LGBTQ youth account for a disproportionate rate of the runaway and homeless youth population, and experience disproportionately high rates of victimization. In July 2015, the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research completed the second year of a longitudinal study entitled the Youth Experiences Survey (YES): Exploring the Sex Trafficking Experiences of Homeless Young Adults in Arizona, which explores the sexual exploitation experiences of homeless youth and young adults, including LGBTQ youth. Of the 194 young adults who reported their sexual orientation in the 2015 YES survey, 68 reported having been sex trafficked (35.1%). Of the 68, 36 (52.9%) reported their sexual orientation as LGBTQ. The LGBTQ youth were found to be slightly younger at their first sex trafficking experience (LGBTQ 15.22 years vs. Heterosexual 16.23 years). The LGBTQ youth were significantly more likely to report having been sex trafficked for drugs, money and a place to stay. This presentation will explore the particular vulnerability of LGBTQ youth and the ways in which traffickers seek to exploit these vulnerabilities in order to compel youth into commercial sex.
Read More“She’s Your Daughter” will add value and social change to the local and national discussion around familial human trafficking. Connie was raised in a middle class, religious family in the suburbs of Tampa, Florida. She is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, pornography, sexual exploitation and domestic violence. Over 16 years of her abuse was at the hands of her serial, sex offender father. At 15, a pivotal time in a teenager’s life, Connie made a choice to be a prostitute. You will learn how her father became addicted to sex and pornography at the age of 13, became a serial sex offender and was still a pimp until he passed away at 82. Connie will share how she serviced men in the parking lot of her high school, the nights she was the party favor for high profile clients, and how she covered up living separate lives by being involved in school activities, such the dance squad, in beauty pageants and modeling. You will hear how she escaped, raised a family of her own, graduated with honors and obtained her Masters. in Adult Education, Training and Development. Today Connie is a beam of hope to other survivors. She travels internationally sharing her story and her journey. Attendees will learn the signs to look for and what they can do to make a difference in the lives of teens that are at risk, exploited or are being sold for sex.
Read MoreThis session will discuss the details of a human trafficking case investigated by the FBI and Toledo Police. This presentation will cover the investigation from start to conviction, going over such elements as the sting itself, victim witness issue's, and the trail. The presenters will also show clips from a training video used to educate police officers on what to look for when engaging potential victims and/or traffickers.
Read MoreResearch shows that approximately 70% of the population will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives. Although some of the traumatized population will seek help from caring professionals, workers who deal regularly with trauma stories and images are likely to experience symptoms of Secondary Trauma transferred to them from the disturbing material. These symptoms can mimic symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, without the individual being the primary participant in the event.
Read MoreUntil December 2005 child trafficking and slavery were not crimes in Cameroon. Despite the recognition as a crime, very few prosecutions have been made for child trafficking and enslavement in the country. This study examines the self-recovery efforts of survivors in the North West Region of Cameroon that has been identified as the main catchment area. It is a tracer study of the lives of 218 child slaves in the region aged 30 – 45 years old. Seventy-four percent of them are females and 26% are males.
This study looks at the economic, professional, and family lives of the survivors. Twenty-two percent of the women are married or stayed in a marriage for at least ten years. A shocking 48% of survivors have released their own children into slavery while 64% of the women embraced survival sex work in at some time in their lives.
Twenty-four percent of females became pregnant by their masters and/or relatives, yet less than 2% of these children recognize them. Economic desperation of survival sex workers, “prostitutes”, is very high with most of them living in slums, attempting to operate petty businesses. A few have become enslavers recruiting other desperate survivors into yet another budding form of secondary slavery where survivors lacking marketable skills become prostitutes under the control of an older and retired prostitute who sets the rules of the game. These rules promote peer monitoring and peer abuse of the slaves by each other.
The survey recommends long term recovery programs for victims and survivors of child trafficking as a major way to break the vicious cycle of childhood slavery in Cameroon.
Trafficking of persons with disabilities is a disturbing new trend in the United States. The 2016 Trafficking in Persons Report identifies persons with disabilities as a vulnerable population in the United States. However, the trafficking of persons with disabilities in the United States is largely unexplored. The primary objective of this session is to raise awareness about this growing problem. This presentation discusses why persons with disabilities are targeted, how they are trafficked, how this can be prevented, and how victims can achieve justice and accountability.
The program will draw from new research on the U.S. -- an in-depth analysis of federal criminal and civil trafficking cases involving victims with disabilities. Case materials document victims with disabilities trafficked into the sex industry, held in forced labor, and trafficked into sexual servitude. Victims have been trafficked and abused in multiple sectors, including the meatpacking industry, the agricultural sector, the commercial sex industry, and domestic servitude.
Case analysis reveals that traffickers target victims with disabilities in order to steal their government disability benefits. A Pennsylvania woman was sentenced to life in prison plus 80 years for a scheme that targeted six individuals with disabilities. As individual representative-payees, perpetrators fall outside the monitoring and investigative authority of federally-mandated Protection & Advocacy agencies.
This presentation will identify the system failures and missed opportunities that contribute to the continued trafficking of persons with disabilities. Using these lessons learned, we hope to initiate a dialogue on how the anti-trafficking community can best serve this vulnerable population.
Victims of child trafficking may appear to have formed a positive and close relationship with their trafficker despite the abuse, coercion, and exploitation they have experienced. Terms such as Stockholm Syndrome and trauma bonding are used in the literature pertaining to the psychological trauma experienced by victims to explain this identification and bond with the perpetrator (Cohen, Mannarino & Deblinger, 2006; Adorjan, Christensen, Kelly & Pawluch, 2012). However, more recently, research has focused on the concept of complex trauma, which was first proposed by Herman (1992) and can be summarized as, “symptom clusters reflecting alterations in affect regulation, consciousness, self-perception, perception of the perpetrator, relations with others, and systems of meaning” (Resick, et al., 2012, p.241; Ai, et al., 2013). The topic of bonding with the trafficker comes as a direct result of qualitative data collected by the presenter with 15 service providers. This session openly examines the attributes of this bonding process among victims of child trafficking, the resulting dynamics, their connection to current interventions, and future strategies in addressing this bond.
Presentation Objectives:
· To become familiar with outcome data specific to service provider experiences related to the victim bond
· To examine the complex trauma and the corresponding social constructs that fuel the bond with the trafficker
· To identify several areas of direct practice that are impacted by the resulting victim resistance and strategies to overcome them
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