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Before Measuring: Identifying Victims and Understanding Vulnerability

IDENTIFYING VICTIMS

This chapter covers the workshop’s wide-ranging discussions on measurement and vulnerability. Amy Leffler (National Institute of Justice) noted that the first step to understanding the prevalence and scope of human trafficking is for people to be aware of and willing to see that the problem exists in one’s own backyard. For example, when a service provider or doctor comes in contact with a victim, it may not be related to the person’s victimization. She said it is important for a wide range of providers to have the tools, resources, and vocabulary to be able to identify victims. Several presenters mentioned the challenges of identifying trafficking victims, which starts with helping individuals understand when they are being victimized.

Hard to See, Harder to Count

Michaëlle De Cock (International Labour Organization [ILO]) described the ILO as the guardian of the Forced Labour Convention (see Chapter 1). Since 2008, she said, the ILO has been testing tools both for qualitative and quantitative research on various forms of forced labor: bonded labor, which is of particular concern in some Asian countries; vestiges of slavery, which is being measured in Niger; and forced labor of children, although De Cock noted that there are several different ways of identifying forced child labor. The ILO also surveys migrant workers, and it studies forced labor within indigenous communities. In 2008, the ILO released Hard to See,

Harder to Count,¹ a survey tool that provides guidance for human trafficking data collection. De Cock said the objective of the tool was to share the ILO’s lessons learned from 10 years of pilot surveys of human trafficking.

De Cock noted that when member states ask for support for prevalence surveys, it is with the objective of translating the results to efficient and targeted policies. Through its research, the ILO’s objective is to inform policy making to more effectively protect, identify, and prevent forced labor or trafficking. She emphasized that research should not be seen in opposition to policy making; rather, researchers should consider their work of service to those who can make a difference.

De Cock said the ILO has made significant progress in the past two decades. In addition to Hard to See, Harder to Count, it has a set of international guidelines for both qualitative and quantitative research that are being adopted by all member states. The guidelines use a unique statistical definition for human trafficking, and the ILO is working to translate it into an operational definition that can be used to create information guides for first-line respondents. Because the forms of coercion, recruitment, and type of exploitation vary among countries and labor sectors, De Cock said the ILO is also working on identification guides for specific sectors.

While there has been progress in the ILO’s efforts to understand prevalence, De Cock said it is still facing several challenges, such as designing a quality sample for a probabilistic (or prevalence) survey. The ILO is developing and testing innovative sampling tools, but because the trafficking population is difficult to identify, obtaining a sample big enough for drawing general conclusions is a challenge. She noted the importance of collaborating with and using data from nongovernmental organizations and organizations working specifically with trafficking victims to design the samples.

De Cock said she believes that the future of human trafficking prevalence estimation is a mixed-methods approach, which would involve looking at all data available from a variety of tools and research methodologies—for example, surveys, multiple systems estimation, and statistical discriminant analysis—to see if the results are comparable and learn how the methods may complement one another. However, she noted, large confidence intervals make it difficult to effectively measure trends and changes in prevalence, which is of interest to the ILO’s member states. Yet methods like statistical discriminant analysis have the capacity to illuminate risk factors for human trafficking, which can be useful information for policy makers.

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¹Hard to See, Harder to Count: Survey Guidelines to Estimate Forced Labour of Adults and Children. (2012). Available: http://un-act.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Harder-to-SeeHarder-to-Count.pdf.

Different Types of Trafficking in Different Sectors

During the workshop discussion, an online participant asked whether one could list the top five labor trafficking sectors in the United States. Sara Crowe (Polaris) responded that data from the 2017 Human Trafficking Hotline² list domestic work, agriculture, and peddling as the top three types of labor trafficking, but she noted that the hotline also receives a lot of calls pertaining to the restaurant industry, traveling sales, and landscaping. Sheldon Zhang (member, Planning Committee) said that in the results from ongoing work he is doing on migrant workers in San Diego and North Carolina, the top sectors appear to be construction, janitorial service, food processing, and landscaping. He also noted that the rates for agriculture had been lower than the researchers anticipated, even within foreign-born and undocumented populations in San Diego.

Understanding How Victims See Themselves

Kelly Dore (National Human Trafficking Survivor Coalition [NHTSC]) mentioned how different human trafficking looks all over the United States and throughout the world. It is her goal to let people know that survivors are “more than a story” and do not always look like the sensationalized pictures of people in chains and children in cages. She added, “If we don’t know what we are looking for, then it is really hard to see what is in front of us.” Dore said that familial sex trafficking can be especially difficult to identify because the victims are children you see every day. She considers familial trafficking an important area to research, noting that the vast majority of commercial sex trafficking victims report having been sexually abused or victimized for the first time at home by someone they knew.

