out where you see digital wellness and you see the castle, the California SEL standards, and you see like the health standards and how they all really, really work together really well.

This is a whole district effort, to move forward. So that’s number one. Number two, I think getting parents involved as much as you can, but if they’re not coming. Do you reach them other ways? Like we talked about, like with social media or making videos and pushing them out and then translating those videos and [00:29:00] getting those out.

but also talking to the students. I did, uh, focus groups with kids around our digital wellness lessons and had them tell me what they liked and didn’t like what they were learning and didn’t learn. And now we survey our kids every single year, twice a year, and the survey points they don’t do well on become our next set of lessons.

So it’s like, okay, they didn’t, they didn’t understand that, even though we’ve taught it to them a bunch of times, I only have 50 percent of kids who think this, therefore I need to get that up to 80. So I need to make a new lesson. And now we’re going to readapt our videos and change and add that lesson in, resurvey at the end of the year and see if their knowledge has grown.

So some kind of measure, you know, cause a lot of times it’s just throw out digital safety lessons. No idea if they worked or not, but you should have some kind of accountability, some kind of measure Before you start teaching after you’ve taught at the end of the year Where are we and then how do you adjust and move forward?

You don’t just keep teaching the same thing.

Sandie Morgan: Wow. Jeremy Davis. I will invite you back, we’ll have more conversations. [00:30:00] We can keep our kids safe, but we also must build resilience. So my key takeaway today is that we’re going to have more confident kids who can say no to unhealthy relationships and to things they see online. So I thank you so much, Jeremy.

Jeremy Davis: You’re welcome. Thank

you

Sandie Morgan: listeners, we’re inviting you to take the next step and go over to ending human trafficking. org to find the resources we’ve mentioned today and so much more. And if you haven’t visited our site before, take time and become a subscriber to receive a newsletter with the show notes when a new Episode drops. And if you’re already a listener, write a review to help others find us and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. We want to stay [00:31:00] connected together. We will build confidence and resilience in keeping our community safe online. I’ll see you in two weeks.

Alia Azariah joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss her journey from being an online victim of trafficking to becoming an advocate for youth and aftercare.

Alia Azariah is a passionate advocate and survivor dedicated to ending human trafficking and empowering those affected by this grave violation of human rights. Her focus lies in creating safe and sustainable communities through education and advocacy, service provision, and social justice. With a combination of professional knowledge, personal experience, and compassion, she works diligently at both local and national levels to create lasting change in the lives of trafficking survivors through specialized training and safe housing initiatives.

[00:00:00] Sandie: 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 number 338 survivor alia Azariah, from online victim to serving youth and aftercare. My name is Dr. Sandy 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.

[00:00:35] Alia Azariah is a passionate advocate and survivor dedicated to ending human trafficking and empowering those affected by this grave violation of human rights.

[00:00:49] Her focus lies in creating safe and sustainable communities through education, advocacy, service provision, and social justice with a combination of professional knowledge, personal experience, and compassion. She works diligently at both local and national levels to create lasting change in the lives of trafficking survivors through specialized training and safe housing initiatives.

[00:01:22] Alia, it is such a delight to have you on the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. And as I was reading your bio, it sounded like you’ve been part of Global Center for Women and Justice for years. use a lot of the same language that we do in our work against human trafficking. So welcome to the show.

[00:01:47] Alia: Thank you.

[00:01:48] Sandie: So let’s start out withy experience go back a few years

[00:01:56] to when you were a young person and you were online on MySpace and tell us about that part of your story.

[00:02:09] Alia: Yeah, so I was vulnerable before I ever got on the computer, right? And so that’s important because I was already, like, experiencing a lot of bullying at school. I was already, lacking family support. I was involved in a group of students at school who were very young and yet making really scary choices already.

[00:02:31] And this was about 6th grade, and so I had a lot of vulnerabilities before I ever got to social media, and so when you mixed those things together, it was really a prime, situation for exploitation and for meeting people who were looking to fill a need, and I was going to social media Hoping to get a need met, right?

[00:02:52] So my, my goal for social media wasn’t to talk to the friends that I already had, wasn’t to communicate with family. My goal entering social media was to fulfill my needs of, one, having people who cared about me. I already had like mixed messages in my mind about how people were supposed to care about you.

[00:03:14] So that was really, really priming me for exploitation. So I was already, even outside of social media, looking for my needs to be met by adult men, believing that that was like how I could best get those needs met. And so social media seemed like a more streamlined version to a way of having those needs met.

[00:03:35] And then I was looking for people to, to, buy me new shoes and, and things that, most teens want, right, but are getting from their parents or the people that take care of them, usually. and so, this was also just a dangerous time, as it is even now, but in a different way with social media, in that at least now we know what the dangers are.

[00:03:55] And we have things to prevent some of those dangers. When MySpace launched, nobody knew what social media could present. Nobody knew or thought of what the dangers were because it was brand new. Right. And so these weren’t conversations we were having in schools or with parents or things like that.

[00:04:14] And so, nobody even really knew to know if I had a social, a social media page. nobody was wondering if I had a MySpace and, creating rules and boundaries around what that looked like. And so when I created a MySpace, I was going on there. To connect with people that I didn’t know, because I thought that that would, that would fill my needs.

[00:04:34] and in many ways, I think the hard thing is like it did. It fulfilled them in ways that were really unhealthy and really unsafe and led me to being trafficked. But that was the kind of the tool that my trafficker used was the fact that he was able to fulfill those needs for somebody who cared about me.

[00:04:50] He was able to say those things to me that he needed, to. And so I was already meeting up with people via MySpace when I met my trafficker. I was running away outside of social media. And I would find myself in situations that were really, really scary. When I would run away, when I would just meet people on the street.

[00:05:11] and so I, I was using, you know, now I look back and go like, look at my little 12, 13 year old self. doing harm reduction in my own life, you know, and, and I felt like, okay, if I meet people on social media, at least I know who I’m meeting with. And I can kind of like, maybe get a vibe from them was what I was trying to do.

[00:05:32] It was actually trying to keep myself safe and, but of course, safety is really skewed when you’ve grown up in a vulnerable home and things. So, I was meeting people on social media, and I would run away, and at least I would have a place to stay, and I would have, like, a roof over my head when I would run away, and then I would come back home, and, you know, a couple weeks later, I would do it again.

[00:05:53] and, one time, this one time, I was communicating with somebody over social media that I was planning on running away with, and it, I didn’t know this. You know, we didn’t talk about trafficking. This was probably like 2004. and I was communicating with him over social media and the person on the other side of the computer was someone who had a history of trafficking girls.

[00:06:17] He’d been doing this. He was 28 at the time that I was messaging him. I think he had started trafficking girls when he was like 17. and so he’d been doing this for, a decade. And, what he struck me as different than the other people that I had been really being exploited by as well, but not in this like third party trafficker kind of way.

[00:06:40] he struck me as different because his goal was not to meet with me that day. Whereas everyone else that I had been, like, it was like very clearly, I know what their goal is. I’m just trying to find a place to stay. that was my goal. They had their goal. He showed me that his goal was to get to know me.

[00:06:59] His goal was to find out like who I was and to tell me that he cared about me and to talk to me. And that was like the most enticing thing. And the thing that I didn’t, I didn’t have a dad. I didn’t have real men in my life who were taking care of me and were showing interest in me. And so. It instantly, even over social media, created a, like an extreme bond that his goal was not to get me to meet up that day.

[00:07:30] His goal was to love me. And even when we did end up meeting up maybe a week or so after communicating online, he, we just sat in his truck at the end of my street. He did not sleep with me. He did not get me high. He just sat there with me and told me that I should probably go back inside. And so we sat there until like late in the morning and then he had me go back inside.

[00:07:54] And so he was building this trust and this, belief that like he was so different from all of these other experiences that I had and that, his goal was not just to like fill my need and get out and his goal was to take care of me. And so that was like how he was using this like grooming process.

[00:08:15] that was the message that he was, he was, giving me in this grooming process over social media and over our interactions was that he wanted to take care of me and that he was going to be there for me. which was much more powerful. That was an extremely powerful belief to embed in my mind that he wanted to take care of me and make me feel safe, because that was something that, that was a need I didn’t, that was a very significant need that was empty and not being felt in my life.

[00:08:49] Sandie: So I love the fact that you can go back and look at your younger self and teach us about that vulnerability from the young person’s perspective. It’s like Monday morning quarterbacking from your chair. And so I’m really interested in how you as now a professional apply Maslow’s hierarchy to what happened.

[00:09:17] Alia: Yeah, I, I love Maslow’s hierarchy because I think what I see and what I’m sure you see and everyone sees is like, of course, There is a significant portion of people who’ve been trafficked that have all of the same vulnerability, right? There’s a lot that have the same vulnerabilities. But we also run across, I mean, I’ve run across women who had master’s degrees before they were ever exploited, or, you know, doctorates even, or came from families that were really, really supportive.

[00:09:49] And I think Maslow’s hierarchy helps us understand how they were exploited also instead of kind of grouping everybody together into, well, you had to have been sexually abused when you were younger and you experienced poverty and you were within the foster system because it broadens our idea of what a vulnerable person is.

[00:10:10] And so if we look at Maslow’s hierarchy, right, like, Of course, the people who have that bottom level of physiological, physical needs, of course, those people who don’t have that met are going to be significantly vulnerable, but it allows us to broaden like the, the, these people who are just searching for truth, and searching for purpose, and searching for belonging, and searching to the, for, the best version of who they can be.

[00:10:36] They’re vulnerable, too, if they’re met with the right trafficker who knows how to exploit that thing and how to, like, come in and say, like, I’m gonna, you know, I have girls who it’s been like, I’m gonna make you a star, right? that’s not That’s not this bottom. They had food. They had house. They had this, but they wanted, they were searching for something more.

[00:10:55] And if you have a trafficker who promises whatever need it is, you’re vulnerable. and so I think it helps us like broaden that. And like, there is a book, there’s a few books out there that, I’ve been able to get my hands on that are written by pimps or traffickers. And if you’re interested, make sure you buy it used or look at it used.

[00:11:14] Don’t buy it new. They get the royalties. Little disclaimer in there, but they have pictures of Maslow’s Hierarchy in them, or they have elements of Maslow’s Hierarchy in them, or they’ll even talk about like, there’s one, I think it was Pimpology, I can’t remember which book it was, but there was one of the books that was like, It says like, if you can’t find a need, make one.

[00:11:36] if you can’t find, like a, a, a place of insignificance in their life, create it. And then fill. So, I, I, the thing I think, though, is that’s so great about Maslow’s Hierarchy is it allows us to understand some of those things that we’re like, wait, but this person didn’t grow up vulnerable. How could a trafficker get in there and, and can, fill a need if they had a house and they had a supportive family because it broadens those things that create need.

[00:12:03] Sandie: Absolutely. And sometimes, the vulnerability is having dreams.

[00:12:08] Alia: Totally.

[00:12:09] Sandie: Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. So, you have come a long way from my space. And in fact, I am so impressed that you received the prestigious resiliency award from Ventura County District Attorney’s Office. Shout out to Ventura. County for that recognition and applause for you.

[00:12:33] I want to know, how your personal journey shaped that, how it shaped your approach to working with survivors and mentorship that led to you to being recognized for resiliency. That’s like more than just, I’m okay. It means. I’ve bounced back,

[00:12:59] Alia: Right? I think, for me, my trafficking went on for so long, you know, I was in, in, you know, of course with breaks and trying to get out, things like that, but my first experience of being exploited was in, 2003 or 2004. And my last experience was in the beginning of 2018, and so I had trafficking experiences all throughout that time.

[00:13:22] And, I learned so much in that. I learned how difficult it is to leave. I learned, a lot about what other people had gone through, because of course you’re not usually trapped. Some people are, but my experience wasn’t that I was trafficked in like a silo where I was the only person being trafficked that I met.

[00:13:40] and so I learned a lot about other people that were being exploited. and I had multiple traffickers, and so I learned a lot about different types of exploitation and how it can look different based on, the type of exploiter that you’re with. and I made a lot of either like made a lot of decisions out of my own trauma and my own like attempt to survival or were forced into a lot of positions that caused a lot of damage, by the time that I was able to exit.

[00:14:06] And so when I go into working with other survivors, I think it gave me like a really a breath of kind of experience and understanding to be able to like hold space for people and understand that our journeys, just, look, our journeys are not clean, and I had to do, because of the way, and not that all survivors don’t need to do a lot of work to, find healing, we do, but I think, the longer you’re in the life and the longer that’s your normal, maybe the more of the worldview you have to break down, to reintegrate successfully, and so I had to do a lot of, not just, like, rewriting trauma responses, but a lot of, creating an entire new worldview, in order to do well in life.

[00:14:56] and so, because I’ve done that, when I work with a survivor, it’s, easier for me to understand where they’re coming from and to not ever have this feeling of like, well, they’re too far, or that’s too messy, or that’s too hard and I’m, I’m really grateful that I’m able to articulate, I, like, I, found a lot of healing from like understanding why my brain kept sabotaging me.

