On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: The United Nations commemorates its World Day Against Trafficking in Persons on July 30. The theme this year is “Leave No Child Behind in the Fight Against Human Trafficking.” Children, particularly girls, remain at great risk here. A staggering 1 in 3 victims of human trafficking globally is a child. How can we prevent this type of exploitation and what’s being done to end human trafficking both in the U.S. and globally? Emma Ecker, a Senior Policy Specialist with Freedom Network USA, the largest coalition working on human trafficking in America, joins The Excerpt to share the progress that’s been made and lay out the challenges that continue to impede efforts to end the practice altogether.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I’m Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, July 28th, 2024. In just two days, the United Nations will commemorate its World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. The theme this year is Leave No Child Behind in the Fight Against Human Trafficking. Children, particularly girls, remain at great risk here. A staggering one in three victims of human trafficking globally is a child. How can we prevent this type of exploitation? And what’s being done to end human trafficking both in the US and globally? Our guest, Emma Ecker, is a senior policy specialist with Freedom Network USA, the largest coalition working on human trafficking in the United States. Thanks for joining us, Emma.
Emma Ecker:
Thank you so much for having me, Dana.
Dana Taylor:
Freedom Network USA has tracked an increase in unaccompanied minors at our southern border. Tell us about the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and is it enough to keep the children at our border safe from predators?
Emma Ecker:
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act is the seminal legislation in the United States that created our framework for addressing trafficking. So it revolves around three specific points, prosecution of traffickers, the protection of victims, and the prevention of trafficking. It is focused very heavily on prosecution over the last 24 years. While there is substantial funding for services across the United States, there’s not sufficient funding to provide services to all survivors everywhere, including unaccompanied children. So when a child is identified as an unaccompanied child at the border, they’re put into the protective custody of Department of Health and Human Services, which means that they have specific protections under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. They are required to have access to services for HHS to find them a secure and safe placement with that being family or a family friend, someone who is deemed to be safe by the Department of Health and Human Services, where they’re then able to access services and education in the United States and legal protections from deportation.
So we have great legal protections in place, but when our asylum policies are more restrictive and our immigration policies are more restrictive, we find that children are made more vulnerable to trafficking when they come to the United States unaccompanied. So when their families are not able to access safety and safe work in the United States, when there are a lack of labor protections for children, they’re more likely to end up in a forced labor situation. And when there’s a lack of education and safe jobs for their placement adults, then that family is less likely to have a secure and healthy environment for those children.
Dana Taylor:
With Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas War, and the war in Sudan, is there concern about children in war zones being particularly vulnerable and at risk of being trafficked?
Emma Ecker:
Yes, absolutely. So when we see conflict, we see all of the vulnerabilities that children may face and adults may face anywhere to trafficking becoming amplified. So when people lose access to housing, to safe work, to jobs that pay well for anyone, when your economy has been disrupted, and there’s insufficient legal protections for adults and children, we see an increase in vulnerabilities to trafficking. And what that means is that folks who experience multiple types of marginalized identities become even more vulnerable. And we see a lot of populations like that in conflict zones across the world.
Dana Taylor:
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes’ global report on trafficking and persons, children are twice as likely to face violence during trafficking than adults. What can you tell us about the long-term psychological and physical effects here?
Emma Ecker:
When someone is trafficked, they’re experiencing a violation of every right, essentially, so the right to autonomy and to choice, often experience different forms of violence, whether that be psychological coercion or physical. And that means that there’s a long path to recovery for folks. So it involves both things like housing stability, financial security so that they don’t become vulnerable to trafficking again, and things like long-term therapy. So we have extensive emergency services for survivors, but that long-term access to mental healthcare, physical healthcare to deal with disabilities, trafficking is often a disabling event, there’s a lack of those types of services as people continue on. But folks need almost lifetime services. They may phase out of some eventually and need access to less, but that journey is a long process.
Dana Taylor:
And then Emma, what role do poverty and gender inequality play in the targeting of victims?
Emma Ecker:
So gender and poverty are two main driving places where someone may be vulnerable to trafficking. Trafficking only happens when someone has experienced multiple failures of systems meant to protect them. So when someone’s human rights are taken away, when someone experiences poverty or financial instability, and that includes things like being unable to afford housing, childcare, health and mental healthcare, food. So it’s not just that someone is vulnerable because of their gender or because they’re poor, it’s because they’ve been made vulnerable by these systems. And that puts them in a place where someone may be able to step in and make promises that they may be able to feed their families or offer housing and find people in a vulnerable position to exploit.
Dana Taylor:
What does human trafficking look like here in the US? Even one human being trafficked is too many, but what is the scale of the issue here?
Emma Ecker:
In the United States, there’s every form of trafficking. We tend to think of trafficking as just sex trafficking in the United States or just involving children. But we’ve seen across the board that all ages and all genders are being trafficked across labor and sex trafficking. And one thing we’ve seen in the United States is a rise of children and adults facing forced criminality, which is when someone is forced in traditional forms of labor like farming, mining, fishing. But we’ve seen folks forced into different types of crimes, so forced begging, selling drugs, theft, and scamming. That’s something that has probably existed in the United States as long as trafficking has existed, but is something that we’re learning more about. So we’re seeing the numbers of cases of people involved in forced criminality rise, but we’re not sure if that means that there has been a significant increase. But we see trafficking everywhere in all industries. We especially see labor trafficking in industries where migrant workers are either in the United States without documentation or are in the United States on a work visa that makes them vulnerable to trafficking.
