The legacy news media reports primarily on the most attention-grabbing subjects of our current day. The legacy media is defined as veteran newspaper and television news outlets that have pre-dated their establishment before the information age (social mobilization of information). Alison Dagnes, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, described some of the ways sensationalism is used: “Amplifying language, trying to use very big words that are exacerbating. Something that invokes ... a whole lot of emotion.” This can be anything ranging from celebrities, Hollywood, politics, foreign affairs, and more. The problem with awareness for sexual exploitation or human trafficking is that the subject matters only become headlines within a local city’s news media. With this, even some of the most egregious crimes in this section of sexual criminal activity essentially gets little to no airtime within the news-cycle, or even on social media. The intent of Natly’s presentation is to illustrate how, no matter what the legacy news media presents, in trend, human trafficking and modern-day slavery grows, and goes unnoticed. This is a compounding problem that, if ignored, will grow exponentially than ever before. Now in our information age, we have the incredible ability to notify our local communities of said dark horrors, as well as encompassing an element of education. The onus is on us as local residents to our native jurisdictions to make human trafficking detectable and accounted for. This also entails local action, once illustrated criminal data points trend. Cleaning up our own communities and ridding of human exploitation starts with us. Natly will demonstrate effective ways to quickly research and deploy local criminal headlines (of sexual exploitative nature), perform root-cause analysis on what local criminal justice systems should advocate for, and deploy this information to your local communities for taking civic action to combat human trafficking.

Presentation Objectives:

· Demonstrate how to sift through the media headlines to identify local sexual exploitation, or human trafficking reporting

· Identify the faults in the criminal justice system that could forecast ease on the criminal or detect faults on any further criminal justice downstream processes that present opportunities of reform

· Offer ideas that would mobilize this information within your communities to garner local civic action for change

Read More

Sex trafficking is an inherently coercive and exploitive act with direct and indirect financial implications. Survivors are often left with financial consequences directly related to the financial abuse endured during their trafficking situation. “Coerced debt” is a type of financial abuse that is defined as all non-consensual, credit-related transactions that occur in an intimate relationship where one partner uses coercive control to dominate the other partner (Littwin, 2012). Much of the extant literature on coerced debt has been conducted with service-connected women who have experienced domestic violence. However, little research has been conducted on the impact of coerced debt in the lives of people who have experienced abusive relationships in the context of sex trafficking. This presentation will discuss findings from a study conducted with thirty-four individuals who experienced sex trafficking in the United States. Individuals were invited to participate in qualitative interviews through convenience and respondent-driven sampling of an online anti-trafficking listserv. Thematic analysis of interview transcripts was done to answer the following research questions: “Did survivors experience coerced debt as part of their trafficking situation?” and, if so, “What types of coerced debt did they experience?” Descriptive findings about the frequency and nature of financial abuse and / or coerced debt in the lives of trafficking survivors will be presented. This presentation will conclude with a discussion on the current state of practical and legal remedies for addressing coerced debt and recommendations for future research and policy to address this issue.

Presentation Objectives:

· Provide an overview of “coerced debt” in the context of abusive relationships

· Present findings from a qualitative study conducted with survivors of sex trafficking about their experiences of financial abuse and/or coerced debt during and after their time in the sex industry

· Discuss the implications of this study for practitioners, policy makers, and future research

Read More

The goal of this presentation is to assist with awareness and understanding human trafficking when working with individuals with Developmental Disabilities (DD). The session will cover DD individuals’ risk factors and why they are so vulnerable. The presenters will share stories about experiences with this population who have been trafficked, how to report, how to recognize the signs, and how to support individuals and families if they experienced human trafficking. The session will also cover some labor trafficking stories in order to protect the DD population from employers who have immoral practices. Attendees will take away how DD individuals’ vulnerabilities have made them targets in the United States and abroad. Finally, the presenters will share resources to assist the DD individuals and the general population about human trafficking.

Presentation Objectives:

· Discuss the risk factors and vulnerabilities for the DD population

· Describe how DD systems need to work together for positive outcomes of the victim

· Explain the importance of why the Developmental and Learning Disabled population need to learn about trafficking in order to prevent victimization

Read More

CommonSpirit Health, one of the largest Catholic health care systems and the second largest nonprofit hospital system in the nation, implemented a system-wide Abuse, Neglect, and Violence policy/procedure. A key component of this policy/procedure is the PEARR Tool, which guides health professionals on how to offer victim assistance to patients in a trauma-informed, healing-centered manner. In this presentation, attendees will learn more about the PEARR Tool and recent research to evaluate its effectiveness. The PEARR steps are based on an approach in which patients are empowered with information about violence and resources before further screening is conducted. The goal is to have an informative conversation with patients to promote health, safety, and well-being and to create a safe environment for affected patients to naturally share their own experiences and possibly accept further services. PEARR stands for Provide privacy, Educate, Ask, Respect & Respond. The PEARR Tool, a three-page handout that summarizes the PEARR steps, is based on learnings gathered from CommonSpirit physicians and staff who have had experience in identifying and assisting patients affected by abuse, neglect, and violence, and on learnings shared by national subject matter experts and organizations. This includes learnings from the “CUES model”, an evidence-based intervention from Futures Without Violence, in which health professionals are encouraged to use safety cards to talk with all patients about the health effects of domestic and sexual violence. The presenters include a clinician and survivor of human trafficking, both representatives of CommonSpirit Health and its system-wide Human Trafficking Response Program.