[00:15:24] and so I did a lot of work when I was healing in trying to understand if I don’t want to go back to the life and I don’t want this to keep happening why do I want this? Why do I want to go back to the life today? If that’s not what I want, why do I want to do it today? and so, that’s like one of the biggest things that I encounter with survivors, is they’re like, Today I want to go back, so that means I need to go back, or that means nothing mattered.

[00:15:47] And really being able to articulate like the, you know, neuro, pathways and things, and being able to like give them freedom in that way. But, I think it’s really helped me, like, hold space for the process, and, come back time and time again and know that, like, I think the biggest thing for me is, like, I got better and I got out and I found healing through community.

[00:16:09] if I didn’t have a village of people that assisted me in my exit and in my recovery for multiple years after, and even now. I wouldn’t have gotten better. It wouldn’t have been therapy alone or programming alone. Like, I needed so many people to just be with and just spend time with, that that’s something that I’m like grateful I get to be a part of the community for others and kind of help build that and broaden that message.

[00:16:42] Sandie: so let me drill down just a little bit on the, the theme of you did the work, you did the work. And as I’ve become friends and part of someone’s village, this sense of personal responsibility in your healing is something that I don’t always see acknowledged in the The programs that come alongside and want to, serve well intentioned, but making it too easy, maybe, I’m not sure what that means, but I, I just, I, I hear successful survivors who say, I did this, I made this happen.

[00:17:33] And that is a commitment. That is a key element of resiliency. So I want to talk about how as a survivor leader working within existing systems, how do you address those wonderful allies who are trying to do it all for you? maybe any other observations.

[00:17:57] Alia: yeah, I think I have been so spoiled in the field, honestly, in that my first position is still my main position and they’re gonna have to kick me out the door, kicking, like, kicking and screaming to get rid of me, because my first experience in the field was with allies, our CEO and COO, who put me in a position that honestly, like looking at my resume, I had no business being in and said, we’re going to teach you, we’re going to teach you how to do this job.

[00:18:30] And we’re going to teach you to do it well. And right now, all you have is your own lived experience and, and almost a degree didn’t even have a degree yet. but we believe you can do it. And so we’re going to teach you. And so I’m really blessed, really lucky to have had that experience. And what I’ve seen is that that’s not the usual experience of survivor leaders in the field, that usually the experience is, this is kind of what we believe survivors are able to do, they work great with other survivors, we love putting survivors in direct care positions, we love having survivors as consultants, we love having survivors as advocates.

[00:19:06] As speaker roles, but when it comes to like, especially executive leadership, leadership positions, administration positions, those just don’t gel with. Survivor skill sets or they’re not the place where like the survivor voice is most needed and I really have been wanting to push back and been pushing back on some of those and trying to guide organizations to being like, we need to be a part of teaching survivors

[00:19:32] how to step into those roles because anybody who’s good at those things, they’ve got to be good at those positions by having the experience and to do that. Nobody, you know, no executive, no ED didn’t have some kind of at least tangential, experiences that helped them learn how to do that.

[00:19:50] Or, maybe they didn’t. I have known EDs who had no experience and stepped in, and they learned, and they fought, sought help, and they found out how. And survivors are just as capable of learning that as anyone else, right? And so, I’ve really been trying to push, like, allies to find, like, how do you hire on character, how do you hire on, goals, and then come alongside with the learning to be able to equip somebody to sit in those positions, because this needs to be a joint effort, like, I couldn’t, I would never be where I am and have the, the skill set that I have if my supervisors Didn’t have expectations that I could learn and that I could accomplish things that I didn’t know how to do when I step into, when I stepped into the field.

[00:20:39] and it’s really, it’s been incredible, obviously for my professional experience, but even for my personal growth and like self esteem to know like, oh, I can learn how to do Excel.

[00:20:51] Sandie: Oh wow.

[00:20:53] Sandie: Oh my gosh, you’re so funny because I’ve been trying to learn how to do Excel and I’m overwhelmed and I can’t do it. And,

[00:21:00] and and we’re going to make sure we put a link to safe house project because they are doing this well, and they’re such a model for the rest of us to learn from so we got We will definitely need to follow up on that conversation in another episode when we’re looking at where the biggest needs are to create that kind of lasting impact.

[00:21:30] What do you want to say to, those of us in the field? Some of us have been doing this for a very long time. we’re disappointed with our results and we just don’t know the next path. Tell us.

[00:21:45] Alia: Yeah, so I am really passionate about emergency solutions for minors. I, I mean, we need everything for adults, of course, and we need all of the solutions for minors also. But what I’m seeing, right, as this was my experience as a minor, this is the experience of, most of the adults that I’m friends with, or mentor, and especially the experience of the minors that I’m working with right now, is We’re not coming alongside with appropriate solutions for those six months post exploitation.

[00:22:23] and I think sometimes we have tried to over compensate for the poor solutions that we’ve had in the past, as far as like, we all know juvenile system and the juvenile justice system and like a lockdown behavioral health hospital are not the solution.

[00:22:43] We’ve gotten to a point where we understand that, right? But we’re asking, so we’ve created these like CSEC specific STRTPs, and we’re asking them to do the work of the first six months. And that’s not what they’re set up to do. I have worked with almost all of them across the state, and I think they would, and so they look like they’re unsuccessful.

[00:23:09] They look like these CSEC STRTPs are unsuccessful.

[00:23:12] Sandie: let’s define STRTP.

[00:23:14] Alia: Yeah, short term residential treatment program

[00:23:17] therapeutic congregate care for youth. That’s what an STRTP is. But I think they would be successful if they were getting youth who’d been stabilized already. I think that the way that these programs are written, they would be able to do something in that second six months to nine months with the youth about trying to like help reintegrate.

[00:23:37] Let’s focus on Let’s get into the deep healing. But when I have a kid that can’t get out of survival mode and like runs every three days, like we can’t, of course the STRTP or the safe home isn’t looking like it’s working and it’s looking like it’s a bad place because this kid is in a place where they can’t engage therapeutically about their trafficking.

[00:23:59] Like they’re not in that place. And so we’ve made these solutions to step in so that juvenile justice isn’t a solution, but we’re not using them. Our kids are still in juvenile justice systems and our kids are still in really locked down behavioral health centers that, that can take them right away off the street.

[00:24:21] And we’re just looking like we’ve done the thing that we’re supposed to do and we’re not, we haven’t actually because all the kids I’m working with are still in juvenile justice and they are still in the lockdown behavioral health centers that are not equipped for this population of kids. Other populations of kids, I think they’re doing really great work, not equipped for this population.

[00:24:44] It’s hard to have a lot of girls who are all exploited, especially in California, especially in, the world that we live in where they’re all connected. That’s what I’m noticing, is all the girls know each other, even if this one’s from Oakland and this one’s from San Diego. They know each other because this one knew this one’s cousin and they were in this group home together and they knew this and they know this person through social media.

[00:25:09] So you’re not getting six strangers in a treatment program together anymore. You’re getting six girls that are already connected who already have trafficking experiences and asking them to heal alongside of each other. When they can’t even, because they’re all together, they can’t even get out of survival mode.

[00:25:25] and so I’m really like passionate about finding some more appropriate solutions for youth that are just coming off the street, who have significant C Sec and trauma history, and significant rates of elopement, that those girls need a different option.

[00:25:42] Sandie: Well, that makes, me really glad that you are a member of the California CSEC Action Teams Advisory Board and so you’re working on improving policies and practices for children impacted by commercial sexual exploitation. I’d love to have another conversation in a future episode

[00:26:06] To talk about how we can improve policies at a local level, at a county level, at a state and at a national and I do believe that that conversation includes changing language that is already established and codified in our legal system. And so there’s confusion about how we talk about this that ends up labeling victims.

[00:26:37] And I’m getting away from our topic. And so I want to jump back to where we started as a vulnerable youth. Engaging with an adult equipped with the knowledge of Maslow’s hierarchy, that always just blows me away because that means that if we want to compete with the people recruiting our kids, we need to understand Maslow’s, and so you’re a mom. And I want to know how you’ve taken your knowledge, your experience, everything you’ve learned, and now you’re like officially labeled as a resilient survivor with a lot of influence. How are you applying this in your own home for internet safety?

[00:27:29] Alia: yeah.

[00:27:30] Alia: Well, we start by example. We start by the way that like I conduct myself on social media or that my husband consults, conducts himself on social media, and we don’t post very personal things. Obviously, as a survivor who’s really vocal, I have a lot of my personal things out there already, but I don’t have I don’t, I keep like my.

[00:27:52] My personal life inside my home, very separate from like my survivorship and my,voice in the field. So my pictures of my kids don’t go on social media, full pictures of our family doesn’t go on social media, my husband does the same thing, we keep our private life very private, he uses his social media for work.

[00:28:11] And that’s pretty much it. so that example is set for them, so that’s helpful. But we also have a lot of rules that don’t always make sense to the kids. but that are, we are on the same page with that. We, our kids are not allowed to have social media until they’re 16. So our oldest is coming up on that, and so she’s gonna get to have that.

[00:28:34] The amount of conversations we’ve been able to have with her, you know, up until 16, that’s significant. There’s so many conversations about social media that we’ve been able to have when, before she turns 16 this year, so many things, so many mistakes she’s been able to see her friends make before she ever got on social media.

[00:28:54] so that kind of reinforced some of those things that we’ve told her. We also, don’t have, games where they can, where people can communicate with you, and things like that, so, like, I, we have a nine year old, and, she’s not allowed to have Roblox, and she is devastated, and has been devastated for years, and has asked me for years, and, But I’ve been able to explain to her like this isn’t this isn’t because I don’t want you to have fun like there’s all sorts of other ways that we can have fun, I believe that like this, there’s a risk to your safety with people being able to communicate with you and, and so she understands that and we’ve been able to have like another thing that we’re really for us, that’s really important, is we’ve taught the older two about sextortion, the nine, my nine year old, we haven’t had that conversation with, but the older two know, because that is such an epidemic right now, the sextortion piece, so that, I mean, we can’t control, I can’t control what they do when they’re not in the home.

[00:29:54] Right? And we’re not so naive to think that, like, if she wanted to get social media and hide it from us, they’re smart kids. I’m sure she and my son could do that if they wanted to, and so we, but we have taught them that, this thing happens, where people will pretend to be one thing, or they will be one thing.

[00:30:13] you know, and they will try and blackmail, or, or extort a youth, and I need you to know that if that ever happens to you or your friend, you need to tell us, and we care way more about helping you through that situation than we do about, the consequence that you had social media when you weren’t supposed to.

[00:30:29] and so we have a lot of conversations, about safety, what safety looks like online. and I really believe that like the knowledge is power piece of all of this. Like we’re, we’re, we’ve taught them in an age appropriate way about exploitation and the dangers of the world.

[00:30:44] And, and sometimes they feel like it’s, you know, it’s not like my kids are great with these rules.

[00:30:52] Sandie: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And that’s going to be one of the things that we’re talking about at Ensure Justice, March 7th and 8th here at Vanguard University. I’m so glad you’re going to be part of that conversation as we sign off, but not for the last time we’ll have more conversations. Tell us how to find you.

[00:31:15] Alia: Yeah, well, you can find me, on at, at everything to do with Safe House Project. Basically via email is my easiest way of communicating, which is just Alia, A L I A @safehouseproject.org. But I’m also on LinkedIn, Alia Azariah, and that’s tends to be the social media and my place of communication and posting that I use the most, and you can find me at Ensure Justice in March too.

[00:31:38] Sandie: Oh, that’s so great. Thank you so much for today, Alia. I look forward to becoming part of your village and you as part of my village.

[00:31:48] Yes, thanks for having me.

[00:31:50] Alia: Thank you for joining us today, Alia. And I’ll see you at Ensure Justice, March 7th and 8th. Listeners, we’re inviting you to take the next step and go over to ending human trafficking.

[00:32:05] Sandie: org to find the resources we’ve mentioned today and to And so much more. If you haven’t visited our site before, take some time, look around at the resources, become a subscriber, and you’ll receive a newsletter with the show notes whenever a new episode drops. And if you’re already a listener, will you write a review to help others find us?

[00:32:35] And of course, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Ending Human Trafficking, Instagram at EHT underscore podcast, stay connected, be part of our community. Of course, I will be back in two weeks.

Dr. Delaney Ruston joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss parenting strategies in the digital age, focusing on mental health, communication, and her book Parenting in the Screen Age.

Dr. Delaney Ruston is a physician and award-winning filmmaker renowned for her impactful documentaries, including the Screenagers series, which explores the intersection of technology and youth well-being. She has appeared on numerous media outlets discussing screen time, mental health, and parenting in the digital age. Dr. Ruston also hosts the Screenagers podcast and blog, offering practical advice to families navigating digital challenges. Her work is driven by a passion for fostering open conversations about mental health and technology’s role in our lives.

[00:00:00] Sandie: 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 number 337, Dr. Delaney Rustin and Parenting in the Screen Age. My name is Dr. Sandy 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.

[00:00:33] Sandie: Dr. Delaney Rustin is a physician and award winning filmmaker renowned for her impactful documentaries, including the ScreenAgers series, now comprising four films that explore the intersection of technology and youth well being.

