Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Dr. Jodi Quas to discuss new research on forensic interviews for minor victims of human trafficking. They review what the research is saying, strategies to work with minors, and how this research is being disseminated for implementation.

Jodi Quas, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychological Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her work is recognized across the globe for advancing knowledge of children’s eyewitness capabilities, abuse disclosure, and of the consequences of legal involvement on child victims, witnesses, and defendants. She has received numerous awards for her work and student training. She is dedicated to pursuing rigorous science on crucial topics relevant to identifying and intervening on behalf of victimized children, and to disseminating findings to law enforcement, legal and medical professionals, educators, and social service professionals in the U.S. and abroad. Most recently, with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis Center, she has been focused on improving legal interventions for adolescent victims of abuse and commercial sexual exploitation.

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 278, Identifying and Interacting with Minor Victims of Human Trafficking, with Dr. Jodi Quas.

Production Credits [00:00:13] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave [00:00:33] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:39] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:41] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, we’ve had so many conversations over the years of thinking about children and the unfortunate connection with trafficking and there’s so many things for us to learn and I’m thrilled today to be able to welcome back a guest. Absolutely an expert in so many of these areas and it’s going to help us to really think about identification and interacting with victims. I’m so pleased to welcome back to the show, Jodi Quas. She is professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine. Her work is recognized across the globe for advancing knowledge of children’s eyewitness capabilities, abuse disclosure, and of the consequences of legal involvement on child victims, witnesses, and defendants. She has received numerous awards for her work and student training. She’s dedicated to pursuing rigorous science on crucial topics relevant to identifying and intervening on behalf of victimized children and disseminating findings to law enforcement, legal, and medical professionals, educators and social service professionals in the U.S. and abroad. Most recently, with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis Center, she has been focused on improving legal interventions for adolescent victims of abuse and commercial sexual exploitation. Jodi, what a pleasure to have you back on the show. Thanks for being with us again.

Jodi [00:02:08] Oh, thank you so much for the invitation. It’s great to be here.

Sandie [00:02:12] So Jodi, I’m always a little bit in awe when I look at Research Gate or someplace else where all of your work is hosted online. People can go on and read amazing articles that you’ve written that really inform our understanding from an evidence-based perspective. And so I’m really excited about our conversation today as I want to find out what you’ve been up to lately and especially some new tools.

Jodi [00:02:49] Absolutely. So what we’ve been really thinking very deeply about in studying for the past several years concerns interviewing and identifying victims who are adolescent aged. Over the past several decades, we’ve–we being science and practice–have really done a great job developing tools and questioning approaches to elicit accurate disclosures from children. And yet, adolescence is also a really important time period. Adolescents are actually the second most likely age group to be victims of violent crime. And when you think about a crime like commercial exploitation, what you then see is you see that most victims begin exploitation and are also first identified by the legal system when they’re adolescent age. So we really pivoted several years ago to begin to really try to test methods of questioning adolescent victims, both victims of crime in general, most often exposure to different forms of violence, but also commercial exploitation specifically.

Sandie [00:04:02] So when you’re thinking about this, I know when I first met you, you were just so informed and I’ve learned so much about talking to kids who had been victims of child sexual abuse. And as we entered into this decade, really, of focusing on children and adolescents who have been victims of commercial sexual exploitation, this is a different approach. So what are some of the challenges to investigating that kind of intervention?

Jodi [00:04:45] We kind of think of the challenges in two domains. One is just the challenge of adolescence. Anyone who has raised an adolescent or who works with adolescents knows that they, you know, you can’t treat them like children. They want to be autonomous. They want to have some responsibility. They they want to feel in control and as sort of a valued contributor in a way that children don’t. So one of the challenges when you question adolescents is just recognizing and sort of supporting and validating those normative developmental trends. And so you can’t tell them what to do. You really need to make sure that they understand that they have some control in the interview process.

Sandie [00:05:32] How do you do that? How do you make them feel like they have control?

Jodi [00:05:36] One of the strategies is really, and this sounds the sounds so simple, is to let them guide the conversation. And so we always tell people pause, pause and listen. And that’s not a strategy specific to the exploited adolescents. That’s all adolescence. If you’d like to get them to talk to you more, let them guide the conversation and pause, listen to what they say and ask them about those topics. So that’s really what we’ve it’s a simple strategy. There are lots of other ones that we’ve been testing in kind of in different types of experiments. But one of the ways is just give them a little bit of control because developmentally that’s what they want.

Sandie [00:06:19] Okay. So when you’re actually looking at disclosure because in an investigation that’s going to result in an actual criminal charge, we’re looking for testimony, right?

Jodi [00:06:38] Yes. Yes.

Sandie [00:06:40] So what changes there?

Jodi [00:06:43] Well, that brings to the second point where when you’re interviewing a suspected minor victim of exploitation or trafficking is what you really want to do is you want to your goal, at least your goal as an investigator, is to obtain some information that’s relevant to that investigation that can help you pinpoint whether the actual victimization is occurring, whether there is a perpetrator or a trafficker controlling the victims, or perhaps whether the victim’s engaged in some type of exploitation, such as survival sex, just to survive on the street. And so what we’ve been really kind of trying to talk to with our investigators is, number one, find out what they do because we can’t recommend anything until we know what they’re doing and what they think.

Sandie [00:07:31] So let’s talk about for a second who they are. So who are they?

Jodi [00:07:37] So we’ve been talking to law enforcement, forensic interviewers at both the kind of local kind of within different counties, but also even at the federal level. And so we’ve been doing some surveys nationwide of these different groups of professionals and finding out how do you question suspected victims of trafficking? What do you think works? And then we can come in and we can say, well, based on our research, here’s what also might work or might complement what you’re already doing.

Sandie [00:08:10] And some of these folks were health care providers and even school psychologists. So it’s a pretty robust community.

Jodi [00:08:21] Yes. Yes. One of the really unique kind of characteristics of minor trafficking victims is that unlike other forms of sexual abuse where victims own disclosures oftentimes lead to an investigation, trafficking victims tend to be identified only by others, so they’re not particularly forthcoming. So school psychologist and school counselors might be a really valuable set of professionals who encounter these victims potentially on a semi-regular basis. In addition, turning to health care, there are surveys that suggest that about 80-90% of victims, while being trafficked, encounter some type of medical or health care professionals, be it a first responder like an EMT or EMS, emergency medical service, like someone in an ambulance or firefighters or perhaps at a community health clinic or even in an emergency department. And so those professionals are really in a unique position to be able to identify victims, but only if they know how to ask questions, only if they really understand adolescent development needs, only if they really understand the kind of potential invasiveness of trafficking victims and the difficulties they have trusting authorities.

Sandie [00:09:46] So I’ve talked to you know, I’m a pediatric nurse in my background and so I’ve talked to people who feel like they’ve done due diligence. They are that first responder and they said, well, I asked, are you being sex trafficked? And it was like and they said, no. It’s like, well, of course they said no. And you and I have talked about this in the past. And one word you used that just lit up all the nodes in my brain, this sassiness and how they respond. Can you explain that from a developmental perspective?

Jodi [00:10:28] You know, you can explain it from both a developmental perspective, their adolescence, but also a kind of trauma history perspective. And these are youth who many of whom who have been immersed in different systems. They might have been in the foster care system. They might have been in the delinquency courts. They might have had multiple run ins with law enforcement. These victims don’t discriminate among different professionals. To them, social services, law enforcement, judges, they’re all a part of a system that has not responded to their needs. And so why would they trust yet another professional asking them a question? They may not see it as there any long term value. They may or may not recognize that they’re being victimized. They may see it as they have some needs and these needs are being met with this person helping this particular trafficker. And so one of the crucial kind of ways that professionals need to approach these victims is by asking general questions. Tell me about what you’re doing. Tell me about your needs. Tell me about how you’ve been covering these needs rather than just the straightforward yes or no question, are you trafficked?

Sandie [00:11:51] Okay. So this is really different than sexual abuse and the expectations because, you know, I’ve talked to SANE nurses and the sexual abuse nurse examiner thinking about those kinds of screening tools and surveys that they do. How can we begin to shift that to accommodate this new understanding?

Jodi [00:12:21] You know I think that’s a really important but also difficult question to answer. But I do think there needs to be a shift because as I mentioned, most sex abuse cases are identified because victims disclose to someone, victims tell someone. And one of the number one kind of predictors of maintaining a disclosure of talking in a forensic interview is prior disclosure. And so when you look at sex abuse victims, they sort of are much more likely to be cooperative because they’ve already told and trafficking victims aren’t; they didn’t necessarily disclose. In some ways, they might be more similar to domestic violence victims who have sort of experienced these kind of repeated assaults, but don’t either feel like they have no way out or they’re afraid to tell because of all the other consequences that may occur. And so we need to really think about what measures might need to be in place to sort of provide victims with really a safe space before expecting them to tell.

Sandie [00:13:29] Wow. That seems to me because you’ve been talking about trust here in this, that that’s going to take longer than a 15 minute debrief when they’re brought in.

Jodi [00:13:41] Mm hmm. Absolutely. I think that’s also a real challenge for law enforcement. And the forensic kind of interviewing side is that it may just be that it’s going to take longer for these victims to tell. And so it may, we may have to even shift sort of our expectations that may be a first interview isn’t about the legal intervention. Maybe a first interview was about establishing a relationship, making sure victims feel safe, and then kind of gathering a small amount of information, but making sure that there’s that build up of trust so that once the victim feels safe, the victim can disclose.

Sandie [00:14:25] Can you give us a little insight on some interaction recommendations?

Jodi [00:14:34] You know, I can. So, number one, one of the things that even with adolescent age trafficking victims, even if they are sassy or evasive, one of the things that we are recommending is that rapport building at the beginning in an honest way is really crucial. And so you can think of rapport building as, you know, establishing some type of common ground, explaining the purpose.

Sandie [00:15:05] I’ve never heard anybody say in an honest way about that. Do you feel like we kind of have maybe, we I’m saying but those of us in this community, have our patterns that might be designed to get the response, so maybe a little manipulative? Or what what prompts the honest?

Jodi [00:15:27] I guess one of the things that prompts the honesty and this is a it’s an interesting thing to say, but when you encounter a potential victims, you can’t make promises that you can’t keep. So coming from the child witness field, interviewers are actually very good about not promising, saying you won’t ever have to see him again or everything will be okay. You can’t promise that because you don’t know. And I think the same thing with adolescent victims, particularly those who have been in this trafficking world and who have really seen an incredible array of really challenging, incredibly hard events. And they’ve been exposed to such significant trauma histories. You can’t tell them everything will be okay and we’re going to protect you and he’ll never be around again or he’s going to jail. And so you need to I think you need to approach it with an honest way and explain to the victims exactly what’s going on.

Sandie [00:16:28] You know, I think they’re going to trust you more because they’ve, especially so many that have already been air quotes “in the system,” they have expectations. They know what we’re going to ask and they’re prepared to avoid and circumvent any of our goals if it doesn’t feel like it supports their goals.

Jodi [00:16:56] Absolutely. And oftentimes, their goals are very proximal or they’re very kind of, you know, just immediate. Their goals might be immediate shelter, immediate food or other kind of, you know, maybe clothing. Maybe it’s to get their hair done, their nails done. And so they’re not potentially thinking about their needs over the next five, ten years. They’re really thinking about their immediate needs. And those needs are going to take precedent over an interviewer’s need to get information.

Sandie [00:17:26] So, how do you then move into encouraging disclosures? Because we need those.

Jodi [00:17:35] You know, we do. Actually, it’s interesting. We want disclosures and in child sex abuse disclosures are absolutely crucial because there’s oftentimes no other external evidence of abuse. But again, as you said earlier, trafficking is really a different beast. We kind of what we’re trying to do is to really get interviewers and law enforcement maybe to think a little differently about the type of information they need. Because maybe, and this is kind of a maybe because this is where evidence-based kind of data collection becomes crucial is, maybe disclosures aren’t as important in cases where there’s other forms of evidence. And so in trafficking and commercial exploitation, there might be posts to online videos, there might be text messages back and forth. And so instead of focusing exclusively on a victim’s disclosure per se, it may also be valuable to obtain some of information about these other potential sources of evidence.

Sandie [00:18:41] So give me some examples.

Jodi [00:18:44] So, for example, what we might not need is we might not need a victim to disclose whether or not the trafficker is the one in charge. We might not need her, I’m going to use her even though, you know, all genders can can be exploited. We might not need details on her experiences of control by a trafficker, because what we might be able to get is we might be able to get the Web postings, possibly from Facebook or from some other source where he is controlling the Facebook, he’s controlling the prices, he’s controlling what goes onto the Web. So if you could get access to the Facebook posts, you may not need as much detail from the victim.

Sandie [00:19:28] Okay. That’s very helpful. It kind of reminds me of a case many years ago when I was part of the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force and one of the corroborating evidence points were the candy wrappers in her pocket when someone asked when was the last time you ate? And they were from a specific hotel. So that contributed to building the case.

Jodi [00:19:56] Yes. And that’s a great example. You could ask victims tell me about the hotel, tell me about when you were there. And you’re not necessarily asking about sexual activity. You’re not asking about control. What you’re doing is you’re establishing a timeline and you’re establishing this control of food indirectly, which puts less pressure on the victims to disclose. And so that may also help kind of build that relationship because there’s not the kind of the more direct of questioning specifically about the crime.

Sandie [00:20:29] Okay. So then when you’re working with people in these roles and your specialty is forensic interviewing and it’s not high pressure, how do you begin to help the professionals adapt to their expectations for the long haul instead of short sighted expectations?

Jodi [00:20:58] Well, you know, learning about best practices is really different than getting people to implement best practices.

Sandie [00:21:05] Okay, okay.

Jodi [00:21:08] You know, and I think we’re with the help of I think really kind of generous and helpful colleagues and, you know, from law enforcement, social services both here in Orange County, but also abroad in other counties and states, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of really beginning to narrow down what we think are going to be the most effective ways of questioning victims. They might not always work, but we know that if they might, you know, that these are looking like the best. What we’re now really focused on trying to do is well how do we take that and package that in a way that will get us to begin to train different groups of professionals to actually use this? And that’s a trickier question. We are working with the Criminal and Investigative Network Analysis Group, which is also called CINA. It’s a center actually at George Mason University funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and they’re working with us to develop fact sheets to try to get information just even in brief formats out to professionals, particularly the professionals who encounter and have to kind of collect this information initially from victims. So we’re working with them to get a fact sheet out. We do, you know, I do podcasts like this. And what we’re trying to do now is to really talk to some of the individuals who are doing some of the law enforcement training, who are doing some of the forensic interviewing training as to try to get them to begin to practice and think about these different strategies.

Sandie [00:22:46] Okay. So that brings up a really interesting question because there are a number of nonprofits that offer training to law enforcement. And I’m curious how there might be a way for integrating more of the identifying and interacting recommendations for them. Will they be able to access those fact sheets?

Jodi [00:23:19] So number one, absolutely. The idea of these fact shetts is certainly not to make them exclusive. And I think you’re and my goals are always the same. It’s let’s get information out there to as many people as possible: professionals, the public, policymakers. And so we always want to make our information as widely accessible as possible. And so that’s sort of one I think one thing is just you make everything accessible because all of our goals are ultimately the same. It’s we want to intervene, protect, and possibly even prevent victimization from occurring. Second, though, what I do sometimes struggle with is when you have so many people doing different trainings and where I really want to make sure is I want to make sure all the different organizations doing the trainings are actually doing the trainings from an evidence-based perspective. This has been an ongoing challenge in the child witness field where you have sometimes you have nonprofits or private organizations doing forensic interviewing training, but the training is not based on best practices. And so I think it’s great when nonprofits and even for profit organizations are doing the training. I just always want to make sure that their training and best practices.

Sandie [00:24:40] So what would your recommendation be to a nonprofit leader that’s doing law enforcement training? Where would they start to beef up their best practice approach, evidence-based approach?

Jodi [00:24:57] You know, what I would say to all nonprofits is I would say partner with professors at universities. And it’s not that all the professors that are doing exactly the work, but if you formed these partnerships and I’ve been a huge advocate, it’s really in these partnerships that, number one, you can be checking to make sure your the information you’re providing is best practice. But there’s really another advantage. And what you can do is you can be educating kind of the professors in the universities, the ones doing the research, the ones kind of collecting the data. You can actually inform their work in really enormously beneficial ways because oftentimes the scientists are doing the work, but they don’t really have a good understanding of what’s happening on a day to day basis in the field. And so I’m a huge fan of those partnerships. You know, this cross communication, and I think that’s really the key to successful both collection of information, but also dissemination or kind of how you getting that information out.

Sandie [00:26:00] You’re singing my song now, collaboration. I love that teachers and health care professionals need to be at this table. I have one more group, though, that I think we are sometimes overlooking because we’re so professional, and that might be parents and caregivers. It might be a grandparent or an aunt and uncle. How can we make this easy to access for parents that need to learn how to communicate and connect with a very reluctant and to use your description, sassy adolescent.

Jodi [00:26:48] Boy, that’s the million dollar question. And that’s a tougher one. But I think we have to keep trying in different ways. We also have to meet parents where they’re at. You know, back in my early days as a scientist, I always thought, oh, you know, you meet people half way. They give a little, you give a little. But I think now that I’m older and I’m a parent, I think you really need to meet parents where they’re at. So if parents are struggling to get by, just barely getting through a couple of papers from their child’s school, I think you just put a little bit of information in that. If parents are on Tik-Tok or they’re trying to kind of scan through social media, you get to parents like that and you give them small amounts of information, you give them tools, you give them cues to look for risk, not necessarily trafficking, because I think that’s probably an overwhelming idea to throw out there. But I think risk is risk. And if you can identify vulnerabilities in youth, you can begin to build on parents kind of knowledge to recognize different types of vulnerabilities. But I think you really have to meet parents where they’re at.

Sandie [00:27:58] I love that, a little bit at a time. That’s really wise. Okay. For our listeners, how were they going to be able to access fact sheets?

Jodi [00:28:10] So the fact sheet, what we’re hoping to do is, is we’re hoping to have that fact sheet up. I do have a lab website. If you go to Jody Quas at UC Irvine, there’s a link to my lab’s website, which is the ACEs Lab. It’s the Adolescent and Childhood Experiences Lab. We have links to different forensic interviewing protocols, different studies that we’re doing. If you want to get involved, we have links to some of the other materials that have been generated, not even by me, but just by different leaders in the field. Over time, the fact sheet will also be up on our website, but we’re also hoping that it’ll be up on the George Mason University CINA website, which is C-I-N-A. And so they have to because it’s funded by them and via Homeland Security, they all have to approve it, but hopefully it’ll be on all of these websites. Our contact information is on there and that people can always reach out and I can send them information directly as well.

Sandie [00:29:11] Jodi, we will put all these links up in our show notes so people can access them. You are a reservoir of resources and I especially want to encourage nonprofits that depend on the Ending Human Trafficking podcast to stay up to date, to spend a little extra time investigating your resources because our kids are depending on it. Thank you so much for coming back. And, you know, of course, that we’ll have to have another conversation.

Jodi [00:29:45] Oh, absolutely. And thank you for inviting me. And by all means to you, to Dave and everyone, feel free to reach out. I am always happy to be a resource or to connect you with others who might be appropriate resources. So please do invite me back and please always keep me in mind if I can help.

Sandie [00:30:05] Thank you, Jodi.

Dave [00:30:07] Thank you both for this conversation. We’re inviting you to take the first step now. Go online and download a copy of Sandie’s guide, The Five Things You Must Know: A Quick Start Guide to Ending Human Trafficking. Sandie will guide you through five critical things that she’s identified in her work that you should know before you join the fight against trafficking. You can get access to it by going over to endinghumantrafficking.org and we as a podcast are building and expanding our community of advocates as well. And there’s an opportunity for you to become a patron of the show. You can get access to exclusive content and join a community of advocates who are working to end human trafficking. Just go over to endinghumantrafficking.org and you’ll see a link for Patreon and you’ll get access to more content such as bonus questions and segments, we’re about to record one with Jodi here in just a moment. Also, exclusive resources and toolkits. It’s a simple and affordable membership. $5 a month gives you access to a number of benefits. Certainly you can give more if you’d like. But go over to endinghumantrafficking.org for more. And if you’re already a patron, thank you so much for your support. We’re just excited to bring so much to you over this next year and to continue to support you through the work here at the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University. And we will be back with our next conversation in two weeks. Thanks as always.

Sandie [00:31:29] Bye, Dave.

Dave [00:31:31] Take care, everyone.

Sandie Morgan is joined by Phefelia Nez, the Navajo Nation First Lady. They discuss new initiatives the Navajo Nation has launched to address human trafficking and missing and murdered indigenous women, as well as how non-tribal entities can partner with tribal nations.

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 277, Navajo Nation Interview, with First Lady Phefelia Nez.

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

Dave [00:00:31] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:36] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:38] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, what an honor we have today to be able to welcome an incredible leader with us who’s gonna really help us to expand our perspective in so many ways and really look at how partnership. Of course, we talk about so much the importance of partnership and being able to work across organizations, governments and of course, most importantly, people. Today, I’m so honored for us to have a first lady Phefelia Nez with us. First Lady Nez was born in Keam County, Arizona, and raised on Hopi Partition Land in Big Mountain, Arizona. She is married to Jonathan Nez and the mother of two children, Christopher and Alexander. She is the daughter of David and Julia Herbert. She grew up in a traditional Hogan without modern amenities and has always spent time outdoors, tending to livestock, the corn and vegetable field. Having ample outdoor space, she enjoyed a childhood of running, hiking and biking. Her favorite hobby growing up was reading and journaling. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in political science with an emphasis in comparative and international politics and criminal justice from Northern Arizona University, as well as a Master of Public Administration at NAU. She is also an alum of ASU Lodestar Center’s Generation Next Nonprofit Leadership Academy. First Lady Nez, what a pleasure to have you with us on the show.

First Lady Nez [00:02:11] Thank you for having me.

Sandie [00:02:12] I feel like I just saw you recently. Oh, I did. I was over there. Your bio is so much more meaningful now to me from just that visit and meeting so many other Navajo leaders like yourself and understanding that your bio represents your background and the traditions that bring so much to building family in the context of the Navajo Nation. So it inspires me and I’m really appreciative that you’re with us today for the podcast.

First Lady Nez [00:02:54] Oh, I was going to say, yes, it’s only been, I think, a little over a week since we’ve seen one another at the Navajo Nation Ensure Justice conference that we had in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Sandie [00:03:05] That was quite an opportunity, and it was very connected to one of the young men who became a student at Vanguard. Matthew Holgate went with us at the Global Center. Except for during COVID, we always do a study abroad. And Matthew was on one of our teams when we went to Argentina and did an Ensure Justice conference in a northern province of Argentina. And on the plane, on our way home, he asked to sit with me for a while and we had a couple other adjunct faculty and he would move around and later we compared notes and we discovered he asked us all the same question: Will you come to Navajo Nation and do an Ensure Justice conference? And through all of COVID, Matthew was diligent and persistent that we bring that conference to his area. And your focus on family really resonated with his goals. And so that theme was to build a resilient child. Can you tell us a little bit more about your focus on building strong families?

First Lady Nez [00:04:35] And so from the office of the First Lady and Second Lady, we chose to have that as a platform. And when we say focus back on the home and the family, that really takes us back to the institution of the household. And just my academic studies and just from some of the work that I’ve done since college and up to now, you know, you look at all the things that come out of Navajo Nation data, like what afflicts homes and families. And we talk a lot about abuse, neglect, substance abuse, drug abuse, and then, of course, the mental health aspects of our people. And so then you start thinking about how many of our children go into foster care and how many of them just grow up and through some very challenging environments. And so when it comes to the criminal justice system just in talking with social services, public safety and some of the other departments that we have, you know, it’s really when we look at prevention and that really goes back down to the childhood of all of us and the type of homes that we grow up in. And so I’ve always looked at it as well, if we don’t ever want our children to end up grown up in environments like that or even ending up in the criminal justice system later on in life, then we really need to restore and kind of strengthen our parenting skills and just the environments of our homes.

Sandie [00:06:12] You’ve been a very vocal advocate for family, and when you began to address the connections, the overlap of the abuse issues and vulnerability to human trafficking, you actually started taking more action on human trafficking. And because of that, the Navajo Nation received a presidential award for extraordinary efforts to combat trafficking in persons. My understanding around prevention is if kids are safe at home and are in a very resilient community, they will have less vulnerability to that. But can you talk just a little bit about that award and what it represents.

First Lady Nez [00:07:08] The human trafficking award that was given to the Navajo Nation back in October of 2020, that was really to acknowledge the council’s passage of the human trafficking legislation. And we’re one of, I don’t know if there’s any other tribe across the United States who has passed legislation against human trafficking. But that’s really what it was for. And so with the Navajo Nation Ensure Justice conference that we did, you know, it’s we’re still at the I guess, at the beginning stages of really educating our communities on what human trafficking is and just bringing more awareness to that. And in another related topic, you know, we talk about missing and murdered indigenous peoples all across the United States of America, and that’s been elevated to the national level. And so there’s when you look at both of those instances in terms of missing persons and then homicides and then you add in human trafficking, there is an overlap. We just don’t know how much of an overlap. And so I’m personally been more involved with the missing and murdered indigenous peoples initiatives and at the state level for New Mexico. And then of course on our own Navajo Nation and working with the in creating a tribal community response plan for missing and unidentified persons.

Sandie [00:08:41] So, I know it’s not completely finalized, but you talked about that response plan last week at the Ensure Justice conference. Can you kind of do a brief overview of your expectations for how that will help?

