How to Talk to Working People About Preventing Human Trafficking

Brad Owen manages about three dozen chapels across the United States, all serving one mission: provide a place of worship and faith — for truck drivers.

But three months ago, Owen, the vice president of operations for Truckstop Ministries Inc., got a call from one of his chaplains in Amarillo, Texas; there were police everywhere and the chaplain was being questioned.

“They were asking him what he was doing there and why he was there,” Owen tells NationSwell. “After he showed his credentials and the police were satisfied, they explained what was going on.”

What was going on was a sex-trafficking ring near the chapel, located in a white cargo trailer just off Interstate 40, which winds through the southern half of the U.S. The police were investigating.

Owen wanted more information, so he called Truckers Against Trafficking, or TAT, a nonprofit that enlists the help of truckers to spot and report sex trafficking. Owen asked if the trafficking near the Amarillo chapel was real.

It was. And it was happening in a whole lot of places outside of truck stops too.

Worldwide, there are approximately 25 million people who are forced or coerced into labor every year in some capacity, according to the International Labour Organization. The U.S. is by no means immune to the trade. In the past decade, 40,000 trafficking victims’ cases have been flagged to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, with over 26,000 calls made this year alone.

Though underground sex trafficking is often concentrated in larger cities — an Urban Institute report found that in just eight major U.S. cities, the local sex-traffic economy amounted to an estimated $290 million — there are thousands of cases of women, men and minors being trafficked in areas that are more rural and remote, such as truck stops, hotels and convention centers. For years, efforts have focused on beefing up police probes around activity at truck stops with the help off the FBI, which has an arm dedicated to investigating sex-trafficking rings.

That has forced the trade to move even farther underground, leading to sometimes deadly consequences for victims, who are often killed or beaten if they try to escape. But now, thanks to TAT, truckers — a group that used to be piously referred to as the “knights of the highway” — are being heralded as saviors of the road once again. Thousands of truckers around the country, along with trucking schools and truck-stop workers, are signing up for TAT certification, which includes a 30-minute instructional video on how to to spot victims while on their driving routes. They’re given a wallet-sized card to keep with them, with helpful tips for what to be on the lookout for, such as seeing someone get dropped off at a truck and then picked back up again 20 minutes later.

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Through Truckers Against Trafficking, drivers can become TAT certified and train their colleagues and peers at trucking events.

To date, TAT has certified more than 573,000 people in and around the trucking industry and law enforcement. Others become certified through TAT’s partners, like UPS, which trained over 97,000 of their employees last year.

All that training is clearly having an impact. In 2017, out of the 1,058 victims who were identified by truckers and reported to police, 324 were minors, according to the organization.

“Truck drivers show to be a great solution. They’ve been trained to be vigilant and they’re on the city streets, pulling into areas and being put up in hotels where this happens,” says Kylla Lanier, deputy director for Truckers Against Trafficking. “Even though most of these men don’t buy sex, they’ve been quiet on the issue. We want to turn these passive bystanders into an interrupting force.”

In sheer numbers, the truckers are pretty much an army of their own. By enlisting the help of truckers nationwide, TAT is utilizing the eyes and ears of almost 1.7 million people, a force that rivals the size of the U.S. military.

Currently, five states rely on TAT’s training and education materials, including Arkansas, which was one of the first to mandate truckers be certified as of August last year.

“It’s like a neighborhood watch, where you have people who are the eyes and ears of an area,” says Arkansas state Rep. Charlotte Douglas, a Republican who spearheaded the bill after a similar one was presented in another state. Arkansas has the highest quotient of truckers across the nation per capita. “Truckers extend our police force when they are aware of dangerous situations and know what signs to look out for.”

HUMANIZING THE VICTIMS

Tajuan McCarty, a field trainer for TAT, is one of a handful of survivors who shares her story with truckers. McCarty believes it’s important to put a face to the crisis.

“I knew women who were decapitated, their heads placed in between their legs as a sign to other women to not cross their pimps,” McCarty tells NationSwell.