[00:00:53] Sandie: She has appeared on numerous media outlets discussing screen time, mental health, and parenting in the digital age. She is the voice behind the Screenagers podcast. and blog and offers practical advice to families navigating digital challenges. Her work is driven by a passion for fostering open conversations about mental health and technology’s role in our lives.

[00:01:26] Sandie: Today, we’re going to talk about her book, Parenting in the Screen Age, a guide for calm conversations.

[00:01:35] Sandie: I am so happy to have Dr. Delaney Rustin with us for this episode of Ending Human Trafficking. Welcome.

[00:01:45] Delaney: Oh, it’s wonderful, Sandy, to be here. Thank you.

[00:01:48] Sandie: We are, let me just tell everybody that in our next Insure Justice, March 7th and 8th, we’re going to be screening the movie Screenagers. And I’m excited now to have this interview to talk with Dr. Rustin about her book. And do you want to kind of give us a snapshot of the book and why you wrote it?

[00:02:18] Delaney: Oh, absolutely. I, 12 years ago, was really struggling at home with my two kids who wanted more and more screen time. And I had been doing documentaries on mental health issues. And I found that the mental health, if you could say that in our family, the stress was so high. And I felt completely confused on what to do.

[00:02:44] Delaney: I didn’t,

[00:02:48] Delaney: So I started to wonder as a doctor who takes care of teens and adults, what I could do to look for solutions. And I started to make the first Greenagers movie. which is called Screen Readers Growing Up in the Digital Age, which came out in 2016, although we just re released it, updated. Since then, there’s been three other documentaries.

[00:03:14] Delaney: During the time that I became much more knowledgeable, as I went on this journey to help my family, my kids, my patients, I In making these films, learned so much that I realized it would be really helpful to parents to have this information in a book. I did my residency at San Francisco and I stayed on for a couple years to do research on human to human communication.

[00:03:45] Delaney: The ways that we can more effectively use communication for good, as well as in your world, how communication can be manipulative and take advantage of people. Well, I want to be opposite. How do we as parents use techniques that understand the development of our children, understand our struggles to not be triggered by our intense emotions that we have in parenting this, and use that knowledge of communication science?

[00:04:15] Delaney: Along with everything I’ve been learning in making the documentaries and to put that in a book called Parenting in the Screen Age.

[00:04:24] Sandie: I would recommend highly listeners that you go and look for your closest bookstore, go on Amazon. and order this book. even if you’re not currently raising young people, it’s a great tool to share in, in your community. Grandparents would value this as well. So, because my community, I’m a grandparent.

[00:04:53] Sandie: And grandparents are really concerned about their grandchildren growing up in a digital age. So I’ve started recommending it to all the grandmas and grandpas. So let’s talk about the book. How did you lay it out? And can I say parenting in the screen age and the subtitle? I love a guide for calm conversations.

[00:05:16] Sandie: Because when I talk to parents who are intensely. In the middle of this right now and having flaming arguments about you can’t take that away. And, and I’ve talked to parents who have decided to shut down the internet at their house at eight o’clock at night. I’ve talked to parents who gave up and their kids don’t have any supervision.

[00:05:43] Sandie: And I often, correlate this with how we teach our kids to be safe on the streets. We started, we, when they were toddlers and could walk, and we held their hand and we said, you walk across the street when there is a crosswalk. So there’s, there’s boundaries, there’s guardrails for how you do this, and it’s not the same rule from the time you’re three years old until you’re 13.

[00:06:11] Sandie: When you’re 13, you’re walking across the crosswalk by yourself. So this book for calm conversation is really based on your experience in communication. So tell us how the book is broken down.

[00:06:27] Delaney: Yes, and I would say what’s really important is what you just mentioned. Having boundaries and limits on the, the most attention grabbing, devices ever created is incredibly important and part of our job as parents and yet there’s all this discussion in the media, how much time is okay, how much is not.

[00:06:50] Delaney: We’re not talking about the real how to. So let me give a context of first the number one thing that I say to parents which is in the book, which is there’s really no And I think it’s a better way to approach this than to have a calm conversation, whether it be once a week, which I recommend, or once every two weeks.

[00:07:15] Delaney: But you really, and I’m going to say how to do this. It’s the number one thing that is in the book and that I have still now on the stage and working in my clinic room, whatever the audience is, how valuable and vital this is. And the reason it is so important is that every day there is new things in the, in the internet age that is impacting all of us.

[00:07:45] Delaney: There are good things and there are hard things. And we get to work with our kids to have them be incredible, critical consumers of all that’s happening. And Work with them to make sure they have a very full life and it’s not overly consumed by the digital age. I made a lot of mistakes and I’m going to be telling you some of them in this interview.

[00:08:11] Delaney: I’m going to start by saying in, we call it in our home and now I have eight years of blog that helps a lot of parents, which is called Tech Talk Tuesdays. And the idea is to have a short five minute conversation with our families once a week about technology. But I was doing it wrong when we started. I was just wanting to focus on the problems.

[00:08:34] Delaney: And in fact, my daughter, when we gave her a smartphone, which by the way I would have delayed longer had I been able to know better, and And I shouldn’t say just no better, if we could have done it as a collective community to all delay. And I say that in the updated version now. Ultimately though, when I gave that to her, we also gave her a contract.

[00:08:58] Delaney: And we tried to get her to, put in there what she wanted also. And so that it would be a collaborative. She just tuned out. She didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to do it. It was a real What didn’t go well, I realized that I hadn’t validated enough of the reasons why she wanted to use technology.

[00:09:19] Delaney: It’s this, it’s the same reality that people want to be understood as much as they want what they think they want.

[00:09:27] Sandie: you, can you describe what you mean by validated?

[00:09:32] Delaney: Yes, I needed to say to Tessa, wow, tell me more about why you love being on Snapchat with your friends. And then she would tell me and I would actually repeat back some of it. Oh, okay, you, you really, it does feel good when you’re invited into a Snapchat group that you feel really like and I’ll try to use her same words.

[00:09:53] Delaney: I want her to Really see that I get it doesn’t mean I agree with it doesn’t mean that I’m condoning it and say that’s fantastic Let’s get you more time on

[00:10:02] Sandie: Ah, ha, ha,

[00:10:04] Delaney: It’s just that she’s seen. Oh my mom gets it She’s not just saying oh you should not ever use that whatever because then she’s then the brain writes that person off Then they feel justified in their conscious and unconscious to say, Oh, I’m not going to listen to how we’re trying to do this safely and limit the amount of time because my mom doesn’t get it.

[00:10:27] Sandie: Hmm.

[00:10:29] Delaney: And it’s the same way, for example, as a doctor. Let’s say I have a parent who brings in their 10 year old, 11 year old who has an earache. And I look in there and I see it’s a little inflamed, but it really, the whole, everything fits that it’s a virus and doesn’t need antibiotics. I’ll say back to the parent, actually, I’m usually talking with the child because it’s a wonderful, uh, and the parent keeps wanting to, to speak up, but I just love to not talk down, but really, I’m going to be repeating back, I’ll say, wow, so your daughter she’s had feeling achy and she just doesn’t feel right and, and she’s not eating well and she has a runny nose.

[00:11:16] Delaney: That’s hard. She has a lot of stuff going on. It’s only after that. Then the parent, if I say, you know what, I’m from all my 30 years as a doctor, I can tell we’re actually going to do more harm at this point if we give antibiotics, because all the symptoms align with this being and the epidemiology with this being the viral.

[00:11:36] Delaney: So the point being the parent was heard, so she’s not going to leave the office and be mad that doctor, she just didn’t hear me. She didn’t understand how sick you felt.

[00:11:45] Sandie: Hmm.

[00:11:45] Delaney: validation is The central, central theme because as parents we are indeed so worried and we have a right to be. There’s lots of things to be worried, but what’s most important, we might be right, but are we effective?

[00:12:02] Delaney: And when we use validation, communication skills like that, we become much more effective. So when you mention the book in terms of what are the ways that, things that I make sure to include in the book, I love to talk about the three V’s. One is validate. The next next one is values, and then we’ll get to vulnerable village

[00:12:25] Sandie: Oh, this sounds fun. Values.

[00:12:28] Delaney: values are talking about what are the things that we as individuals in the family value, as well as as a family. I don’t like to say our family values without. Having the kids be thinking about what do they value because I I never want to speak for other people But once it’s been discussed like oh, do we all kind of agree that?

[00:12:52] Delaney: Being kind to people is a value and and then you can have that discussion. And so like yeah, but do we also You know, value, honesty, and so sometimes that might be that we’re not going to, we have to say something to someone that might not be as nice as we want to be. Values as parents is, I need to value, I need to parent with integrity.

[00:13:16] Delaney: That’s a key element. For me as a parent, I have to be science based, I have to look at evidence of things, and I have to do what I really think is the right, right thing. I value. People’s input. And that means you, Tessa, and um, my daughter, I value your input into figuring out how we ensure safety and not excessive screen time.

[00:13:41] Delaney: And, and then, and then, for example, I value, because of science, your guys sleep. And, you know what? This is a non negotiable. We need to have technology out of the bedrooms for sleep time. But here, Sandy, is where some of that validation comes in. Like, but I know that’s hard. I know that you are really, you’re really Empathic.

[00:14:07] Delaney: You would love to be there for your friends at any time. I, I see how it’s uncomfortable when you can’t respond. If you have a friend who’s going through a hard time and might, just, you want to know that they could call someone, could, you could give them my number. Can they call me? And I, and we could talk about maybe I’d go and get you if it’s not bedtime yet.

[00:14:25] Delaney: So it’s working together. And with that values, I say, Tess, I, I need I want your input and there’s some collaboration. I think the devices should go away at nine o’clock. You’re 13, 14. You know, I think that time you should be off by then. She might say, mom, no, that’s too early. 9. 30 or 10, or she might say 10.

[00:14:48] Delaney: And we say, let’s, let’s do 9. 30 and we’ll check in in two weeks. Let’s put this on the refrigerator as a, one of the things we’ll talk about on Tech Talk Tuesdays. So that’s where the values that all of this is. I value Tessa, your incredible creativity. I, that’s why a big part of why we’re limiting screen time because screen time is really And I’m talking about screen time as a treat, there’s a tool and there’s the treat part of it.

[00:15:17] Delaney: And the treat is really a lot of consuming, a lot of chit chat with friends, which is important, but there can be excessive, that can come at a cost. and so I, in terms of that treat time of consuming, I want to make sure, Tessa, you’re using your incredible heart and brain to produce your own life, your own things.

[00:15:40] Delaney: In person relationships with calling grandma, with, talking to, having some time to just, you’re outside and you end up just chatting with the neighbor. You’re doing your own painting. In fact, you can, you, the listeners can’t see

[00:15:54] Sandie: Yeah.

[00:15:54] Delaney: My daughter just left to go back to college and my Christmas present in a card was, Mom, you can, you can have me paint, any painting you want me to do.

[00:16:03] Delaney: And so on my wall there, is this beautiful landscape of Paris with the Eiffel Tower done out of, yeah, that she painted for me. And I got to direct it. I’m like, oh, I’d love to have that a little softer sage green. Can we do that? It was looking a little pink on the sky and still has some pink. So that’s about values.

[00:16:23] Delaney: And then Vulnerable Village is one that luckily I was just talking to Jonathan Haidt yesterday that we’re doing, talking about different collaborations and he has a book, Anxious Generation, and he’s in two of the Screen Readers documentaries.

[00:16:37] Sandie: And he was on your podcast recently. So we’ll put a link to that interview, in the show notes for our conversation today. So, so we’ve got validate, values, and the third V we’re moving into.

[00:16:53] Delaney: it’s, I like to call it Vulnerable Village, so you could say that’s, yes, so Vulnerable Village is something I came up with years ago around this and the reason I bring up Jonathan Haidt is so much of this needs to be done collectively. For example, if we’re going to delay smartphones, if our daughter or son or however they self identify don’t have that device and everyone, very, a lot of their close friends do, they’re in a pickle.

[00:17:21] Delaney: And it’s not to say they still can’t work, it absolutely can. They can use the computers and be able to Text and communicate with friends and whatnot, but better yet ideally as a community of parents we decide hey, let’s all delay smartphones until and And so this collective action concept is really being heightened by Jonathan Haidt who actually is being very Concrete, which he, which in terms of creating new social norms, is to delay giving smartphones until the beginning of high school and actually delay two years longer social media, which would be like the age you start driving if you’re getting the license at 16.

[00:18:06] Delaney: So that the, and he is very, he knows, as all of us know, this has to be done collectively because There’s, if we don’t start now with younger parents of younger kids, it becomes, much harder to do later on. Now, it’s not to say, the point is, even if our kids, and many do, have social media and, and smartphones, and social media, honestly, is now on the computers in all sorts of forms, that we can still do the work that I’m talking about.

[00:18:35] Delaney: We can still very much do helping our kids be safer online and have, and prevent excessive. Screen time. So Vulnerable Village, and I’ll give concrete examples of what I mean, when I was making the first Screenagers movie, my daughter was in seventh grade and many of the kids already back then had a phone.