First Lady Nez [00:08:59] Yeah. So the Tribal Community Response Plan for Missing and Unidentified Persons for Navajo Nation is really looking at assistance level with what we did with the mapping of the entire criminal justice system when it comes to the response to a missing persons case. And so you start at the initial report then to dispatch and how it goes on down the line from there to investigations, how our emergency management responds to it, and in bringing in, you know, listing all the partners who get involved at every step all the way down. And so then there’s always a determination whether that, you know, missing persons is not a crime in itself. But at some point there needs to be determination made whether it is a criminal case or not. And if it is, then it goes over to criminal investigators and for tribal lands or some of the time that also involves the FBI. And so there’s federal agencies who do get involved in the investigation and then the prosecution who will take the case. And then not every case that becomes a federal case, and some of them, they do have declamations. And when those happen, they return back to the Navajo Nation. And then, of course, that goes on down to the sentencing aspects of it. And then the whole other conversation on unidentified persons that revolves around finding human remains, or, you know, all of that, or even people in different institutions who have no identifications on them then trying to find out who they are. So it’s a whole mapping of that. But the TCRP itself consists of the development of four guidelines. There’s law enforcement, which involves all this stuff that I just said about the mapping of the systems and the different agencies involved in it. And then there’s the victims services. That’s the thing you look at who’s providing what type of services all the way down the line. And then the other one would be the media. The media and communications. And the last is the community outreach or community resources guidelines.

Sandie [00:11:15] Fascinating. And when we were at Ensure Justice and the director for Criminal Investigations contributed a little more detail. I was really encouraged by the same word that you just used, partnerships and bringing together partners in our community that are very diverse and it feels like the opportunities for collaboration are growing in this. I have kept the presentation that you did at our Ensure Justice conference here at Vanguard in 2021 when we all had to be just online. And you talked about a lot of the challenges that increase vulnerability. And part of that was historical. Would you outline that a little bit for us?

First Lady Nez [00:12:16] So in terms of historical challenges, I think you’re very for every tribal or indigenous peoples and in any place, I guess, but here in the United States, we would be talking about the loss of lands, the loss of culture, and but the one that had the most impact on us, I think, would be just the loss of children having the opportunity to grow up with their parents, being around them on a day-to-day basis. And I say that because you can have loss of land, but when you separate children from families and that’s what happened when it became when when we went under the boarding school years, there’s children who were separated from their parents and their relatives, their communities for, you know, a school year stretch at a time. And when you do that, they never get to see their parents modeling for them what a parent should, should be and how they should interact and bond with their children. And they never got to see what a home environment and extended family, how all of that built into community. They weren’t exposed to that. And so from tribal perspective, we always say there’s a whole generation lost who experienced that. And then, of course, there’s a lot of things that happened while they were at those institutions. So when they return back home and some and a lot of them, they came back with the loss of language as well. They never got to participate in a lot of the practices and traditional aspects to what family life is supposed to look like in the Navajo native culture. And so when they returned, they had you know, they got married, they had their children. And so just even that one instance of, you know, just that that speaks volumes to why we have a lot of us who grew up with maybe alcoholic people in our families, a lot of incarcerated people. And I always say it’s because we didn’t have either with our parents or grandparents somewhere down the line who never was given that opportunity to educate themselves on what a home life is supposed to be, what a marriage means, and how, you know, how you interact with a spouse and you know the important things when it comes to parenting and just the development of a child. And I think that’s where a lot of that impact was made. And so now we’re trying to turn the tide on that and really put an emphasis back on why it’s so important that we talk to our children about what a marriage is and to model those things for them, and then also to educate ourselves and model it for our children what, you know, positive parenting is all about. And just the importance of having those strong connections at home, where they bond, where they have people who love them, who provide for them and who just encourage and support them.

Sandie [00:15:32] That is something that I saw you demonstrating and modeling as you brought your children with you for lunch. And it was very endearing and encouraging to see in your leadership role that your children are not sidelined, but they’re part of demonstrating that. I really want to talk just for a minute about the boarding schools, because our study team of faculty and students made a tour, a listening tour, a learning tour, and one of our stops was at a closed boarding school. And my friend and colleague, Matthew’s dad, walked us around the grounds where he was taken in first grade and he showed us where when he was inducted into the school. I’m not sure the right terminology to use, but here’s the room where they shaved his head and he had no idea that was going to happen. And here’s the dorms where a six, seven year old is taken from family and now they’re asked not to speak Navajo they need to assimilate and learn English. And when the school day is done, they go back to the auditorium and watch movies in English. There was great sadness in his face and voice as he showed us that physical evidence of his experience. But he wanted us to understand the impact of that and why he has been so supportive of everything his son Matthew has been doing to address the kinds of issues around prevention and human trafficking and just in general. And one of the most interesting presentations at Ensure Justice was Dr. Brenda Navarrete on child resilience. And she included in that integrating cultural resilience and embracing and celebrating culture. And I was very encouraged by all I saw the Navajo Nation, Miss Navajo Nation, Miss Western Navajo Nation and the cultural competitions that were brought into that. And I don’t think my listeners know what happens at a Miss Navajo competition. Could you tell us just a little bit about that?

First Lady Nez [00:18:20] So our Miss Navajo Nation pageant, really the mission for them is really to keep a focus on the retention of Navajo culture and Navajo language and just the teaching of the values that have always been a part of Navajo Society. And so, you know, it’s a week long pageant held every fall and it does start off with butchering. And then they go on to cooking some of our own traditional foods and then they also include a modern and traditional talent portions. And then there’s also an interview portion. But in it all, really, it’s to get, you know, just to really get a sense of how much they know about Navajo traditional culture. And I always say Navajo philosophy as well, because they’re going to be the ambassador for Navajo Nation and those aspects, right. Just to have a vast amount of knowledge and skills just pertaining to Navajo culture and using Navajo language. And then of course, they always say they also come in with their own, you know, they talk just the way they carry themselves, their attitude. And a lot of that is established by Navajo philosophy.

Sandie [00:19:40] They were amazing representatives, ambassadors, as you call them, and were inspiring very much to us. Wow. I have so many more questions. I would like to talk briefly about the role of research. When you presented a couple of years ago here for our conference, you talked about the role of research and the things that we need to do. You had recommendations and supporting data gathering capacity and how do you see those recommendations as we move out of COVID and have more opportunity for collaboration?

First Lady Nez [00:20:28] To the Navajo public, we really encourage our young people and even not just young people, just to all people, to continue to educate themselves in their lifetimes. And a lot of research is done. And that’s another thing that we also encourage. You know, we want our students to come back and to do research for Navajo Nation so we can get a better understanding of what the landscape really looks like. And like, for example, for the TCRP, right, we’re talking about all these things in terms of the criminal justice system and which agencies do what, where along the way. And then, of course, in terms of victim services and everything else on down the line. But it’s the response plan, right. This is like after something has already happened and it seems like a lot of our activities here on Navajo that it focuses on those areas. It’s always about coming in right after something has already occurred and then the treatment services that all of that follow. But when you look at preventing those things you have to get a very good understanding of why are these things happening. And, you know, who are these populations and what is it that sets them up for these type of scenarios to occur? And once we have a very good understanding of that, then you can build a very good prevention strategy around that. But I always say, you know, we don’t have that peace right now. And that was the same thing with the missing and murdered indigenous peoples initiatives. We don’t understand fully who goes missing and why do they go missing and what is it that needs to be done to really prevent or reduce those numbers? And so that’s where research comes in. And then the other aspect would be, you know, you brought it and you’re talking about resilience. How do you build resilient families or communities or tribes? And that’s another I mean, just understanding some of these things in terms of tribal peoples, it would add a lot to building better prevention systems, intervention systems, and then maybe we’ll finally truly focus on just strengthening families instead of waiting till something happens and then putting all these resources and efforts into the response and treatments of, you know, after something has occurred.

Sandie [00:23:00] Everybody knows prevention is my favorite language. What do you want the larger anti-human trafficking community to know so that they can be part of the solution? How can they best be part of that?

First Lady Nez [00:23:18] You know, just working with Jaycee family programs and their suicide prevention projects, you know, in their studies, they’ve found that for indigenous peoples and the problem is for everyone, you know, children who have a sense of safety, who have a sense of identity, who have a sense of connection, and who have a sense of purpose they’re the ones that will be, you know, that we won’t see ever getting involved in a lot of things. And then I always add in for communities and tribes, if we can tell everybody how important it is to pursue higher education, to have permanent housing, always have housing for your household and to always have employment. I mean, just covering those three things really, I think eliminates being in the vulnerable group that gets themselves caught up in a lot of different things for their children and then, of course, for the adults, too.

Sandie [00:24:18] When you talk about secure housing, one of the places we visited, there was no running water. And actually, it’s Mathew’s grandmother. She welcomed us and she was feeding the horses and preparing for a celebration the next day. So she had just butchered one of the sheep. And we got to see firsthand the things that you’ve been talking about from in celebrating Navajo culture. And she wanted to make sure that we understood the meaning of some of the traditions like basket weaving and the importance of using everything from the sheep, the wool making rugs. It was inspiring to me, and I’m sure that that kind of celebration is an important piece of the resilience for families that you’re talking about. But I didn’t think it was okay that his 74-year-old grandma has to drive a truck to get the water to bring back to water to provide water for her horses and sheep. So I’m hoping that that’s a direction that partners in this can begin to address.

First Lady Nez [00:25:42] Yes. There’s a lot of our families don’t have running water under Navajo Nation. And just in terms of infrastructure, you could say that, too. I mean, not every it’s something that and as vast as the Navajo Nation is, those are still pieces that are getting worked on. And it’s going to be you know, it’s going to take a lot to get water to every single home. And then even in just the housing, you know, it’s a lot of our families don’t have permanent housing. And some of them are you know, as we learn from the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of our homes are multi-family households and so there’s probably two or three generations living in one household. And so all of those type of things, they do come into play. And then, of course, just having access to electricity, to even the Internet itself, you know, all of those things have to be they are needed. And right now I’d say probably the majority of households on the Navajo Nation don’t have access to them.

Sandie [00:26:53] So as a university professor and I talked to other university professors, a friend of mine said that if you live near a university, engage them in this conversation. And even if this hasn’t been part of their work in the past, when we invite them into this conversation, I think that they’ll be able to help with some of the recommendations that you’ve made in especially data gathering, because data driven decision making is going to be helpful in these three areas that you’ve outlined for us. Do you have any last remarks that you want to point us in the right direction.

First Lady Nez [00:27:41] I think one of the most important things to remember when it comes to working with tribal entities is just that whole notion of sovereignty, because as tribal nations, there’s always that. And for Navajo Nation in terms of research, and then we have our own human research and review board who, you know, you go through their entire system and then get approval from them. And the retention of data for the tribes is something I think every tribe really stands on. And so when we’re talking about research being done by universities, a lot of times we advocate for this everything to go through our own human research and review board. And then for the retention of those data by the tribes, by the tribes themselves. So that’s something to keep in mind. And then the other part is when we’re talking about an infrastructure like housing, like roads, like any type of electrical or water lines, any of that, we have to always end up talking about land status and what it means for Navajo, for our huge portion of our lands would be trust land. And, you know, my husband always equates that to trying to build something in a national park. And it’s like all those things that have to come into play. It’s not a quick fix, like as if you were on a state feel and somewhere else in any other part of the state. But just to keep things like that in mind and then just to always remember to consider those aspects to the cultural aspects to anything. That’s another portion that for the TCRP we have to that’s an added piece that will be in every one of the guidelines that we develop. And so those are probably the most important pieces to always think about when it comes to research and then developing recommendations or new guidelines or new protocols or processes. And so it’s a lot of education, both ways as to the external partners and then the same the other way around to learning from the external partners on some of the best practices and everything else that has come out of research done on non-tribal peoples.

Sandie [00:30:10] Wow. Okay. So I still feel like I’ve just dipped my toe in this and I have so much to learn. Any links that you want to share? We’re going to post them in the show notes. We’ll also put a link to the recordings from the Ensure Justice Navajo Nation conference that we just were able to partner with Matthew to do right there in Flagstaff. I just want to thank you so much for being such a transparent and generous hostess as we began to learn. And there’s so much we don’t know. When I first met you, I had no idea what it meant. And I’m so glad you just mentioned it, what it meant to say a sovereign nation. And so I want people that are listening. I’ve had people ask us what they can do to get involved. But I think listening and learning and doing your research first, you know how we always say study the issues, be a voice, make a difference, study first and then begin advocacy and action. Thank you so much, First Lady Nez, for joining us again here. And we hope to see you in person in March. You’re always welcome to come to Vanguard if Covid let’s us.

First Lady Nez [00:31:43] Yeah. I hope I get to go out there. March 2023, that’s almost a year away. I have to make it out there.

Sandie [00:31:51] All right. And you tell President Nez he’s welcome to come with you.

First Lady Nez [00:31:56] Okay, I’ll let him know.

Sandie [00:31:58] All right. Thank you, guys.

First Lady Nez [00:32:01] Thanks Dr. Morgan.

Dave [00:32:02] Thank you both so much for this conversation. We’re inviting you to take the first step as well. If you have a moment. If you go online, you can download a copy of Sandie’s Guide, The Five Things You Must Know: A Quick Start Guide to Ending Human Trafficking. It’ll teach you the five critical things Sandie’s identified in her work here at the Global Center for Women and Justice that you should know before you join the fight against trafficking. You can get access to that also all of the notes from today’s episode and links at endinghumantrafficking.org. We’re also inviting you if you’d like to become a patron through Patreon, you have access then to exclusive content and will join a community of advocates around the world who are fighting human trafficking in their own communities. How does it work? Just go over to Endinghumantrafficking.org. Click on the Patreon link at the very top and you’ll see all the information for getting bonus questions and segments and exclusive resources. That’s a simple and affordable way to support the show and the work at the Global Center for Women in Justice. You can just go over to endinghumantrafficking.org and if you’re already a patron, thank you so much for your support as always. We will be back in two weeks with more details. And also the as first lady Nez mentioned, the 2023 Ensure Justice conference details will be in the links as well as we begin preparations for that next year. Sandie, always a pleasure to be with you and I’ll see you again in two weeks.

Sandie [00:33:29] Thanks.

Dave [00:33:30] Thanks, everybody.

Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak discuss how to navigate being a leader and making change during and post COVID. Dave gives tips on balancing leadership roles, how to grow as a leader, and early foundational tips for starting a nonprofit.

Dave is the host and founder of Coaching for Leaders, a top-rated management podcast downloaded 25 million times. With more than 15 years of leadership at Dale Carnegie and a thriving, global leadership academy, he helps leaders discover practical wisdom, build meaningful relationships, and create movement for genuine results. Dave is also founder of the Coaching for Leaders Academy, a year-long leadership development cohort. His credentials include a doctoral degree in organizational leadership from Pepperdine University, several international business leadership awards from Dale Carnegie, and graduation from Coach U. He also serves on the board of the Global Center for Women & Justice at Vanguard University and co-hosts the Ending Human Trafficking podcast with longtime friend, Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 276, Nonprofit Leadership with Coaching for Leaders host, Dave Stachowiak. Hey, that’s me.

Production Credits [00:00:12] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave [00:00:31] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:37] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:39] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, every two weeks we get together, we have a fabulous guest on who’s an expert in some area to help us. Today you just have outdone yourself with the guest you have found. I am so impressed.

Sandie [00:00:57] Oh, my goodness, Dave, I’m so excited to tell everybody that my guest is Dave Stachowiak. Yay. And let me just do, be a little bit formal here. His bio: Dave is the host and founder of Coaching for Leaders, a top rated management podcast downloaded 25 million times with more than 15 years of leadership at Dale Carnegie and a thriving Global Leadership Academy, he helps leaders discover practical wisdom, build meaningful relationships, and create movement for genuine results. Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast, Dave.

Dave [00:01:44] What a pleasure to be here. I feel like I’ve been here before somehow.

Sandie [00:01:49] Well, you’re the founder of the Coaching for Leaders Academy as well, and you have been developing leadership cohorts. You pull together groups of managers, executives, business owners and work with them personally. You’ve invited me to meet some of them and they’ve brainstormed and asked me questions. But ultimately you help them develop their leadership excellence and empower them and building relationships. And while you have an impressive pedigree of credentials–a doctoral degree in organizational leadership from Pepperdine and lots of leadership awards–my favorite thing about you is that you serve on the board of the Global Center for Women and Justice and co-host the Ending Human Trafficking podcast with me. And I suddenly realized just a week or so ago when I was talking to some of my colleagues, we’re all nonprofit leaders. We’re all struggling in the process of emerging from COVID. And this is the time when we need to make change. We aren’t really sure how to make change, but we’re probably going to be more willing to change right now than any other time in the recent past or distant future. So I thought, I need to ask Dave to do an interview because I always refer people to the Coaching for Leaders podcast. But our community really needs some support and skill in managing leadership from a nonprofit perspective. So thank you for saying yes.

Dave [00:03:48] Well, I am honored, of course. It has been such a pleasure to co-host the show with you for the last 11 years and to serve on the board and to learn so much about I’m trying to even capture how much I’ve learned about you, or from you rather about nonprofit work and the service you have done and you continue to do through the Global Center. There’s so much. And all the guests we’ve had on the show have been such wonderful teachers for me in so many ways. And so I was sharing with you before we started recording, I’m not an expert on nonprofit leadership at all. Much of what I’ve learned in the nonprofit world is actually from you and from the guests on our show. And yet there are some core elements of leadership and management that I do think broadly are true for all leaders across all organizations. And then I think there’s some things that are especially true in the work so many of us are are trying to do, which is to end human trafficking, the title of the show. And so I’m really honored to be part of this conversation. Thank you for the invitation.

Sandie [00:04:51] Well, you are very welcome. And let’s dive right in, because some of the biggest challenges right now for leaders in nonprofit anti-human trafficking work are around wearing more than one hat. So, for instance, I’m the director of the Global Center for Women and Justice. I also wear the development hat and negotiating that sustainable fundraising for keeping the big ship afloat at the same time overseeing all of our programs and our initiatives. I sometimes really struggle with balance.

Dave [00:05:35] Yeah, indeed. And I think there’s two big things that come to mind for me, Sandie, when I think about having a role like you do. One is the what’s always true. And then one is, the second thing is, what’s true right now. And the thing that’s always true and will continue to be true is needing to wear so many different hats. If you are a nonprofit leader, and especially if you have a title like CEO or executive director or president or whatever, the top role is within the organization. Because often that person is asked to do a lot for the organization that the organization needs. And like so many nonprofits, there are limited resources, there’s limited funding, there’s limited staff, and yet there is not limited things to do that the organization needs. And there’s two things that I think are really, really critical for every leader and a third that also is probably uniquely true for nonprofit leaders. And the two things I think are true for every leader is the ability to lead with a vision and to handle change well and to decide where the organization’s going. That’s what leadership really is. When I think of the distinction between leadership and management, leadership is answering the question of change and the world is always changing around us. This what’s happening with this issue is always changing. A good leader, an effective leader needs to be able to answer that question of where are we going, what are we changing, and how are we inspiring people to go in the direction that we need to go? And then the second piece of that is the management piece. In any organization of any size, there’s complexity and management answers the question of complexity. Who is doing this work? What does this role entail? What are the metrics, the quality metrics we’re trying to hit? What is the deadline we are working to? What is the operating budget we need to work within? Those are operational management questions that need to be answered on a pretty daily basis in almost every organization. And the thing is, is those two things are, I think, really different, Sandie, that on one hand, you are thinking big and you’re thinking about change and inspiring people. On another hand, you’re thinking about how do I work within today’s budget and the operational things?

Sandie [00:08:00] And it feels like you were watching me at my desk yesterday because I come back from a visionary conference in Texas last week with leaders from across the nation. And I’m sitting down working on the day-to-day budget to make sure that I can fund the next activity. When you say complexity, I think there are things that I didn’t know I needed to manage that I should be managing. And what do you think, and you know me pretty well, some of those complexities that are just not on my radar? I think I have friends in the nonprofit anti-human trafficking space that we are missing a few things that might make our journey a little more stable. How would we learn what to do in that management role?

Dave [00:08:56] Yeah, it’s a hard one, Sandie. And this is where I think nonprofit leaders are probably at a little bit of a disadvantage because this is the kind of thing that I think if you’ve worked in the for profit world or you’ve worked in a large institution before and you have that experience, you have picked up some of this along the way, especially if you’ve had a title like manager or director or executive or whatever the title was at the time. And you’ve probably picked up some skills in how to give feedback, and how to run a meeting, and how to outline a person’s role, and how to navigate difficult conversations when they come up. But if you’ve never had that experience, if you founded an organization and started to build a nonprofit and you haven’t had that prior management experience, I think that’s really that’s a big hurdle for a lot of and it’s a big hurdle for managers who have a lot of support around them in training for that. I think it’s perhaps a bigger hurdle for some nonprofit leaders who haven’t had that exposure. And I think it’s this is where community and partnership is really, really helpful. So one example of that, Sandie, is I, you know, in my work in hosting a podcast and running an online business, which is essentially what we are today, there are not a lot of people prior to me doing that that were in my network that were doing that kind of a thing, because this is a relatively new thing in the world that, you know, someone hosts a podcast and has an online business like that wasn’t something people did 20 years ago. This is this is all new. And so I took it upon myself early on to reach out to other people who were doing the kind of work I was doing. Other people hosting podcasts. Other people who were running businesses that were mostly or entirely online and starting to build relationships and having conversations with them. In fact, I meet every month with a group of other folks who run podcasts in the careers leadership management space, and we support each other and we challenge each other and we ask each other’s questions and we help each other to see some of the blind spots that we wouldn’t see otherwise. And I think that that’s a really useful thing to do if you haven’t had a lot of that experience before. And I think the other helpful thing to do, Sandie, to get back to your point of like, you know, sitting down like, okay, I get to figure out the next thing operationally is it’s really helpful to be conscious of what hat you’re wearing at any given time. So that today might be a leadership day for me. I am spending time thinking about the future I’m planning. I’m maybe reaching out to other organizations. I’m thinking about the big picture. And tomorrow, or maybe this next meeting is a manager. I need to put my management hat on and get really down into the details of what are we doing operationally in a specific project that we’re working on. And I think for most of us, I know I put I change hats almost multiple times a day, it seems like. And I think that’s true for most leaders in most organizations that, you know, if you if you work for a really large enterprise and there’s tons of management layers, I mean, you might do more of one than the other fairly regularly. But I think for most nonprofits, especially in most small to medium size businesses, I think many of us are wearing those different hats pretty regularly. And this brings me to my third point, which is I think there’s another piece of this in the nonprofit world that’s a little different than working in a for profit organization is that you constantly have to have an eye to fundraising and development work that I think a lot of traditional managers in the for profit world don’t always have, unless that’s literally their role within the organization if their chief revenue officer or whatever. I don’t think they have to think about quite as often, and I think that this is surprising to a lot of nonprofit leaders who get in a role like executive director or president, and they realize very quickly how important that is as a nonprofit leader to either spend time and resources to be good at that yourself or to partner with someone else within the organization, to delegate some of that work, to have a strong second person who’s really able to take the lead on many of those development types of activities inside the organization. Those are three big things that I think are always true for nonprofit leaders. And then there’s a what’s true right now and I was at the dentist this morning, Sandie, and I have been wearing a night guard in my mouth for something like 20 years because I grind my teeth at night; it’s just a genetic thing. And so my dentist years ago said, you know, you need to start wearing a night guard because you’re just going to grind out, you know, fillings and you’re you’re going to damage your teeth. And I went in today because I had to have mine redone and we got to talking about it. And he said, you know, I think everyone should wear a night guard. It’s like good for your teeth. But he was telling me I don’t normally recommend it to people because I don’t want people to feel like I’m just trying to sell them something. So I wait to see, you know, if there’s an indicator where they really need it. But he said the most interesting thing has happened in these last two years. Two years ago, I would do one of these night guards a month. He says, now, after COVID, I’m doing one a day. And he said, the difference is the stress. It’s all the normal things that we all deal with in life. And now it is COVID, it is all the things that are happening in the news, all the stress of the pandemic. And he said, I’m seeing so many more people that are carrying so much more stress and I’m seeing physically how thats showing up just in our numbers as far as like what we’re doing here in the office of taking care of people’s health. And I think that’s a real present and cautionary thing for all of us to be mindful of, of that in many places and many organizations, we are under a tremendous amount of stress right now because of what has happened in the last two years and because of burnout and because of anxiety that so many of us are dealing with ourselves, but we’re seeing a lot in our organizations. And I think it’s just a really hard time to lead any size organization. And that all goes into this as well too.

Sandie [00:15:08] So that, I love that. Always and right now. And the right now for me is I learned some great skills for leading the Global Center for Women and Justice. And I’m using the same patterns, the same activities, and not getting the same results. And every time the feedback in real time comes to me I realize I have to adjust my expectations and change what I define as success. And I started watching my colleagues. And I think one of our biggest risks right now is discouragement.

Dave [00:15:52] Yes.

Sandie [00:15:53] Because we are not seeing the same responses to what we did really well and we’re recognized for. The fundraising piece hasn’t changed. It’s the same always and right now. And I’ve tried to find ways to, you know, give that hat to somebody else. But there seems to be a really organic link for a nonprofit leader with that fundraising piece. And I find that when it becomes mechanical and it’s just something somebody does this and they send out this many letters or whatever, the results are widely varied. But when I’m doing it, I’m like planting seeds for the next harvest, so to speak. And I’m very intentional about going towards relationships long term, not the short term, and I don’t know how to delegate that.