Her own bleak story started when she was raped at 12, as she recalled to Good Housekeeping in 2015. Despite being a smart and eager child, she ended up angry and rebellious, running away from home for days at a time. At 15, she was approached by an older man who coaxed her into sex work. By the time she was able to escape almost a decade later, she had been sold off over 42,000 times, she says.
A key role of McCarty’s job is to humanize the victims of trafficking who, for decades, have only been construed as prostitutes or hookers. “I was never a prostitute. I will tell you that.”

As society slowly begins to change the way it views trafficking victims, reframing the debate between sex work and sex slavery, McCarty is adamant: “There is no such thing as a sex industry,” she says. “People say they have a choice. But sit down with any person who claims they have control over their [bodies], and I will guarantee you it is a matter of circumstance, that they had no choice but to go into this. There is no choice.”

Still, those who work as high-priced escorts or seem to be acting of their own volition are not the target for Truckers Against Trafficking, says Lanier.

“You’re not finding a lot of independent people working truck stops, rest areas or locations where professional drivers tend to be at,” Lanier says. “That percentage is pretty small who have other viable options and who are not sexually traumatized or being trafficked.”

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Truckers Against Trafficking Deputy Director Kylla Lanier (left) with trucker Kevin Kimmel after Kimmel was awarded the TAT Harriet Tubman Award for fighting trafficking.

WHO YOU GONNA CALL?

As he learned more about human trafficking, Kevin Kimmel, a 60-year-old trucker from Florida who logs over 120,000 miles per year, found himself changing his view of the women he’d see loitering around rest stops on his routes.

“I can count on one hand the times I’ve come across prostitution in my nine years on this job. And I figured it was a choice — a choice I wouldn’t agree with, but still, a choice,” he says. “But the more educated I got, the more I saw that these were actually victims.”

A few years back, Kimmel was at a rest stop, and while finalizing some paperwork he noticed an out-of-place RV; drivers usually park at the front of the rest stops, but this one was parked in the far back. He saw a man walk in, and soon after the RV started to rock.

“It was pretty clear what was going on there,” he says. But after everything was finished, he noticed a young girl stick her head out of the RV window only to be immediately yanked back.
He called the police.

“A couple officers came, and then I saw a young woman being placed into the front seat of a police car … and two others, a man and a woman, being taken out with handcuffs,” he says. “I stuck around for questioning since I was the one that called. … They said that she had about two days left before she’d have been dead.”

It’s that kind of simple action that TAT asks drivers to do.

“All we’re asking them to do is make a call from the safety of their own truck,” Lanier says.

But sometimes, even making a call can be fraught when it’s not clear who to call. For example, a 2016 survey conducted by TAT found that out of 532 cases of commercial sex reported, only 3 percent were called in to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, whereas 40 percent were reported to the police.
And calling the police, it turns out, has its own set of drawbacks. The National Human Trafficking Hotline is the only central database that can be used to log individuals and track them down. The FBI even recommends calling the hotline to streamline information.

“You have different jurisdictions — state police and local sheriffs, for example — that respond differently to a call. Sometimes it’s the local law enforcement,” says Lanier, explaining that truckers are advised to call the hotline so the information can be properly sent to whatever agency needs to respond. “I think in the heat of the moment, when adrenaline is running and you don’t know what to do, you just immediately call the police.”

For McCarty, the field trainer, the success of the TAT certification program gives her hope, both for its potential to help other victims but also for empowering the victims themselves.

“They should know that she is a princess, he is a prince, and that they are worthy of love,” McCarty says. “There are so many people who have been heard and been blamed. But if there’s anyone out there reading this, know this: It’s not your fault.”

If you or someone you know is a victim of trafficking, visit the National Human Trafficking Hotline’s website or call 1-888-373-7888.

10 Innovative Ideas That Propelled America Forward in 2016

The most contentious presidential election in modern history offered Americans abundant reasons to shut off the news. But if they looked past the front page’s daily jaw-droppers, our countrymen would see that there’s plenty of inspiring work being done. At NationSwell, we strive to find the nonprofit directors, the social entrepreneurs and the government officials testing new ways to solve America’s most intractable problems. In our reporting this year, we’ve found there’s no shortage of good being done. Here’s a look at our favorite solutions from 2016.