[00:18:59] Delaney: and I. I was really surprised how nervous I was, but I called the other parents and I said, can we make it a tech free carpool? And you’d, yeah, and you’d think that I like, here I am, I’m pretty outgoing, you know, I wouldn’t be feeling nervous, but I really thought I’m going to be judged as like the overly controlling, the, you know, anxious, worried parent.

[00:19:27] Delaney: Fortunately, the other parents were immediately on board, which is great. I’m not saying that will always happen, but they did. And having the kids get in the car and hearing them talk and just then, and then now and then I could say a little, I got to know them a little bit better. You know, her friends was such a gift because otherwise free time becomes screen time.

[00:19:51] Delaney: It’s that much of a pull and when we have clear loving boundaries, we do so much service and goodness for our kids. It gets a little bit trickier with some of the other things that we ask. For example, my daughter in Screenagers next chapter, which deals with mental health. Problems in the digital age, and most importantly, as all of my films in the book does, focuses on solutions.

[00:20:20] Delaney: So it, that film looks at depression symptoms, all the way to clinical depression, anxiety, stress, how it’s What are some of the factors to think about how this is all playing out in the digital age? And most importantly, each one of the stories has great science slipped into the film and then also really wonderful experts talking about solutions.

[00:20:45] Delaney: Unfortunately, but this is life, my daughter had a lot of clinical depression in high school. And she was so loving, she let me film a little bit of that and, and at the end I said, Tessa, do you want to be in this film? Because you don’t need to be, there’s plenty of stories, there’s plenty of science. And she said, and she watched the rough cut and she said, mom, when I see how much it helps me to hear these other.

[00:21:11] Delaney: Kids talking and saying how things got better. It helps me so much I definitely want to be in the film and she never looked back. She started talking after the film She joined the suicide prevention club in her school and the list goes on But what I’m about to, that, that was, getting a little bit off track, but when she was doing very poorly, she wasn’t able to do the things that she loved to do.

[00:21:35] Delaney: And one is be around kids. She loves, in fact, she loves babysitting and she wasn’t reaching out to anyone and she was just hiding and no one in her room at times. And so I went to, A neighbor who she would babysit for and I said, Christy, I said, Tess is not doing so well. She has depression and she’s just not able to advocate for herself.

[00:21:56] Delaney: Would you be able to? Ask her to babysit and I immediately, I felt kind of bad that I, because I, I go, but I can pay you to pay, give her money. I didn’t mean for them to have to like go out and pay a babysitter, you know? And she’s like, I’m so glad you asked me Delaney. Of course, I would love to. And she did start asking Tessa to babysit more.

[00:22:17] Delaney: And it’s one of the pieces of the puzzle is my work for 20 years in mental health advocacy is not just, Like being able ourselves to talk about, but for all of us to get better at being a vulnerable village of how to reach out to help others or to ask for help as a parent.

[00:22:36] Sandie: so So, this element of mental health, it’s a whole chapter in the book and, and I think this integrated approach to helping parents have conversations with their kids is what I really valued about this. It is science based, but so many of the guides that I’ve. encountered. They’re about, Oh, here are the risks of social media.

[00:23:04] Sandie: Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. This is not probably going to be very effective with, from an adolescent development perspective. So the, the idea specifically in the mental health is helping parents figure out how to have those kinds of conversations. And, It’s like one of the most valuable chapters in the book from my perspective.

[00:23:30] Sandie: But, in those conversations, the, later in the book, you’re halfway through and you get to the contracts and family rules.

[00:23:41] Sandie: Because, you know, it talks about co parenting. Because you can have rules, but then, unfortunately, sometimes they go to Grandma and Grandpa’s house or Auntie’s, and they have different rules.

[00:23:53] Delaney: and that’s perfectly fine. That’s perfectly fine. I think, I’m so glad, Sandy, that you’re bringing up grandparents a lot because I’ve written about grandparents and that they very much have a role in this and they often feel disempowered. Like, okay, if they bring over that iPad, nothing I can say.

[00:24:12] Sandie: Hmm.

[00:24:13] Delaney: Power to the grandparent who takes that time to have some calm conversations with the parents, beforehand and talk about as well as with the young people and, and defining it.

[00:24:25] Delaney: Ultimately, people do better when they know the rules. And better yet, if they can have a say in them, that’s fantastic. Our world is full of rules. Our kids are going into a world Full of this is okay. This is not. Thank goodness. We have understandings of what’s okay, and what’s not. We know Trafficking people is not okay.

[00:24:52] Delaney: We know violence against women and females is absolutely not Okay, we have put lots of safeguards in place. Do things go awry? Do people go against what we know and what we work hard to establish? Yes! That’s why you’re doing all the incredible work that you’re doing. Our kids will do better when they know, and they help to, when they will, create the boundaries.

[00:25:22] Delaney: I like to say that there are. Roughly 33 billion and two fun things to do on a screen so that the biggest issue is it makes perfect sense that they want to be on it and play games with their friends and, and look for, you know, more ways to do cool things and watch this show and watch it again and again and a thousand YouTube shorts.

[00:25:49] Delaney: It makes sense, but it makes perfect sense that we also need to have concrete limits around this. Now, I tend to, I used to say contract, and um, you can see in the film how that came to be the concept of a contract from a woman who went viral having done one with iPhone Janelle. But I often will say a media plan, a family media plan, a, a, Collaborative contract.

[00:26:21] Delaney: So you can use the word contract, but the idea is for, for us, we really had sleep time, family time, and study time. That’s not just, and I’ll say it’s sleep time, as I mentioned, it’s both a combination of devices out of the bedroom for sleep, even through high school, and That is so science based on all the, so many reasons why.

[00:26:45] Delaney: that also has to do with what time devices are put away as they get ready for sleep time. And so families, one of the biggest issues is homework. That the kid will say, Oh, I still have homework. When you have a set boundary, devices are, go away at nine, they know they have to get their work done or they’re going to be showing up at school.

[00:27:05] Delaney: And kids don’t want to fail. They don’t want to not succeed. And you’ve got to help them if they keep not doing their homework because they were putting it off and they said, well, I’m not going to do it because it screens go away. Then like we have a, we have a problem as a family and, and let’s figure this out.

[00:27:18] Delaney: Let’s, why don’t we go to the counselor together or whatever that is. So that’s sleep time. Family time is like, no devices are away. At mealtimes when we go away for a day on a Saturday or Sunday or something, device is left at home. So my daughter, still to this day, she’s just home from college, she will say, I’m gonna leave my phone at home, mom.

[00:27:39] Delaney: You sit and it’s just more relaxing. She likes it. She likes the breaks.you, other fam, there’s other family, we’re playing, we’re watching a movie, we’re not going to double screen for our family night, we’re not going to all be on our screens. And, and then for study time, which is another hard one, that for us, for example, Tessa’s, when she had that, smart phone was out of the room and she could take breaks, but it’s not right by her.

[00:28:08] Delaney: Um, and so I’ve written about all of that in the book, all sorts of other concrete ways of doing this, but I want to get back to, um, so that’s an example of why, and what, why having a, Plan and set rules is important. Now. I talk a lot about what what does that mean when rules aren’t followed all the time?

[00:28:31] Delaney: They’re not gonna be followed all the time. So what do you do in those situations? Like that’s where we really need the help and that’s where other chapters look at that but I do want to make sure in our remaining time that we touch on some of the parenting skills around mental health challenges and I want to talk about First and foremost, three points about emotions that we can do, all of us, right now.

[00:28:56] Delaney: Whether there’s mental health problems in the home or not. And I’m going to assume right now, the general big population, putting aside any significant mental health problems, even if they are there, in fact, this still works. And the first is, emotions just happen. And You can, it’s also thoughts just happen, but I am constantly working with my kids and kids that I work with, like, Nope, there, and I’ll bring it up.

[00:29:27] Delaney: Oh, there comes that jealousy thought I just had about someone. Oh, there comes this wave of feeling sad. I wonder what it’s, what I’m feeling it for, and so as parents to model that to say, Oh, I’m having this emotion that comes up and talking to our kids who are saying, I’m feeling. Helping them to think of the name, the feeling that they’re having and say, huh, I wonder where that came from and that we don’t control it because kids feel very self punishing for the emotions and thoughts they have.

[00:30:06] Delaney: They feel really bad about feeling less than. feel really bad about feeling mad at and the problem is that prevents them from doing the number one thing that helps us to get out of stuck hard places which is feeling shame. Lists enough, it’s unwarranted shame is what people are feeling. Having enough self efficacy to say, I need help or this is what’s happening inside of me.

[00:30:38] Delaney: And if I had a dime for every time a patient says to me, I haven’t ever said this to somebody else. I would be a millionaire. So, that ability to help our kids name their emotions, help them understand that emotions and thoughts just come, there’s no judgment to that, and modeling our emotions to our kids, both the ones that are just coming up, we’re not sure what they are, Or, and often, why we’re feeling, what emotions we’re having.

[00:31:13] Delaney: I love in, in Screenagers next chapter, Laura Kastner says, she’s a wonderful expert and written many parenting books, says, how is it that we expect our kids to go to their dads and talk about their jealousy or feeling less than on the sports team when the dad is never talking to them about their emotional internal experiences?

[00:31:39] Sandie: So, my mind is racing now and there is so much more. We have to have another conversation, Dr. Reston. I want our listeners to know that if you’re at Insure Justice, March 7th and 8th, we’re going to be doing the new version of Screenagers. We’re doing a screening and we’re inviting parents. And as we sign off today, can you tell us where to find the resources that we’ve talked about?

[00:32:15] Delaney: So, anyone can go to Screenagersmovie. com. The blog is right there and it has a search bar, so look up anything that you want and you’ll get the blog, but it’ll also bring up podcasts, and so I’ve done multiple podcast episodes on all of these. Again, the whole idea. People can find the trailers to all four of the documentaries and how to bring it to their community.

[00:32:42] Delaney: Because what we have been doing now for eight years and have had millions and millions of people in this country and other countries. come together, kids and adults and in schools and out of schools, seeing the film with all the solutions and then saying, okay, what other solutions can we be doing and how do we implement these things?

[00:33:04] Delaney: Collective community action is where this is all going to get, make things get much better.

[00:33:12] Sandie: I am so grateful and I’m going to leave this conversation thinking about the three V’s, validate, values, and our village. And I look forward to Communicating, um, developing our relationships and working together to end human trafficking. Thank you so much, Dr. Rustin.

[00:33:33] Delaney: Thank you, Sandy. It was a delight.

[00:33:35] Thank you, Dr. Delaney Rustin. I encourage our listeners to check out her book and visit the Screenagers website. We are also inviting you to take the next step and go over to endinghumantrafficking.

[00:33:54] org. That’s where you can find resources we’ve mentioned in this conversation. And so much more things like the anti human trafficking certificate program here at the global center. And if you haven’t visited that site before, this is a great time to take the first step, become a subscriber, and you’ll receive an email with the show notes.

[00:34:21] When a new episode drops, follow us on Instagram and Facebook. And of course, I’ll I’ll be back in two weeks.

Christopher Diorio joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss proactive parenting approaches that reduce children’s vulnerability to online exploitation and prevent human trafficking.

Christopher Diorio is a supervisory special agent with Homeland Security Investigations in Washington, D.C. He specializes in combating human trafficking and child exploitation. With over two decades of law enforcement experience, Chris has been at the forefront of investigating complex cases and developing strategies to dismantle criminal networks. He is passionate about prevention and advocates for proactive parenting approaches to reduce children’s vulnerability to exploitation. Chris will also be a featured speaker at Insure Justice on March 7th and 8th, 2025.

[00:00:00] Sandie: 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 number 336.

[00:00:14] Sandie: Proactive Parenting to Prevent Online Exploitation with Christopher Diorio.

[00:00:22] Sandie: My name is Dr. Sandy 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 grateful to have our guest, Christopher W. Diorio

[00:00:38] Sandie: With us today, and he is a supervisory special agent with Homeland Security Investigations in Washington, D. C. There he specializes in combating human trafficking and child exploitation. With over two decades of law enforcement experience, Chris has been at the forefront of investigating the complex cases and developing strategies to dismantle criminal networks.

[00:01:12] Sandie: He is passionate about prevention and he advocates for proactive parenting approaches to reduce children’s vulnerability to exploitation. I’m excited because he’s going to be at Ensure Justice, March 7th and 8th, 2025. There will be a link to register to join us in the show notes. But for now, we’re going to have a conversation with Chris and demystify technology and empower our communities to take action. Welcome.

[00:01:53] Christopher: Thank you, Dr. Morgan. I very much appreciate the opportunity to be here with you today.

[00:01:57] Sandie: Well, let’s get started. In one of our past conversations, you mentioned the importance of making children hard targets, and that caught my imagination. We’re going to use that terminology during this podcast. What. What would it mean for you to make a child a hard target?

[00:02:25] Christopher: Well, thank you very much. You’re right. I hard target is a term that I have used I don’t really remember where it came from and where it started, but it’s certainly something that’s sort of baked into a lot of parents and teaching their kids, right? And when we were children likely it was your mom telling you when you’re on a busy subway to maybe move your purse over your head and wear it like a shoulder bag and put it in front of you Or it was a dad telling a son to move your wallet from your backpack And and just over the course of being reared, you get to the point where your parents are making you hard targets in life.