Dana Taylor:
What role do global supply chains play here? Are there particular industries rife with victims of human trafficking?
Emma Ecker:
Our global supply chain is built on the premise of labor exploitation. You can’t have cheap goods without some form of labor exploitation in your supply chain, whether that be severely underpaid workers or workers who are trafficked. So a lot of the dropship imports have that type of exploitation, but we know that higher priced goods do as well. It’s very difficult to track where in a supply chain forced labor is happening. Global supply chains are purposely made to be very complex. There are contractors and subcontractors and subcontractors to those subcontractors, which makes it very difficult for a company in the United States that’s importing goods to know where in the supply chain that’s happening.
And that also means that companies have become not liable for those issues, which is a problem because that means that they’re not investigating their supply chains to know where goods are being made with forced labor. And they’re not liable under US law often for that. But we know that it’s across industries. We know that, even in the United States, farm workers are facing forced labor, construction workers, manufacturing in general. And so it’s necessary to sort of address it both on the US front and in those global supply chains to find out where forced labor is happening and put an end to it.
Dana Taylor:
I want to go back to the issue of forced criminality that you brought up and why it may be difficult for victims to reenter society. How might that issue play out?
Emma Ecker:
When a survivor has a criminal record, survivors often have complex criminal records related to their trafficking experience. They’re criminalized frequently for crimes related to their experience, but not recognized as survivors in those criminal proceedings. So a survivor may have something like a prostitution charge from their sex trafficking experience, and in the court only be viewed as a potential sex worker who can be charged under that statute. But under federal law and all state laws, there are protections for people who are survivors so that they should never have been charged in the first place. So we find that survivors are coming out with records disproportionately of prostitution, drug-related charges, theft and fraud charges, trespass and loitering, and other misdemeanor offenses. Most of those won’t prevent you from accessing a job, but when you have things like felony charges, violent crime charges, that prevents you from accessing a job and safe housing, which then just makes you more vulnerable to trafficking.
So most states have some form of vacatur law, which is a law that allows you to clear a conviction of a crime for trafficking survivors. Now, 45 states have criminal record relief options for survivors, but most are not comprehensive all the charges a survivor may face. So most just focus on prostitution charges, not those drug charges and other charges that survivors have. And two states only have criminal record relief for minors, so adults are left out entirely. So when we don’t have protections for folks to prevent them from ever being charged in the first place and we don’t have protections to prevent those charges from preventing them from accessing the things that keep them from being vulnerable, people are more likely to be re-exploited.
Dana Taylor:
How is the US working to end human trafficking? Are there newer technologies that are aiding in the fight?
Emma Ecker:
Yeah. So the US approach mostly focuses on prosecution, and our prosecution numbers are low. Only a few hundred cases are prosecuted every year at the federal level. There are some tools and technology that have been created that can help address some of those issues, but most of them are focused on identifying people who have already been trafficked. So tools to identify child sexual abuse material online, reporting tools so that survivors can report when non-consensual images are online so that those can be removed by platforms, and sort of scanning tools to try and identify potential child sexual abuse material.
What we’re missing on the technology side, and there are great tools being created and in the process of being evaluated, are tools that target people for education purposes, like ensuring that children know how to identify safe adults, know their rights and how to restrict what data tech companies are collecting about them online, and things that target workers in vulnerable industries so that they know their rights and can find how to report if their labor rights are being violated or if they’re being trafficked. So those are some new innovations that are on the way, tools are being developed. But it’s really difficult to develop a tool that addresses trafficking online because recruitment may happen online, but it may happen in private, and it’s really difficult to identify because it looks like so many other things on the internet.
Dana Taylor:
And then finally, it’s important to raise awareness about how human trafficking manifests. How can we tell the story of the trafficking of humans without causing further trauma to victims?
Emma Ecker:
I think there’s a lot of ways that we could approach storytelling really creatively in the trafficking space. Historically, survivor stories have been used for fundraising without their consent and not in their own words. So there are survivors who do want to tell their stories, but they want autonomy and choice over how those stories are told, where they’re posted, who reads them, and how someone may financially benefit from those. We have to remember that survivors have had their labor stolen in the past. That’s what trafficking is. And so having protections in place to prevent survivors from having that stolen again and allowing them to have autonomy is really important.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about trafficking. Any time we’re talking about failures of social systems, we can talk about vulnerabilities. We can talk about how someone who may not be able to access housing may become vulnerable to trafficking by having to sleep on the street. They may be criminalized for sleeping on the street and have a record that prevents them from accessing housing again. So we have plenty of opportunities to talk about it, we just have to be careful about what we do and ensuring that survivors are able to lead the way in storytelling.
Dana Taylor:
Emma, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
Emma Ecker:
Thank you so much for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Rae Green, for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I’m Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
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