Dore shared her personal experiences as a victim of familial trafficking from the ages of 1 to 14. When she was 15, she testified in court, and the trafficker—her father—pled guilty to 19 of 27 trafficking charges. Because there were no formal laws in place for human trafficking at the time, her father spent 2 months in jail and did not have to register as a sex offender. Dore said she did not realize that what happened to her qualified as human trafficking until she was much older. She believes many survivors may be in the same predicament, unable to recognize their own vulnerability or their exploitation as human trafficking victims.

Another challenge with victim self-identification, added Carolyn Huang (Bureau of International Labor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor), is how forced labor can initially present itself as legitimate work, such as

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² See 2017 Statistics from the National Human Trafficking Hotline and BeFree Textline. Available: https://polarisproject.org/sites/default/files/2017NHTHStats%20%281%29.pdf.

with instances of debt bondage, which may not occur until after a contract has been signed. She added that differences in cultural understanding of coercion or involuntariness concepts can make victim identification and prevalence estimation particularly challenging in vulnerable populations. Although indicators of forced labor may be present, the concept might be culturally foreign to the victims.

Davina Durgana (member, Planning Committee) noted that the way policies are enacted and advocacy campaigns are managed can have clear effects on how people see themselves when it comes to identifying as victims. There can be significant challenges with self-reported data. Men in some countries may interpret that they are victims of labor trafficking or labor exploitation because they are forced to work unpaid overtime, while those in other countries who report working in legally prohibited and extremely dangerous mining situations with compromised food and water sources may not identify as victims. She added that people who have witnessed generations of their families being subjected to these conditions may then in turn rationalize their own situations and not consider it victimization.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Megan Lundstrom (Free Our Girls) spoke candidly about her experience as a survivor of pimp-controlled and survival sex trafficking, which she has been speaking about publicly for the past 5 years. She noted that her story has often been met with insensitivity by individuals who do not understand the dynamics of control within sex trafficking, offering such comments as “I’m really glad you started making better choices” and “If you weren’t chained up, why didn’t you just leave?” She recognizes that many people have sensationalized views of what sex trafficking looks like, based on what they see on TV and in movies, and that is why one of her goals in telling her story is to provide a framework by which to understand the vulnerability that gives way to human trafficking.

Lundstrom explained that pimp-controlled trafficking mirrors cultic theory in many ways. Often referred to as “the game,” pimp-controlled trafficking has a hierarchy and a strong “us versus them” mentality. She compared it to an ordinary business structure. The pimp would be the owner; the “hoes” would be the employees; and one woman in particular, the “bottom,” would manage the other “hoes” and be the pimp’s primary point of contact. In this scenario, the business’s patrons are the “tricks,” and “squares” are individuals who do not patronize the business. Lundstrom noted that the “bottom” is often charged as a cofacilitator in sex trafficking cases because she manages the money and the other women and helps with recruiting and grooming; to a layperson it can look like she is doing the trafficking herself. Lundstrom explained how pimps create a false sense

of normalcy for their victims by allowing them to interact with others in similar situations in person and on social media. She said she was given the “authority” to manage her own finances and book her own travel to see clients—a move that is also strategic on the part of the pimp because it removes much of the liability from the trafficker.

Lundstrom said she regained her freedom in 2012, but she had difficulty transitioning into school and the workforce because she was a single mother, had been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, had a decade-long gap in work experience, and had 10 arrests on her record. For a while she continued to engage in survival sex because she had been conditioned to see that as her best option for income. As she gained more control in her life, Lundstrom also eventually regained control of her social media, and she then stayed connected with the women she knew were still in “the game.” As she talked openly about her experiences, her social media network began to grow. Her organization, Free Our Girls, formally adopted her social media page and network, and it is now a private group of more than 1,600 actively exploited women across the United States and Canada. Lundstrom provides psychoeducation and intervention on the page and engages the women in critical thinking dialogue around pimp-controlled sex trafficking. The organization provides victims with care packages containing “Fair Trade Certified Items” (so as not to perpetuate trafficking in any form); in 2018 they delivered 600 packages to 54 women in both countries, and in 2019 their goal is to reach 100 packages per month.

In 2017, Lundstrom partnered with a researcher from the University of Northern Colorado who was interested in capturing the experiences of the victims and survivors in the Free Our Girls network. They conducted 50 qualitative interviews and then did a subset with 20 “bottoms.” She said the interviews provided them with a wealth of data, which they are now in the process of analyzing.