[00:02:59] Christopher: They’re teaching you these little bits of lessons. And when we start talking about technology or exploitation of children through the lens of technology, We went through an entire generation where the kids were going up with a type of technology that the parents just didn’t have or weren’t available to them, so they didn’t know how to put those lessons on to the children to make them hard targets.

[00:03:21] Christopher: So I started pretty early on in my. investigative career into child exploitation and the sexual abuse of children to start educating children and parents on how to become hard targets and sort of apply those lessons in the world or the online world

[00:03:39] Sandie: So Chris, can you break down what this means and share everyday actions? parents can take to build resilience and reduce their child’s vulnerability.

[00:03:53] Christopher: Sure. One of the first things that, I like to encourage with parents is getting comfortable with sort of the ecosystem or the world that their kids are going to be living in online, right? if they’re going to be using a particular type of, social media, if they’re going to be operating, on these group chats with their friends, make sure you sit down with them and explain to them that, they need to know that every person that’s on this, making sure that they understand that whatever has been put on the Internet is going to live on the Internet forever.

[00:04:21] Christopher: And then I often ask parents to sort of take. their own personal experiences from when they were coming of age, right? You have to, as a parent, think back to that time when you were 12, 13, 14, and sort of the hormones and the changes that your body was going through and remember what that was like and now apply sort of the pressure that comes with that, with that in and of itself to it being 24 seven through constant communication, right?

[00:04:50] Christopher: And so from that, If you download the apps themselves, like, I, I haven’t mentioned yet, but I do have a daughter who’s, who’s, 13 years old, and before she gets any application or is allowed to learn anything, I’m going to download it myself. Unfortunately, I have way more social media accounts than I would have preferred to have.

[00:05:06] Christopher: but I feel like that’s one of the most important things we can do is actually understand the world that they’re going to be communicating in.

[00:05:13] Sandie: So let’s talk about what kind of, let’s say, what kind of protections can parents put in place. The some, here are some of the options that I’ve had conversations about. Uh, parent who does not allow any social media on their iPhone or Android phone, the parent that says, I’m going to look at your phone every day and check all of your conversations.

[00:05:47] Sandie: And the parent that says, I just trust you. And I know you’ll make a good decision. So that’s a really broad spectrum. What kind of guardrails do you recommend putting up?

[00:06:02] Christopher: Yeah, Dr Morgan. That’s a that’s a really good point. Um, you know, look, it’s not going to be I completely and intrinsically trust you, to just make the right decisions. Um, I wouldn’t put that level of pressure on my children, nor would I ask that parents in general do that. Tech companies have put a tremendous amount of effort into putting parental controls in a lot of social media for a reason.

[00:06:22] Christopher: I also think it’s a sliding scale on how you deal with that, right? It’s going to depend on your particular guidelines as a child. How old is that child? What is their mental maturity of that child? But I think we’re remiss if we completely block our kids out from this world, because what ends up happening is if they’re not learning to use, this social media and interact with people online under the guidance of a trusted adult or a guardian, At some point, they’re going to be released into the world, and they’re going to have no protections in any way, shape, or form, and they’re not going to have learned those hard lessons.

[00:06:55] Christopher: So I personally fall into that middle ground of the three options you gave, which is to allow them to use it, allow them a little bit of freedom, allow them to understand what the benefits are, but then take the time to explain what the downsides are, right? I, as a parent, am constantly leveraging wanting my kids to feel safe and secure and be happy against also warning them of the dangers that do exist in this world.

[00:07:24] Christopher: Right. And having worked these investigations for 20 years, I can tell you those dangers are are horrible. and so I want them to see the problem coming and going back to the hard target analogy we referred to is if you can identify a problem before it is a problem, that is the easiest way to avoid it.

[00:07:43] Christopher: So the example I give a lot of parents is if, if I know somebody is going to pickpocket me, I can just cross the street and, and avoid the interaction altogether. So seeing the problem, understanding the behavior, of predators online and how they work is going to be the best way to avoid that and the best way to become a hard target.

[00:08:02] Christopher: And I think that only happens with limited or, supervised use of social media and these internet platforms and the parental controls that they build into them.

[00:08:12] Sandie: So parental controls, I get that. And I’m often horrified when I’m talking to a group of parents who have never opened the parental controls. What do parental controls do for you as a parent?

[00:08:30] Christopher: Sure. And now it, it, it varies greatly depending on the company or the type of social media. There are some that have leaned into children and children’s communication. They have built messaging apps that are specifically designed for kids, so that the kids can communicate with each other and all of the communications will be put into the parents, social media account as well for review at any given time.

[00:08:53] Christopher: you can turn on or off. Explicit language or messaging and filters that are built into it. Others are less. cooperative, if you will, whereas they allow you to see who the child is communicating with, but not the content of the communication in any way, shape or form. So if you’ve got like sort of a group chat with a bunch of friends from school and inappropriate data was being, shared amongst these kids, or, or, or an adult pretending to be a kid was able to infiltrate that group, you know, the parent wouldn’t be able to see like signs of grooming or other, atypical or, or behavior that would be inappropriate for that. and so understanding those different social media apps and what the parental crawls are is probably one of the most important things. And in full disclosure, it’s not an easy task. It is difficult. Each one is different from the other. these apps are not making money off of parental controls.

[00:09:47] Christopher: So it’s not parental controls aren’t necessarily like the first thing that they’re working on, to fix bugs.

[00:09:54] Sandie: Wow, and that’s an economic. aspect of what we’re dealing with here. So as parents, I think we can drive more motivation for corporate America to put those in place. So our advocacy as parents is part of how we build those guardrails. So Then, in a conversation with a 13 year old who has supervised social media, what are some of the daily topics that come up in the conversation with a trusted adult, a parent, a caregiver, maybe even a grandparent?

[00:10:37] Christopher: Sure. so I make it a, a point of, of chatting with my daughter regularly about who she’s speaking to and what she’s, talking about at any given time, you know, more often than not the, the conversation doesn’t start with you know, there are people out there that are looking to exploit children and these adults, right?

[00:10:56] Christopher: This conversation can happen just from poor decisions that maybe a teenage boy makes or says something in a group chat or, or one of the, you know, her many girlfriends that are on these group chats and having that open dialogue with her, leads to other conversations. So when for example, when we talk about something that maybe went awry or a kid said something about another child that was wrong, I then use that often to break into a conversation about how, that type of behavior, if normalized, can start to seem like it’s reasonable.

[00:11:30] Christopher: And then I will talk about something as, as heavy as grooming, for example, and how adults might groom a child in, which is to normalize abnormal behavior to get that child to sort of feel comfortable with things that are, are not right. and I use those often as jumping off points.

[00:11:47] Sandie: give me an example of how you have that conversation because for me it’s easy to understand, the difference between normal and abnormal, behavior. When I think about having a conversation with a 12 or 13 year old about what’s abnormal, how do I, actually communicate that. That’s a very esoteric concept.

[00:12:10] Christopher: Sure is. I, I had an, an example. My daughter was in seventh grade and she, along with, maybe a half a dozen of her friends were walking to a local coffee shop for one of the friend’s birthdays. And after school, they were going to walk, it’s about a mile walk to this spot, and they walked down a pretty busy road in Northern Virginia.

[00:12:31] Christopher: And during that walk. Now, mind you, these are 12 year old girls. Two cars beeped their horn and catcalled at these 12 year old girls and my daughter didn’t quite understand it, so I took that at the time to describe what normal and abnormal behavior was. And I said, look, you have cars passing down, and we did the math, my daughter loves math, so she leans into it, and we talked about the average amount of cars that went down.

[00:12:55] Christopher: In that one mile, you were probably passed by 100 cars, and in that 100 cars, two cars, you had abnormal behavior. behavior come from them? Actually, we said 200. I pointed out that it was probably 50 50 men, women. So let’s look at the 100 men that had passed you. and I, I use that as an example to highlight for her how, yes, not everybody is bad, but that, that the people who are abnormal in their behavior are hiding amongst all those other drivers.

[00:13:23] Christopher: and the idea is how do you identify that? And when you see it, recognize that it’s abnormal behavior and then trust your instincts when it comes to that. That felt wrong. That’s mostly because it was wrong. not specific to my daughter, but I’ve had the same conversation with groups of Children where I’m doing, what we call, uh, I guardian outreaches to children.

[00:13:43] Christopher: It’s an H. S. I run program. just to make Children hard targets. and I point that out regularly. If you’re amongst a group of friends and you’re seeing that bullying, you generally know what is abnormal and what’s wrong. And I want you to trust your instincts because more often than I’d like to admit, I hear After somebody is arrested for abusing a child, the people around them say, ah, something seemed off.

[00:14:08] Christopher: And I often say, yeah, there was, there was probably things that you would pick up on and that you just need to believe people when they tell you that their behavior is abnormal.

[00:14:19] Sandie: Wow. That is such a good conversation because it’s more than just when you’re online. It’s an in life conversation that parents will routinely have with their kids. I’m also interested in how you took something that is a little abstract and made it concrete. You broke it down in numbers with real cars passing by.

[00:14:48] Sandie: And what I hear an awful lot of is more along the lines of, I’m warning you and there are people, there are predators, they’re going to come after you. And I Would love to hear your opinion on that as a deterrent in Parental conversations.

[00:15:11] Christopher: There is, and again, I, I’m far from an academic, like yourself, but I have spent a little bit of time sort of looking into items, that, pertain to children and to criminals and how to kind of deal with that. And specifically, what you’re referencing is not necessarily the scared straight program, if you’ll recall that,

[00:15:30] Sandie: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:31] Christopher: and, and I know that a lot of the studies that came from that scared straight program actually, showed that it didn’t work very well.

[00:15:38] Christopher: and there was a bunch of reasons for that, probably not necessarily because, because a parent was, was telling them not to do something. And I don’t think it equates over, exactly, but I just think that any scare tactics need to be put into context because if we just constantly tell the children, Hey, this is bad.

[00:15:56] Christopher: This is bad. This is bad. eventually they’re just. It’s we’re going to normalize that bad behavior. And so I always make it a point to point out that the vast majority of people are good. It’s just that the bad people are hiding amongst it. And this is the potential of what could happen and why you need to look for the behavior.

[00:16:16] Christopher: I just. I, I grew up in the 80s with, with the, Just Say No campaign and that all drugs were bad. And I’m not necessarily sure we won that messaging campaign, for people. And I think that maybe over communicating has worked for me, and the kids that I’ve had the opportunity to interact with over the years.

[00:16:36] Sandie: and and that really kind of leads into another conversation Because what you said you want your family your kids to be to have good technology skills. So let’s talk a little bit about the double edged sword of technology, where it can lead to expertise or it can lead to exploitation.

[00:17:04] Christopher: Yeah, that’s a great point because, as you mentioned earlier, I used an example of cars passing in a real life situation to to highlight the scenario. 1 of the things I realized. Maybe my 1st, years into investigating child exploitation, crimes was that children’s brains are, are literally wired different than mine.

[00:17:24] Christopher: they don’t see any difference between communicating with a person right in front of them or communicating via text message or online. And that was a lesson I think that, you know, was a real wake up call for me. And in, in the particular investigation where I identified that was I had a victim who was, I think she was about 13 years old at the time.

[00:17:44] Christopher: And without giving any details of that particular investigation, it was time for me to talk to her friends as part of that investigation. And when she gave me the information for one friend, it had a phone number. It, the person lived two houses down. And then she gave me, the information for the second friend, which was, a phone number for a state on the other side of the country.

[00:18:06] Christopher: and I asked her, I said, have, have you ever met this person? And she said, no. Now, I had been talking to this young woman for, two weeks, and in her mind, the friend that lived two houses down and the friend whom she’d never met in person occupied that same space in her mind. And that was a real wake up call for me, is that kids literally use technology or interpret the information they get from technology different than sort of my generation.

[00:18:32] Christopher: Hopefully that will be fixed with this next generation, right, because they’re growing up with technology as well. But I think that double edged sword means making kids hard targets and applying all of those lessons that they learn in real life and making sure they’re applying those to an online life, right?

[00:18:49] Christopher: Being good digital citizens, understanding, that, Their actions have consequences, maybe even more so. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have everything you do monitored all the time. Like, I just, I made so many mistakes as a kid that I feel like these kids are under a tremendous amount of pressure.

[00:19:06] Christopher: and I try to be mindful of that when I’m having those conversations.

[00:19:09] Sandie: So this risk for being groomed by somebody you’ve never met but feels like a friend that you can walk over to their house. Wow, that just gives me goosebumps. I’m like, what what can I do as a parent to intervene in that thought process? And when would I know to intervene? Are there behavioral red flags?

[00:19:38] Sandie: That we can look for that might indicate grooming?

[00:19:42] Christopher: So, for the children, one of the things I like to point out is the difference. Most people understand what virus software looks like on a computer. Um, there’s really two different types of virus software. There’s the type that looks for downloads your virus definitions, right? And it will tell you, Hey, We know these files are a virus, so we will quarantine them, delete them, not let you pull them down.