Dave [00:17:02] Yeah, and I’m so glad you mention this, because I think it’s really helpful in a larger nonprofit, large organization to have someone who’s dedicated to do this. You can delegate some of this work too. But to your point, if you’re the executive director of a nonprofit, this is still a big part of your job. It doesn’t matter how big your team is, how talented the people are, I think it’s essential that you are the person who is able to be the spokesperson who’s developing the relationships, because even if there’s other people with that skill on your team, and I think in many organizations that’s ideal if you can do that. The way the world works as folks expect the number one person to be an advocate for their organization and they expect to have that relationship if they’re going to have a financial relationship with the organization. And so I think that that’s really key. I don’t think you can delegate all of it. And this gets to a little bit more of the management versus leadership parts of how do you define what are the things you can delegate, what are the administrative things that can be done by somebody else, but what are the things that you should never delegate? And whenever I’m working with leaders, one of the things I’m trying to help them to determine is what are the things that you do that uniquely can only be done by you in the organization. That really are the relationships that you uniquely have, need to have, that the vision that you uniquely can help articulate. And the goal of delegating part of it is to free up more of your time to do those things that other people can’t do. And relationships like you just described, Sandie, are one of those. And so part of that’s looking of where can I, when I’m delegating, where can I hand some things off that can be delegated? And then how can I free up more time for those relationships, for planting the seeds, like you said, to really have the longevity into the future. And that’s a huge, huge distinction for folks.

Sandie [00:18:54] So that kind of leads into my next question because I realized I need to develop those skills. And when I started this, everybody was excited and lots of organizations there started because everybody wants to end human trafficking because of the horrific crime that it is to sell human beings. But now we have a lot of energy and learning those skills to delegate, to make some course corrections on the management side so that it is sustainable just from an operations perspective. Where does someone start? I’m sure you probably have two or three Coaching for Leader recommendations.

Dave [00:19:41] Well, there’s a distinction for me on what feels good and what does good. And I’ve learned a lot of this from you, Sandie, of watching you and your work and talking to so many of the experts here on the show over the years. Is there’s a lot of things that feel good in the moment of, for example, rescuing survivors, of seeing someone go to jail or be charged with a crime. All of those are parts, obviously, of addressing this issue of ending human trafficking. And those are the kinds of things that you see sometimes. I know you’ve seen this a million times, like people starting an organization, very well-intended, who want to rescue victims and want to, you know, chase down the people who are doing evil in the world. And sometimes they end up actually making the situation harder for law enforcement, for community partners, for others who have already put in a foundation and thought this through really well of how can we show up in a way that is sustainable and is actually going to address the issue in the long run. And so I think one of the starting points is making sure you have a really clear distinction from a leadership standpoint of what what might feel good in the moment and where am I actually doing good. And I think that that starts with, like you say, study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference. Those are in that order for a reason. Study the issues first is understand before you start a nonprofit, before you start going out in the community and doing work and being an advocate of going and showing up like here in Orange County to the task force and finding out who else is already doing work, what other organizations are already there? What can I do to maybe not start another organization, but to come alongside the people who are already doing the work, who actually need someone with your talents, to be on their staff, to be the person that they delegate to, or maybe to be the person who’s doing the development work, or maybe to be the person that comes alongside and volunteers inside an existing organization, or to show up in some of those conversations and to hear three or four or five times that, here’s a missing need in our community right now. And the nonprofit that maybe you were thinking about that would have started a shelter, that it turns out there’s already several other people doing that, but that there isn’t a nonprofit doing education in the community. And you hear from law enforcement and from legal folks and from advocates that there’s a need for that in the community right now. What a wonderful gift for you then to show up in maybe a different way than you were originally intending, but to actually do something to bring something to the community that is needed and valued right now. And so I think that it starts there of are you actually aligning with the need or are you just doing something that feels good. And we all want to feel good, right? And sometimes the thing that feels good really does align with the need. But I think that we should be really careful. I know I think about volunteer work, Sandie, and giving the charity much differently than I did, you know, 11, 12 years ago before you and I started talking regularly because I think about, you know, where can I come along, work and support of time and resources actually be helpful versus I just make a donation or I volunteer somewhere just because it makes me feel good. And I think that’s a really key distinction at the early start of the process to be able to step back. And I don’t think you can get there if you haven’t done things like read your book, go to a task force meeting or several, go talk to the other people who are doing the work in your area, listening to a show like this. Because that opens up your eyes and your perspective to see things that you otherwise wouldn’t see.

Sandie [00:23:35] I really appreciate how you work in the collaborative nature of nonprofit leadership in the anti-human trafficking space, because I have seen so many organizations try to do all of it and they often end up in a space where they’re really good at one piece of it and not so good at other pieces. And wouldn’t it be more effective in the long run for the whole community and especially for victims and survivors if we were able to let go of trying to control the whole scenario? That might mean that a director, a CEO of a nonprofit would actually need to revise their mission statement and their goal to narrow it to what they are good at and where they can fit into the need.

Dave [00:24:35] Yeah, indeed. I mean, if you look at any good sustainable business, and a nonprofit is a business, it’s not a for profit business, but it’s a business as in there’s revenue, there’s expenses. If you want to do good in the world, you need to have the resources and the structure to be able to do that well. Any sustainable organization has a very clear vision of what they’re doing, and by virtue of that, also doesn’t try to do everything. History is littered with tons of examples of organizations that tried to be the end all, be all for everybody, but organizations that have a very clear vision of what we’re trying to do and and that the vision isn’t centered on I think it’s generally a mistake to center your vision on being competitive with other organizations. We’re going to be the number one shelter, or we’re going to be the number one provider, or we’re going to be, I mean, so much of especially this work centered around ending human trafficking is about partnership. It’s about collaboration. There’s no one organization that’s going to show up and do all of that. So having that vision centered around how are you working to come alongside to be an ally in this fight to help revolutionize what’s going on? I think it’s just a wonderful, wonderful place to start. And there’s two resources that I’d recommend for anyone who wants to get into this further. Michael Hyatt has a wonderful book on vision. I’ve interviewed him on Coaching for Leaders. I’ll send the link along to you, Sandie, first include for folks who would like to who have never put together a vision for an organization. I think his framework is a wonderful, wonderful framework to follow that really looks beginning to end of where to begin with a vision. And then I also really love David Burkus’ work on how great teams find purpose in thinking about what is it that we can do that finds purpose in a way that’s a lot more meaningful of we want to be number one or we’re going to be the most successful nonprofit or whatever and really look at it from a standpoint of instead of someone to fight, how do we find a cause that’s worth fighting for? And that mindset shift that he makes in his work, I think is really, really helpful. And I’ll get you a link for that as well.

Sandie [00:26:43] And that’s for teams. The David Burkus.

Dave [00:26:47] Yeah, yeah, indeed. Yeah. He’s done some great work on that of really thinking about how do you help a team to find purpose.

Sandie [00:26:54] Well, and my experience in this kind of leadership is building a strong team to go with is a key part of sustainability, because this is a hard battle and nobody can stay on the road all the time. Everybody has to plan some down time and take care of themselves as well. And we’ve heard a lot about self-care. So my nagging thought, you and I have been working together for a long time, and as we’ve walked through some of these discussion points, we keep coming back to the visionary leader, and that is the norm. All of the nonprofit leaders that I know, I understand their passion. I was attracted to the energy that they have when they talk about what they care about. And so that’s pretty standard. But, that also holds some risks because that nonprofit can become very personality driven. And in my own work, I’ve been looking for ways to mitigate that, to be able to share the vision and the purpose and the leadership with other people. Are there some tips for how to reduce the personality driven focus of a nonprofit?

Dave [00:28:32] Indeed. My engineering friends have a great term for this. They call this a single point failure system. And, you know, whenever engineers are building something like building an airplane, for example, there’s always 3 to 4 redundant systems on an airplane that if one system failed or was damaged or something happened, that the other there’s a backup system or tertiary system that can step in and still do the work to land the airplane, right. And I think that’s really important in organizations, too, that if everything in the organization revolves around the founder, the executive director of being physically present and they’re each and every day and all of the work is going through that person, all of the decisions, all of the resources, all of the everything that happens in the organization, that’s fine as long as that person’s there. But what if they decide that that role isn’t right for them anymore, or they get ill or whatever else happens where they’re not able to serve in that capacity anymore? All of a sudden the organization ceases to function because it’s dependent on that person. And we’re I think it’s really helpful to think about is to really start from a framework of what are the different roles that this organization needs. And I would invite anyone who is leading a nonprofit, if they haven’t done this already, even if you’re a one or two person organization, is to sit down and to think about what are the different roles that we need in this organization for it to do the work that it does to serve people well. And one of those roles is executive director, and one of those roles is development, and one of those roles is administration and detailing those out. And you might initially, if you’re a one person or two person organization, you might have one person’s name next to all of those roles. And that’s okay. Almost every organization starts off that way. But as you grow, you’re not growing on personality, you’re growing around the different roles and you start thinking about, okay, who, now that this is grown and I can’t do everything anymore, who else do we need to bring in to do these roles and expand these boxes as they become bigger? As they do in most organizations of any size as they have more success and they continue to grow. So I think it’s really helpful to start from a framework of thinking about roles, job descriptions, what does the organization do and documenting that? Because if you document that, then you use that as a framework and it’s much more likely that you’ll then make decisions going forward of how do we build an organization that’s sustainable, that if someone exits the organization for whatever reason, even if that person happens to be the founder and the executive director, how do we make sure that that’s a sustainable transition? And how do we think about succession planning? And when you have roles and you have that all documented of who’s doing what and what are our plans? If someone exits the organization, especially if that’s the top person, that goes a lot smoother, as does having a great board, right? Sandie, you know this with our board.

Sandie [00:31:43] Yeah, I got a great board.

Dave [00:31:43] Yeah. And having a great board is, I mean a board should be overseeing the work of the organization. They should be providing feedback to the executive director. There should be collaboration. There should be good, healthy conflict that’s happening and discussion about what the future looks like. And so this is to me, a good organization is a lot about partnership. That everyone is working together in partnership through these different roles to help the organization achieve its vision. It’s not about one person having success or being visible on everything, unless that’s the vision of the organization, and that drives that vision. But even then, I think it’s really important to be clear about what are the roles and how to do that. And I’m happy to pass along some resources on delegation and creating roles from our library if folks would like to get into that. Another framework that I have found so helpful over the years and I’ve recommended to so many organizations, especially in the start up phase, is a book by the folks that strategize. They’re called Business Model Generation, and I know that title may not land well with everyone in our audience, because you may think, well, you know, I’m not trying to put together a business, I’m trying to start a nonprofit. But to my earlier point, a nonprofit is a business. It’s just a business that’s not taking a profit. But all of the core elements of business are still there. Marketing, human resources, revenue expenses, financial management. And Business Model Generation is a canvas essentially of how do I start thinking about that? It’s a very visual process and how do I start thinking about all those pieces of where is revenue and fundraising and development going to come from? What are our expenses going to be? What’s the work we’re trying to do? What are the products or services that we offer that support people? And I think getting that down on paper early on, even if it’s not perfect, which of course it won’t be, but is really useful to start framing what the future is going to look like and how do we help support this organization in a very sustainable way?

Sandie [00:33:42] Wow. There are going to be a lot of resource links in this episode, Dave. Thank you so much. I think we could continue this conversation for a lot longer, but our time is up and I’m going to hold you over for a Patreon subscriber question. And I think that question is going to be about how to deal with conflict in nonprofit leadership where you are dealing with mostly volunteers. So if you want to be a Patreon subscriber, please go to our webpage. Dave, you usually do this. I don’t, but go to endinghumantrafficking.org and click on the Patreon link and become a supporter because that’s how we continue to offer this resource to our anti-human trafficking community. And Dave, this has been an encouraging conversation for me as well as challenging. I’ve written down a few notes, especially the always and right now, and there are some things I need to let go of and focus on the right now in order to be more sustainable. And I’m going to look at some of these resources that you’ve offered to us as well. So if you want to hear more from Dave, stick around.

Dave [00:35:15] Sounds great. Well, thank you, Sandie. I really, you know, we’re all learning as we go on this and so many other things in life and in working in organizations. So thank you for all you’ve done to help support me and expand my learning especially in the nonprofit world and the work we’re doing here on the podcast. And to echo Sandie’s point, please go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. If you’re looking for the resources, the notes, all the episode links that I mentioned on Coaching for Leaders we’ll provide all those for folks so it’s easy to get access to. And then we’ll be we’ll be off and running with you and we’ll be back, of course, in two weeks for our next conversation. And, Sandie, always a pleasure.

Sandie [00:35:55] Thank you, Dave, especially for being our guest.

Dave [00:35:59] Of course. Thanks, everyone. See you in two weeks.

Dr. Morgan and Dr. Harris discuss overlapping social issues and the role of the community and the church in developing solutions with positive outcomes.

Human trafficking in plain sight: the story of a true survivor Keeya Vawar

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 275 Reflections on Human Trafficking from a Community Leader.

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

Dave [00:00:29] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:34] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:37] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, so much of what we’ve talked about on the show over the years is from the perspective of partnership, and there’s no greater partnership than the partnership within our communities. I’m so glad today to be able to welcome community leader and expert who will help us to really bring some new perspective into this conversation. I’m so pleased to welcome the Reverend Dr. Antipas Harris. He is a scholar practitioner with more than 20 years of experience as a university professor at several schools, namely Sacred Heart University, New York Theological Seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary, Portland Theological Seminary, Vanguard University, and Regent University, where he was a tenured associate professor and held administrative roles. He has held a lecture chair at North Central University in Minneapolis. He’s also served as the founding president and dean of Jakes Divinity School in Dallas, Texas. He’s the founder and president of the Urban Renewal Center in Norfolk, Virginia. It is a center for moral thought, voice and action. The center engages research, conversations, consulting and community engagement. It advances principles and practices of diversity, equity and inclusion for common good through the fusion of cultural competence and the ongoing process of cultural humility. Dr. Harris, what a pleasure to have you on the show.

Dr. Harris [00:02:04] I’m honored to be here. Thank you and Dr. Morgan for this opportunity. Thanks for having me here.

Sandie [00:02:09] So, Dr. Harris, from the very first time I met you when you were lecturing on the social justice book that had just released here at Vanguard, I have been so interested in how you bring together such diversity in your research, in your conversation, and at the same time you’re so sensitive to the inclusion of every person in that conversation. I invited you to speak in my intro to Women in Justice class, and I have never, ever had a guest who referred to God as God and never used the male pronoun, which for some of my female students has led to some misconceptions about God. So I am just absolutely so honored to have you here and respect you greatly. Thank you.

Dr. Harris [00:03:14] The respect is mutual. Thank you so much, Dr. Morgan. It’s an honor. Thank you.

Sandie [00:03:18] So tell us a little about the Urban Renewal Center that you’ve launched. The ideas of the principles behind it and what you expect to see grow out of that.

Dr. Harris [00:03:32] Thank you so much for the question. The Urban Renewal Center was founded in 2017. In 2016, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were the national optics, along with five police officers all killed in the same week. And of course, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed at the hands of police officers. And then there were five police officers that were killed in Dallas the same week. And I sat in my office at my house in Virginia Beach at the time and cried real tears. I was a professor at Regeant University and I thought to myself, what am I doing in my lifetime that’s going to really make a difference? What will the future say I did? Just taught classes, preach sermons, or would I have made some kind of contribution to this ongoing distress in the community? And that evening, it was a Saturday morning. That evening, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Norfolk, Virginia called me and said, I’m scrapping the bulletin for tomorrow for all three services. We’re going to talk about race in America. And I said, okay, sounds good. I was doing some I was a theologian residence there doing some teaching and outreach there. And so we didn’t prep our questions or anything. We just got up there and start talking for three services. And then one of the long standing members of the church, Taz Taylor, met with the pastor the next day for breakfast and said, We got to do something. We really didn’t know how it was going to come off because we were pretty raw. We were pretty raw in our conversation that morning and people wanted to be part of the solution. So we launched the Urban Renewal Center because we recognized that on the one hand there were problems in the world, but on the other hand, there were many people who want to be part of the solution. So I resigned my tenured post at Regeant University and decided to start a community development corporation to respond to the ongoing needs in the world and the ongoing opportunity to mobilize people to be part of the solution. And so that’s when we started. And then, of course, I left the Urban Renewal Center when I started Jakes Divinity School, and I returned to the Urban Renewal Center January 2022. And so we hit the ground rolling. We consider ourselves a center for moral thought, voice, and action. And we’ve had conversations around the issue of human trafficking. And we have a plethora of issues that we try to respond to in different ways. So thank you for having me here today.

Sandie [00:06:06] So this idea of moral thought, voice, and action. So we aren’t going to just talk about it, we actually are going to design solutions and take action. What does that mean in the intersection with human trafficking?

Dr. Harris [00:06:26] A lot of churches, on the one hand, are really engaged in outreach, and sometimes the faith community does more output than seek for outcomes.

Sandie [00:06:40] Mmm. Can you clarify because I have students who are going to listen to this later and they don’t know the difference.

Dr. Harris [00:06:46] Yeah, we like to be involved in actions, want to do action projects, want to do good in the world. But I went to Haiti, for example. I was going to Haiti every year before the earthquake several years ago. I think it was 2010 when the big earthquake happened. I was going several years before and after. So I remember getting on the plane after having gotten bags of rice and lots of food, raised money, went there, shopped locally, took it to a local orphanage and got on the plane and felt good about myself. I had done good in the world and I heard a voice say, by the time you get back to Virginia, they’re going to be hungry again. So I discovered within my own reflection that while it is good to do community engagement through outreach, acts of kindness is part of the spiritual formation of a person. It is also important to recognize that we need research connected to the actions that we engage, and we need to be concerned about outcomes and not just output because output is good for the spirituality and personal development and people feel good about themselves. Outcomes is how do I make impact and inroads among the people that I’m serving so that we don’t create sort of this toxic by charity, right? Toxicity by charity in which we are constantly giving but not really helping the people.

Sandie [00:08:15] Wow. So I just I just want to stop in the Haiti example, because this was in the news recently that people have not recovered from that massive earthquake.

Dr. Harris [00:08:29] Absolutely.

Sandie [00:08:30] And so it feels like this focus on output over outcome may be a contributing factor.

Dr. Harris [00:08:39] Yeah, I observed it and I’m speaking out of two corners of my mouth as they say. On the one hand, I’m affirming acts of kindness because as part of our own personal development. So we get something out of it and we should affirm that. But at the same time, that can’t be the only thing we focus on how we feel about what we did, but rather how do we research responsibly and partner effectively and strategize intently and seek for long term solutions so that the people are not always in that condition or this that condition. And so, in other words, how do we work ourselves out of a job that’s a greater outcome, you know, so what we do with the homeless, we think about that, we say, hey, we don’t want to just be in the business of helping homeless people or we’ll always need homeless people. We ought to be in the business of helping people become mobile so we can, at least in our own strategy and consciousness, work ourself out of a job. Now, that doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to be out of a job, maybe, but it changed our thinking so that our approach is different and our strategies and what we’re trying to achieve is different. So we’re focused on how to help homeless people get jobs so that they can become upward mobile and won’t remain in the homeless situation. Now, there are other factors involved, factors of mental health, factors of disabilities and all types of challenges that may keep certain individuals in the situation longer until they get the right solutions. But if we don’t focus on how to help people come upward mobile, I think we cheat ourselves of what we’re called to do as people of faith. And scripture, for example, in Acts 3, after Pentecost, Peter and John saw a man in a physiological situation. He had an economic impediment as well. And they had seen him, along with his friends, at the gate called beautiful every day. But after Pentecost, they saw him differently than they did before Pentecost. So after Pentecost, they see a man who is in need of a hand up and not just a handout. And so they said, so we know we don’t have, but what we have, we give it to you. And they reached out the hand and lifted him up. So my approach is how do we lift people up, not just give them handouts.

Sandie [00:11:15] Wow. Okay. So one of your statements that I’ve read is about your vision as a leader in the community, in the church, and the relevance of faith in the public square. So, tell me how that engages in anti-human trafficking work with crossing and you list racial, ethnic, gender, class, denominational, and religious lines.

Dr. Harris [00:11:46] Yes, this is a very good question, partly because human trafficking is often thought of as an international problem, right? People are being sort of brought into the country from developing countries and being sold in the sex trade industry. That does happen and that is horrible. But I think that often the church does is not as keen to understand ways in which human trafficking happens in plain sight. And I have had stories that I engage people with, stories about how this makes itself into the church often, because we’re not often trained to identify those indicators. I took a group of students from Regeanr University when I was a professor there to New York, and we were doing actually homeless outreach. And we partnered with New York Theological. It was New York School of Urban Ministry, and that’s where we stayed and went on the street and we were offering sandwiches we made and gave them bags with information of safe places to live and so forth. Often, we gave blankets because it was was chilly and so forth. And we were at Penn Station one day while we were there and ran into a group of young girls. And when I walked around, I said, Why are you here? I mean, it just stunned me. These are kids. What are you doing out here? And one stood up and said, Oh, we actually live around the corner over there in a big house. There’s a bunch of us. And as she was talking, it occurred to me they’re being trafficked. And at the time, I wasn’t as knowledgeable as I am now with resources that were available, because we were there for one thing, and we encountered another. And most of the folks with me didn’t even catch that that was more of the conversation that they were making was basically indicators that this was a situation of human trafficking in plain sight. But it was framed within the context of homelessness. And so often the church is not equipped to discern or discover what is happening right before us, because we often think of these sorts of situations in categories. And that’s one that often is referred to as international human trafficking. I’ve seen human trafficking in restaurant situations. And so it’s all around. So the church being equipped to be able to know how to identify. It’s sort of like mental health situations, right? I came from a Pentecostal background and everything is a demon, right? So, you know, you’re casting out a mental health situation that never goes away and you think maybe you don’t have power, maybe you don’t have knowledge to know they need to go get a counselor. So it’s about the knowledge that I think that the church needs to know, best needs. That’s one situation. Then respond to another dynamic of your question, the ways in which the church or faith has a vital role in the public square. Even if you look in the urban context, skylines often look like businesses. But a real skyline in the urban context is a lot of steeples and a lot of storefronts and a lot of faith. A religious context, right? So more mosques and more synagogues, but a lot of churches. And so even the architecture of the city is riddled with faith imagery. So, we’re, we’re there. And then there is this sense of culture. When we talk about morality and we think about how do people know what’s right and wrong and the good and  good business practices and how to treat each other and how to stop the violence. These things are not transactional. These things are rest upon the moral consciousness of our community, and it’s none other than the faith community. Businesses don’t sort of nurture and develop moral practices. What’s right? What’s wrong? They want to hire people who already know that. And people know that from a framework within the faith community that nurtures and develops that. And the more of a distress in our community where people make poor choices, people don’t want to bring businesses in that community, people can’t find the right workforce, there’s corruption. The absence of faith in the community will cause community collapse, even so much so that as you know, the last several months there’s been a national uptick in violence across America. And one police department reached out to me and said, Dr. Harris we need a divine intervention because its got to the point where cities expect chief of police to stop the violence and they get fired if they can’t stop the violence. It’s like, they can’t stop the violence. That’s a moral decision that people are making. A chief of police can’t stop that. Only the faith community plays a part in helping people make better choices. And faith community, as I said, not just teach right and wrong, but it’s a moral consciousness. It is the faith community that needs to be at the table to help strategize on how to lower some of the problems in the community, including poverty. Because in poverty is where we get a lot of violence and poverty is where we get a lot of human trafficking. And that human trafficking issue in America, in our inner cities, dare I say in the black community, is lodging in low income areas and in housing projects that like, you know, public housing. These impoverished areas is where this immoral activity often lodges.

Sandie [00:17:52] That’s such a great illustration of how complicated it is and complex. And so you can’t, some people want to just say, well, here are the numbers. And this demographic is overrepresented in this activity, particularly of being victims of human trafficking. But they haven’t brought into the picture the poverty issue. And so then the trainings are in the community and I’ve been sitting in them, are about diversity and inclusion instead of how do we raise up, lift up it to use your language, people in that community. But how am I going to change the way people talk about it in the public square if it’s an us and them?

Dr. Harris [00:18:49] Right. I like to think of this as all of our problem, partly because poverty is a social construct and it’s a social construct that benefits some at the expense of others. So then the problem becomes all of our problem. Violence the same way, born out of a social construct. Now, people make decisions, but all of us make decisions out of lived experience. We all do. I decide where I want to go tonight based out of lived experience. All decisions, even though they are personal, they are also social. And that social dynamic of our reality is shared experience that birth decisions. It makes more sense through the lens of say an African philosophical approach social philosophy, which is ‘ubuntu,’ I am because we are. So, in other words, however my life turns out it is because of the we factor. And it plays out if I’m successful, I’m not successful on my own. The whole community is successful because I didn’t make myself a success on my own. You see a turtle up on top of a post, a fence post. You know that turtle didn’t get up there by themselves. You know, everybody is dependent on community for success. And we often say, you know, you didn’t get that by yourself. You you know, it was a community. People made sacrifices. The flip is, if I end up in jail, I didn’t get there by myself. If I had to murder him, I didn’t get there on myself. Something went wrong? Yes, with my own judgment, but also, yes, with my formation. And that formation was communal formation. And it’s not just sort of my family, although my family is part of it. Is societal formation. Systems, whether family systems, social systems, legal systems, whatever. So if we take that shared approach with victories and with challenges, I think we would land at a conclusion that the problems that we face in our society, I don’t I’m not saying we all are guilty in sort of a personal way, but we are all responsible for how do we make these things better.

Sandie [00:21:11] So when we’re working with the victims, now we’re talking about real survivors in my community. And now I’ve got to bring it from the 30,000 foot level to the shelter program where I volunteer in my neighborhood. How do I begin to cross those barriers for community partnership? Because ethnicity and gender and poverty, race, those are all pieces of this. And frankly, I just have to be really honest. I’m white. I have blue eyes. I have been told that I don’t belong there and yet I want to be part of the solution. So, how do I build those partnerships in the public square?

Dr. Harris [00:22:07] First of all, I’m very sad that because you’re white with blue eyes, somebody say you don’t belong there.