This Woman Has Collected 40,000 Feminine Products to Boost the Self-Esteem of Homeless Women
Already struggling to afford basic necessities, homeless women often forgo bras and menstrual hygiene products. Dana Marlowe, a mother of two in the Washington, D.C., area, restored these ladies’ dignity by distributing over 40,000 feminine products to the homeless before NationSwell met her in February. Since then, her organization Support the Girls has given out 212,000 more.
Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America
Joseph McGill, a Civil War re-enactor and history consultant for Charleston’s Magnolia Plantation in South Carolina, believes we must not forget the history of slavery and its lasting impact to date. To remind us, he’s slept overnight in 80 dilapidated cabins — sometimes bringing along groups of people interested in the experience — that once held the enslaved.

This Is How You End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline
Abandoned by an abusive dad and a mentally ill mom, Pamela Bolnick was placed into foster care at 6 years old. For a time, the system worked — that is, until she “aged out” of it. Bolnick sought help from First Place for Youth, an East Bay nonprofit that provides security deposits for emancipated children to transition into stable housing.

Would Your Opinions of Criminals Change if One Cooked and Served You Dinner?
Café Momentum, one of Dallas’s most popular restaurants, is staffed by formerly incarcerated young men without prior culinary experience. Owner Chad Houser says the kitchen jobs have almost entirely eliminated recidivism among his restaurant’s ranks.

This Proven Method Is How You Prevent Sexual Assault on College Campuses
Nearly three decades before Rolling Stone published its incendiary (and factually inaccurate) description of sexual assault at the University of Virginia, a gang rape occurred at the University of New Hampshire in 1987. Choosing the right ways to respond to the crisis, the public college has since become the undisputed leader in ending sex crimes on campus.

This Sustainable ‘Farm of the Future’ Is Changing How Food Is Grown
Once a commercial fisherman, Bren Smith now employs a more sustainable way to draw food from the ocean. Underwater, near Thimble Island, Conn., he’s grown a vertical farm, layered with kelp, mussels, scallops and oysters.

This Former Inmate Fights for Others’ Freedom from Life Sentences
Jason Hernandez was never supposed to leave prison. At age 21, a federal judge sentenced him to life for selling crack cocaine in McKinney, Texas — Hernandez’s first criminal offense. After President Obama granted him clemency in 2013, he’s advocated on behalf of those still behind bars for first-time, nonviolent drug offenses.

Eliminating Food Waste, One Sandwich (and App) at a Time
In 2012, Raj Karmani, a Pakistani immigrant studying computer science at the University of Illinois, built an app to redistribute leftover food to local nonprofits. So far, the nonprofit Zero Percent has delivered 1 million meals from restaurants, bakeries and supermarkets to Chicago’s needy. In recognition of his work, Karmani was awarded a $10,000 grant as part of NationSwell’s and Comcast NBCUniversal’s AllStars program.

Baltimore Explores a Bold Solution to Fight Heroin Addiction
Last year, someone in Baltimore died from an overdose every day: 393 in total, more than the number killed by guns. Dr. Leana Wen, the city’s tireless public health commissioner, issued a blanket prescription for naloxone, which can reverse overdoses, to every citizen — the first step in her ambitious plan to wean 20,000 residents off heroin.

How a Fake Ad Campaign Led to the Real-Life Launch of a Massive Infrastructure Project
Up until 1974, a streetcar made daily trips from El Paso, Texas, across the Mexican border to Ciudad Juárez. Recently, a public art project depicting fake ads for the trolley inspired locals to call for the line’s comeback, and the artist behind the poster campaign now sits on the city council.

Continue reading “10 Innovative Ideas That Propelled America Forward in 2016”

Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America

Gazing out from the columned manor of Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, S.C., visitors can admire green gardens, footbridges over burbling canals and moss-cloaked cypress trees. When the azaleas bloom each spring, one can almost forget that these 500 acres (originally, it was 2,000 acres) of Lowcountry Field were once a working plantation where dozens of slaves toiled growing rice. Staring the brightly colored flora, it’s difficult to comprehend the majestic home hasn’t always been a place of beauty and was once a site of exploitation, whippings and sexual violence.