[00:20:02] Christopher: And I’m sure you’ve seen this on your computers. And there’s another type of virus software called heuristic virus software, which actually doesn’t look for the particular files, but instead it looks for the behavior of the software. So, I have adopted this and, and the I Guardian Project has adopted this, and I highly suggest that parents do this, which is understanding how people groom and how it works.

[00:20:23] Christopher: A couple of examples would be something we refer to as white knighting. So you will have somebody who is online, and they will befriend a, a potential victim online. They will also create a second online persona where they will, will attack that victim. And so. They’ll start making that victim feel bad.

[00:20:43] Christopher: They will start attacking them. They will start cyber bullying them. And with the white knight account, the one that’s a friend, that white knight account will then defend the victim from there. And all of this is just a show to build trust into the victim that I am looking out for you and I am not the predator.

[00:21:00] Christopher: But really both accounts were run by the predators. It’s also like understanding For example, the Nigerian Prince, scheme where people won money, we saw that a lot in the early 2000s, late 90s. And looking back on it, it’s almost laughable that somebody would lose their entire life savings. But when it was novel and you didn’t understand it was a fraud or scam, you can get caught by it.

[00:21:24] Christopher: So again, understanding or being that heuristic software or explaining with your kids how the predators work, what they do, what is their behavior will give the kids the ability to see that behavior. Hey, it is abnormal for something like this to happen or this is the type of scam somebody might have or somebody might pretend, to be doing in order to gain your trust.

[00:21:45] Christopher: And in reality, that’s grooming and it makes it a lot easier to see it. Um, truthfully, if I had my way, I would never work another one of these investigations because we would put him out, but unfortunately, I don’t think we’re there.

[00:21:57] Sandie: Wow. Really insightful. Thank you. another question I have for you. I don’t get dads on this show very often from a father’s perspective. Is there a unique aspect of male role models?

[00:22:14] Christopher: So personally I think that my relationship with my daughter is very important. I know it’s important for me and I think it’s probably pretty important for her as well. And I think that male role models play an important role really in in both boys and girls and raising them. I often say the best thing that I can do for my daughter is treat her mother well, right?

[00:22:37] Christopher: Because I am setting that standard by which all males will be judged going forward, at least at a younger age. And I want to be that role model. I want her to see that typical behavior, how I interact with her, how I interact with her mother on a regular basis is going to level her expectations going forward.

[00:22:56] Christopher: And if I hold a high standard, when she moves out into the world, she’s going to expect that same standard, from the other males in her life. And I think just by being that person or being that father, I am, I am continually giving her the tools necessary to decipher, What’s good, what’s bad, what’s normal, what’s abnormal, and, and in effect, making her a harder target.

[00:23:19] Sandie: I love that. And the other thought that has been running through my mind since our first conversation is if I’m in a community environment and I’m part of PTA, I’m at a church, maybe I’m a group of teachers, educators. Are there some tips for how I relate to law enforcement?

[00:23:47] Christopher: Yeah, so I think that law enforcement, especially those who work in, in, in sort of the, what we refer to CSAM, the child sexual abuse material, the child exploitation world, realize that this is, this is a ubiquitous problem that knows no boundaries, right? There’s there’s no socioeconomic issues.

[00:24:06] Christopher: There’s no race issues. There’s no gender issues in the end. It’s about adults protecting Children, and working together to do that. at least in the United States of America, we have these things called the ICACs, which is the Internet Crime Against Children, task force that operate in every community across the entire country.

[00:24:25] Christopher: HSI has an iGuardian program that’s built specifically to do these types of outreaches. and I think that leveraging those or using your school resource officers to sort of talk about or engage with the children, is really important. And I think that, parents to understand that the police want nothing more than for this crime to just go away for the rest of their lives.

[00:24:46] Christopher: And, and, and that we are happy to help in any way, shape or form whenever we can. And if that means helping in a way that isn’t reactionary, but instead is proactive, like this podcast today, that we’re, we’re all in.

[00:25:00] Sandie: Oh, that’s so good. Honestly, when I talk to parents, sometimes exactly what you said about the police comes up. They just want this to go away. And parents feel like this is so overwhelming. And there are a lot of media misrepresents the hard facts. And I think one of the things I’ve heard you talk about is the dark web, which is like this monster boogeyman in my mind, and makes me really concerned that somehow this is going to be something I can’t manage.

[00:25:40] Sandie: Can you demystify that just a bit?

[00:25:44] Christopher: Yes, doctor. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. I think that, Not being intimidated by the technology, is, is step one for parents when we talk about keeping kids safe online and, and making them hard targets. the dark web is this thing you hear about online. It’s the seedy underbelly they’ve made children’s movies that involve like, you know, the dark web and, and I find them pretty hilarious and, and, and accurate at the same time.

[00:26:09] Christopher: But what we shouldn’t think is that the dark web is some, some spot that’s hard to get to. Ultimately, the Dark Web, really, when most people refer to that, they’re talking about Tor, which is the Onion Router, was an actual US government project that was developed and released out into the world as an open source way of communicating.

[00:26:29] Christopher: The Dark Web, or Tor, in and of itself, is not evil, it’s not good, and it’s not bad. As a matter of fact, All it does is it makes you anonymous online, and you can imagine that if you lived in a country where because of your gender, you were not allowed to learn how to read or to go to school, being able to get online and be anonymous and get access to resources or even just read the news like the BBC or the Wall Street Journal might be really beneficial because otherwise that would be blocked by your country.

[00:26:59] Christopher: You could really put the dark web through the lens of something that is beneficial for society. The problem is that anonymity that is intrinsic into, the onion router, more commonly known as the dark web, is, or a dark net, is leveraged by bad actors, right? And bad actors use it. They commit heinous crimes with it.

[00:27:21] Christopher: and that sort of, gives it that ominous feel to it. And truthfully, there are some terrible things happen in it on a regular basis. The technology is really just encryption, not unlike end to end encrypted messaging you would have with, your, your Apple phone or your Android phone or, or a messaging app.

[00:27:39] Christopher: The difference is the encryption is deployed not to keep the data safe, but the encryption is deployed to keep the users of it anonymous. And it’s very good at what it does. I mean, this isn’t, these wasn’t created by some hackers wearing hoods, like you see on television. This was created by some of the smartest cryptologists and computer programs, software engineers, in the world, really at the behest of the U.S government and under contract for them.

[00:28:03] Christopher:  Which is why the technology is so good, and there is an argument for privacy. So from a parent’s point of view, going to torproject. org, going to HSI’s iGuardian resources, Leaning on DHS is no to protect, campaign will help them understand sort of how this technology works.

[00:28:24] Christopher: So they’re not intimidated by it. Ultimately, my goal is sort of to pull the veil away from, the technology itself and empower people. It is not. Intrinsically evil, and it’s not illegal, by the way. That’s the other piece. You can go to tour project dot org and download a tour browser. I would be very careful about where you visit with it, but, you could go and you can read about it and understand it.

[00:28:48] Christopher: But most importantly, what you need to know is that your kids can also do that. It’s very easy to download the browser and just get online.

[00:28:55] Sandie: Wow. Okay. So. It’s demystified, but I’m still pretty intimidated by it. So I’m going to be going to iGuardian first to get more information. And there are so many great apps out there in our community trying to keep our kids safe. We’ve interviewed people like Rachel Thomas with the Cool Ants series.

[00:29:18] Sandie: We’ve interviewed folks from Thorne, from NCMEC, um, last year at our Insure Justice Conference, by the end of the second day, we had a tagline, Talk Tech Every Day. And I think we can equate this conversation with how we reduced dental caries, cavities, decades ago, because we made brushing your teeth a daily expectation that every parent taught every year in school, you got to chew that little tablet to see with the black light, if you had any gaps in how you were brushing your teeth.

[00:30:01] Sandie: And so as we continue to dialogue on this and develop better online safety, I’m, would like to know how you have changed. You’ve been doing this for a couple of decades and as you have become a recognized, a recognized active, no, that’s not what I, a recognized advocate for proactive parenting. I think that’s why I’m so excited you’re coming to Ensure Justice because you’re an example of what we can do, not what, how we can run, hide, protect, be on our guard all the time.

[00:30:46] Sandie: And so I would like to know how you would advise parents to join you in that movement away from a fear based approach to proactive parenting.

[00:30:59] Christopher: Yes, and I certainly would, would encourage parents to lean into communications and lean into talking about tech. I, I refer to it as raising the cyber IQ of parents, but I very much like your tagline more, talk tech every day, gets to that point where we’re, we’re demystifying it, we’re pulling it back.

[00:31:19] Christopher: We’re having a conversation. And truthfully, I learned more from my child about how these apps work than, then I could figure out on my own because it’s just all very intuitive to her. And so opening that line of communication up, opening it up with the other parents, every Christmas party we have, sometimes I’m not the funnest person just for the, the nature of the work I do.

[00:31:39] Christopher: It’s kind of a downer, but if we, if we gear it to sort of their kids and their presentations, then what we ended up finding out is that, They have the skills necessary to lean into it, but they were just a little bit intimidated to your point. And, and once they have somebody sort of empower them or tell them, Hey, look, you can do this, download it, let’s do it.

[00:31:57] Christopher: As friends, we all have social media communication apps that we wouldn’t use ourselves, but for our kids being on it. So now we all sort of get in and now we communicate on it, not because we really want to, but because it’s the right thing to do. So we understand the platform that our kids are using daily.

[00:32:14] Sandie: And I do think it’s important that parents. partner in their communities. A few years back, my daughter’s friends, when my granddaughter was a teenager, had all started becoming friends with a guy at school, that it turns out when my daughter asked, who is he? Where does he live? Nobody actually had ever met him.

[00:32:42] Sandie: And so she reported it to the school, they found out he was, some, a guy in his 20s targeting high school girls. And so parents can be part of, of a community that is alert to what other kids in their kid’s friend circles can do as well. And I’m more and more convinced that proactive parenting is going to be the next big thing in combating human trafficking when it comes to online recruitment and predatory behavior.

[00:33:18] Sandie: Last remark, what do you want people to be thinking about?

[00:33:26] Christopher: Well, as it relates to being a hard target, being online and keeping our children safe, I just want people to remember that, the vast majority of the people are in fact good people in the world, right? And being able to identify that and trust your gut and trust your communication levels with your children so that you can continue to have those conversations is something we need to strive for.

[00:33:49] Christopher: Look, talking to a teenager isn’t always the easiest thing. I think we all know that. but you know, as parents, we should, we should embrace that and we should continue to talk tech every day. And I fully endorse that.

[00:34:00] Sandie: Thank you so much, Chris. it’s been a pleasure to have you with us today. I have learned so much. I’ve got more questions, but I’m going to have to have you come back. No, wait, I’m going to have you come to Vanguard inn March, 7th and 8th, Ensure Justice, sign up so you can have a personal conversation with our team here.

[00:34:23] Sandie: And everybody, if this is your first time to listen to the podcast, go over to the EndingHumanTrafficking.org website. Subscribe, and you’ll get an email when a new episode drops every two weeks. Give us some feedback. Are there topics you’d like us to explore? And join us.

[00:34:47] Sandie: Again in two weeks.

Brian Joseph joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they discuss how investigative journalism can reveal the hidden realities of sex trafficking in the United States.

Brian Joseph is an investigative journalist with more than 20 years of experience uncovering stories of systemic corruption, criminal enterprises, and human exploitation. His latest book, Vegas Concierge, is a riveting expose that shines a light on the darker realities of the entertainment capital of the world.

[00:00:00] Sandie: 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 number 335, Investigative Journalism, a Pathway to Understanding Sex Trafficking. We’re here with. Brian Joseph. My name is Dr. Sandy 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.

[00:00:51] Sandie: Brian Joseph is an investigative journalist with more than 20 years of experience uncovering stories of systemic corruption, criminal enterprises, and human exploitation. His latest book, Vegas Concierge, is a riveting exposé that shines a light on the darker realities of the entertainment capital of the world.

[00:01:20] Sandie: Brian, welcome to our podcast.

[00:01:23] Brian: I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:25] Sandie: So you’re used to putting all of your energy into written expression. How are you enjoying being on the speaking circuit. I saw you last night at a book signing and last month at another one.

[00:01:43] Brian: It’s, it’s been a change. Obviously I’m feel more comfortable behind a keyboard than anywhere else, but this has been a lot of fun.

[00:01:49] Brian: It’s, it’s great to, you know, interact with folks that have read the book and, and it’s always a, you know, I enjoy talking with people.

[00:01:55] Sandie: All right. Well, we’re going to have a great conversation. I do have a keyboard here. I could let you hold. So, okay. So tell us what. What drove you to actually do more than just an investigative article, but an entire book?

[00:02:13] Brian: Well, I think, you know, by the time that, uh, uh, I started working specifically on, on the case that became the centerpiece of Vegas Concierge, I had already, gathered quite a lot of information about domestic sex trafficking in the United States. And so, and then the, the story itself that does serve as a centerpiece of the book is such a winding tale that it, it just seemed quite, quite obvious that it would, it would most fit as a book rather than anything else.

[00:02:38] Brian: There was just so much material, so much of a plot that it, it would, I couldn’t imagine telling that story in any other way.