Sandie [00:22:13] Well, I’m not, I’m not upset about it. I just want to figure out how to overcome that.

Dr. Harris [00:22:19] Well, I don’t mean again, and I don’t mean that necessarily personally. I do mean it personally because you heard it personally. But that’s a social problem for somebody to be excluded in any verbal way or any kind of way, because of the way they look. We all are here and we’re going to be here till we die. And we got to figure out life together and this idea of you don’t belong, to me, that that’s part of the problem that get us where we are today on either side of the discussion. We all belong. This is all of our problem. This is we all are part of the solution. And as soon as we start saying what this person, its just like women problems are not just women problems, they are men problems too. So how can we be part of the solution and not just let the women figure out the women problems over the women’s group or men’s problem. As soon as we overcome all these bifurcations that somehow determine who belongs in the conversation. Until we’re able to do that, I don’t think we ever have a real solution. I really I really don’t, because I think that the systems that cause us to become the way we are are the systems that we’re trying to use to fix the problem and that doesn’t work. Its the system that said that black people didn’t belong, that land black people in this sort of the underbelly of an experience in America. So you can’t use the same who belongs, who not belong, who does not belong type of system to fix the problem. Because this is, that’s what we mean when say it is a systemic problem. That’s a system. That’s the problem. And oftentimes, I even see it with African-Americans or with women, for example, when we want to become where we’re mobile and more women get in position. Oftentimes, women use the same oppressive system that oppressed them as part of their leadership to oppress others. Blacks can do the same thing. It’s like that’s what we mean by there’s a systemic problem. There needs to be another vision of the way this should be run, not look at the people who are the perceived oppressors and say, No, you don’t belong. Well, you’re using the same system that they use to oppress you, to try to get back at them. And that doesn’t fix the problem.

Sandie [00:24:42] So we have to go back to the purpose statement that we started with for moral thought, voice, and action. And in the context of our conversation about human trafficking, you recently interviewed a survivor, Keeya Vawar. Did I say her name, right? I want you to introduce me. It was a fabulous interview and I’ll put a link in our show notes so other people can find it. But you start you asked her, are we doing enough? And I want to know your answer to the question you ask Kiya. Are we doing enough? You talked about marginalized youth in our inner cities and you mentioned 400 young people in Dallas. Are we doing enough?

Dr. Harris [00:25:38] I don’t think so. I think we’re not doing enough because we don’t realize that a large number of our youth are being taken advantage of sexually. And the whole discussion of our sexuality, we just kind of turn our eyes on anyway. So, I don’t think we are, we don’t have enough conversations around it. Not enough people are, I mean, there are projects like the one you  mentioned you volunteer at. Well, we have such a bifurcating society, we say, oh, those people over there handling that problem without realizing the magnitude of the problem in that it’s not as isolated. Norfolk, Virginia, for example, largest naval base in the world. Human trafficking  happens all the time, but I can’t take you to the corner of the community where it all happens because it’s pervasive throughout the community. So, part of this is its so pervasive that sometimes you don’t know how to contain it or to respond to it because you can’t always know exactly where it is. But the other thing is we need more resources available. And I believe that the faith based community can talk enough about it to mobilize our churches, our faith communities, to at least know the signs, be able to provide resources to people, and to champion legislature to do more.

Sandie [00:27:00] I’m in total agreement with you. A couple friends of mine and I just released a book of strategies for churches on human trafficking because I do think that the church has powerful resources. And your experience as a leader in the church, in education, in social justice, what is your hope for the church in their response to this neighborhood issue? Not something over there, but right in our own neighborhoods.

Dr. Harris [00:27:36] I hope that we can raise awareness about it and places where it lodges. I hope that we can also create more ministries that respond to the specific needs once we discover it, or at least build the partnerships with specialized situations that can support it even better than we can. I’d like to see more work done with helping youth make good decisions, because these everything is so connected. It’s messy. I understand why some people don’t know what to do because it’s so messy. As you mentioned, Keeya, her situation, her father was abusive to her and she was looking for a way out. She wasn’t looking to go be human trafficked. She fell into it, right? So, if the abuse at home didn’t happen, she wouldn’t want to go get away. So it’s like one thing is connected to another. But I think that there needs to be greater attention given from a law perspective on some of the things that happens in the entertainment industry. You know, as I mentioned to Keeya, R Kelly is the one who we all can identify based on what came out about him, but he wasn’t operating by himself. This is pervasive throughout. It is so commonplace that nobody pays attention or see it and don’t pay attention at the same time. So I think the greater awareness about it, more attention given to it, more ministry connections to support the types of ministries that you’re doing or involved in, whether you’re a center or where you volunteer. I think there need to be not just an expectation that that’s been taken care of.

Sandie [00:29:17] Oh, that’s so good. And I, I think I love landing back at education because I agree with you specifically on children and youth and helping them learn to make better choices, better decisions, and building that resiliency and working in our public square means we need to be working with our public educators as well, and we can probably have a conversation about that on another day. But, I’m going to be following the Urban Renewal Center much more closely. I’m subscribed to Narrativity now. Do you want to just tell us how to find your podcast?

Dr. Harris [00:30:02] Yeah, our podcast is wherever you get your podcasts, there’s Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or one of the others. It’s called Narrativity with Dr. Antipas Harris. Thats Narrativity where we’re telling stories that inspire challenge and encourage. These stories are sometimes riveting in and definitely can be heart wrenching at times. Other times they are stories of victory. And this story that you’re referring to is the one of a woman who left home and ended up in the in the music industry, in music videos, but was taken advantage of in a sex trafficking situation. And she went from that to another taboo too, not really a taboo of limited knowledge is that the human trafficking industry or so that these johns or these men who are trafficking women. But as Keeya talks about in the episode with me, there are women, madams, who are in the industry. And either they came up through the industry, but some didn’t come up through the industry. They’re doing it for financial gain and they have women that they’re trafficking in. The same thing is true with men who are being trafficked. A lot of the prostitution in Hampton Roads are men.

Sandie [00:31:28] Wow. And this brings us back to your point earlier about the connection between poverty and the exploitative crime of human trafficking. So you’re going to stick around and answer one more question for our Patreon listeners, and I’m sure that we’re going to keep this conversation going over the next couple of years. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Harris [00:31:54] Thank you for having me.

Dave [00:31:55] Antipas, Sandie, thank you so much for this conversation. What a pleasure to learn from you both, as always. And we are inviting you to take the next step as well. The Ending Human Trafficking podcast is online at endinghumantrafficking.org. If you’ll hop online, it’s a great starting point to download a copy of Sandie’s guide, The Five Things You Must Know: A Quick Start Guide to Ending Human Trafficking. It’ll teach you the five critical things that Sandie’s identified in her work that you should know before you join the fight against trafficking. You can get access to it free just by going over to endinghumantrafficking.org. We’re also now part of the Patreon platform by the Ending Human Trafficking podcast is building and expanding our community of advocates. By becoming a patron, you get access to exclusive content and you also join a community of advocates around the world who are fighting human trafficking in their community. Just go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. You’ll see in the corner of the page there a link for Patreon and you can get access to content such as bonus questions and segments, as we’ll do today. Also, exclusive resources and toolkits. It’s very affordable, $5 a month. You can get access to all of the benefits. And of course, you can give more if you’d like to. Go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. And for those who are already patrons, thank you so much for your support. We’re excited to continue to bring you so much over this next year and going forward from the Global Center for Women and Justice here at Vanguard University. And of course, we will be back in two weeks with our next regular conversation. Sandie, I will see you then in two weeks.

Sandie [00:33:34] All right. Thanks, Dave.

Dave [00:33:36] Take care, everybody.

Sandie Morgan and Ashleigh Chapman take a deep dive into all the work Ashleigh has been doing through her various organizations, how her team is developing tools to identify and fill the gaps, and connecting organizations across the nation to collaborate with one another.

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 274, USA Today Women of the Year Honoree, Ashleigh Chapman.

Production Credits [00:00:11] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave [00:00:31] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak

Sandie [00:00:36] And my name is Sandie Morgan,

Dave [00:00:39] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, it’s such a pleasure to come together with you twice a month here on the show because we get to hear from so many wonderful experts who have received such incredible recognition all over the world from all kinds of organizations. Today is no exception. I’m so glad to welcome an expert today. We’re going to be able to learn so much from Ashleigh Chapman. She has a law degree from Regent University and was recently named USA Today’s Women of the Year Honoree from Wyoming and has spent her entire career working to end human trafficking across the world. She’s doing it by running a variety of organizations, including Alta Solutions, a business for good founded in Wyoming that powers solutions to end trafficking; the Alliance for Freedom, Restoration and Justice, a nonprofit that’s connected more than 10,000 anti-trafficking advocates around the world; and Justice U, an online learning platform where students can learn the basics of how to identify human trafficking. Ashleigh we’re so glad to have you with us on the show.

Ashleigh [00:01:52] Thank you so much, Dave and Sandie, well I’m just thrilled to be with you both and just so grateful for your advocacy and efforts through this podcast and so many other ways on an issue like this. It’s a joy to join you today.

Sandie [00:02:03] Well, I’m excited to have you here. First of all, congratulations on this important recognition. I met you at a conference in Philadelphia more than a decade ago. And yeah, so we we like we bond over those memories, but we don’t often end up in the same spaces physically. But I know you well enough that the recognition of this award isn’t your goal. So can you tell us what this award means to you?

Ashleigh [00:02:36] Yeah, thank you, Sandie. That’s right, it was such a joy to receive it. It’s certainly an honor, and I consider it a team award for all of the amazing women on our team and men who just work so diligently every single day on these issues. What it means to me, while I guess I don’t quite know how to answer that exactly, except to say what I hope it means, right? What I hope it means is that it’s going to increase awareness of an issue that is every day present in our communities everywhere. And I hope it calls people to action, right? So really wanting to see our world and all the people in it move from a general awareness of human trafficking to the reality that every part, every person can be part of the solution. And just, we really focus on building the solutions and the tools and the resources that usher people into becoming part of that solution. So I pray that it accomplishes that, but it was a real honor to receive it and just really grateful. Big shout out to USA Today for honoring women across the country who are doing great work in so many ways in their communities and just grateful to be part of it.

Sandie [00:03:39] I was thrilled for exactly the same reason because being featured in such a big platform really does bring awareness to the work that you’re doing, and it brings awareness in a way that challenges people to be more educated, particularly. And I’m kind of curious because our works have a lot of parallel. How do you think we’re doing? And how will we know when we’re done with our goals of educating others.

Ashleigh [00:04:13] Yes, right. So yeah, I think we do share a love for education and just the belief in the power of education to equip us, right? Education is a tool and every person has unique passions and skills and interests. But it’s getting those skills and getting equipped with those skills that’s going to make our ability to to change our world possible. So when will we know we’re done, man? When I quit having people ask me what human trafficking is, right, we still get those questions today. But I think that we are, we are reaching a saturation point. I will say, having been at this now for a couple of decades, you know, I think we’re reaching a point where people generally have an understanding of what human trafficking is. But the education that we’re really driving forward, that I know is on your heart too, is helping people really move from just a general understanding to really knowing precisely how their lives are going to interact or could be interacting with this issue in their own communities and what they can do, depending on what hat they wear in those communities to make a difference. Right? To make a difference in addressing trafficking head on or even supporting those who are most vulnerable in our communities so that this never becomes part of their story. So when we see people, not just understand that this issue exists, that it’s real, but that they really can make a difference in it and they know how to do that. I think that’s when we’ll, we maybe, you know, be able to start packing up. But we’ve got a ways to go yet.

Sandie [00:05:44] Well, this is a good point to ask you about all these different organizations that are on your CV. It’s kind of amazing because you’ve been such a catalyst. And I’m pretty interested in how you started with one and felt really compelled to launch others. So let’s start with AFRJ.

Ashleigh [00:06:14] So AFRJ was, I mean, I think the big umbrella for everything we’ve been doing is trying to understand what are the solutions that would that you need to build to help everyone succeed? Right? So if we’re facing over 40 million souls worldwide, what are the solutions that can reach 40 million souls? And from our perspective, from my perspective, it has been there have to be, there just have to be solutions that can help every organization out there do better. Every person who’s passionate about this understand what they need to do better, every community to strengthen its efforts. So what are those solutions that have that capability? And so the alliance was the first one we built and that was way back. I mean, to start a building that was in 2010 when we were researching everyone on the planet who was working on these issues. And we really felt that one of the big missing gaping holes in the movement at that time was that people did not know each other. And so, you know, trafficking was still fairly new to our world and certainly new to the United States kind of citizenry. And so people were either running and closing their eyes, right? Like, my gosh, it’s too dark, it’s too dark an issue. Or they were jumping in, right? They were just jumping in and we were seeing thousands of efforts start to proliferate, but they were disconnected from each other. So the first thing we built was the alliance and with the idea of how could we help bridge, how could we serve as a conduit between people so they could find each other, find resources that were already out there, really fill the gap in relationships and strategies and solutions so we could accelerate our ability to make an impact and not be spinning our wheels in spaces that people had already learned some great things from or even build upon, you know, with collaborating with others. So that was the dream with the alliance. We started with about 3,000 anti-trafficking efforts that we were supporting when we first launched, we’re well over 10,000. And our record day last year was helping, I think sixty seven organizations in one day around the world with being a conduit in that way.

Sandie [00:08:15] I love the image of connection and people who know me really well know I love to talk about the Greek jar from the palace in Crete called a Pithari that has handles all over it so that lots of different people can grab on and help move such a heavy issue forward. And that’s why I love the alliance. I think after that you started Engage Together. What brought about that?

Ashleigh [00:08:46] Yeah, so Engage Together– So we we kind of birthed the alliance, or the concept in 2010, really birthed it in real time. In 2013 and 2014, we birthed Engage Together. And this came out of so, I mean, literally thousands of conversations where we realized that communities, so while we were kind of supporting this world of people who were out there doing this work, from law enforcement to social work, the teachers, the parents, the faith based institutions, the business. I mean, it was just such a multi-sector cohort. What was going on in communities was it was all very still new to them, right? And so they didn’t realize literally everything that they need to be taking a look at to address human trafficking and all the ways they could work together to do that. So everyone was starting to get concentrated in raising awareness and building aftercare programs. When that’s two very important pieces of a very big puzzle, right, that need to be taking place. And then, of course, you know, on sector engagement, it was heavily nonprofit and government, and churches weren’t at the table, and businesses weren’t at the table, and civic clubs weren’t yet at the table. So the idea between Engage Together, maybe the best way to explain it, was how one of our interns put it one day. They said we were globalizing knowledge. So taking global knowledge about the issue and what works and doesn’t, and really localizing it to communities that were struggling to address it well. And that birthed Engage Together. And it’s grown every year since. We’ve evolved and evolved and evolved it. Now it includes technologies that can heat map down to a county level the strengths and gaps in a community, and really help that community gain the strategic insights that they need to make a massive step forward in transforming the reality on the ground.

Sandie [00:10:30] So people can go to Engage Together to see those tools, right?

Ashleigh [00:10:34] Uh-Huh. Engagetogether.com and start taking a look and knock on our door any time so that they feel like their community could need a resource or a tool like that.

Sandie [00:10:44] And then you started Justice U.

Ashleigh [00:10:47] Yes.

Sandie [00:10:48] And how did that happen?

Ashleigh [00:10:52] So we– So once we launched Engage Together, we were supporting so many communities, Sandie, and I was on the road. Pre-pandemic, I was on the road upwards of 40 to 48 weeks a year for about a seven year sprint. And sometimes multiple cities per day. And so this one day I had trained three separate cities in two states that day and I was flying home and I just thought, we are never, ever going to win the war on this. How we’re educating people is gathering them into a room and trying to bring them from a zero level of understanding, most of the time, to a 101, right? We couldn’t hardly get past that in one singular training. You know, we’d always start, and it didn’t matter who we were training. Whether it was law enforcement or social workers or you name the cohort, we’d start the day with a general understanding of the issue and end the day with everyone just flagging case after case after case of potential trafficking victims that they had interacted with and did not know it because they just simply lack the knowledge. So for me, it was, OK, how do we take the bits of knowledge that sit with so many of our global network partners, that every single community needs, but not just general knowledge, the very specific bits of knowledge that individuals within those communities need because the way a health care provider will interact with trafficking is very different than a middle school teacher. So, so we need some baseline knowledge, but very specific knowledge. And how do you build something that can scale to millions of people, right? All at the same time? And that’s when I learned about digital badging and digital certifications, and this was way back in 20, I don’t know, 2018, I guess. And we started to just build an alliance of tech companies and universities who are passionate about this, including Indiana University and several others, and just started to design it. What would it look like to create an online university for justice advocates? And we launched it in beta in 2020 and in full this past year. And our goal is to equip over a million learners in Justice U in the next three to five years. So it’s pretty exciting, but it’s a pretty aggressive timeline too.

Sandie [00:13:02] Wow! A million. That’s a big goal. That’s a big goal. Wow. And it’s all available online.

Ashleigh [00:13:10] That’s it. Yeah, it’s all online. It’s the latest educational pedagogy. So if you’re a visual learner, you’re kinesthetic learner, you’re an auditory learner, it’s got something for you. It’s mobile friendly. You’ll end up with not just knowledge, but certifications based on your field and accreditation, CEU’s, et-cetera. So we try to bake it all in. Make it as accessible as possible. Take it in five minute chunks or in a full hour or four hour long, however long your particular program is. And just our goal is to just disseminate knowledge as fast as we can so that lives can be saved.

Sandie [00:13:42] OK, so I knew about the alliance. I go to Engage Together pretty regularly. I followed the launch of Justice U. But I didn’t know about Altus until I read the interview with USA Today. What is Altus?

Ashleigh [00:14:05] Well, Altus is a solution that we built to a problem we were experiencing in scaling the solutions we had built. So, you know, with the alliance and supporting just literally thousands of organizations out in the field, with Engaged Together and supporting all these communities, and Justice U supporting all these learners, you know in the typical nonprofit skin, what that required was a pretty significant focus by myself, especially in our teams, to just consistently be out there trying to find donors to support all of this. And it would just became– I just began to realize this is not the skin for this. So what if we went after impact investments instead? What if we powered some of these solutions through are business for good, a benefit corporation. We found impact investors to kind of help us stand the thing up. Then we could scale, right? These are solutions we mean to scale to every community struggling with trafficking in every country that needs it. And we have learners in Justice U right now and forty seven states and eight countries, but we’re aiming for all 50 right and many more countries than that. So how do you scale that? These are not simple solutions. They require a massive team and a massive technological kind of under, you know, underbelly, if you will, to push that forward. And so we decided to launch a company that could help us power those solutions into the future. And so that we could play with things like impact analytics.

Sandie [00:15:32] Wait, wait. You have to stop and define that for us. Impact analytics?

Ashleigh [00:15:37] Impact analytics. Yes, sort of burgeoning new field, and we’re taking some steps to pioneer pieces of that puzzle. But the idea is on complex societal issues, the world has gotten better, I would say not great yet, but better at what what I would call activity analytics, right? So how many people did we train this last year. For instance, we have a training with doctors that that’s going on across the country in partnership with Anthem, right now. So I could say, Hey, we’ve trained four hundred doctors in this community, but what does that mean? Right? So does that mean that more victims were identified, that care improved, that the outcomes for survivors improved? Now we’re leaning into this world of impact analytics, not just activity analytics, and there are some things that we want to test and try in that space as well. And the nonprofit skin really isn’t the right skin for that, either. So we’re building those kinds of solutions and a business for good skin with the idea that the profits from that company will then pour out to all of our partners in the field, too. And then, you know, Lord willing, will not just sustain everything that we’re doing, but we’ll be able to mightily bless all those we’re doing it with as well. So that’s the big idea.

Sandie [00:16:49] OK, so lets drill down just a little bit because I am totally with you on the difference between activity analytics and impact analytics and just doing, doing, doing isn’t moving us forward. And I remember looking at how many presentations, how many people came, and being at some of those. And so now I want to know not just how much activity you did. So many of the community events, all the same people come and we still write down we did an event and we had 50 people, but nobody actually measured impact. So explain the difference and what that’s going to do as we move forward.

Ashleigh [00:17:36] Well, I might answer that in the inverse. So what it will do is it will let us know whether what we are doing is working, right? So because if we’re just monitoring what we are doing without knowing whether that is actually transforming the face of our community’s response to this, are we actually decreasing trafficking in their communities? Are we increasing care? Are we improving outcomes? And how are we going to define that. Then yeah, we all are going to come to the same table over and over and over. And it’s not that that coming to the table isn’t a good thing to do, right. But the point is not to do that. Our point is to end this right. So this is a bit like taking a look at this massive problem and saying, how do we work ourselves out of a job, right? How does this end? And what do we, how are we going to define that? And how are we going to then monitor that right? And so even back in the day when I was advising on the End Modern Slavery Act right here that our U.S. Senate passed with Senator Corker, right? So when we were building out this big bill that if you’ve heard about, you know, years ago, is meant to decrease trafficking in targeted locations internationally. But when we were designing that bill, you know, the big idea was, Hey, in seven years, let’s decrease the level of human trafficking in targeted cities. Well, I countered with, I think it’s going to take us seven years to even understand what the prevalence is in the first place. We’ve got to unearth what’s really the prevalence of this issue. Then we’ll discover whether we started to decrease. But you’re leaning into impact analytics at that point. And so, this is a new field. We got some great humans, you know, who are getting kind of specialized training and even MBAs, you know, degrees around this right now and trying to apply it to complex societal issues. And so I’ll keep you abreast of it, Sandie. It’s sort of a, you know, we’re taking a look at all the different ways and all the different people it would take. But let’s just take health care for a moment. You know, in this country, studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of victims in our country, just in the United States I’m talking right now, are presenting themselves to health care environments, sometimes as many between 15 and 18 times before they’re properly identified as victims of human trafficking. So we need to get that health care community trained. But it is no good if all we do is train if that training isn’t then being implemented in ways that actually lead to identification. And what good is identifying victims if we don’t have a way to care well for those victims, right? If we end up just kind of handing them back to the trafficker, putting them back out on the streets, which happens a lot in our community still to this day. And then if we’re caring well, are we building bridges between immediate triage to all the things that they need to start building a successful life? So it’s just really about taking that long view of what we’re trying to catalyze with all this activity we’re doing and making sure that it is doing what we intend for it to do. And without that, I think we’re a bit guessing at what we should do or we’re just repeating the same things over and over that we know how to do. And we just I just think we have to raise the level of excellence. And in fact, analytics will show us the way.

Sandie [00:20:54] I’m so encouraged by that. I have been in a lot of, I don’t know if you remember my backgrounds pediatric nursing. So I’ve been involved in this health care conversation for a long time, and I remember helping a hospital that was open to developing algorithms and creating protocols. But the obstacle, the barrier was the legal ramifications. So when I went to meet with people about at the hospital for developing some of these protocols, I’ll never forget walking into the room and discovering that the attorneys outnumbered the nurses. Yeah, see, you’re an attorney, so you and I would make a great team. Oh, my goodness, yes. So impact is because we’ve done trainings. We’re back doing trainings at the same hospitals that we’ve done before, but they have so much attrition that you feel like you’re starting over all the time.

Ashleigh [00:21:57] Sure. Sure. Yeah. And it’s not, impact analytics isn’t replacing the activity. It’s just making sure the activity is accomplishing what we need to do, right. So they really are complementing each other. And we really are making this into EngageTogether right now, so being able to unearth down to a county level, literally everything being done by everyone in that community for labor and sex trafficking, adults and children, for nationals and domestic and getting a picture of an incredibly detailed picture about the strengths and gaps of all that. And then as that community shifts and changes based on those data insights, we start to fill in gaps, right? So those red zones go to yellow zones go to green zones and we’re starting to see kind of transformation there. So impact analytics has to blend. Yes, the people on the ground with the ability to share information, right? And as an attorney, you know, I am laughing at that right. So there are so many ways to do this that will still protect, right, all of the concerns that might be there. But we have to work together to see that or we’re just not making the level of impact we need to or we think we might be, but we may not be. And and it’s no good, right? People who are hurting deserve more.

Sandie [00:23:11] I’ve got two more questions, and our time is running out. I was really interested in your work with the Wyoming State Attorney General’s Office and the links to the missing and murdered indigenous women. Can you help our listeners understand that connection?

Ashleigh [00:23:31] Yes, so we worked this past year with the Attorney General’s Office in Wyoming and their Department of Victim Services to assess every single county’s efforts related to human trafficking. This would be this would fall into our Engage Together bucket. And try to understand where is Wyoming currently strong and where are there gaps? Where are there things that still need to be done? Wyoming was the last nation in the country to pass human trafficking laws and so that’s a bit of a yikes. But at the same time, they learn so much from all the other laws, and they baked in a really progressive, very comprehensive law. But even though that was 2013, that’s pretty short amount of time for implementation, right? So we were helping them really unearth everyone doing anything everywhere. And we’ve been able to give them all kinds of reports and ways forward and things to consider doing next. So that’s all good. But Wyoming, like any other state in this nation that has a large a minority population, especially those who are indigenous, that is a highly vulnerable population to human trafficking in this country. And the complexities there, I mean, you and I could probably talk about this forever, but I’ll just make it short for our listeners. The complexities lie in just the vulnerabilities exist in those cultures anyways, just their lack of access to resources and health care and the things that would make their communities strong, right? And there’s a whole historical context to that in our nation. But then the jurisdictional issues of sharing information when an individual does go missing or is murdered is almost nonexistent, as far as sharing data. And I have personally trained law enforcement in Texas who know that some of the women they have found murdered, who are Native American women on just their bodies literally dumped on the highway outside of a truck stop were trafficked from lands, tribal lands in Wyoming or Montana. But there’s no mechanism to trace that. No mechanism to activate a protocol, multistate protocol. I am very pleased to say our federal government right now is paying more attention to this than ever before, and Wyoming and several other states are realizing this nexus between missing and murdered persons, efforts going on in our indigenous populations and trafficking as well. And, you know, and we’re there to support any and every way we can those conversations because it’s an issue that must be addressed and is growing.