Out of sight from the main residence, stand four extant wood-sided cabins, painted white. Here, slaves slept and ate and prayed and sang, raising families in single rooms. Amid the lovely Southern grounds, these dwellings stand as a reminder of the captive men and women who lived and died on the land they were forced to cultivate.

The Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, S.C., where dozens of slaves lived in shoddy dwellings (not pictured).

Across the country, these shacks and cabins are under threat. Unlike the mansions where slaveowners displayed their wealth, these dwellings are far from magnificent. Housing fieldhands, many were built from the cheapest material available. Most resemble tool sheds, which, some might say, is effectively what they were. Among the catalog of historic homes, battlegrounds and memorials worthy of recognition, these hovels rarely make the list.

That’s why Joseph McGill, a Charleston native, began sleeping overnight in these crude shelters in 2010. Now nearing 80 overnight stays in 16 states, McGill says what started as a kind of publicity stunt to draw attention to the structures has grown into a movement. After the election of our nation’s first black president, the conversation around daily violence in urban communities and the retirement of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, McGill hopes the preservation of these makeshift homes will play a part in how America comes to terms with its racist past. Without the buildings, he argues, what’s there to remind us of the institution of slavery?

“One of the things that we need to understand is that 12 of our former presidents were slaveowners, eight of whom owned slaves while they were in office. Even those who contributed to those major documents that we live by today — you know, the Constitution’s ‘We, the people.’ It should have read, ‘We, the people,’ comma, ‘here in this room,’ because otherwise that document meant nothing to you,” McGill tells NationSwell. “Even after emancipation, there were obstacles put in place to deny those recently freed people their pursuit of happiness. Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow laws and white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings. We’re still being denied opportunities to pursue that happiness. We’re dealing with the residuals of that today.”

McGill always loved history. In his prior day job at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, he safeguarded America’s iconic buildings. And on weekends, he dressed up as a solider for Civil War reenactments. (As a black man and descendant of slaves, he “fought” for the Union.) But he began to notice that African-Americans’ place in history, especially antebellum history, was often glossed over. It’s undisputed in textbooks that landowners held slaves and a bloody conflict erupted over their freedoms. But outside of, say, Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, there’s little public knowledge about the everyday lives and traditions of the enslaved. Across the South, McGill felt like he had a much easier time spotting statues of Johnny Reb (a personification of Southern states) than seeing plaques about early African-American figures.
McGill slept in his first cabin — on the oak-lined Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant, S.C. — in 1999, as a way to get footage for a documentary about war reenactors. He didn’t think of the meager buildings again until 2010, when he was asked to consult on the restoration of Magnolia Plantation’s slave cabins. After his second overnight stay, he realized these places had to be preserved. “When the buildings aren’t there, it’s easier to deny the people who lived in those buildings,” he says. “The fact that they exist is an opportunity to let the world know that these people not only existed, but contributed highly to the fruits of this nation.”
McGill started contacting historic sites and preservation groups across the Palmetto State and soon, up and down the entire Eastern seaboard (including several in the North, where, we often forget, slavery persisted through the late 18th century), asking to visit their slave residences. Because of their enthusiastic responses, he created an official organization — the Slave Dwelling Project — that works to protect the homes that remain standing more than a century and a half after being erected.
Soon, people started reaching out to him (both individual families researching their lineage and established historical societies hoping to broaden their offerings), wanting to join his overnight visits. “I’m seldom sleeping in these places alone anymore.”
Putting together a group isn’t always easy. McGill has to fend off ghost hunters and treasure seekers. And some private hosts worry that descendants of slaves will knock on their door asking for what McGill calls the “r-word”: reparations. And interestingly, McGill says blacks can be hesitant to participate. “There are a lot of us, being African American, that don’t even want to set foot on a plantation,” he says, explaining that they don’t want to go to a place where their family was held as chattel. “I express to them that they are part of the problem, not the solution. As long as we continue to be afraid to even want to come to these places and have the courage to tell that story, [others] are going to tell it the way they want,” referencing tour guides who say masters were kind and treated their slaves well, calling that narrative, “junk history.” Once that message is delivered and it becomes clear that these stays are about African Americans and their history — revisiting history, not revising it — most agree to participate.
Once others started accompanying him, the project’s aims subtly shifted from an external campaign for recognition to an internal dialogue about race in America. Bringing together descendants of slaves and slaveowners in the very place where one group once shackled the other inevitably prompted soul-searching and candid discussion.