[00:02:45] Sandie: So let’s do, it’s really hard because this, I don’t remember how many pages it is, but can you give us, in a nutshell, the theme and your agenda as you processed how to put this story together?

[00:03:03] Brian: Well, uh, Vegas concierge uses a, uh, the tale of a years long investigation into sex trafficking in Las Vegas is a narrative vehicle to explore how American society fails victims and survivors of sex trafficking. It was a project that required a lot of sensitivity and required a lot of work to get it put together in such a way that it was, I felt that it could be beneficial and impactful to the larger society.

[00:03:30] Brian: And, uh, it was something that required a lot of, uh, diligence and thought to put together in a way that was hopefully respectful and appropriate while also, while also, being authentic.

[00:03:40] Sandie: So one of the things, and it’s not a spoiler alert for our listeners, but one of the conclusions towards the end of Brian’s book is a great place to start as we explore more. In this story, he says, this is modern day slavery, a nonpartisan human rights issue. If there ever was one and it’s time it’s eradication becomes a part of the American political agenda.

[00:04:15] Sandie: And Brian. I am totally in sync with that. I have served in so many capacities and I am constantly bringing back to the table that this is nonpartisan. So as a disclaimer, before we start our conversation, cause we may not always agree, we are both committed. to the human dignity of our survivors and victims that are out there that we have not recovered.

[00:04:44] Sandie: So, okay. So, we’ll dive in. My first big question now is in your very unsettling story, what Initially inspired you to make Las Vegas the focal point.

[00:05:04] Brian: Well, that’s, that happened to be where I was, where I was based and where I began my investigation of domestic sex trafficking. So, to some degree, it was just, you know, where I happened to be.

[00:05:16] Brian: Now, on a more, on a grander scale, Vegas, as I understand it, is considered by, by many people in the, uh, the pimp prostitution subculture to be sort of the, the Mecca of, of that, of that community. And so it made sense to me to center the book on, in Vegas because it is such a, a nexus for this sort of activity.

[00:05:35] Sandie: I have to agree totally with that. I was shocked when I first came back from living overseas and got involved in understanding what sex trafficking looks like here in America, and discovered a pimp conference. In Las Vegas, they get together and they study and share notes and say, Oh, this works, but this doesn’t.

[00:06:00] Sandie: They collaborate in sharing knowledge, which honestly, one of the reasons I love doing this podcast is it’s an easy way to share what we’ve learned with others and connect our knowledge and insight. So give us a rundown on your top characters in this narrative.

[00:06:24] Brian: Well, I would use the word subjects because they are, they are, they are real people.

[00:06:27] Brian: Obviously, the, the primary subject of the book is Angela. She’s a survivor and we, we follow her through the course of her life and her experiences in the pimp prostitute subculture and as, as being trafficked. Another main subject is Don. He is a retired vice sergeant from Las Vegas who has a deep heart for these victims and survivors and was very disturbed to see how certain issues played out in the community.

[00:06:50] Brian: The primary trafficker in the book is a, uh, a hip hop music producer by the name of Molly Mall. Uh, and then there’s a number of, of other people, other traffickers, other smaller characters that are, are subjects I should say that are, that are, that were victimized. And then there are just another collection of, of police and judicial figures in the book as well.

[00:07:10] Sandie: So one of the themes that was kind of new knowledge for me, I mean I supposed that there was a lot of connection with the hospitality industry in Vegas, but that’s an area that you established direct connections. Can you expand on how that helps us understand ways to intervene with victims, male and female, ways to begin to establish effective interventions to help them leave their victimization?

[00:07:56] Brian: Well, sure. So the book, uh, talks a lot about the interplay between victims and survivors of sex trafficking and sort of the larger casino industrial complex of Las Vegas. Uh, you see in the book, women who are being trafficked, who have to interact with people like taxi cab drivers or valets or security guards.

[00:08:16] Brian: And you see how,  The tipping culture of Vegas allows them to essentially work their way through the massive facilities that are casinos in Las Vegas.

[00:08:28] Sandie: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This, this is a new, new way of thinking the tipping culture is involved in human trafficking.

[00:08:37] Brian: Absolutely. So as you may may be aware Las Vegas runs-

[00:08:42] Sandie: Im not a regular visitor to Las Vegas.

[00:08:45] Sandie: So yeah, you have to educate me

[00:08:47] Brian: Sure, so a huge a huge way that business is done in Las Vegas involves involves tipping So if you you know, you want to you know you know, maybe, uh, get into a certain part of the casino that, uh, you might not otherwise have access to, or you want to, you know, find out, uh, you want to get a, a referral to, uh, you know, a cool club or whatever you might, uh, you might ask a, a taxi cab driver for, for referral and, and either you might tip them for that, or, or maybe, uh, the person that you refer them to the taxi cab driver refers you to might get a tip for, for, for that referral.

[00:09:21] Brian: And so that what happens with, uh, with victims and survivors of sex trafficking is they will, uh, they will often tip security guards to, to in a casino so that the security guards might let them know if police are in the area so they can watch their back or the security, they might tip the security guard so they can be allowed to, to loiter in an area where they otherwise might be not allowed to loiter.

[00:09:43] Brian: And so that sort of tipping culture is a, is a tool that women who are being trafficked used to to then work their ways through casinos in Las Vegas, and it’s a way for them to sort of operate without being detected. Now, it does speak to the sort of interplay between that that subculture and and the above board casinos that operate in Las Vegas.

[00:10:07] Brian: It does. I should point out that it’s unclear at the highest levels of casinos, whether they’re there intimately aware of what’s going on or if they’re just sort of vaguely aware of what’s going on. I think, I don’t know that there’s any, there’s any doubt that the people at the highest levels know that this happens to some degree.

[00:10:22] Brian: I don’t know the extent to which they, they understand that this is happening.

[00:10:26] Sandie: Okay. So when we’re talking about these direct connections, then what other levels are there? You, you talk about entertainment there, and sometimes it feels like even when you’re talking, talking up in a, in the story of tipping that this is something that the women are doing.

[00:10:52] Sandie: So it seems to take the trafficker, the pimp out of the story and she appears to have agency. Can you comment on that? On how that comes across.

[00:11:04] Brian: I want to make very clear that I don’t believe. Well, I don’t want to take agency away from anybody, but I want to make very clear that that when I’m talking about traffickers, I’m sorry, trafficked women engaging in perhaps tipping.

[00:11:17] Brian: This is not something that That they came up with on their own and that they decided they want to do. This is an expectation of them that’s placed on them by their trafficker. They need to do whatever is necessary to execute their goal of selling sex for the trafficker. And so these victims and survivors, these women have to learn sort of essentially the ropes of surviving in Vegas.

[00:11:36] Brian: And often they have, of course, most of the time they’ve been manipulated into into this lifestyle in the first place. So. On one hand, yes, they, I guess you could say that they consciously, you know, learn these skills in order to, to operate in Las Vegas, but on a much larger level, they have been coerced into this lifestyle and been convinced that they, they want to and desire to engage in this sort of behavior and that they are indeed being pressured to do whatever, whatever is necessary to, to make a buck in the sex industry.

[00:12:07] Sandie: And that really speaks to the blurred lines around the sense that we can call someone a seller and arrest them for selling illicit sex, but not actually see them as a victim. So they look like they have agency. Can you speak to what you learned about grooming that results in this coercive manipulation?

[00:12:38] Brian: Well, absolutely. So, so grooming plays a central part of, of the victimization of, of women who are trafficked. Grooming in and of itself, as I think we discussed the other day, at least on its face, as I understand it, doesn’t doesn’t qualify as a crime. I mean, that’s just somebody cozying up to you, but it’s a very coercive behavior that then allows traffickers to become very close to their victims and essentially convince the victims that it’s their own initiative.

[00:13:08] Brian: And their own desire to engage in this behavior when in fact, I think the the record will show that these women have truly been been brainwashed and been manipulated into this lifestyle. But it is a very difficult and very subtle interaction that we’re talking about. And it’s something that most people have a difficulty wrapping their mind around.

[00:13:27] Brian: And it, and it, it. It’s different for for every trafficker and every victim. It’s, it’s very hard to talk about these things in in vague generalities or sort of in theory. You really, it’s, it’s really important to talk about them with, you know, in this specific case at hand, because again, the, these things are so, are so nuanced.

[00:13:48] Brian: It’s just, it’s just very difficult to say in, in sort of broad strokes, you know, this is the way it is or that is the way it is. It, it, it’s, you really need to look at, I, I believe you really need to look very closely at the, uh, the facts of an individual case to be, to begin to understand, uh, what may be driving, uh, the behavior of  a woman who is being trafficked.

[00:14:07] Sandie: So what. Would you point out specifically about Angela that you used her story with her permission and collaboration to teach us about that? What are some key signs?

[00:14:22] Brian: Well, in Angela’s case, I mean, there’s a, there’s a number of, of potential signs you could point to. I mean, I think one of the largest one is, is the number of promises that were made to her by  various traffickers that she engaged with.

[00:14:33] Brian: And there was always these promises of, you know, a dream team of lawyers of. You know, ascending to, you know, higher ranks of the, of the industry of, of, of, I guess you could even say protection or, um, satisfaction, you know, those were empty promises that she was given.

[00:14:51] Sandie: And you use the plural for traffickers.

[00:14:55] Sandie: And so give us kind of a timeline or, or a way to conceptualize the idea that this, this crime is something that can often become a pattern in a victim’s life. They may get away from one trafficker to be controlled by another.

[00:15:18] Brian: Well, it’s important to understand that survivors and victims of sex trafficking often don’t Don’t have a clear view of their own of what’s going on with themselves.

[00:15:28] Brian: They don’t necessarily see themselves as victims they don’t necessarily really even see the at least initially the the coercion that’s been it’s been affecting them, Often times women who are are trafficked have suffered tremendous traumas earlier in their lives long before they ever thought about engaging in in sex work and and and what happens is, is these, these traffickers step in and exploit those traumas, exploit the, the, uh, the harm of those traumas caused, you know, perhaps they, they, uh, these women have low self esteem and a trafficker may step in and say, you know, you know, may, may, may pump her up, may, may make her feel good about herself and use that sort of connection to then push her into, into the work and into sex work.

[00:16:14] Brian: And so, So these women, this becomes all that they really know the, the, the only sort of relationships that they, they, they become familiar with are these sort of exploitative, coercive relationships. And so, yes, they may get tired with, with one trafficker. They may, they may get very upset with being beaten or being lied to and eventually leave.

[00:16:36] Brian: But once, once that happens, uh, they, they really don’t have a, uh, a picture in their brain of any other sort of relationship, and so then they become, you become victim to the, the coercion and exploitation of another trafficker and then another trafficker. And it’s very similar and akin to, uh, someone who engages in a serial, a series of, uh, of dysfunctional relationships.

[00:16:59] Brian: It’s very much in that same vein.

[00:17:02] Sandie: And the, the lineup of people that trafficked Angela is horrendous and, but it really points to something people often overlook. Traffickers are not all like Hollywood images, and it’s, It’s wonderful that you point out that one of her traffickers was female, because we overlook that.

[00:17:29] Sandie: We look, uh, and in the early days of doing raids and busts to recover even quote unquote rescue victims, all of the women would be in the same room. And then we’d find out later, Oh my gosh. One of them was going around telling. them, what would happen to them if they said anything. And so I eventually did some research that showed about 40 percent of sex trafficking, traffickers are female.

[00:18:05] Sandie: And you did such a great job. And this isn’t supposed to be great job, Brian. Podcast. But that was one of the highlights of the book for me is you told that story. Do you want to comment on how you saw that? Were you expecting that?

[00:18:22] Brian: I, uh, by the time I, uh, began working with Angela, I was familiar with the fact that there are at least some women who, who are traffickers.

[00:18:29] Brian: So that, that didn’t necessarily come as a surprise. I, of course, hearing. You know, the details of Angela’s story was, was very traumatic and very upsetting. And I, I would hope that anyone who reads the book would, would come to the same conclusion.

[00:18:44] Sandie: So good. So the institutional complicity that was, that was something that was a thread through the entire book and it actually seemed to contribute to the the word that came to mind is a thriving money making industry.

[00:19:10] Sandie: And I, and I want to point out to folks listening that exploitation is the bottom line for sex trafficking. Someone else is profiting by commercially selling another person. So can you speak to how you told the story of that complicity?

[00:19:34] Brian: I told that story very carefully. I mean, the difficulty in in in reporting on something like that is it’s not necessarily something that people are going to want to talk about directly, and it’s not something that you’re going to find a lot of direct clear examples of.

[00:19:49] Brian: It’s something that you’re going to have to come to by by talking to someone here, looking at a document there and sort of beginning to put the pieces together yourself. There’s not one single. individual that’s going to be able to say, this is what’s going on in this situation. I mean, it’s something that you really need to, to piece together bit by bit.

[00:20:06] Brian: And that’s what I, I, I’d like to think we did in the book.

[00:20:09] Sandie: So what were some of your methods? You, what are you piecing together?

[00:20:14] Brian: Well, you know, my, my method as a, as a journalist is, is to be, is to be very thorough and be very careful and to, you know, to essentially, you know, talk to everyone that I possibly can and to review every, uh, piece and piece of written material that I can and, and to begin to see connections and draw connections and then, and then to return to my sources and ask him, am I making the right connections?