Sandie [00:26:00] Well, I’m going to stay tuned to learn more from you. We’re taking a team to Navajo Nation in May working around building resilience, particularly for children. Yes, so. OK, here’s my last question. I loved your interview answer that you gave about one of the problems that we have is that we’re giving people who are hurting in our world our leftovers. Our leftover time, our leftover talent, and our leftover treasures. What do we have to do instead?

Ashleigh [00:26:43] We have to address this with excellence. And, you know, when I was born, I promise this will be fast. But my dad was the pastor of the homeless mission downtown Nashville. And I feel like my whole life I have grown up seeing hurting communities and hurting families and hurting individuals. And certainly my whole professional life has been aimed at supporting those who are desperately hurting in our world today. And it is maddeningly frustrating that when let’s just stop and take federal budgets or state budgets, when those get slashed for any number of other reasons, you know, the budgets that tend to get slashed the fastest are those that protect those who are most vulnerable. Or even in our own communities when we’re looking at addressing issues of domestic violence or child abuse, and certainly human trafficking, homelessness, poverty. You know, we’re relying on overwhelmingly nonprofits and our government agencies, and we’re just giving them never what they need to fully accomplish that well. And so it’s just we are never going to win the war on issues of human trafficking or all of the many things that led to the presence of human trafficking at the level it is today. So all of these vulnerabilities that were not addressed well and are not being addressed in our communities that are leading to this reality, where people can be exploited in such a horrific way in our country and all around the world, if we are just going at this as though it’s just not that important. So we have got to raise the level of excellence at which we are going at these issues. Everything we’ve talked about in the course of this podcast, you know, is aimed at that, which means I hold myself to a certain level of excellence. Our team holds ourselves at a certain level of excellence, but we’re just pushing for excellence in this field because we’re just never going to win this war if we’re just giving people our leftovers. And I just think that for whatever reason, that’s been baked into our culture for decades. And that has to change.

Sandie [00:28:43] I love it. Well, everybody knows here at the Global Center for Women and Justice, we are not giving our leftovers. We are giving our students all of the tools they need to be successful in joining the fight. So will you hang around after? We’re going to close this episode up and answer one more question for me for our Patreon subscribers?

Ashleigh [00:29:08] Absolutely.

Sandie [00:29:09] OK. Dave.

Dave [00:29:12] Ashleigh and Sandie, thank you so much for this conversation. We’re inviting you to take the first step if you haven’t already, take a moment and go online to our site at endinghumantrafficking.org. It’s a great place to download a copy of Sandie’s guide, The Five Things you Must Know: A Quick Start Guide to Ending Human Trafficking will teach you the five critical things that Sandie’s identified in her work here at the Global Center for Women and Justice that you should know before you join the fight against trafficking. You can get access to it by going over to endinghumantrafficking.org. And Sandie mentioned a conversation coming after this. Patreon is a wonderful way for you to support the work that Sandie and I are doing through the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. We’re working on continually expanding our community of advocates. And if you become a patron, you can get access to exclusive content, including bonus conversations, episodes, and you’ll join a community of advocates around the world who are fighting human trafficking in their community. If you just go over to endinghumantrafficking.org, you’ll see a button there right on the home page for Patreon and you get access to content such as exclusive resources, toolkits and also conversations. After our episodes. You can become a patron for just $5 a month and will access all of the benefits, or you can give more if you like, just go over to endinghumantrafficking.org for more info. And for those who are already patrons, thank you so much. Stick around for a bit more here in just a bit. And we’re excited to bring you more this year as we continue to do the work here at the Global Center for Women and Justice here at Vanguard University. And of course, will be back for everyone in two weeks for our next conversation. Thanks a ton, Sandie. Have a great day.

Dave Stachowiak interviews co-authors, Shayne Moore, Sandie Morgan, and Kimberly Yim about their newly released book: Ending Human Trafficking: A Handbook of Strategies for the Church Today. Together, they discuss the inspiration for the book and each of their unique take on equipping leaders in the church.

Shayne Moore, MA

Shayne Moore is an author, editor, and activist. She coauthored Refuse To Do Nothing: Finding Your Power to Abolish Modern Day Slavery, which was named a 2014 Resource of the Year in Outreach Magazine. Shayne is the cofounder of Redbud Writers Guild, and former director of operations at the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College Graduate School. With an MA in theology, Shayne is a national guest lecturer on issues of global justice.

Sandie Morgan, PhD, RN

Sandie Morgan is director of the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University. She is recognized globally as a leader in the fight against human trafficking. She hosts the Ending Human Trafficking podcast, and she also served by presidential appointment on the Public-Private Partnership Advisory Council to End Human Trafficking.

Kimberly Yim, MA

Kimberly McOwen Yim is cofounder and executive director of the SOCO Institute, and she writes and speaks on issues related to human trafficking. She is also coauthor (with Shayne Moore) of Refuse To Do Nothing: Finding Your Power to Abolish Modern Day Slavery.

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast, this is episode number 273 Ending Human Trafficking: The Book!

Production Credits [00:00:09] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave [00:00:29] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:34] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:37] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, I am so looking forward to this conversation today because we are featuring the book that is coming out on ending human trafficking with both you and two of your co-authors. And I’m so glad that we have the entire author team here today to be able to talk about this new book and to really look at some of the key lessons that are coming out of it. So first of all, congratulations to all of you on this book coming out, and I’m really glad to introduce to our audience today, Shayne Moore, Kimberly Yim, and of course, my co-host Sandie. Shayne Moore is the author of five books, including Ending Human Trafficking: A Strategy for the Church Today and was director of operations at the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College Graduate School with a focus on anti-human trafficking. And Kimberly Yim is returning to the show. She is the director of the Soco Institute and author of Refuse to Do Nothing and Ending Human Trafficking. And of course, you all know my friend and colleague Sandie Morgan, who is also co-author on this new book, Ending Human Trafficking. I’m so glad to have you all here. Welcome back to the show.

Sandie [00:02:00] It’s so good to be a guest on my own show.

Kimberly [00:02:05] Thank you for having us.

Shayne [00:02:07] Yes, it’s good to be here. I’ve been a podcast fan for a long time.

Sandie [00:02:12] Well, one of our favorite stories is the Pithari and Dave and I have used that story many, many times during episodes and in other events, and I think I want to start this book launch interview with a statement of gratitude for Dave Stachowiak. Dave is on the Global Center for Women and Justice Board, and when he learned about human trafficking, he had heard me tell the Pithari story for new listeners. It’s a really large vessel that I saw at the palace of Knossos on the island of Crete. It’s so big I could stand up inside of it. And this is a people that were three thousand years ago. They didn’t have cranes, they didn’t have elevators, and they would literally fill that huge jar, the Pithari, with grain or olive oil or whatever. And then they had to get it down very narrow stairs. And the ingenuity was just phenomenal. They baked into the jar handles from the top to the bottom, so everybody had a place to take and carry that big, heavy piece of materials down those stairs. And when Dave encountered our work at the Global Center on Anti-Human Trafficking, he found his handle and said, Let me help you start a podcast, and that’s the origin story of Ending Human Trafficking, the podcast. So thank you, Dave.

Dave [00:04:05] Oh my pleasure. It has really been a wonderful blessing to me to learn so much about this, to have that handle as a piece of this, and I think it’s just a great lead in to the conversation about this book. The title, of course, is Ending Human Trafficking, but the subtitle is A Handbook of Strategies for the Church Today. And so many in our church communities as they learn about human trafficking and modern slavery, have a heart and desire to want to help in a substantial way. And they’re and they’re active and getting more active in the fight against modern slavery. The challenge is, it’s not always in a way that’s helpful, and one of the things that we run into, Sandie, we’ve talked about in the show before, but it’s featured in the book as well, is this savior mentality mindset that that sometimes shows up when churches dive in. What is that and why is it an obstacle for being helpful in this fight?

Sandie [00:05:03] Well, one of the wonderful things about having Kim and Shayne as co-authors is helping shape the message of the book so that it fits in everyday life. And so many times, from my perspective, when I was a task force administrator, some of the things that particularly churches did were well-intentioned. Kind of going out and doing their own rescues. But that kind of a citizen savior thing isn’t really sustainable nor necessarily effective. And so looking at it from a different perspective of how we can do rescue and Shayne, you want to tell the story of the cliff?

Shayne [00:05:49] Yeah. To go off of that idea that, you know, there’s some very well intentioned efforts in the churches today to fight human trafficking and all three of us have seen, or possibly, these well-intentioned efforts were not, in the end, the most effective efforts. So, you know, we wrote the book really with the intention to empower churches to play their unique and indispensable role in ending human trafficking or modern-day slavery. And Kim can talk more about this, about what human trafficking might actually look like in your specific community. But we built the book around the image of needing to build a safety fence so that people don’t fall off the cliff of human trafficking in the first place. Most of the resources today are really poured into scraping people off the bottom of the cliff once they’ve already fallen into human trafficking or as we say, they’ve fallen off the cliff. And of course, rescue and rehabilitation absolutely has to happen. But the thesis of this book, it’s an academic book, but it is an accessible tool for all church leaders or anyone in congregations that are interested. Is this idea that we will only end human trafficking if we, as the church, we understand that we are uniquely positioned for prevention and protection. And so we give this analogy of together we need to build a safety fence and that throughout the whole book, we talk about fence posts and every church, every community, and we teach you how to do this. You’re going to go out into your communities, you’re going to look at your own church, you’re going to look at your resources, you’re going to look at your strength, who’s there, who’s not, and you’re going to pick your fence posts. What can you do? What can your church do that is uniquely your sweet spot and build that fence post, and whether that’s around cybersecurity or after-school programs or whatever. And we unpack all of these ideas in the book. As you start to pick your fence posts. You might be a small church. You might have one. You might be a church with a lot of resources. You might have 10. So you build your fence posts and then you partner and you collaborate and you connect your fence posts to everybody else’s fence post. And the church is uniquely positioned to just make this huge force field protective fence.

Dave [00:08:26] Shayne, it’s such a helpful analogy in thinking about how we can work together to keep people from going past that fence, right? And I’m thinking about the church communities that need or maybe are just coming to this for the first time. They’re engaging. What’s an example of a fence post that you find often that is a good starting point to begin to engage?

Shayne [00:08:48] Well, you know, we, the way we start our book, quite frankly, is that we give examples for a church collectively and corporately to understand the role that they’re playing in slavery, both past and present. So, quite frankly, a very specific early fence post is to study the scriptures, know what it says and God’s desire and how holy people and the church should be set apart and see everyone in the image of God. And we talk about having a prioritized times of lament and repentance for the parts we play, whether we know it or not in our attitudes, in the past, present or even our purchasing habits. Do we know where our products are coming from? So those are some corporate ideas of fence posts, but we also give fence posts, and Sandie can speak to this of the idea of learn how to do a community assessment, walk around your church. What’s there? What are the needs? And what can you do? And start creating a plan.

Dave [00:09:58] Yeah, you said the word study a moment ago. And of course, Sandie, the Global Center for Women and Justice study the issues has always been the first invitation, right? And so much of this comes down to education. And you know, Kim, I was thinking about you in the context of education of there’s often, you know, certainly well-intended, almost everyone in the church community of wanting to serve well. And yet there’s often a lack of understanding of what’s involved with fighting modern slavery. What do you see when you run into that tends to be a stopping point on that?

Kimberly [00:10:32] Yeah, thanks. I think that in terms of the church, you do like Sandie said, you do see people with kind of savior mentality idea of going to the rescue. But you also see people either paralyzed when they learn about the issue, like it’s so overwhelming there’s nothing they can do, and the needs in their own communities seem so, so overwhelming that they don’t want to engage. They see human trafficking as another issue and another something to engage with, and it seems like too much. I already have enough on my plate. I can’t engage. Or, I see church leaders, community leaders just thinking it doesn’t exist in their own community. They don’t see it being a problem in their church. They don’t see it problem in their own towns. And so it’s like it’s the lack of understanding of what human trafficking and modern-day slavery is, not only globally, but locally. I think a lot of people think that human trafficking goes on overseas, that it’s in another country, that it only impacts people in extreme poverty or in war, and they don’t recognize the connection with their local community. They don’t see their own children at risk for being trafficked. They don’t see their own complicity in their purchasing and what they’re buying to Shayne’s point. And so the lack of understanding of the global and local domestic issues around trafficking either are not addressed because they don’t think it’s a problem, or they don’t want to lean into it because they think it’s going to be too much or too overwhelming for them to address. And those are the couple of things that I see in meeting with pastors or even nonprofit leaders who might be engaged in issues of homelessness or issues of poverty. And they see this as like another issue competing with what they’re doing, and they’re not seeing the intersection with what they’re doing and how it’s intersecting around human trafficking. So to be informed and be educated around this, I think we begin to see either, one: wow, maybe there’s an individual church organization that’s already doing something. Maybe they don’t see how this is really a preventative piece to trafficking. So learning about it and getting informed and educating yourself, you begin to see, Wow, when I am working at this homeless shelter, I’m actually doing trafficking prevention. So rather than looking like you have to jump ship and do something else, you’re more informed in what you’re doing and you could begin to see families like when I care for families on the brink of homelessness, I’m protecting these kids from being trafficked. When I’m involved in, you know, wheelchair missions, I’m helping people not be trafficked. And also, as you learn about trafficking, it’s not just how your church can help or how individuals in a church can help outside. But looking at, are we a strong community that we’re protecting our own kids, single mothers, adolescents from possible exploitation and harm? So I, as you can tell, I’m very passionate about educating and being informed on the issue of human trafficking. I think both protects our local community strong, but it also helps us see how we can, I think, will help develop what are those fence posts that we can do well and recognizing maybe we’re already part of a fence post that needs to just get stronger or needs to connect with another local fence post.

Dave [00:14:08] I so appreciate you saying that, Kim, because I experienced that myself when I first learned about human trafficking. That sense of overwhelm and also that sense of like, well, I’m already involved in other things like this is another thing competing for my attention. And it is interesting that like to be able to come to a place to see the intersections, right? And I’m wondering, as you’ve talked with church leaders and observed folks who really are able to start to make that transition. What do you find that’s helpful to get past that mindset of like, OK, this is too big or it’s like, I’ve got so much else and starting to see the intersections and how it all fits together?

Kimberly [00:14:49] In terms of, like continued learning, I think some people feel like they know all that they need to know and to have the posture of continually to learn and be open to where they’re places. I don’t know if that’s answering your specific question.

Dave [00:15:07] Yeah, I think it does. And it like having that is really key, then. When you run into situations with church leaders where maybe that isn’t the leading indicator. Is there anything you found that either they do or you do or someone else does that just helps people to like, move down that path a little bit of starting to do a little bit of that leaning in of that, that willingness to learn?

Kimberly [00:15:28] I think one of the things that I have told people is that if they start feeling uncomfortable, upset, overwhelmed to just pause and take a breath, but continue to lean in where your heartbreak is, where you’re beginning to find yourself kind of choked up. I feel like it’s kind of where God’s kind of nudging you for a little bit more. I have spoken to some groups of women and you can feel their resistance like they don’t want to get upset. They don’t want to get upset. They think they can’t handle it. But the more that they’re informed, the more they realize they have capacity to lean in, that there is something for them to do, and I, I think that people, as they come to around trafficking issues of trafficking, they don’t want to be left with a sad story. They just don’t want to be moved to just an emotional place. They want to get tangible, get to the place where they have tangible actions and feel and power that the steps that they’re doing make a difference. And I can’t stress enough that reading, learning, getting informed, knowing the language around trafficking, all of that’s going to help prepare for what that step is. Understanding the language around trafficking was we talk about becoming human trafficking literate, helps us to engage in the public square and then regardless of what that steps looking like, even understanding, OK, we talk about purchasing power. When we learned just a little bit, then we can go to our grocery stores and we’re more informed on the products we’re buying. That might feel so small, like an insignificant step, but with a little bit of education when a lot of people start changing their consumer habits and tweak it, that that changes entire global markets. When individuals start changing their habits, then this system of whole global markets change. All of a sudden you’re seeing more fair trade chocolate items in your grocery store. Why? Not because someone thought selling a five dollar chocolate was more, you know, smart fiscally. But it was because consumers started saying, Why don’t we have more fair trade chocolate items? This is fair trade chocolate tells us that the people and the kids that are harvesting our cocoa are not enslaved and making the chocolate bar. That’s a big deal. When people start asking or kind of demanding their money to have more fair trade options in their stores that begins changing entire markets. But it’s hard to– I think it’s hard in the beginning to make that turn like that, that my individual actions and my individual purchasing decisions, what I click on, what apps I download are going to make a big difference in the larger global issue around trafficking. But I think the more you learn and the more you understand the issues, the more you’re empowered by, actually, it does. It does matter.

Dave [00:18:29] Yeah, I so appreciate your invitation to us to think about. I mean, a lot of times we don’t think about the study in the reading as tangible. We think about, okay, I need to get out in the community and go somewhere or volunteer or bring food. And all of that is like good and important and as a part of this, but also to reframe thinking about the study as being so important as a tangible thing each one of us can do. And as you were saying that Kim, I was thinking I actually purchased a gift for Sandie yesterday, which spoiler alert Sandie. You have a gift coming in the mail and it’s a food item. So I was making sure that it was a fair trade item and it took me more time to find it because I was looking for something specifically fair trade. But I know to do that now because of all of the conversations I’ve heard on this show and from Sandie over the years. And just that study, that awareness, especially on an issue so complex as human trafficking is really key and like then framing our behaviors that are really tangible. And speaking of that, Sandie, you know, one of the other mindset shifts that I think a lot of us have started to make over the years, and certainly we’re always inviting folks to make is thinking about this on prevention as the way to really end human trafficking. A lot of times we think about it as people initially think about it as rescue. And one of the quotes in the book says that: “focusing primarily on prevention is the only way to end human trafficking and modern slavery.” That’s not news for anyone who’s been listening to this show before, but it’s such a key important principle in all of this, isn’t it?

Sandie [00:19:59] Absolutely. And and I have to say that we need a bigger understanding of what the word prevention means here. To your point about purchasing fair trade, I can’t wait to see what comes in the mail, and I’ll be sure to let everybody know. But the idea and Kim, I think you were the one who put the quote in from Kevin Bales. This is an economic crime. People do not enslave people to be mean. They do it to make a profit. And whether thats sex trafficking or labor trafficking, understanding that my purchasing decisions reduce demand for slave made products and one candy bar doesn’t save a continent. But there is a dioceses in Australia that did some research on their procurement policies, and their spending is four point six billion dollars a year. And so that’s a big chunk of prevention when it’s intentionally designed to look for avoiding labor trafficking or sex trafficking, whatever the prevention focus is. So we do a lot of prevention materials and interviews here. Just a couple of weeks ago, we interviewed Rachel Thomas and the Cool Aunt Series. We want to do prevention right here in our own backyard, but we also want to think about it in the big picture and how we start to impact how our church members think about stewardship. Cheap isn’t good stewardship. The respect for people created in God’s image is good stewardship. When I think about prevention, I also think I can make almost anything sound like prevention, I’ve been told. But the idea that we equip in this book, we equip readers with the language to be part of the community response to ending human trafficking. So we teach you the five Ps of prevention, protection, prosecution, partnership, and policy. And those five Ps are laid out so that church leaders can develop strategies that will empower their whole community, and they can be part of that. And when we become part of it, we become part of the army that is protecting our children, protecting the most vulnerable who might be labor exploited or even labor trafficked. So prevention looks different in different communities. Sometimes I go back to the recent interview with Chris Fields and the work of Mercy Project on Lake Volta. And Lake Volta, for decades, we’ve gone in to try to rescue kids who are being labor trafficked in the fishing industry. And they went in and figured out from a community assessment that building a stronger business economy for the fishing industry and equipping families to be safer and more economically secure. That was the best prevention, and now, they’re recognized for their model of developing avenues for removing children from being labor trafficked. And it really went back to a prevention mentality.

Dave [00:24:02] You know, so much of this really comes from a place of starting, and I know all three of you have the heart for church leaders to come to this book and to take something away from it that’s a starting point. Kim said there were tangible a few times earlier, like something that that you can begin with. And Sandie, we often when we have conversations on the show we talk about, you know, what’s the first step? And I’m curious for all three of you, actually, and I’ll start with Shayne. If you were having coffee with a church leader who was asking your advice about getting started with ending human trafficking for the first time, perhaps on their own volition, perhaps folks in their congregation that were starting to think about this? I’m curious if you were going to make one invitation for them to begin with as a starting point, where would you invite them to begin?

Shayne [00:24:57] Yeah. Often the saying goes, you know, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. And we wrote the book really with this spirit of we wanted to come alongside church leaders and congregations, and it be an encouraging book. We want it to be a compelling resource. And, you know, if I was going to give a starting place piece of advice or encouragement, it would be you don’t have to invent anything. You don’t have to do it alone. And to really build up that sort of enthusiasm and morale that this is a movement. People are talking about it. Our children are talking about it because you may think you don’t have issues of human trafficking in your community or your church with four walls. But every one of your kids have a phone, and there’s so much cyber security and online security and so many resources about how you can protect our very own. That would be, I guess, my word of encouragement would be: Join. Find your friends post. Join it to the fence posts around you because you don’t have to do this alone.

Dave [00:26:12] So often there is whatever starting on something new. There’s that tendency for all of us to start from the beginning and create an isolation and not to think about what’s already there that we can help with and like finding the place we can latch on to. Thank you so much for that invitation. Kim, the same question to you. If you were sitting down with a church leader starting on this, what would you invite them to start on?

Kimberly [00:26:34] I think I would encourage them to spend some time in prayer, both in their church and then to get a few and walk around their church, walk around a few blocks, start praying for asking God for wisdom on where to begin and finding a few people in their church with the same feelings of we’re ready to listen and to do something. I think listening and learning should kind of be some of the first postures in terms of when we’re coming to an issue. I think our impulse is to do an act and at first, and I think I take this pretty serious. So I would say, I would encourage people to listen and learn, and then those next steps would be then begin to see what needs have risen to the surface. What kind of resources do you have available within your church and then to begin that discussion around assessment before acting. But I think my very first things would be through prayer, listening, and then learning.

Dave [00:27:41] Thank you. Sandie, I know, like Kim and Shayne, you’ve been involved in many of these conversations over the years with church leaders. When you sit down with someone who’s starting with this for the first time, what’s the invitation you would make?

Sandie [00:27:56] My invitation is really centered around collaboration, and that means I want them to understand the framework and figure out if we can go back to the Pithari where they actually fit instead of trying to do something they’re not very good at. I love what Kim just said about listening and in collaboration to be a real partner, to have the trust of the community. We need to show up and have respect for the other members in our community, respect for law enforcement, respect for victim service providers who are required to use a trauma informed approach. To learn those, the language around that and demonstrate our value for the leaders that are doing that hard work. Communicate with the people in your local coalition, your task force. There are so many opportunities to be involved. It’s really interesting to see how often churches feel very isolated and they start a human trafficking ministry and I ask them who their partners are and all their partners are people in their church. And actually, if we’re going to make a community impact where we actually have the capacity to become a safety net that doesn’t allow our children, our adults, people who are part of our mission organizations to fall through, then we need very densely woven connections to have a a net that is a safety net. And that means creating partnerships with people in other parts of town, in other walks of life, and opening our doors to people that we don’t always agree entirely with. But we all have the same focus and we want to end human trafficking. And when I finish coffee with this church leader, I would suggest that they do a book club or a staff training and use the Ending Human Trafficking Handbook of Strategies for the Church Today as a starting place, as they grow their impact in the community.

Dave [00:30:41] Thank you all three of you for the incredible work that you have done and the hours you have put in, not only to write this book, but of course, in your work and your volunteer work over the years to yourself study these issues so you can be a voice and make a difference. And I would love to echo Sandie’s invitation of this book as a resource. Normally, here at the end of episodes Sandie, we talk about resources on the website and the guide and Patreon. But today, I really would just have my single invitation for you would be to grab this book because as we’re airing, the book is available and out. It is a resource that will help you really from beginning to end to frame some of the key places on study, as you’ve heard or echoed in this conversation. And when I read through the book Sandie, I thought, Wow, this is just such a wonderful guide that captures so much of what we talked about over the last decade on the show in one place from the context of a church leader to really begin. And so I hope that you’ll take a moment to find Ending Human Trafficking: A Handbook of Strategies for the Church Today on Amazon or wherever you purchase books. We’re, of course, going to link to it at endinghumantrafficking.org and utilize it as a starting point, either for yourself or within your own church community as the beginning place to take tangible action. Thank you so much to all of you for your work on this. Shayne, thank you so much. Kim, thank you. And Sandie, of course, always a pleasure to work with you and just support you on your efforts on all of this.

Kimberly [00:32:20] Thank you so much for having us, Dave.

Shayne [00:32:21] Thank you.

Sandie [00:32:23] Dave, as we wrap up here, I do want to let people know that InterVarsity Press Academic has offered a promo code on their website and will give our listeners 30 percent off plus free shipping. And all they need to do is enter the code EHT30 perfect.

Dave [00:32:46] We will have that linked up on the website. Thank you so much for that Sandie. So just go over to endinghumantrafficking.org find the link. EHT30 is the code to use and we would love to hear from you on what questions and conversations are coming out of the book because we’ll address them in future episodes. Sandie, Shayne, and Kim, thank you so much to all of you. Sandie, we’ll be back in two weeks for our next conversation.