For one of her undergraduate finance courses, Lundstrom applied economic modeling to the business of sex trade, looking at how the risk to traffickers changes depending on the presence or absence of certain variables. She discovered through her analysis that the risk to pimps remains low despite the fluctuation of other situational variables or the threat of arrest because the demand for commercial sex in the United States is so high. She gave an example of how something as innocuous as building a new professional baseball stadium in an urban area can increase demand for commercial sex because of the people, hotels, entertainment venues, and other activities that will follow. Lundstrom noted that in her scenario, some of the money made by traffickers would go back into the local community—through hotels, ride shares, drug stores, doctors’ offices, cellphones, and the like—but the majority of the revenue from commercial sex would leave the local economy. She plans to refine this model so it can be used to estimate prevalence and demand and inform counter-trafficking efforts.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN PREVALENCE AND VULNERABILITY

Several workshop participants underscored the importance of understanding how a person’s vulnerability can perpetuate that person’s risk of victimization. Lundstrom told the following anecdote: “A young girl went to a doctor’s appointment. She arranged transportation and showed up to the doctor, only to realize it was the wrong day. So she had to walk back home in the rain because her ride was not supposed to be there for another hour. As she walked, a man pulled up and said, ‘I’ll give you a ride where you need to go.’ He gave her a ride, and when he pulled up outside of her house, he forced her into a sex act. And that was in exchange for something of value. So in that moment, trafficking, in my opinion, happened.” Lundstrom also mentioned situations where women who were short on rent were told by their landlords that their debt could be negated by performing a sex act. She sees that as coercion, and she urged researchers to consider instances such as these when they seek to collect prevalence data on commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking.

Reducing Survivors’ Vulnerability

Jessica Hubley (AnnieCannons), whose organization works with survivors of trafficking, said she believes that most, if not all, trafficking exists at the confluence of vulnerability, demand for illicit labor or sex, and exploiters who are incentivized to leverage a victim’s vulnerability to meet that demand. Her organization targets vulnerability by providing survivors with job training and paying them incomes high enough to lift them and their families out of the cycle of exploitation. Survivors are referred to AnnieCannons by shelters, case managers, and other service providers. If the survivors pass a logic aptitude screening and show stability in life sufficient to learn, they are taken through a 6-month computer coding boot camp. Successful graduates enter a teaching hospital model where they work on software development projects as they build incomes and skills over time. Hubley said that all of the students who have qualified for the development work through AnnieCannons are still in that field.

More broadly, AnnieCannons is working to reduce vulnerability and enhance survivor well-being by creating a pilot software program that will allow survivors to manage their own personal data and permit access to providers on a case-by-case basis.

Hubley stressed that although she is not a survivor, it is important to involve survivor leaders in the anti-trafficking movement to maximize survivor well-being. AnnieCannons uses survivor-advisors in its training and earning programs, as well as in community outreach and aftercare.

She thinks that past prevalence research has often provided only indirect support for survivor well-being. The benefits to survivor well-being are conditioned on the completion of the research, the use of the research to secure resources that help survivors, and the successful application of those resources to survivor well-being. She added that in absence of any one of these three factors, resources contributed to prevalence research can be lost to survivor care, treatment, and reintegration.

Hubley offered the proposition that the most effective approach to measuring the prevalence of human trafficking would center on measuring vulnerability rather than targeting the crime. She emphasized the challenges in defining human trafficking and measuring underground markets and said that while researchers validate the data, victims are dying. She gave the analogy of walking into a flooded kitchen with a flowing tap: one would first turn off the water source and then clean up the flood. In the same way, she proposed that counter-trafficking efforts first seek to mitigate the vulnerabilities that cause individuals to become victimized by human trafficking and then address the crime.

Hubley noted that the absence of vulnerability would negate both existing demand for exploitation and the presence of exploiters. She added that minimizing vulnerability can also improve survivor well-being because survivors are often still exceptionally vulnerable. She reminded participants of the high incidence of recidivism with trafficking victims, and she reported that many of the survivors in her program note having been rescued, put into shelters, re-trafficked, and re-rescued—perhaps even going through several such cycles—before ultimately receiving the support to exit.

Another reason Hubley gave for targeting vulnerability instead of the crime is that while criminal activity is carefully and purposefully hidden, vulnerability can exist in plain sight. She gave examples of government actions that can exacerbate vulnerability, such as de-enrollment from or elimination of food assistance programs for people who cannot find enough work to support their families and the trauma inflicted by separating children from their parents at the southern border. She listed homelessness, hunger, orphanhood, participation in the foster system, drug addiction, and sexual abuse of minors as other major drivers of vulnerability.