Presentation Objectives:

· Educate attendees about human trafficking using the PEARR approach

· Describe how to assist patients with referrals to community agencies using the PEARR approach

· Explain how to access resources and tools that can assist with this process

Read More

This panel consists of four survivors of child sex trafficking, ritual abuse (RA), and mind control (MC) programming. As survivor leaders, they know many others who have endured similar mixed forms of abuse. Those working with sex trafficking victims often focus on exploitation through prostitution or pornography, missing signs of other forms of extreme abuse. Panelists range in age from 58 to 85 and collectively have 121 years of healing. They will discuss how they were introduced to sex trafficking by their families and how their experiences ranged from being exploited by a local group of pedophiles to global elite child sex trafficking rings. Panelists will describe their mind control experiences. MC is a torture-based method of fragmenting a person's self to use them as sex slaves, spies, or assassins. Those abused in cults and/or subjected to MC are easy prey for further manipulation and abuse by sex rings. If the victims escape, they are often coerced back into the rings, despite the best efforts of their helpers to keep them safe. RA is the repetitive ritualistic abuse of children and non-consenting adults in a group setting in the name of an ideology. Panelists will discuss how they were abused by Satanists, Nazis, and dark occultists in the United States and Europe. Ritual abuse and mind control are seen in a subgroup of sex trafficking victims. Awareness of this kind of trauma is vital to helping survivors in their escape and healing. In Part II, panelists will describe their escape and entry into healing. They will also discuss personal examples and signs and symptoms of RA/MC. Resources for working with RA/MC survivors will be provided.

Presentation Objectives:

· Describe each survivor's mind control, ritual abuse, and child sex trafficking experiences

· Describe the effects of the abuse and signs exhibited of being a survivor

Read More

To increase understanding of the intersections between substance use and human trafficking (sex and labor), this presentation describes a project focused on creating a coordinated plan between the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) Safe Harbor Human Trafficking Prevention and Overdose Prevention programs that are currently underway and will be completed in fall 2022. The project includes a literature review, environmental scan, engagement with program grantees, stakeholders, and persons with lived experience in different regions of the state, all culminating in a report providing qualitative data and interpretation to inform future state-level and community-based efforts based in health equity and designed to raise awareness while also supporting multidisciplinary prevention, harm reduction, and intervention initiatives. Of specific interest is the role substances play in survival sex and in tactics by traffickers, as well as challenges and opportunities for cross-informed, trauma-responsive care within both trafficking prevention and substance use treatment services. This project is conducted as part of Safe Harbor Director Caroline Palmer's Master of Public Health program practicum at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she is a Bloomberg American Health Initiative Fellow in the Violence Cohort.

Presentation Objectives:

· Provide an overview of how state-based programs in human trafficking and substance use/overdose prevention can work together to support services responses

· Explain the findings of the literature review, community engagement, and final report

· Describe recommendations for next steps in terms of prevention, harm reduction, and intervention responses on the state level and in partnership with service providers and persons with lived experience

Read More

Now more than ever, decisions that have widespread impact on our world are made based on data collected on a nationwide and/or multinational scale (i.e., big data). This data can come from many sources including governmental efforts (e.g., census), academic pursuits (e.g., ABCD) and/or the efforts of community and/or national organizations (e.g., Transpop). Though much of this data is available to the public, it’s potential remains often unknown and/or underutilized by community experts, activists, and researchers. This presentation will focus on how community members, and researchers can find and use big data ethically to examine, understand, and combat violence and injustice on a national scale. The presenter will first discuss how even those without advanced statistical knowledge might find out about, access, and utilize big data for their cause. Dr. Stenersen will then present a recent effort that used big data to unearth the extent of police harassment and violence towards transgender and gender diverse people involved in sex trade in the United States. The presentation will then include a brief demonstration on how to use a free software (JASP) to conduct analyses using publicly available data. Finally, the presentation will conclude with a discussion in which audience members can share their own topics of interest and brainstorm how big data can be used to support their cause.

Presentation Objectives:

· Discuss how to find, access, and use big data to combat injustice

· Provide an example in real time about how to use big data to answer community- and researcher- generated questions

· Discuss how audience members can integrate big data into their own work

Read More

The National Council of Jewish Women Canada (NCJWC) is committed to enhancing the lives of individuals within communities through education, service, and social action. It seeks to create positive change by empowering women, assisting the vulnerable, educating the public, and advocating for others. In 2013, after hearing an account from a survivor of sex trafficking at its national conference, the NCJWC Board unanimously passed a resolution to take on sex trafficking awareness as a key project. Given the reality that sex trafficking victims have become younger, NCJWC began its focus upon educating parents, grandparents, and caregivers about this risk to children. NCJWC recognizes that educating parents is key to averting victimization and critical to healing children who have become victims. NCJWC has created an educational power point presentation (NOT IN MY FAMILY) that engages audiences to better understand the risks posed to children and how to help children if they have become victims. NCJWC has also developed partnerships and coalitions and successfully advocated to governments to raise awareness about sex trafficking, culminating in the Government of Canada declaring February 22 as Human Trafficking Awareness Day. As a women’s organization where many members are mothers and grandmothers, NCJWC has created a powerful collective voice to address this critical issue. This work is relevant and serves as a model to other community organizations, women’s organizations, and ethnocultural groups who wish to mobilize and educate members about the dangers of human sex trafficking.

Presentation Objectives:

· Explore and emphasize the responsibility and power of community groups in addressing the issue of sex trafficking

· Share a resource that has been developed for parents

· Share the approach that has been taken in building partnerships and coalitions to raise awareness

· Identify risk factors and ways of prevention sex trafficking

Read More