Dr. Sandie Morgan and Rachel Thomas discuss a new curriculum developed as a resource for parents, social work agencies, after school programs, and more. The Cool Aunt Series is an online prevention course developed for youth that will guide them through understanding human trafficking and provide resources and support throughout and after the curriculum.

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 272, The Cool Aunt, with Rachel Thomas.

Production Credits [00:00:09] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave [00:00:28] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:33] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:36] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie and I are so glad to have Rachel Thomas back on the show today. If you didn’t listen to our prior conversation with her, I’m so glad to introduce Rachel to you. She is a graduate of UCLA with a master’s in education and a personal survivor of human trafficking. Rachel has extensive experience teaching, training, curriculum writing, public speaking, and mentoring. As the founder of Sowers Education Group and the lead author of Ending The Game and The Cool Aunt. She has educated and inspired a wide range of audiences, including teens, social service providers, churches, teachers, college students, and law enforcement. Her intervention curriculum, Ending The Game, is being used by over a thousand facilitators in 36 states and helps survivors break the bonds of attachment to traffickers and the lifestyle of commercial sexual exploitation. Since 2012, Rachel and the Sowers team have reached over 150,000 live audience members and millions more through numerous media outlets. She was also nominated and appointed to the White House Advisory Council on Human Trafficking. Rachel, we’re so glad to have you back on the show.

Rachel [00:01:55] I am so blessed and honored to be here. Thank you for having me, Dave and Dr. Sandie.

Sandie [00:02:01] Well, Rachel, I have to tell you, episode 196 when you really opened up Ending The Game, the goals, and breaking that attachment to the traffickers, that has become a really popular tool among people trying to understand coercion. It is, it’s the most frequently cited for hearing about coercion. So thank you so much for contributing your insight there.

Rachel [00:02:33] That is, that is so great to hear. Thank you for that opportunity, and I’m glad that people are hungry for that type of information because it is. It’s such a missing link in a lot of survivors journey to recovery that mental psychological piece.

Sandie [00:02:50] People think rescue is moving someone from one physical place to another, and that is so much more complicated.

Rachel [00:02:58] Right, exactly.

Sandie [00:03:01] So I’m really excited about your work on the advisory council. And before we dive into your newest endeavor, will you tell us what that is and what you’re doing?

Rachel [00:03:14] Yes. So of course, 2020 was a crazy year for all of us. But in the midst of that, I was nominated and invited to join the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking. And I did not know much about it. I still don’t know who nominated me, so that’s kind of a cool, little cool, little thought in my head that someone out there noticed and thought enough of me to do that. But I don’t know who. And the time that I’ve had on the council, man, it has been amazing. Kind of short changed because of COVID. We haven’t gotten to go to the White House or anything in person, yet. I’m hoping it’s a yet, but it has been very eye opening. I am someone who started as a high school teacher. I’m very hands-on, direct service, ground level type. And for this experience, I have really been exposed to more of the systems level and governmental level and global look at human trafficking. So I’ve learned a whole lot more about labor trafficking. And most importantly, I’ve learned about systemic level answers and resources and thinking on a broader scale than just, you know, my community and my network. And so I was on the Administration of Justice subcommittee, and so we had multiple meetings with the Department of Justice, Department of Education. The president’s interagency task force is made up of 26 different federal departments, and so we’ve gotten to meet with each of these departments and write an amazing report of recommendations based upon hearing what they’re currently doing and how we know that they can help combat human trafficking more within their capacities. But I mean, it’s just, it’s really been an honor and just learning new skills for how to how to end human trafficking.

Sandie [00:05:12] That’s so insightful. And I’m I wish I could have been there when you met with Department of Education because of your background in education, so that must have been fun.

Rachel [00:05:24] It was. It was.

Sandie [00:05:27] One of the things that I love about how you do anti-human trafficking is your platform of education and from the beginning, from the first time I met you, it was really clear. You are a teacher and you have a masters in education. So your voice as a survivor of lived experience and expertise, that expertise is so evident in everything you’ve done. People can go back and listen to episode 196 for the Ending The Game curriculum. But I want to start our conversation around why education is different than awareness. And I pulled up a basic definition of curriculum, and this is this is rote for you. But for our listeners, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page. Curriculum is a standards based sequence of planned experiences where students practice and achieve proficiency in content and applied learning skills. And I’ve personally been a little frustrated in the prevention efforts because we, you know, we have the five Ps: prevention, protection, prosecution, partnership, and policy and prevention so often is like throwing a glass of water on a burning house. It’s too little, and education takes a very different approach. Can you tell me why you chose education as your platform?

Rachel [00:07:13] Definitely. I mean, going back to to the first curriculum that my organization wrote for the anti-human trafficking field, Ending The Game, I needed to figure some stuff out. I, for my own healing, from my own journey, I needed to know how I got so far away from myself. How was I manipulated like this? And I needed to know how it happened so that I knew it wouldn’t happen to me again. And so really the point of education, and I love that you brought that up. The difference between education and awareness, being aware of something you know was kind of surface level and awareness is good. That means okay, I know it’s happening. I get the overall gist of this is what’s out there. But the education is diving deeper into it and really looking at the how, the who, the when, the where, the why, you know, figuring something out. And so for each of our trainings, for each of our curricula, everything that that we do, we want people to walk away with a deeper understanding of how it works and how to stay safe. Specifically, for the Cool Aunt series, for kids to understand how people are lured into human trafficking and how they can stay safe.

Sandie [00:08:25] I love the title of the Cool Aunt series and one of our adjunct professors here, Ruthi Hanchett, often teaches workshops for parents on how to keep their kids safe, and it starts really, really young. And so she uses the five fingers of one hand. You can teach a two or three year old to count the people that you can talk to on one hand. And when we think about so much of our literature has been focused on one trusted adult, but if that person isn’t available, our kids need to have more than one. And so this idea of the Cool Aunt, I know so many people who had an aunt that was a significant voice in their lives. And I was, my parents were overseas, I was still a teenager and going to college, and my aunt was the person who made sure where I was on the weekends, and bring your boyfriend over here, that I had a cool aunt and I didn’t think about that before. So tell us about your Cool Aunt series.

Rachel [00:09:39] That is such a blessing. I’m so glad you had that, Dr. Sandie. And when we decided on this title for the curriculum, I’ve heard so many amazing stories about the cool aunt and about the cool uncle, so they are definitely a part of this equation. And I am blessed to have, I can count for cool aunts that I’ve had. And that person fills the role that they’re not going to, they’re not going to put you on punishment, they’re not going to, you know, they don’t– They may have the authority, but they don’t utilize the authority to ground you or punish you. That’s more of a parent role. They sometimes are younger than your parents, so they may be a little bit more, a little bit more cool and and hip to some of the stuff that’s closer to your generation than your parents would be. But they’re still, they’re still old enough, they’re still mature enough and far enough along in life that you can get really good advice from them in a non-judgmental, noncompetitive and, you know, just a loving way. And so the Cool Aunt series has exactly that same feel. We want to be that resource for teenagers and to talk about human trafficking prevention in a way that is different from how a lot of school curricula may do. And really, it’s it’s meeting them where they are. So we have real teenagers acting out real life scenarios. And then I kind of press pause on it or just afterwards, we’ll say, you know, OK, here’s what happened right here. Here’s how this is dangerous. And here’s how to stay safe if you find yourself in a situation like this. Here are the risk factors that we just saw play out in real life. Have you seen any of these? Have you experienced any of these? And if so, here’s what you can do. And so we’re pointing them to national resources. We’re encouraging them to talk to their safe adults in their lives or to their social worker, whichever organization that that they’re reaching us through. We encourage them to really dive in deeper to the resources that are already around them.

Sandie [00:11:46] And how is that delivered?

Rachel [00:11:49] So it is a one hour online course. There are 12 short videos and twenty five questions, and so if a teenager sits down, they could go through it all in one hour. Usually it takes about an hour and a half because, you know, they pause, they reflect. There is opportunity to do some breathing exercises throughout. So about an hour and a half total.

Sandie [00:12:13] OK. And do they do this in the school, in the home? What’s the best venue?

Rachel [00:12:19] Yeah. You know, we wanted to be a resource that parents and after-school programs or social service agencies could utilize. A lot of the, and I’m trained in a lot of the leading prevention curricula and I think they are wonderful, but the model has always been the school has to adopt it. Then you teach the teachers and then the teachers teach the kids. We know that COVID turned everything upside down and a lot of times our teachers are already busy. They they are not always able to take on a whole another unit or curriculum. Sometimes our schools don’t have the funding to purchase a new curriculum or really adopt something new on their plate. And so we wanted this to be something that would reach teens through other avenues with no facilitators to train, no added pressure to the adults in their lives. And then so right now, our main avenue is through social service agencies and after-school programs. So a lot of YWCA’s, YMCA’s, PTA’s, and a lot of different counties or agencies that are working with foster youth. They found it very, very helpful.

Sandie [00:13:37] So I can do this with my niece or I can do this with my Sunday school class?

Rachel [00:13:44] Exactly. Yes.

Sandie [00:13:46] OK. So I don’t have to be an expert to use this?

Rachel [00:13:51] Not at all. And you know, we do. We also have a page that is like a curated guide to over 50 of the best of the best online prevention resources that we have found for parents. So if parents want to do a deep dive in, we have that for you guys also, for the service providers, social workers, parents to do a deep dive. And I mean, links to documentaries, you could get as deep into the prevention work, you know, and knowledge as you want. But for the teens, you either just send them the link and they get it to their email inbox and then they can do it from there, from their smartphone, from their computer, from their iPad, whatever. Or you can sit down with them and do it with them live.

Sandie [00:14:36] So one of the things that I love about this particular curriculum is that students get to actually practice and achieve proficiency, which is a key piece of a curriculum foundation. And my delight, if you will, I know can I’m kind of a nerd when it comes to prevention. I get really excited about this, and it lit up my joy center in my head when I read about how it deals with solicitation. I just had Ensure Justice. For those of you who missed it, you can still access the virtual conference by going to the GCWJ.org website. But this idea of solicitation has been a growing concern for parents and educators, community leaders, and they showed us stats that made us absolutely terrified at how many kids are being lured or approached by predators online and this idea of solicitation. So tell us how you address that potential and almost there was a sense that this is inevitable. Your child very likely will be approached by someone trying to lure them into sending them sexual pictures or things like that.

Rachel [00:16:06] Yes. First of all, I’m a nerd too, so that’s awesome. Nerds unite. Yeah. And it’s a matter of when, not if, honestly. If your children are online, if they have any social media account, or even if they’re just, you know, on YouTube or if they’re playing video games where there’s like a community portion where people can message them, it’s a matter of when, not if. And so they will be approached, they will be solicited. And so really, really having them ready for that and not being blindsided by it and hopefully not being tricked by it. That’s really the goal. So with solicitation, this has been, and in fact, the Department of Justice in their 2019 report stated that online solicitation and recruitment is the number one way that kids are lured into sex trafficking. It’s no longer the face-to-face stranger danger out on the streets, that is happening as well. But the online solicitation and recruitment is the number one way. So, in the Cool Aunt series, so the series walks you through the streams of influence and Dr. Sandie, did we talk about that in the Ending The Game one?

Sandie [00:17:23] I don’t remember talking about that. Go ahead and review it anyway.

Rachel [00:17:28] Yeah. So the streams of influence. This is an acronym. And this is what we developed with the Ending The Game curriculum to help survivors understand that, you know, they’re not stupid, that there are many small influences usually that lead to sex trafficking. Of course, we know nobody woke up at 12 and said, Hey, I want to do this with my life. But oftentimes, you know, it’s also not just, Oh, I met this person, and he talked me into it. The streams of influence describe those seven small influences that lead to sex trafficking, and it’s the acronym STREAMS. You know, we talk about how it is, how it is like a stream, like a stream of water. You’re not going to step in and drown and get swept away. It’s usually a smaller body of water, but it flows in a specific direction. And over time, that small, steady stream does make an impact on the ground around it, and it usually leads to a larger body of water. And so this is the same concept with getting into sex trafficking. And so STREAMS the acronym. The first S is for survival, T is for trafficker, R is for recruiter, E is for environment, A is for abuse–specifically childhood sexual abuse–M is for media, and then S at the end is for a solicitation. And so within the Cool Aunt series, we have a skit, and it just shows a teenage girl on her phone and it shows from her vantage point the conversation and what she’s writing. And then we switch to who’s on the other end of the phone, and it is not who the girl expects, and it’s not who the audience expects, either. And it really just shows how the conversation, you know, it’s not going to be obvious. It’s not going to say, Hey, I’m a predator trying to trick you, little girl. Let’s meet up. You know, it’s something that is using language that your friends use. It’s flattering. It’s fun. It’s a little risque, maybe, but not in a way that feels offensive. And so we give them a good look at how this conversation can progress. And then afterwards, I talk about the dangers of solicitation and what to do when you get solicited.

Sandie [00:19:51] Wow. So the dangers and what to do. So then if they practice that they build their resistance to those kinds of solicitations. I don’t think the word solicitation is in my niece’s vocabulary. Where are they going to learn that?

Rachel [00:20:14] In the Cool Aunt series. In fact, that’s one of the questions and we break down what that word means. And really, you know, for this curriculum, we don’t care that they know or can spell solicitation as a word. We care that they know what it means. That there are people who will try to ask things of you, who will try to approach you, and want something out of you and may be, you know, have like a secret motive. And so we look at it more as that. The word itself, of course, helps the adults to know what we’re talking about, but for the youth, we care that they understand what it looks like, what it feels like, how to spot it, and in what to do when it happens.

Sandie [00:20:54] OK. Wow. I’m thinking through how I might start using this just in my circle with family, in my neighborhood. So tell us some examples of how people have customized that? I would, I went to your website and my imagination was incited because I saw the different ways to do this. Can you talk about how when somebody brings their kids into this, what kind of resources and tracking and support comes along with it?

Rachel [00:21:32] Yeah. So OK, let’s start with parent. So if a parent goes to the coolauntseries.com and clicks purchase, then they will purchase the series and they’ll immediately get an email and the email will, you know, welcome them to the series. It’ll give them their link to to view the series themselves if they want to do it before they send it to their teenager. They will get the link to our parent resource guide, which is that page of over 50, 60 links about what we consider the best of the best curated guide to everything you need to know about human trafficking prevention. And then they will also have the opportunity to either have their kid call them in one night, maybe after dinner, and sit down with them for an hour and a half and go through it together if they want, or they can send it to their teen if their teen has an email address. Then they can email it. They put the teen’s name and address in there, and then they’ll get an email in their inbox saying, Hey, you know, you were invited to do this and they could watch the trailer. Some parents are giving incentives. You know, I told my daughter if– And whenever a teen finishes and gets all the 25 questions right, then they get a certificate of completion. And so some parents can give incentives for, I don’t know, target gift card or something or whatever the team has been asking for if they successfully complete the series. And also in that parent guide, we give resources for how to talk to your teen afterwards. You know, this is, some parents are still weirded out by the sex talk. And so this is the sex talk plus more because it’s sex talk plus trauma plus, you know, trafficking. I mean, it’s more daunting than for parents even than just talking about sex talk. And so we know that and we want to be the resource to the cool aunt, to kind of be the mediator, so the cool aunt can say the stuff that’s more awkward and the parent can just kind of watch the video with the kid and be there as a resource.

Sandie [00:23:38] I love that and I love that it is presented in your content as you are like, have a team. So if I’m part of the Cool Aunt series, I have access to the Cool Aunt team. So the things that I feel uncomfortable about in conversations with the youth in my life, there’s somebody I can go to to get help with that. And that kind of support gives me a lot more confidence in starting conversations that I may be fearful are too hard for me to handle.

Rachel [00:24:12] Exactly. Yes, that is exactly right. And all the email addresses that we have, they get ongoing resources and support. So we have our newsletter that goes out about new resources, new new healthy clubs to get involved with for teens. You know, new pages to follow on Instagram about mental health or about healthy relationships. So they get that ongoing support from us and also, you know, within the series at the end, there is a 10 question self-assessment. So after the teen learns about, you know, the streams of influence and they answer the questions and they get that education on how teens are lured into sex trafficking, then they have a ten question self-assessment and it says, you know, have you ever been solicited online? Yes, I’m not sure, or no. And if they answer yes, then we give them the link to where they can report it. Or if they, you know, do want to talk to somebody from our team? They can, they could send us an email. And so there’s a whole, a whole process to make sure that they get the support that they need and they can always, you know, email us, reach out to us. We do answer questions. And really, the bulk of the questions we have received from teens have been about solicitation. There they just learned something new, and they’re like, Wait. So there’s this guy I’ve been talking to on Instagram, and he’s really cool. But one time he said this; is this dangerous? And they are asking the questions that we we are so happy that now they have the awareness and somewhere to go to with these questions. And they are, they’re yeah, they’re processing it and is making them more aware, and we’re really grateful to have that impact.

Sandie [00:25:56] I am so impressed because this curriculum truly is standards based, planned experiences, practice and then you assess their achievement, their proficiency. And that makes me very hopeful for changing the tide so that our kids are not as vulnerable to those kinds of solicitations. Two minutes left. I have one question for you. I stole it from Dave on his podcast, Coaching for Leaders. You’ve been doing Sowers Education for 10 years. Have you changed your mind on anything?

Rachel [00:26:38] Hmm. I think one thing I have changed my mind on is the, and I named it Sowers because I felt really overwhelmed. I felt, Sowers was a way to remind myself that I’m just here to sow seeds. If I never see the impact, if I never have a success story, if I just keep getting up and doing what I do and I never see the fruits of it, I have sown a seed. And so that was, that was really my way of managing my expectations and remembering my why. And I can say that after 10 years, this is our ten year anniversary, where God has taken this is so far beyond what I expected, and so I have gotten to see some really amazing fruit of our labor and the seeds that we have sown. And so people ask, can we end human trafficking? I do not think we will end it because this is not. I think our world is going to have suffering and abuse and trauma here. But I do think that we can make a huge impact, and I do think that we can get two steps ahead of the bad guys. And I really do feel more hopeful that the seeds we sow really do produce good fruit.

Sandie [00:27:55] Rachel, I want to thank you so much for creating an on ramp for our ending human trafficking community to start using the Cool Aunt series with a discount code. So if you go to the Cool Aunt web page, you can purchase the content using a 25 percent discount code: EHT25. Thank you so much, Rachel, for coming back.

Rachel [00:28:29] Thank you for having me.

Dave [00:28:31] Thank you both for this conversation. We’re inviting you now to take the first step as well. Go online and download a copy of Sandie’s guide, The Five Things You Must Know: A Quick Start Guide to Ending Human Trafficking. The guide will walk you through the five critical things that Sandie has identified that you should know before you join the fight against human trafficking. You can get access to it by going over to endinghumantrafficking.org. We’re also now partnered with Patreon, and the Ending Human Trafficking podcast is building and expanding our community of advocates. If you want to become a patron, you get access to exclusive content and join a community of advocates around the world who are fighting human trafficking in their community. Just go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. You can click on the Patreon link and you’ll get access to additional content such as bonus episodes and exclusive resources and toolkits. We’ll also be having some additional interview content, including a bonus conversation here with Rachel that will be available there as well and many of our other interviews. You can access it for just $5 a month and get access to all of those benefits. Or you can get more if you’d like. Just go over to endinghumantrafficking.org for more information. And if you’re already a patron, thank you so much for your support. We’re excited to bring you a lot this year and thank you for supporting the Global Center for Women of Justice here at Vanguard University. All of the links, of course, will be available at endinghumantrafficking.org as always, and we’ll be back in two weeks for our next conversation. Thanks, Sandie.

Sandie [00:30:07] Thanks.

Dave [00:30:08] Take care, everyone.

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 271, Using Stress to Your Advantage, with Jeanette Morgan.

Production Credits [00:00:09] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave [00:00:29] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:34] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:37] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, on most episodes we get one Dr. Morgan. On this episode today we get double the Dr. Morgan’s. I’m so glad to welcome our expert guest today, someone you know well, Jeanette Morgan. Jeanette earned her doctorate in clinical psychology at Azusa Pacific University. She provides individual therapy using evidence based treatments to children, adolescents, and adults who struggle with anxiety, panic, OCD, tic disorders, trauma, grief and loss, relationship problems, singleness, self-esteem, and behavioral problems. In addition to her therapy work, Jeanette is also a licensed educational psychologist with almost 20 years of special education experience, first as a special education teacher and then as a school psychologist. Her warm, compassionate and optimistic style encourages those who work with her to feel connected, heard and feel hopeful. She believes that everyone is doing the best they can with what they know, and that expanding what they know through discovery in their personal patterns and learning new skills is empowering and builds resilience. And Sandie, unlike many of our guests, I’ve had a chance to know Jeanie for many years and I can say she is all of those things. Jeanie, so glad to have you here on the show.

Jeanette [00:01:58] Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Sandie [00:02:00] Well, not any more excited than I am. And just for our listeners, there is a stronger connection here. Dr. Jeanie Morgan is my daughter and I have followed her career in just amazement and wonder at her persistence and perseverance and excellence in everything she does. I recently asked her to come and speak to my interns at Vanguard because with COVID and boomeranging back and forth, in-person zoom, so much stress, almost every conversation starts with, “I’m so stressed.” So, I ask her to come. It was an amazing conversation, and so I ask her to come on the Ending Human Trafficking podcast with us because everyone’s talking about how stressed our kids are, the mental health challenges. And so, Jeanie, thank you for joining me and let’s talk about kids and stress.

Jeanette [00:03:12] Sounds good.

Sandie [00:03:13] Tell us what is the secret to finding the stress advantage?

Jeanette [00:03:21] The secret is changing our relationship with stress. So, we have heard all of these messages for so long that stress is detrimental, detrimental to our health. You’re going to die. It’s detrimental to relationships because you’re going to be irritable. All of those different things. When in reality, our stress response was actually designed to be helpful for us, to keep us safe. To help us meet the challenges that we have in life and thrive. So changing how we talk to kids and helping them to not view it as this horrible thing that needs to be managed and instead kind of make it their friend and use it is really the change that we need to do in talking with our kids.

Sandie [00:04:12] So you’re talking about our perceptions in our relationship to stress?

Jeanette [00:04:18] Absolutely. Absolutely. How we view stress actually changes, not just how we relate to it, but it actually changes us at a physiological level; how our hormones respond. So, there’s been several studies over the last three or four decades that looks at how how we think about stress impacts how our bodies actually produce hormones. So, when we think and know that stress is bad for us, right, like all of the messages that we’re always told that stress is harmful, then we have the stress hormones that are produced and these are going to be produced no matter what. But we have cortisol and adrenaline–and you’ve all heard of cortisol, right, it’s like the one that the commercials all show how it gives you belly fat. So none of us want that. These hormones slow down your digestive system, they slow down your growth, they slow down the physiological processes that aren’t as important when you’re in a life threatening situation and you need to respond. So that’s the cortisol, the adrenaline. But what we don’t really talk about is that there’s also a hormone called DHEA that’s a neuro steroid. And that one actually does the opposite. It’s actually a growth hormone and it helps create new neurological pathways, et cetera. And when you understand that stress is actually, it’s a signal, it’s a response your body’s having to try and help you, then just by understanding that, your DHEA rises more than your cortisol levels. And when that happens, then you have a physiological response that’s healthy. It opens your blood vessels. It helps your, it strengthens your heart. There’s other hormones that also come as a result of that, including more oxytocin, which is a wonderful hormone that you may have heard of as the cuddle hormone because it makes you seek out others. It also is the bravery hormone, but it’s a it’s a strong hormone for resilience. So just by that one little mindset shift of recognizing that your stress hormone is actually meant to be your ally, you shift your whole biological response to it, which is absolutely amazing.

Sandie [00:06:51] It sounds like a magic button, and I just flip the switch. It cannot be that easy. You’re going to have to convince me.

Jeanette [00:07:01] Well, there’s been a lot of different studies, so they’ve done studies in really high stakes interviews where they have people being really critical, and of the interviewees, and before they go into these interviews, the groups are shown: one group is shown that stress is debilitating, kind of the same messages we’ve all received. And then another is shown stress is enhancing video and the people who were shown that stress is enhancing–so in a three minute video, these are not like long interventions, these are just, hey, let’s look at this differently. Let’s think about it differently. Those people did better in those interviews. They were rated by outside people–so blind raters–they performed better. And with this, they also again looked at their hormone responses through spit tests, et cetera, and heart rate monitors and all of those different kind of things. And again, all it was was just that one mental shift of understanding that our physiological stress response, the signal that we have that, hey, something’s important to us and we need to rise to this. If we understand that that response is helpful, then we actually can be healthier because of it.

Sandie [00:08:27] So then how do we move from a stress that is the typical what we’re told all the time to a mindset that is going to flip those stress hormones?

Jeanette [00:08:41] Well first, we need to acknowledge the stress response. So when we have it, we go, OK, yes, I’m feeling stressed. Then, actually look at it as a positive, almost in a welcoming way and recognize that the reason you’re feeling this is because something is important to you. Whatever the value is that’s being triggered, you wouldn’t be stressed if something wasn’t important to you. And it could be, you know, a relationship that’s important to you. It could be a job that’s important to you. It could be that maybe the job is not important and you’re feeling stressed, but maybe the job is helping you to attain something that’s important to you or giving you a sense of security or something in there that you value. And then instead of fighting that stress response and trying to manage it, make use of the energy that the stress response is giving you instead of wasting it, trying to manage that stress.

Sandie [00:09:46] So I shouldn’t look at this as a threat to my safety, but more as a challenge like climbing a summit.