[00:20:34] Brian: Am I, am I seeing the right things? And uh, uh, did that numerous times over the course of this book and, and, uh, you know, repeatedly was told, yes, you’re on the right track. This is exactly what the picture truly is.

[00:20:48] Sandie: So, one of the things that I loved about how you told the story is you were totally committed and commented in the narrative in the chapters telling stories about the personal agency, the respect, and checking back to make sure you got it.

[00:21:11] Sandie: Right. From their perspective. What made that your like your plumb line for this? Because honestly, sometimes journalists are just looking to see how many people are going to read this. And I don’t always see a lot of  respect for the actual person behind the story.

[00:21:36] Brian: That’s just who I am as a person. I mean, that’s what matters to me and what’s important to me.

[00:21:40] Brian: I mean, the beauty of writing a book is that, you know, I got to call the shots about what the standards would be in terms of how we handled the approach, in terms of we handled the reporting and handled, you know, various disclosures. And the book just reflects what I believe is important.

[00:21:53] Sandie: So then if you’re speaking, I’m at a university, I have journalism students that I work with.

[00:22:01] Sandie: I was in a conversation yesterday with one of them. Success now looks like a model of social media getting likes and the clear understanding is that if you want to get those, you have to do the sensational stuff. What was the personal price you paid because you didn’t go down that road?

[00:22:33] Brian: Well, I, I guess we’ll still see.

[00:22:34] Brian: I don’t, uh, you know, we’re only at the publication of the book. I don’t know at this point what sort of personal price I’ll pay for the approach that I’ve taken to this book. What I, what I will say is that my overriding concern the entire time, even to this day, is, is accuracy. I still find myself going, gosh, did I get that sentence right?

[00:22:51] Brian: Did I do that correctly? I mean, I just care very much about that. I mean, the notion of having, popularity be a priority for me, which just, which just wasn’t there. My, my, my focus was on telling the best, most empathetic and truthful story that I could.

[00:23:08] Sandie: I, I just love how you treated the victims who were being exploited.

[00:23:14] Sandie: So sometimes we can clearly identify that someone is by law, by the elements of force, fraud and coercion, a victim, of sex trafficking, of human trafficking. But sometimes it’s not as clear, and I’ve heard you use, and I read, the word exploitation. So how are you using that language? Because language matters.

[00:23:44] Sandie: Absolutely. And it contributes to an understanding of that pathway. So talk to me about exploitation.

[00:23:54] Brian: I mean, this may, this may be a simplistic way of putting it, but for purposes of our conversation, you know, I tend to very generally think of exploitation as, as simply, uh, another person laboring for the benefit of another.

[00:24:09] Brian: And that’s certainly what, uh, what is going on. As it relates to victims and survivors of sex trafficking, there is a pimp, uh, above them who through manipulation or through force, makes them engage in activities and then the reaps almost, almost or entirely the benefits of those activities that to me is exploitation and should bother anyone with a pulse.

[00:24:35] Sandie: (laughs) That shows the humanity side of you, Brian. I, I, when I think about exploitation, I actually have begun to look at it in my own world because it’s an economic term, which this human trafficking is an economically based crime.

[00:24:58] Brian: Absolutely.

[00:24:59] Sandie: And so we will be sitting around the table making a strategic plan for our company, our business, our, our newest program.

[00:25:11] Sandie: And someone will say, well, how can we exploit these resources? It’s a business term. And we’re very comfortable leveraging because leveraging is one of the elements of exploitation. Do you think culturally that kind of profit agenda is something we have ignored in our prevention and intervention?

[00:25:40] Brian: that’s a good question.

[00:25:40] Brian: I don’t, I don’t know. Um, I mean, if you, if you’re talking about using the term exploit as in the business terms of say, you know, you’re, you’re an automotive manufacturer and, uh, you’re in a meeting and you say, you know, we have a good relationship with this provider of tires and they can make a lot of tires quickly.

[00:26:00] Brian: We should exploit that by, you know, doing whatever. I don’t, I don’t find that upsetting. I find, I find using terms like exploitation or exploit in reference to people upsetting. So I guess my, my response to that would be context matters as well as, as language. And when you’re talking about people, I think we should, we should think more carefully and, and more thoroughly about the language we use.

[00:26:26] Sandie: I agree. One of the most interesting chapters is when you start talking about policy agendas. So talk to us about your understanding of decrim, legalization. What do you think is the most important thing for people to pay attention to?

[00:26:48] Brian: Well, I think, you know, there’s a number of different ideas on the table for addressing sex trafficking, both in the United States and elsewhere.

[00:26:56] Brian: There are a number of people in the anti trafficking movement here and across the globe who, who believe different things. You know, some believe legalization, some believe decrim, some believe the Nordic model, some believe, you know, the status quo is the, is the best way to go. Uh, Me speaking for myself only.

[00:27:13] Brian: I appreciate those, those debates, but I don’t know that the time is now to have those debates because from my perspective, it certainly seems that not enough people, at least in the United States, take this issue seriously. And so my belief is that instead of having these squabbles within the anti trafficking community over what, what’s the best way to move forward, there should be a focus on just.

[00:27:39] Brian: Getting the general public, the larger public to take this issue seriously. So that’s the, uh, The only, uh, message I guess that I would advocate for is just simply that my sense is that the general public doesn’t take this seriously enough and that that that really needs to be addressed before we begin talking about specific policy options.

[00:28:00] Sandie: And for our listeners, we’ve done a few interviews on this issue. Dr. Donna Hughes, Brad Miles, uh, Lisa Thompson talked to us about the kind of vocabulary we use. Um, her big concern has stayed in my head all the time, because when we start using language like sex worker, it legitimizes this as a job that your kid can grow up and aspire to, and that concerns me, which is why I prefer to look at this from the lens of exploitation, and I don’t have,

[00:28:42] Sandie: An answer to where we need to go. I do believe that our law enforcement teams are beginning to recognize the victimization on a more general across the board, proactive policing agenda, like we talked about in the last episode. So I encourage you as a listener to make this a point to get more knowledge and insight, seek some education, because this is an area where intervention can begin to develop real concrete steps to help women and men leave that kind of exploitation.

[00:29:30] Sandie: Brian, I have two more questions for you. The first one is how long did it take you to write this book?

[00:29:38] Brian: That’s a good question. I mean, it depends on what you mean by, by write this, I, I, um, I spent a couple of years researching domestic sex trafficking when I was working for the paper in Las Vegas. When I then was on my own, I spent roughly four years working on the book involving both research and writing.

[00:29:56] Sandie: And have you changed your mind about anything?

[00:30:01] Brian: Have I changed my mind about anything? Yes, I guess, I guess if I had to point to one particular thing that has changed for me, it’s, it’s simply that this understanding that it’s very difficult to, to talk about relationships, to talk about individuals cases without looking at the specifics of those cases.

[00:30:19] Brian: As I mentioned before, it’s very, it’s very tempting to sort of talk about issues of sex and issues of exploitation and sort of a vague sort of way, but it’s really not helpful. We, we, we need to, to really, if we’re going to talk about, you know, A case, we need to talk about the case in its entirety in the details of the case, you can’t just sort of talk vaguely about, well, you know, my perception is that if I was in that situation, I would handle it this way.

[00:30:45] Brian: Well, you don’t really know because you don’t know all of the specifics of that case. So I guess for me, what’s changed is I’m much less I’m less likely to, to think in sort of broad strokes and to think more specifically about each individual and each individual case that I come across.

[00:31:03] Sandie: Thank you for that. What is your call to action to your readers?

[00:31:07] Brian: Well, I don’t know that I have a call to action. I, you know, I, I, as a journalist, I, I work very hard to, to focus on, on telling the story. And to getting at the truth and letting other people decide what the, what the call to action is. I guess if I did have a call to action, it would be simply to, uh, uh, to engage with this issue in a, in a real and substantive way and to, uh, to not rely on what you’re seeing in, in pop culture and what’s being discussed vaguely in, in, in conversation, but to really understand it yourself and to educate yourself on this issue.

[00:31:40] Sandie: That’s great. And how can they get your book?

[00:31:42] Brian: So the, uh, um, the old catchphrase, you can get this book wherever books are sold actually does apply to Vegas Concierge. Our publisher, Roman and Littlefield has an excellent distribution network. And my understanding is that you can get it, you know, just about any, any bookseller.

[00:31:57] Brian: So of course available online through Amazon and Barnes and Noble and other places like that.

[00:32:03] Sandie: That’s wonderful. And do you have a website?

[00:32:07] Brian: We do, our website is https://www.vegasconciergebook.com/ you can find some summary materials as well as some documents we used to flesh out the research of the book.

[00:32:14] Sandie: All right.

[00:32:14] Sandie: And I did really appreciate the heavy annotations. You’ve been wonderful. Did a great job from a professor’s perspective of making sure people’s voices were documented, and that’s really commendable.

[00:32:33] Brian: I appreciate that. Thank you.

[00:32:35] Sandie:I look forward to your next book, and I have questions. That I’d like you to investigate. Yeah.

[00:32:42] Brian: I’m all, I’m all ears. Thank you

[00:32:42] Sandie: Okay. All right. Well, thank you, Brian, for joining us today and for your dedication to exposing injustice. And for my listeners, I encourage you to follow up. It’s pretty heavy reading, but you will gain a deeper understanding of systems that are behind the scenes. That are not as easy to just say, well, we’ll fix this.

[00:33:12] Sandie: And it’s very nuanced and that comes across. Thank you for listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. Go online if this is your first time and become a subscriber and you will receive the show notes every time an episode drops every two weeks. See you again soon.

Derek Marsh joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as the two discuss the role of law enforcement in preventing human trafficking.

Derek Marsh is the Associate Director of the Global Center for Women and Justice. He is a retired Deputy Chief of the Westminster Police Department, CA, with over 26 years of service. He co-founded the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force and has been a national and international leader in anti-human trafficking training, investigations, and advocacy. A former Bureau of Justice Assistance Visiting Fellow, Derek has worked extensively to improve labor trafficking investigations and task force collaboration. He holds master’s degrees in Human Behavior and Police Management & Leadership and continues to advance education, outreach, and justice initiatives through GCWJ.

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Derek Marsh 36:22

Sandra Morgan 36:57

Derek Marsh 37:12

Sandra Morgan 37:14

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Josie Heyano as the two discuss the importance of bridging communities to prevent human trafficking.

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.

Sandra Morgan 0:14

Josie Heyano 1:30

Sandra Morgan 2:06

Josie Heyano 2:19

Sandra Morgan 3:34

Josie Heyano 3:42

Sandra Morgan 4:23

Josie Heyano 4:48

Sandra Morgan 6:10

Josie Heyano 6:13

Sandra Morgan 7:53

Josie Heyano 8:23

Sandra Morgan 11:23

Josie Heyano 11:24

Sandra Morgan 12:54

Josie Heyano 13:28

Sandra Morgan 17:50

Josie Heyano 18:19

Sandra Morgan 21:17

Josie Heyano 22:28

Sandra Morgan 24:46

Josie Heyano 25:30

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

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Peter Baynard-Smith as the two discuss Hagar International’s Community-Based Care Model.

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.

Hagar International

World Vision International

Concern Worldwide

Engineers Without Borders

45- War, Conflict, and Human Trafficking, with Esther and Camille Ntoto

Sandra Morgan 0:14

Peter Baynard-Smith 1:27

Sandra Morgan 2:55

Peter Baynard-Smith 3:31

Sandra Morgan 3:32

Peter Baynard-Smith 3:53

Sandra Morgan 3:56

Peter Baynard-Smith 4:26

Sandra Morgan 7:02

Peter Baynard-Smith 7:53

Sandra Morgan 11:02

Peter Baynard-Smith 11:41

Sandra Morgan 13:23

Peter Baynard-Smith 14:03

Sandra Morgan 16:56

Peter Baynard-Smith 18:14

Sandra Morgan 20:34

Peter Baynard-Smith 21:09

Sandra Morgan 22:58

Peter Baynard-Smith 23:38

Sandra Morgan 26:55

Peter Baynard-Smith 27:34

Sandra Morgan 30:54

Peter Baynard-Smith 31:08

Sandra Morgan 32:11

Peter Baynard-Smith 32:40

Sandra Morgan 32:50

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 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.

Sandra Morgan 0:14

Daniel Varon 4:33

Sandra Morgan 4:50

Daniel Varon 5:15

Sandra Morgan 6:53

Daniel Varon 7:32

Sandra Morgan 11:31

Daniel Varon 12:34

Sandra Morgan 14:16

Daniel Varon 14:38

Sandra Morgan 18:20

Daniel Varon 18:22

Sandra Morgan 20:31

Daniel Varon 21:32

Sandra Morgan 24:31

Daniel Varon 24:40

Sandra Morgan 28:05

Daniel Varon 28:11

Sandra Morgan 29:10

Daniel Varon 30:15

Sandra Morgan 33:44

Daniel Varon 34:45

Sandra Morgan 38:51

Daniel Varon 39:49