McGill stands with overnight visitors in front of a slave dwelling.

One night in Stagville, a historic North Carolina plantation, for example, young black men spoke by glinting lantern-light of the anger, fear and frustration they live with. In Mississippi, one female college student asked McGill if he had ever met a descendant of slaveowners who is proud of his family’s history. On South Carolina’s Daufuskie Island, a young black man, whose family had been enslaved there, stared at a wall built of tabby concrete, made from broken oyster shells, sand and ash. “I’m allergic to oysters,” he said. “I wonder if my ancestors were.” And in the coachman’s quarters on a Hillsborough, N.C., plantation, a 100-year-old matriarch told stories about her ancestors, who had been born into bondage on the property.
McGill’s stays are not just for African Americans; whites who want to revisit their history as a way of making amends often join him. Prinny Anderson, a leadership coach descended from Virginia slaveowners, has joined McGill on 22 stays to date — all within driving distance of her Durham, N.C., home. When descendants of slaves are sharing their family history, she’s largely silent, preferring to listen and absorb. But when the group is largely white, she says she’s an “instigator,” asking critical questions.
Anderson’s most moving trip was a visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s hilltop estate in Charlottesville, Va., where she has family connections. She fell asleep in the basement (where the slave workplaces were constructed, hidden from sight), thinking about her distant cousins, white and black, and what it meant to revisit their shared home.
“That really felt like getting the blessing of my ancestors. You came home and slept where your great auntie slept,” Anderson says. “Nobody who lived in the big house during that day ever came down to the [slave] quarters and slept on the floor. In that sense, it was like crossing the bridge.” Spending the night there, it was like Anderson had atoned for something.
Part of the Slave Dwelling Project is to recover slaves’ individual narratives, finding personal stories amidst the black mass in chains. “I think the general perception is that enslaved people were brought here for the ability to do grunt work or heavy lifting: the physical labor. But there’s a lot more to their skills and abilities,” McGill says. From the engineering feat of “taming those cedar swamps” to growing rice and constructing building frames, ironwork, bricks and tools, slaves were vital to the plantation’s production, arguably much more so than any master lounging in the big house.
While the conversation at these places steeped in history may be the most candid talks you’ll hear these days on the subject of race, McGill knows it’s not the only forum for the issue. If anything, he hopes the talks will overflow into guests’ neighborhoods and university dorms. And there, discussion will be led by people who are better informed of their place in the long march for racial equality.
Joseph McGill in his reenactor’s uniform.

Above all, McGill wants his guests to remember that black history does not begin at a Montgomery bus stop in 1955 and end at a Memphis hotel room in 1968. It spans lifetimes, back to the auction block and long past when Obama leaves office. The recent conflict at the University of Missouri, which ended in the president’s removal, did not begin when these students arrived on campus or even when the school was ordered to integrate by a court order in 1950. Anyone who has listened to Billie Holiday croon “Strange Fruit” knows Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance featuring dancers in Black Panther uniforms was not the first to push the envelope. These victories, whether from the Civil Rights movement or Black Lives Matter, all date back to one common source: slavery, a period we cannot forget, McGill insists.
“Historically, these are some times we have not yet overcome. There’s still things that we have not yet dealt with, rooted in the institution of slavery,” McGill says. “If we should let these buildings go away, then we are going to allow this nation to continually perpetuate that false narrative. We shouldn’t allow that to stand. We shouldn’t let that narrative carry the day. The record needs to be corrected.”
Through McGill’s work, the authentic story is now being told.
Correction: This article originally stated that Magnolia Plantation was 390 acres in size and that slaves worked in cotton fields and later on as freed sharecroppers. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.  
MORE: Fighting Prejudice in America: One Woman’s Battle to Change the Rhetoric Surrounding Race