Jeanette [00:09:58] Exactly, exactly. In any stressful situation, all of the stress hormones raise. But when you believe that stress is bad, cortisol raises higher than your DHEA, and that is what causes blood vessels constricting and a lot of other kind of negative responses that can have a detrimental impact on your physiological health and mental health, of course. But when you just make this one little shift and recognize that, actually, it’s my body helping me in preparing me to do well and to meet this challenge, then what happens is your stress hormones rise, but your DHEA rises higher than your cortisol and that is actually called the growth index. And the growth index actually predicts resiliency, even in extreme circumstances, like recovering from child abuse. So the growth index is such a powerful physiological response and powerful for us to understand that because it gives us such a simple tool to shift our relationship with the stress and the difficult times that we go through. Our body doing this is not our enemy, it’s actually our friend and trying to help us move through it and rise to meet those challenges.

Sandie [00:11:23] So after I heard you talk to my interns, I started thinking about imagining what was happening in my body. And the thing that stuck out to me was that my blood vessels remain open when my heart rate goes up and I see it as a challenge. So that means I got more oxygen in my brain and my focus is stronger. My vision is better, my hearing is sharper and then I feel like I’m ready to take it on. And that mindset means that when I’m done, I have a sense of having been in control, not being controlled. Now I’m wondering, how can I use that in my everyday life? Do I have to be stressed?

Jeanette [00:12:23] Well, if you’re not stressed, are you doing something meaningful? If there’s no stress, then it’s not that, not that all stress, you know anything that you’re doing relaxing, right? There’s there’s meaning there, but viewing it as yes, it is helpful. It actually does increase, it even increases your ability to problem solve, right? Because you have all of the oxygen going to your brain. So more of your frontal cortex is activated, which is where you where you problem-solve and you make sense of things and you plan. So being able to access that in all situations, even in the smallest little thing, right? You know, oh, it feels stressful to go to the grocery store. It’s like, OK, I feel a little stressed. I’m still going to go to this grocery store because I value eating, high value, feeding my family. I value whatever that is, and okay I feel a little nervous about it. Maybe because there’s going to be people and they’re feeling a little social anxiety. That your heart rate’s going to increase, maybe your hands get a little sweaty. And instead of viewing that as, Oh no, I’m going to have a panic attack, oh no, I’m not going to be able to handle this. Oh no, this is terrible. My body’s my enemy here. And instead looking to go, OK, my hands are a little sweaty. My heart’s racing a little bit. OK, that’s my body actually preparing me to do well, my body preparing me to get in that store and get those groceries and deal with the people that are in front of me. So it’s shifting. It’s like, OK, when I feel these physiological sensations, it’s not a bad thing. It’s actually helpful. My body is truly trying to help me to approach life and find joy and meaning and all of those wonderful things by helping me meet these challenges.

Sandie [00:14:27] So stress is more than survival. It’s actually about achieving what you want to do, giving you the power and the ability and what you need in the moment to be successful.

Jeanette [00:14:42] Absolutely. And, you know, if you think about it, if we didn’t have any stress, we would sit on the couch and be couch potatoes. Because why do anything? Why reach out to people? Why go to work? Why do anything if we didn’t have a certain level of stress? So it’s necessary? It’s the beautiful–haven’t talked too much about this–but the other beautiful part about stress is when you are going through a stressful and challenging time, the oxytocin rising when you see it as helpful also helps you to reach out to others. So you’re connecting. Which that, we need that, we need to connect. That kind of, that builds resiliency. So it’s a powerful, powerful, powerful thing to understand how much our stress actually supports us socially at work, in life, and just all the different ways.

Sandie [00:15:42] So when we talk to our kids who when they’re stressed, they sometimes pull back. How do we talk to them so that they understand stress is their friend and what they’re feeling is okay?

Jeanette [00:15:59] That’s a great question. We stop talking about it and modeling it as a bad thing. So, you know, if you think about all the self-talk that we have, but not even just itself, it’s what we say, say out loud. Oh my goodness, I’m so stressed I can’t handle one more thing. Oh my goodness, I’m so stressed I can’t, I just want to go hide in my room. I don’t want to see anybody, all of those different things that we, we say. With kids, we need to watch our own self, our own talk in front of them and start talking instead about, “Oh hey, I’ve got a lot. I’m feeling stressed. How can I use this?” And with kids helping them go, OK, you have a lot going on. You’re dealing with a pandemic. You’re not able to see your friends in the way you want to see them. You’re experiencing a lot of disappointments and it’s hard and your body. How’s your body responding? And help them kind of recognize, you know, oh, my body’s feeling this way. OK, how can we use that? Is your body trying to make you feel bad? Like, is that really what our body is designed to do? No, our bodies are designed to be our friends, or to help us. So with the kid helping them to actually change how they view their physiological responses. Oh, when my heart starts to race, that’s not because I’m so scared I can’t handle it. That’s because my body’s trying to send oxygen to my brain so that I can, I can act. I can be faster. I can, I can hear better. I can see better. I could, it’s like a superpower. So changing how we talk with kids about it as well about our own stress in front of them, as well as instead of with them saying, Oh, you’re so stressed, I know. Why don’t you, why don’t you go play a game and and relax? You know, why don’t you go– You’re so stressed. You’re so stressed. And instead help them to use it.

Sandie [00:17:57] I heard you say something earlier. You said that stress means that something matters to you. How do I communicate that to a child?

Jeanette [00:18:10] I think it’s asking them because, you know, with kids, you can ask them, like, what’s important? You can ask them about values. And kids, even at six and seven, they get it. You know, it’s like, well, maybe my mom matters to me. My dad matters to me. Getting to play with my friends matters to me. So asking them, when you’re feeling this way, what are you, what are you thinking about? What are you hoping will happen? What are you hoping you can do? What are you hoping for? And by shifting to that, it’s like, then you can have a conversation about what’s important to them because they’re going to tell you, Oh, I’m hoping that I get to spend time with my friends. Oh, so your friends are important to you? Yes. So it all leads to conversations with them about what’s important. Maybe it’s important for them to do well. Maybe it’s important, you know, for their teacher to like them. Whatever it is, but then using that and going, OK, so your body, your heart beating faster, your hands being sweaty, that’s because your body’s trying to help you to have more oxygen so you can get what you want, or you can get what is meaningful to you.

Sandie [00:19:29] So the media is feeding us a very different story, Dr. Morgan, I’m sorry. I went on the internet and just did a quick search, and there were millions of hits that linked stress and fear and trauma and withdrawal. And I didn’t see it as a positive. How are we going to flip that switch for our kids right now?

Jeanette [00:19:57] It’s such, I mean it is hard because we are bombarded, bombarded by these messages. And they, it’s funny because when I first was was really learning all of this I was working in a university setting. And there were signs all over the hallways, like near the counseling center I worked in. Signs all over the hallways about how bad stress was for you. And that just drove me crazy because now I know, oh, it’s how you think. And so we’re setting everybody up to think badly about it and then have an unhealthy response. And the news that’s out there about stress being bad, it’s not that it’s wrong. I mean, if you believe it’s bad for you, your body is going to have this response. Your cortisol is going to be higher and it is going to be unhealthy. So from a global perspective, I suppose, it’s somehow getting the messages that are coming out from the medical world, et cetera, to change and get this message out there to more people. But from an individual level, from the kids in your home, to the kids in your classroom, to the students, the university students you work with in a classroom, et cetera, getting this message out to them, helping them to look for what things stress me out and why. What’s the value I have that is being activated here? That’s making me feel stress? OK, now how is that stress response trying to actually support me and help me to get through it? And it’s at an individual level. I think it’s not something at this point. There’s a way to get around all of the dire messages that are out in the world and on the internet.

Sandie [00:21:53] Well, you’ve changed the way I talk to myself about this. I tell myself when I have to convert another class to Zoom that I need to be courageous and I need to think about how important it is for me to connect with my students. And it completely refrains how I turn my computer on and how I start that class. I want more DHEA than cortisol for a lot of reasons, but mostly so that I can be successful in what matters to me.

Jeanette [00:22:32] Yes. That’s exactly, exactly the response that I want.

Sandie [00:22:39] All right. All right. So back to you, Dave.

Dave [00:22:43] Thank you both for this conversation. I’ve learned so much from both of you over the years. And I hope that you will take the next step as well to go further. We’re inviting you to take that first step. If you’re listening to the show for the first time or maybe, maybe it’s the second or third time you’ve listened. Go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. You can download a copy of Sandie’s Guide The Five Things You Must Know: A Quick Start Guide to Ending Human Trafficking. And as we all know, stress shows up in so many places in our lives, affects so many of our decisions, and of course, affects the conversations we have about trafficking in such a significant way. It’s a great starting point for you, and perhaps you have been listening for a bit and have been utilizing the show. And if you have, we’re inviting you to join us on Patreon. We’re building and expanding our community of advocates this year. And you can become a patron. How does it work? Just go online to endinghumantrafficking.org as well. You’ll see a link there for Patreon. It’ll give you access to bonus episodes like the one we’re doing today. Also, exclusive resources and toolkits, so you can join us for $5 a month and access all of those benefits. You can certainly get more if you’d like. A thank you to those of you who have already supported us, continue to support us. We’re really honored for the work you are doing, not only to bring the lessons from our conversations into your work, but also to continue to support the work of Sandie and the Global Center for Women Justice. And if you haven’t yet join, go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. More information there on how you can get started to support us as a patron, or simply just to visit the links from today’s episode. And of course, we will be back in two weeks with our next conversation. Sandie, always a pleasure to be with you, and Jeanie. Have a great day and see it in two weeks.

In this episode, Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Brooke Istook from Thorn to discuss how parents can protect their children through equipping themselves with knowledge and resources. They dive into research on child sexual abuse materials and look at studies demonstrating the difficulties youth are having navigating in an increasing digital environment.

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 270, How Can Parents Defend Children? with Thorns Brooke Istook.

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

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

Sandie [00:00:35] My name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:37] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, today we’re glad to welcome another expert with us, Brooke Istook. She is vice president of youth and communities at Thorn, a tech nonprofit and global leader in fighting online child sexual abuse. She leads Thorn’s education and behavior change work to prevent online child sexual abuse. Brooke and her team use child centered research and digital interventions to empower youth and families with knowledge and tools to navigate the digital world safely. Brooke, we’re so glad to have you on the show today.

Brooke [00:01:17] Oh, thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Sandie [00:01:21] I’ve already had a couple of conversations by phone and email, and I’m so excited about the content of our conversation today. I’ve been following Thorn for a long time and Thorn’s work has leveraged technology in ways that are innovative, including building software to help both law enforcement and tech companies stop online child sexual abuse and trafficking. And recently, you guys have increased your upstream efforts to prevent abuse from happening in the first place, and that’s where my heart is, as our listeners know. So tell us about your role at Thorn, Brooke.

Brooke [00:02:08] Yes. So I’ve actually been a Thorn for a while. It’s been almost eight years now, and I’ve played a variety of different roles over the years. But my role now is leading our youth and communities team, which is our prevention work or prevention pillar at Thorn. And that’s where we’re focused on using in-depth research with kids, and we built educational tools to help kids and families prevent online child sexual exploitation and abuse and to enjoy safer online experiences. We’ve conducted a bunch of research over the last three years with nine to 17-year-olds across the United States really trying to understand their experiences, understand the vulnerabilities that might be at work and various online dangerous situations, and really try to get at the root of what’s going on so we can prevent these situations from happening.

Sandie [00:03:04] Let’s talk a little bit about what that research does for parents. My understanding so, I mean, I grew up my kids didn’t have digital access until they were adults, and a lot of parents don’t really know how to have these kinds of conversations. And the biggest challenge that I’ve discovered talking to parents is they used to feel like they could talk to their kids based on their own experiences when they were that age. They can’t do that now. They didn’t have these experiences. So tell us what your research shows about those experiences of children and youth online.

Brooke [00:03:50] Yeah, I think that the experience you’re talking about is very common. We did a bunch of focus groups with actually parents and children, as well as surveys to really kind of understand those dynamics, and we did learn that there is kind of this digital divide to your point, right? Like kids are experiencing things in ways that their parents didn’t exactly experience that growing up. They didn’t have to grow up and navigate normal childhood development with the phone in their hands. And sometimes parents can be at a loss as to how to guide their children to navigate those experiences in a different way, as well as, frankly, just keep up with the tech that’s constantly changing. But one of the most surprising things in our research over the last three years that’s come up is really how early these situations start, particularly as it relates to kind of online sexual interactions being propositioned by strangers online. And then one of the issues that my team is really focused on right now is what’s called self-generated explicit material. So think about situations where, like naked selfies or nudes that are either shared consensually, at least initially, among peers. But those types of situations can also happen via online interactions, where, like an adult perpetrator might try to coerce the child into sharing an explicit image that’s called online grooming. There are other situations where an adult might try to befriend a child online, start up a livestream, ask the child to undress, and then they record that, that’s called capping. And any of those situations can escalate into what’s called sextortion, where an adult perpetrator, even a peer, threatens to expose or share intimate images to get that person to do something so that could be anything from stay in a relationship with them if it’s a peer. It could be money, that happens, especially in like an online grooming situation, to meet up in person, or even create more egregious and abusive content. So it’s it’s a tricky landscape right now for children to navigate, and I think it’s important for parents to understand that these things can happen, as scary as they may sound, but there are ways that parents can can show up, even though they didn’t experience that themselves, can show up and guide their children through these experiences. And that’s really what a lot of our programing is about. It’s about equipping parents with those resources and how to have a conversation with their kid about this. When should they start having the conversations, right? What are conversation starters or even scripts? You know, what are the things they need to be teaching and how to approach these conversations in a way that their children can understand?

Sandie [00:06:41] So, I’ve been sitting in a living room with a few young moms, and we start having this conversation. And part of the concern is they don’t want to overreact and jump right to child sexual abuse material. And because they they’ve read all of their development books and they know that kids explore and what used to be right there in maybe a playroom or something that was very innocent now becomes something exploitable. So not a big lesson, but kind of a 101 intro to internet child sexual abuse material. What are the definitions, the guidelines?

Brooke [00:07:31] Yeah, I think this is really helpful context to have, but it’s also, to your point, like it doesn’t have to be about the scary, the scary stuff. So I think where those conversations are headed with those moms is is right. It’s good for parents to know what’s happening, but how they approach it with their kid will be different, right? So, yeah, when it comes to child sexual abuse material online, folks might be familiar with the the legal term is child pornography, and it’s the documentation via video or images of the sexual exploitation or abuse of a child. And that abuse gets documented and then spreads online, as you can imagine. In 2020, actually, there were over sixty five million images and videos reported to the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children. In fact, I don’t know if you know this, but back in, I think the ’90s, this issue, child sexual abuse material, actually more or less went away between credit card companies clamping down on it, as well as the Postal Service getting involved. They were basically able to eradicate the exchange of child sexual abuse material. But with the advent of the internet, it’s just exploded given the easier access, the facility, and taking pictures and sharing them and all of those things. But over the past couple of years, what’s been interesting, because we obviously work really closely with nonprofits like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and law enforcement and tech companies, so we have our fingers on the pulse of where these issues are going. And about three to four years ago, we started to hear from our partners about this dramatic increase in explicit images created by children. So these nudes or naked selfies that I were I was talking about that were circulating online and being consumed by communities of offenders. And since that time, three years ago, we’ve just continued to see that portion of child sexual abuse material grow. But it’s a different dynamic, right? Kind of the situations I talked about earlier, like, you have kids exploring, right, they’re growing up through exploratory, curious, developmental stages with a phone and a camera in the palm of their hand, right, connected to a never forgetting always on internet. So it really complicates what’s already developmentally, maybe a complicated stage, right? And that’s where things like online grooming, nonconsensually sharing of nudes and spreading of nudes online, the capping in sextortion that I talked about earlier. That’s really what we kind of need to be aware of. And I think one thing that’s important as we’ve continued to unpack this issue is just understanding the harm, right, that happens in these because oftentimes we as parents, we’re focused on, you know, the physical dangers around us in our world, right? But this can be kind of hard to imagine because it’s just it’s happening on the other side of the screen. And when these situations spiral out of control and a child’s intimate images, regardless if it was coercive or initially consensual, once they start spreading, it can be really traumatizing. It is very traumatizing, and it can lead to things like depression, self-harm, and even suicide. So it’s important that we really understand these dynamics so that we can address these with our kids and prepare them for what they’re going to face and help them, you know, have a safer online experience.

Sandie [00:11:05] So one of my concerns has been how we do prevention. A lot of times in our communities, we’re reaching out to high school students, and the understanding that I have is that we really need to have access for those conversations a lot younger. So let’s, that sixty five million blew me away. But let’s go back to just statistics around online sexual interactions. That includes self-generated materials, and let’s break it down by age. And let’s start with what we expect to see with our teenagers 13 to 17. And then let’s go younger.

Brooke [00:11:50] Yeah. So yeah, let’s talk about the older children. So kind of like the tweens and teens, really, that 13 and above. And what we know is that as kids get older, they developmentally want to explore. They want to connect, their peers and those relationships become very important. We also see things like insecurity, right? Their bodies are changing, right? Dynamics are changing. So that’s coupled with greater access to technology in general. Their own devices, social media. And what our research has shown is that as kids grow up and start connecting with people in online spaces, the boundaries get really kind of tricky when it comes to online relationships. So it’s not often clear the difference between a safe and unsafe online interaction because the boundaries tend to be a little bit different. So, you know, whether it’s sexting with the crush or flirting with adults online, those categories, like stranger and friend, are just a lot grayer when it comes to those online interactions. And kids are rarely connecting with friends via games via shared interests, right? And you know, a large portion of those are people they haven’t met in real life. Now, on the other hand, with older kids, the good news is, is that the kids that we spoke to had a really strong sense of what’s called creep, what they called creepers, right? So this like creepy adult that randomly approaches them and solicits them for nudes or other things on a regular basis, and you’d be shocked at how often it happens, but they’ve kind of gotten immune to this, right? So they’re regularly blocking creepers that fall into that category. But when online relationships turn more kind of towards the romantic end of the scale, we notice that the difference between peers and adults got really fuzzy. So age gaps don’t mean the same thing online as I they do offline. About 40 percent of teens agreed that it’s normal for kids their age to share nudes with each other, and that chatting and flirting with adults they met online was also considered fairly normal.

Sandie [00:14:10] Normal to flirt with a full grown adult.

Brooke [00:14:15] Right. And you know, it’s a tricky spectrum, right? Because like, sure, 35-year-old 14-year-old like that throws off alarm bells, but there’s a lot of areas in between their. 13-year-old and 17-year-old, 19-year-old, right? 21-year-old and a 14-year-old. It just starts to get really fuzzy and I think we can all as adults sitting here looking at it, it’s really clear to us the dangers, right, and the risks that are associated with that ambiguity. Another thing that we learned is that when it came to sharing their own nudes, about half of kids who had shared their own nudes had shared them with someone they had never met in real life.

Sandie [00:15:00] Oh, okay.

Brooke [00:15:03] And about 41%  believed they were sending the images to an adult.

Sandie [00:15:11] Hmmm. Wow, okay.

Brooke [00:15:13] Yeah, so–

Sandie [00:15:15] Let’s go younger now. Really make me uncomfortable.

Brooke [00:15:20] Yes. So with younger children, you know, starting about age seven or eight, you know, kids start to become curious about their bodies. You know, there’s definitely more of an exploratory kind of experience for younger kids, and it’s important to know that it’s not always sexual either, right? So one of the programs that we run is called NoFiltr, which we do educational videos on TikTok, Snap and Instagram directed at youth online, right? And one of our most popular educational videos for youth on TikTok, and it’s gone viral like several times over, we pose the question: “How old were you when you were first asked for nudes?” And something about this question resonates with the youth we’re talking to online, so much so that, like I said, it went viral multiple times and we had over twenty thousand young people comment on that video. And they said things, if it’s okay, I’d like to actually share a couple of the comments that were said because it’s really just helpful to see what these experiences are like. One said, “I was like 12 and he was 30. I didn’t understand about the age thing at the time.” Another one said, “I was nine and he was 14.” Another one said, “I was nine and I’m a guy first asked at 11 first sent at 12 and it was because I felt like I had to because the guy was guilt tripping me. I was naive and caved.” So like I said before, kind of that age spectrum gets a little tricky. And what we know as adults, looking back, right, is that whenever you have a significant age gap like that the child is always going to be outmatched, in like, decision making intellect, right? So it makes these situations particularly risky. From a stats perspective, our research showed that one in five nine to twelve-year-olds that we surveyed had had a sexual interaction with someone they believed to be an adult.

Sandie [00:17:26] So they knew, or they thought they knew, that this was an adult. So, okay, so as a mom, I remember having the book about puberty and sitting down with my daughter and walking through that and conversation. And so your research is so compelling about risks around the intersection of puberty and the internet. It’s like those books are really outdated. We need new resources as parents to defend our children.

Brooke [00:18:05] Yes, that’s that’s definitely true. Yeah, we like to say puberty and tech are on a collision course. And one thing I’ll say that, you know, these statistics can be terrifying and scary for parents to hear. But I guess what I would like to say through all of our research is that, yes, like it’s important that we know how often these things are happening or the likelihood that they’ll happen, when these things start happening so we can prepare our kids. But there is a fix: by better understanding how kind of puberty and technology interact here, that can inform not only when we approach our kids, but also how. Because how we approach this conversation is really, really critical in safeguarding them. So one thing I would just say is that, it’s really important to have proactive conversations with kids about digital safety. You know, just like we wouldn’t give them a bike or a car without the knowledge and the tools to operate those that machinery, right? The same. Think about that also when you’re giving a child a device, right? And what type of access is available on that device and make sure before you turn on chat on any device or before you give them access to YouTube that there they have the knowledge and skills to operate those things safely.

Sandie [00:19:32] Well, so let’s talk about specifically the resources that you have with Thorn for parents to address those risky interactions and keeping your kids safe. I love the use of the word defend.

Brooke [00:19:48] Right. Yeah, so it was really because of the dynamic. So, between 2019 and 2020, we saw a significant uptick in the nine to twelve-year-old age range of kids participating in and being involved in these behaviors. And so that really inspired us to think about how we can create an intervention for parents because what needs to happen is parents and the adults in kids lives need to start having conversations with kids early and often to start laying a foundation for how to navigate these situations before they start happening. You want to make sure you have that conversation.

Sandie [00:20:30] So when you say early, how early, what age?

Brooke [00:20:34] I mean, I would say like eight or nine, at least, but the earlier, the better. And our Thorn for Parents website actually tries to not only educate parents about the issue, but give them the tools they need to have those conversations. So we have things like conversation starters. We have discussion guides because parents we’re just figuring this out as we go, right? Like, we don’t have all the developmental psychology at our fingertips, much less the knowledge about all the tech. So we brought together experts, child safety experts and social workers and licensed therapists to help us create this resource. And it’s conversation starters, so how you can start a conversation, how you can bring up these topics in effective and casual way without, you know, putting kind of shame and blame in the mix. It’s also discussion guides, you know, how do you have a conversation about how to make online friends? What types of red flags your kids should be looking for? Teaching them how to trust their gut. Teaching them to be able to identify safe and unsafe dynamics. Teaching them about things like consent, digital consent and not sharing their or other people’s private information. So we get into all of that with specific guidance on how to have these conversations.

Sandie [00:21:59] So one of the things that this group of moms said to me was, it’s kind of like my little focus group, is well I’m just not letting my son, my daughter, have a device. And I noticed in the curriculum or the parents materials that you have that you address that issue.

Brooke [00:22:24] Yeah, I mean, that is an approach. It’s not necessarily one that I mean, we don’t really make specific recommendations about when and how in terms of device access. We really kind of layout the child development timeline as well as typical kind of device access for parents to get that broader view of what dynamics might be at play at different ages to make some of the decisions that you’re talking about. But in general, I would say that we would probably lean more into making sure that parents are building their kids judgment as they grow and as they progressively get more and more device access. I think locking things down on some level for the younger ages or limiting access for the younger ages is appropriate and each family has to make that make that decision and how they want to navigate that. But as kids grow up, I mean, there’s a bit of an inevitability, right, when it comes to technology, for better or worse. And so we want to make sure that as they get more independent, that they have those skills and they know how to keep themselves safe. And I will say we know that we, as parents, can only control what goes on in our own home. So if you’re not preparing a kid for how to navigate risky situations, if they’re at a friend’s house and they have unfettered access to the internet or games or chats or whatever, you want to make sure your kids are prepared for that experience as well.

Sandie [00:24:01] Exactly. I always am telling people you can’t control what happens in somebody else’s house or even in the school library, and now with so many different versions of what school looks like, a lot is online and they are online. So the shocking experience of one of my colleagues is his daughter was online in a class and was contacted by someone who had broke through the school firewall. And so this idea of having those early conversations and doing that regularly, people hear me often talk about prevention isn’t once and done. It’s just like brushing your teeth. It’s every single day. So is there resources on the Thorn for Parents that have discussion guides at every level?

Brooke [00:25:05] Yes, yes we have, we’ve broken it down by ages and kind of comfort level, depending on where a family is in their, in their process. The age of their kids, as well as like how restrictive they’ve been and you know what type of access the child has had to date. So you can filter based on the topic as well as age and comfort level. We do have conversation starters based on the age levels as well, and you’ll notice that right now a lot of the content is kind of focused on that eight to 12-year-old with some teen content as well. But we are looking in the future to expand and have recommendations for even younger ages for folks that want to get started even younger than, like eight or nine-years-old. But a lot of it will apply, even what’s up there already, for some of the younger, younger kids. But one point I would like to make for families is, so I have children myself. My oldest is eight. So we are definitely in the throes of the screen time battles, the games, like all the things. And a little kind of trick that I’ve done in my own home is kind of repurpose that ever present kind of nag for more screen time, more device access and repurpose those moments as opportunities to have a conversation and have a learning moment. So when it, when my son asked for a new game, I look at it. He knows that mom’s concerned about chat and the reasons why, because we’ve had conversations about not everyone online is who they might seem to be. We’ve used those moments that are ever present and use those and repurpose them for educational moments. Now I will say not all of them are repurposed, you know, because they’re constant. But it really is a great opportunity and reminder to use those moments to build their judgment and to build their knowledge so that they’re ready as just the internet world kind of opens up to them more and more as they get older.