Collaboration Within the Anti-Trafficking Movement: A National Approach

Dore explained how she used her expertise as a former commissioner in Colorado, her personal experience as a survivor of sex trafficking, and her desire to empower survivors to be “at the table” when decisions and policies are made around their well-being to create the National Human Trafficking Survivor Coalition (NHTSC). She said NHTSC serves to empower

survivors through legislative policies and to educate lawmakers on best policy practices. It also provides emergency funding for survivor-led organizations and works to help labor trafficking victims who are stuck in unethical working situations. Dore said rapid intervention is key; she estimated the recidivism rate at about 85 percent and said that if intervention does not occur within the first 48 hours, the victim may be lost to trafficking once more.

Dore feels that survivors are best positioned to recognize victims because of their personal knowledge and experience. As executive director of NHTSC, Dore partnered with a survivor leader from Shared Hope International to create the first familial trafficking identification guide to help schools and communities identify victims. She is also working with Shared Hope to develop safe harbor laws that would prevent the arrest of minors in forced trafficking situations.

Dore and Lundstrom serve on the appropriations committee of United Against Slavery (UAS), a coalition that is developing the National Outreach Survey, which will help identify challenges among those working to combat human trafficking and illustrate to policy makers what human trafficking looks like in their respective states. UAS has partnered with representatives from more than 26 stakeholder groups, including government officials, health care professionals, hospitality workers, human trafficking survivors, and law enforcement officials. To date, UAS has collaborated with 47 states and 70 countries, and it is working on a partnership with the Vatican to bolster support and funding for global counter-trafficking and victim identification efforts.

Colorado recently passed the Right to Work with Dignity Act,³ which makes wage withholding (theft) a felony offense. Dore emphasized the importance of national legislation in this area, which would have direct effects for labor trafficking victims. NHTSC leverages policies such as these to advocate for survivors, and it is often able to help survivors recoup wages without having to pursue further action. Dore said that one of her goals both at NHTSC and UAS is to help survivors look past the word “rescue” and put the power of their healing in their own hands. She believes that survivor education, empowerment, and support can help them move past poverty and past their vulnerabilities.

Identifying Vulnerability on a Global Scale

Durgana explained that the Walk Free Foundation is a subsidiary of the Australia-based Minderoo Foundation. The Walk Free Foundation has a

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³ See https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2019A/bills/2019a_1267jud_01.pdf.

global freedom network that focuses on faith-based communities and a Bali Process Government and Business Forum that works to elevate supply chain transparency and best practices and business procurement. The foundation also funds Freedom Fund and Freedom United—two initiatives focused on raising awareness of human trafficking and communicating research findings to a broader civilian and stakeholder audience.

Durgana noted that the common goals among many researchers in this field are to try to find the hidden populations of victims or to discover the hidden reality in uncontrolled spaces. To contribute toward those goals, the Walk Free Foundation created a Global Slavery Index (GSI) that measures the size and scale of modern slavery country by country and assesses country-level vulnerability and governmental responses. GSI operates by the understanding that in order for modern slavery to occur, there needs to be a vulnerable victim, a motivated offender, and the absence of a capable guardian. The foundation developed a risk profile, based on GSI’s Vulnerability Model,⁴ which maps 23 risk variables across five major dimensions: governance issues, lack of basic needs, inequality, disenfranchised groups, and effects of conflict. GSI also has a component that assesses the actions governments are taking to respond to modern slavery by measuring their progress toward the achievement of five milestones, one of which is for “Government and business [to] stop sourcing goods and services produced by forced labour.”

Durgana said that, as with other criminals, human traffickers are likely motivated by what is profitable, has the highest rate of success, and has the least chance of detection. From an international relations perspective, these groups are existing in the spaces that are not covered by legitimate authority of governments. As such, she emphasized the importance of reducing vulnerabilities to national security by looking systematically at the networks between nations and the fluidity across borders that are increased by improvements in technology and transportation, to be able to identify places where national security breaches can still occur.

Durgana said that people often wonder how global estimation can yield actionable results: At what point are the scope and the associated cost too big to manage? She said the key is using the estimates to conduct global comparative analysis, which can be beneficial in measuring prevalence when it is used as an exercise in scale. It can help researchers go beyond the numbers by providing more widely understood interpretations of the magnitude of the problem in particular areas.

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⁴Global Slavery Index: 2018 Vulnerability Model. Available: https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/methodology/vulnerability.

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