Sandie [00:27:13] I absolutely love the web page. I’m looking at it while we’re talking, and I just can hear some of my friends saying, Well, yeah, you could do that, but I couldn’t. I want parents to know that this is broken down into almost a script, how to start talking and then asking, What’s your favorite game to play right now? And just repurposing the normal conversations that you have. And it takes you through this in a step-by-step guide. That’s what a lot of us need, and I love that it’s so accessible. I can do this on my phone and have it right there with me. Brooke, how do people access the Thorn for Parents?

Brooke [00:28:03] They go to parents.thorn.org. And there you can see, you know, an issue overview, you can dive into the timeline, which really gives you that high level view of like what’s happening at each stage of development and what to be thinking about when you make decisions about what access to give and what conversations to start having. And then there’s, like you said, there’s loads of discussion guides and conversation starters where you can dig into topics like stranger danger 2.0, requests for nudes, resharing nudes, right? How to make friends online? How to have safe online relationships? You can dive into a myriad of topics and we’ll highlight the most critical things for you to cover, and we actually kind of play this in the scripts we actually play out like how this conversation can happen. Like, you can ask questions like has anyone ever tried to talk to you or chat with you online or in one of your games? And then it kind of walks you through what you can say in response to that and role play a little bit so you can be prepared for those conversations and have them in mind.

Sandie [00:29:12] Preparation is key to prevention, so parents.thorn.org and we’re out of time. But if you’ll stick around, we’ll do a little bonus question about stranger danger for our Patreon subscribers as well. Thank you so much, Brooke, for all your hard work and for showing up today with us.

Brooke [00:29:35] You’re welcome. Thank you so much.

Dave [00:29:38] Brooke, thank you so much for these resources. We have kids that are of similar ages, and so I’m really excited to get into these resources here online, and I hope you are too. The best place to go to get access to all the links we’ve mentioned in today’s episode, and of course, notes is endinghumantrafficking.org. That’s also the place you can download Sandie’s guide, The Five Things You Must Know: A Quick Start Guide to Ending Human Trafficking. It’ll help you identify the five critical things that Sandie’s identified that you should know before you join the fight against human trafficking. Again, endinghumantrafficking.org is the best place to go for that. Sandie mentioned Patreon a moment ago. We have started this year to build and expand our community of advocates, and if you’d like to become a patron, you get access to exclusive content, including today’s bonus question, and join a community of advocates around the world who are fighting human trafficking in their community. You can go over to endinghumantrafficking.org, click on Patreon, and get access to new content like early episodes, bonus episodes, exclusive resources and toolkits. It’s simple and affordable. You can become a patron for only $5 a month. You get access to all those benefits, or you can certainly contribute more if you’d like, again endinghumantrafficking.org for more details. And if you’re already supporting us, thank you so much for your continued support of the work here at the Global Center for Women of Justice at Vanguard University and of course, supporting Sandie’s work as well, and we will be back in two weeks for our next conversation. Thanks, Sandie.

Sandie [00:31:11] Thanks, Dave.

Dave [00:31:13] Take care, everyone.

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Matt Friedman and they discuss how businesses play a role in combatting human trafficking by auditing their supply chains, educating corporate executives, and developing tools for businesses.

Matt Friedman is an international human trafficking expert. From 2006 to 2012, Matt was the Regional Project Manager of the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP) in Thailand, an inter-agency coordinating body that links the United Nations system with governments and civil society groups in China, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. From 1991-2006, Matt worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Thailand, Bangladesh and Nepal. For over a decade, he worked passionately to design and manage both domestic and regional human trafficking programs. He also helped establish a counter-trafficking regional training centre, participated in resource mobilization, and produced two award-winning international films about sex trafficking. Matt is a technical advisor to numerous governments. He is frequently cited in the news media, has been invited to speak at major conferences around the world, and is the author of nine books.

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 269 Empowering Businesses to Create a Slave Free World, with Matt Friedman.

Production Credits [00:00:11] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave [00:00:31] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:37] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:39] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, we have had so many conversations over the years about the importance of partnerships and the importance of working closely with businesses, of course. And we’ve many times had a conversation that involves the word “global”. It’s even in the name of the Global Center for Women and Justice. Today, I know that Matt is going to really help us with some wonderful perspective on both, of looking at things through the lens of business, but also to be able to look at our world as we really need to in almost every context through a global lens. I’m so glad to welcome Matt Friedman to the show. He’s an international human trafficking expert and CEO of the Mekong Club. He has served the United Nations and Thailand linking civil society and governments in Asia. His work also includes more than a decade of working with USAID, which is the United States Agency for International Development in Thailand, Bangladesh and Nepal. He worked passionately to design and manage both domestic and regional human trafficking programs. He’s also helped establish a counter trafficking regional training center, participated in resource mobilization, and produced two award-winning international films about sex trafficking. Matt is a technical adviser to numerous governments and is frequently cited in the news media, and has been invited to speak at major conferences around the world, and is the author of nine books. Matt, what an impressive resume you bring to us. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Matt [00:02:14] Thank you for the opportunity. I’m thrilled to be here.

Sandie [00:02:17] So I met you recently, Matt, and we’ve got a big time difference, but we found a ways to connect, and I’m learning so much about what it takes for businesses to be part of our collaboration. I downloaded your book, “Where Were You? A Profile of Modern Slavery” and I just want to recommend that people go to wherever you purchase books and get a copy of Matt’s new book. The home page, though, of the Mekong Club sums up your mission and strategy so well. I just want to read the title, “empowering businesses to create a slave free world.” And I think we have often focused on how we can empower people so that they don’t become victims, slavery of human trafficking. But we’re really taking and moving the focus to actors who have a lot of power and presence globally. So the next byline is “the Mekong Club is a catalyst for change, uniting and mobilizing businesses to bring about sustainable practices,” everybody knows sustainable is one of my favorite words, “sustainable practices towards the fight against modern slavery.” So my question for you to start, Matt, is why do you believe businesses can be catalyst for change?

Matt [00:04:01] Excellent question. Let me just start off with a little bit of context related to modern slavery. As we all know, there’s 40 million people, out of the 40 million, 25 million are in forced labor circumstances, of which about 16 million are associated with supply chains. Our desire to go in the direction of working with private sector happened all the way back to the time when I was still with the United Nations. This was about 10 years ago. We were looking at the statistics, and at that time the number was 21 million. But when we looked at the number of people that were being helped globally to address this issue, it was estimated to be about 34,000. When you put those two numbers together, it means the world with all of the NGOs and the United Nations government is helping about 0.2 percent of the victims.

Sandie [00:04:48] Wait, stop right there because I know the first time I heard that stat, I was totally, I couldn’t imagine it. So you’re not even talking two percent, you’re talking point two. So it’s not even a whole one percent.

Matt [00:05:03] And if you look at the statistics now and compare the 40 million to the 108,000 that we have documented that we’re helping, it’s still 0.2 percent. So because of this kind of situation, we realized that we were not having as much impact as we thought we were. We went back to the numbers and when we realized that many of the people are in forced labor circumstances who are associated with supply chains, we said we have to deal with the private sector. We have to get to know them. We have to find out what they know and don’t know to see whether or not we can engage them. And that was kind of the genesis of this.

Sandie [00:05:38] So the private sector that you’re addressing, these are big businesses. How are you expecting them to make change?

Matt [00:05:51] Well, if you stop and look at different private sector organizations or sectors, they have different categorizations. The banks are interested in this topic because the profits generated from modern slavery one hundred and fifty billion US dollars a year. If any of that illegitimate money gets into a bank, it’s money laundering and they get fined and penalized. There was a bank in Austria that was fined 1.3 billion Australian dollars for not taking the time to look into this. When it comes to the kind of manufacturing world, they have to be concerned about this because they have supply chains and within their supply chains, many of them have been auditing tier one, the top level where they kind of assemble things, but they haven’t looked at the second and third tiers, where they have the component parts, the zippers, the shoelaces, the soles of their shoes or the raw materials. And so as they start looking down, they begin to find that there’s forced labor in those circumstances. The hospitality industry has to be concerned because they have construction that could be fraught with modern slavery, they have third party contractors, migrants that end up in the hotels that could be treated with indebtedness, and they also have sex trafficking. And lastly, retailers are being sued all over the world because they’re buying, for example, seafood from Thailand, which is considered to be tainted by modern slavery. These lawsuits result in naming and shaming and embarrassment of these different organizations. So they have to be concerned about this.

Sandie [00:07:18] That reminds me of a conversation that I had with Ben Skinner in episode 247, and he made the point that holding companies accountable for their actions is important, but pressuring them to cut ties with worksites, that often left the workers in a worse place. And so what is it that we need them to understand so that it doesn’t put other people in jeopardy?

Matt [00:07:48] Ben is a great champion of kind of addressing this particular issue and has been doing things for a long time. And what I like about Ben’s approach is he identifies something and then goes to the company and says, well, I’ll give you six months to decide what the end of this story is so they can fix things. He’s absolutely right. If we find a forced labor circumstance where people are disenfranchised and then we, the company terminates the agreement, then these people are in worse situations. So the prevailing advice is always to do what you can to fix what exists before you move to a situation where you terminate the agreement.

Sandie [00:08:25] And we’ve seen that happen right here in Orange County where our task force started back in late 2004 and our whole focus was on rescuing victims. And it didn’t make any sense to us when we would find someone and they didn’t want to be rescued. It’s like, OK, but I’m I have a roof over my head. This is paying off a debt for my uncle in another country. And when we, in the case of Shyima that we’ve interviewed her here before, her parents had sold her as a child housemaid to pay off her sister’s debt. So when she was rescued, they told her she had to go back and work for those people. So how do we begin to change our community perceptions of what a rescue really looks like?

Matt [00:09:24] Well, I mean, I’ll just give a sex trafficking example. In Nepal, where I was for eight years, you had girls that were tricked and deceived and forced into the brothels. And, you know, for the first six months, they wanted out. But after that, when they found out that their family found out and they had no place to go, they said, Well, I have to stay in the brothel. You know, there’s no place for me. If you try to take me out, where am I going to go? What am I going to do? The same situation happens with people in forced labor circumstances. And in fact, during COVID, what we’re seeing in, for example, in Bangladesh and this is an example that I recently heard people are going to the factories and saying, I’ll work for nothing if you just give me room and board and a place to stay because I’m desperate. Desperation does a lot of things to motivate people to allow themselves to be exploited. And we have to take that into consideration.

Sandie [00:10:12] Wow. It’s complicated, and there are a lot of different aspects to understand. And you mentioned migrant labor and that kind of recruitment seems to be a major theme. How does a corporate executive in a beautiful C-suite begin to understand that issue for their company? And why does he or she need to understand that?

Matt [00:10:38] Well, one of the first questions that C-Suite needs to understand is how big is their supply chain? Where are the employees coming from? How are they being recruited? Many of them don’t know that, but they should. And the reason for this is that within the recruitment process, there is an inherent exploitation that often takes place. A person from Nepal is told, Well, you can go in a $250 work in Malaysia, but before you do that, you have to pay $2000. Person says I don’t have $2000. The recruiter says, Well, don’t worry about it. We’ll lend it to you. Sign this agreement. They don’t understand the interest. The additional fees and $2000 quickly becomes $5000, so they end up going to Malaysia. But they ended up working for two or three years just to pay back the debt and the interest which keeps compounding. That’s the issue that we say in about, see in about 65 percent of the Southeast Asia trafficking cases where indebtedness holds a person in place. And that’s one of the things that we work with companies on to help them to understand that if you work with a factory, ensure that none of those migrants have indebtedness. If they do, you either pay the debt or have the factory pay the debt. And this is kind of a trend that we’re seeing all over the world.

Sandie [00:11:48] So I had a conversation recently because I’ve been investigating and trying to understand this better, and the person I spoke to said, I wasn’t involved in that recruitment. It doesn’t affect me. But there does seem to be some kind of risk for a company and not knowing is not a good defense. Am I right or wrong?

Matt [00:12:15] It’s it’s kind of like if you say that I did pay a particular tax fee because I didn’t know about it. It’s the same defense. It doesn’t work. You have to know about these things. And there’s a tremendous vulnerability for organizations in the United States. Because of the Customs and Border Protection scenario, which says that if a company is accused of modern slavery, their goods could be seized on the border and won’t make it into the United States, not only in the U.S. but in other countries as well. A vulnerability of somebody making a declaration that those employees within the factories that exist within a person’s supply chain are indebted, is enough for that process to take place. It’s enough for this to make it into the newspapers and for naming and shaming and market share loss to take place. So companies have to be concerned about this and much of what we do related to remediation, working with companies and helping them to sort things out, is to focus on ensuring that this indebtedness does not exist.

Sandie [00:13:16] So explain that process of mediation that you just referred to.

Matt [00:13:23] Well, generally what happens is an audit identifies that in fact, employees have this indebtedness. The next step is to identify how many employees and to calculate the amount of money that they basically owe and for there to be a process to remediate that money back to them, to give them that money. Now again, there are different approaches. Some kind of brands say to the factories, This is not our responsibility. We work with you. There can be no indebtedness, so you as the factory have to pay it back. In some cases, brands actually participate in that process. But prior to being able to continue working with a particular factory, something has to change to ensure that indebtedness is not in place. And that’s a complicated process because, you could have people who have different levels of indebtedness and how do you calculate it, how do you send that money back? How do you avoid people within the organization or the factory saying, Well, wait, what about me? You know, shouldn’t I get some money? So it’s it’s a very difficult, complicated process.

Sandie [00:14:28] Wow. So when we’re talking about business, we you mentioned earlier some financial services and the amount of money out there, and I’m curious about how Mekong Club works to empower businesses around how they handle the money and how they transfer money. Can you expand a little bit on why the case in Australia occurred and they had to pay a $1.3 billion fine?

Matt [00:15:04] That’s correct. Australian dollars. OK, so in this particular case, I’m not going to mention the organization. They were allowing online sexual exploitation of children live streaming to take place. There were some indicators that they shouldn’t be doing this and they didn’t pay attention to it and then they got fined. So you’re talking about probably profits of around three or four hundred thousand, resulting in a fine of 1.3 billion. So you’re really talking about a huge hit. As a result of this, the financial community is doing a number of things and we’re working with them on this. The first thing is to develop typologies. What a typology does is analyze the relationship between a perpetrator in a victim at various steps along the way and then identifies transactions that take place in each of those steps. We then look at which transactions could be potentially indicators or red flags of a nefarious activity taking place. And then we bundle those together and we use them to compare it to big data. So let me give you an example. In the United States, there was a nail salon chain run by some Vietnamese people. Some auditors identified transactions that were taking place after hours, the hours were from nine in the morning till nine o’clock at night. But these transactions were at two three four o’clock in the morning. When they looked into it, it came to realize there was a sex trafficking ring within that business. So the nefarious kind of packaged red flags that they can search on would be transactions after hours around two hundred dollars for a particular type of business. So this process of analyzing data helps to protect them from being in a situation where they are identified as being associated with modern slavery.

Sandie [00:16:44] Wow, I suddenly want to go back to school and become an auditor so I can find those after hour transactions. I know early on in our task force it we paid a lot of money for investigations and surveillance and people investigating a so-called nail salon. This sounds a lot cleaner and easier to do.

Matt [00:17:09] Well, can I talk about one of our tools related to audits that that it helps to address this? It’s called the Apprise app. It’s a combined effort of the Mekong Club and an organization called diginet, and the way it works is an auditor has a phone and on the phone is flags on the front of the screen. So the auditor goes to potential migrants for which he or she doesn’t know where they come from and gets them to press the flag from where they come from. With headphones on in that person’s language, the phone then says, We’re going to ask you some questions. If the answer to the question is yes, press green or red. And so even if the manager is there standing watching this, they can’t hear what’s going on. So the questions are, do you have indebtedness? Do you have your passports? Are you being treated correctly or whatever? As a result of this process, we can triage in real time what’s actually happening with migrants within a factory. Prior to this because translation services were not available these people would not be identified. They would not get their voice heard. But this particular approach has allowed for significant increase in forced labor ILO indicators being identified simply by using a simple triage tool.

Sandie [00:18:21] That is amazing, and one of the things that has amazed me as I’ve traveled is there often doesn’t seem to be any really well-developed infrastructure, but I see cell phones, mobile phones everywhere, and that does lend itself to being able to have more of a presence, right? Because they’ve got to have the the cell towers to do that sort of thing. OK, so you mentioned this tool, I think you have other tools as well, and I think it’s important for businesses to know how they can begin to understand and integrate those sustainable practices. So can you talk about some of those things, like risk assessment, compliance checklists? What do people need to be looking for when they sit in that C-suite desk?

Matt [00:19:20] Well, the first thing we have is a baseline survey and we try to make it so it’s a manageable number of questions. It doesn’t go into five hundred questions. It’s about 40 questions. And when we work with an organization, we start with that because it helps them and us to identify what the C-suite know. Do they have policies and procedures in place? Do they have training? What is their risk approach in order to identify their vulnerability? What are they do with remediation? How do they address ESG and sustainability? And what other things that they’re doing. Many organizations feel like this issue stops at auditing, but it doesn’t. There’s so many other activities. Once we have that, we spend about 90 minutes with the organization to help them to identify where their weaknesses is. What training do they need? How deep does the training need to go? What type of systems and procedures and codes of conduct do they have in place? Do they have a hierarchy within the organization? What do they do when they find forced labor? You know, what do they do in order to understand what the vulnerability is related to systems and procedures that are out there within the legal system? So many of our tools address training, address making sure that their policies and procedures are in place, giving them the ability to analyze what to do if they find that they have forced labor. So we have a flowchart that kind of tracks the various steps that people have to take. We have a whole slew of webinars and workshops and various other things that go deeper into things like how blockchain can be used to address modern slavery; the direction of ESG, and how that is going to be really relevant in the future to what companies do related to modern slavery. And these tools don’t get generated by us, the Mekong Club. We bring our community together. We have about 60 association members and they’re divided between banking, retail, manufacturing, hospitality and every quarter we debate and discuss what they feel like they need in order to protect their business. And then based on that, we do the build. So we either build it, we get consultants to do it, or volunteers. But the idea is to give them the tools they need to be able to over time address the issue of modern slavery in whatever stage that they’re at.

Sandie [00:21:28] So as I’ve gotten to know you and spent time following your work, I keep learning new words and we have listeners now in 148 countries, and some of this is just brand new for them, this is, they’ve been working at the other end of things with victims. And so I’d like you to do a couple of definitions, explain things for us. What is a blockchain? I know what a supply chain is. What is a blockchain?

Matt [00:22:02] So blockchain is a technology whereby when you put something through this particular mechanism, it gets stuck in a way that it can’t be altered. But there’s also a community that watches over it to ensure that it is the information that’s there is real and transparent and not adjustable. So what blockchain will do basically is to ensure that through the recruitment process, the process within factories of tracking people’s salaries and payments and everything, it basically just makes the information immutable, makes it transparent and makes it easy for auditors to come in and share that this is in fact real. Bitcoin is based on blockchain. It’s basically every single bitcoin transaction has a documented transaction code that is in place, it doesn’t change. So you will see in order to ensure transparency, not only in this issue of modern slavery, but in the entire banking world, blockchain technology is going to become very much a part of everything that we do in the world. And our own personal life as well, because it offers that sense of accuracy, transparency and a sense that something it can’t be changed once it’s been put in place.

Sandie [00:23:22] So am I understanding correctly then, that this will reduce the incidence of money laundering from human trafficking or drug trafficking or anything along those lines?

Matt [00:23:34] Absolutely, because what it will do is it will make the criminals think twice about using financial circumstances or systems before they do something because they can get it tracked back to them.

Sandie [00:23:46] So even if they don’t have like a warm, fuzzy feeling, they want to protect people, they do want to protect their bottom line.

Matt [00:23:54] Well, you know, the interesting thing about people within banks or any of the other private sector organizations is when I came to Hong Kong, people said, Well, you’ll never be able to do something with the private sector because they’re greedy. All they care about is money. They would use slaves for shareholder profits. It’s just not the case. People are people are people are people. You know, people within the private sector send their kids to the same schools as everybody else. So within the private sector, you do have bad actors, but for the most part, you have people who follow rules and regulations and want the world to be a safe place. And so we found a lot of allies within the private sector who are great champions of ensuring that their businesses are safe, not only to protect the bottom line and to protect their company from risk, but because it’s the right thing to do as well.

Sandie [00:24:39] That reminds me I interviewed former ambassador John Cotton Richmond recently in an episode, and he’s really convinced that the intersection of business and human rights, just the basic issue of human rights is a turning point in our battle against human trafficking. And it’s where businesses can really engage and you’re giving them tools to do this.

Matt [00:25:10] Yeah, we work with a lot of companies not only in human trafficking, but we also focus on the human rights aspect and just look at it from this perspective. If you’re a huge company that has four or five hundred thousand employees, if they fix things from the top and put policies and procedures that trickled down through the entire supply chain, not only to their own employees, but to the organizations that they addressed, one intervention with a company can have an influence of millions of people all over the world. So I’m a huge kind of supporter of the idea of the private sector as being part of the solution in response because they do things very efficiently and they do it very fast because they have to. They can’t kind of diddle around, you know, well, we’ll do something next week or next quarter the way the United Nations sometimes does. And some of the governments do, they get things done, they address them and they do it in a sustainable way, so it doesn’t become a problem for them.

Sandie [00:26:04] And kind of on on this same topic, and you mentioned the acronym ESG just a little earlier. I’ve noticed that less and less we’re talking about corporate social responsibility, which is a beautiful, aspirational model, but we’re moving to a stronger maybe there’s more teeth in the policy of ESG, environmental, social and governance standards. What are some indicators, some ESG indicators that business leaders can use in how they develop those policies? Writing reports? How can we do that?

Matt [00:26:47] Well, let me address the corporate social responsibility topic first. It was supposed to allow for the world to see a company’s transaction between themselves and the planet and people and so forth, but I feel like it went off in the wrong direction. Instead of doing that, what it did is it said we are supporting education and disability with grants and contributions, so we don’t try to talk about all those other things because we’re good because our corporate social responsibility kind of display says that. What ESG has done, environmental, social and governance is said no, you have to look at every aspect of your interaction between the planet and your organization and people and communities. And you know what’s happening with your own employees and you have to be able to measure. So initially, it was a voluntary type of thing, but post-COVID, there’s almost an expectation that businesses have now for criteria used to be three: profit, prestige and growth. Now it’s you have to demonstrate business with purpose. So as it relates to human rights, the S related to ESG is pretty much under-served. And a lot of people have said for a long time, it’s hard to measure that, there’s not much information. But that’s not true. There’s lots of information related to transactions, to audits, various other things and the type of indicators that are important is, do you have your organization’s employees trained on this? Do you have C-suite looking at this? Do you have codes of conduct? Do you have risk assessment mechanisms in place? And if so, how deep do they go? What do you do when you find modern slavery? Do you have a remediation plan and approach? And how do you ensure that over time you add to your improvements to ensure that you constantly get better at ensuring that human rights and human trafficking aren’t taking place?

Sandie [00:28:36] Wow. OK, so I’ve been talking about how much I’ve learned. Will you tell people how to find this information.

Matt [00:28:45] This information you can visit our website, you can send me an email directly if you’re interested. And sometimes that’s easiest so that I can just direct what you need to what it is that you have to offer. You know, the Mekong Club, we offer a one hour consultation with organizations that are interested in understanding this issue. We do that because we’re non-government organization and we consider this to be part of our mandate to create awareness and to help organizations understand things. Also, we were involved with an organization, Refinitiv, Reuters and others to look at myth busting. The fact that the S in ESG is not something you you can’t measure. In fact you can, and I’m happy to offer a link for that report as well.

Sandie [00:29:33] I have just learned so much from you, and I look forward to learning a lot more. You’re going to hear from me again and again. I do have his email address and the website is MekongClub.org. So thank you so much, Matt. We’re going to also do a little bit of a bonus for our Patreon subscribers. So if you’re one of our patrons, go online and find that.

Dave [00:30:02] Thank you so much, Matt and Sandie. I really appreciate this conversation and so much that we can all do to really engage businesses and organizations in this effort. Sandie, we’ve talked so much about partnership over the years and what a great opportunity for us to continue that. All the links we mentioned will be in the episode notes. The best place to go is endinghumantrafficking.org. When you’re online, we’re inviting you to take the first step. If you hop online and download a copy of Sandie’s guide, The Five Things You Must Know: A Quick Start Guide to Ending Human Trafficking. It’ll help outline the five critical things that Sandie’s identified that you should know before you join the fight against human trafficking. You get access to it again by going to endinghumantrafficking.org. It’s also the place to go for more information about becoming a patron, the Ending Human Trafficking podcast is building and expanding our community of advocates. By becoming a patron, you get access to exclusive content and you’ll join a community of advocates around the world who are fighting human trafficking in their community. How does it work? Just go over to endinghumantrafficking.org and become a patron through Patreon, and you’ll get access to new content such as bonus conversations like the one we’ll have with Matt in just a bit, and exclusive resources and toolkits. It’s simple and affordable. Just go over to Patreon, or you can go to endinghumantrafficking.org and begin for just $5 a month. That’ll give you access to all of those benefits. And for those who are already patrons, thank you so much for your early support. We’re so excited to bring you more this year. Well, we do, and we’re so glad to have you supporting the show here and the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University, and we will be back in two weeks with our next conversation. Sandie, look forward to seeing you in two weeks.

Sandie [00:31:51] Thanks, Dave.

Dave [00:31:52] Take care, everyone.