For many of us, the concept of human trafficking is easy enough to grasp, but not the distressing specifics: How many people worldwide are trafficked? How many are children? And most importantly — what can we do to stop it? What about nurse practitioners (NPs) and other health care providers, who have dedicated their lives to serving others?
Part of the obscurity around human trafficking is there by design. For traffickers to do their work, the individuals they traffic must remain below the surface, unseen and unheard. Jessica Peck, DNP, APRN, CPNP-PC, CNE, CNL, FAANP, FAAN, an NP and anti-trafficking advocate, shares her thoughts about this important and fraught subject, and what knowledge she wants to share with all NPs. In 2022, Peck was a guest on NP Pulse: The Voice of the Nurse Practitioner®, and she began by giving an update on her work and advocacy since that interview.
Peck: Over the last couple of years, I’ve worked with a team of students at a large school district in Oklahoma. After the federal government released the very first toolkit for school preparedness for human trafficking, we worked with that school district to augment their child abuse and safety protocol to include human trafficking. We worked with a survivor from that school system who was trafficked from age 11 to 14 by a classmate's mother, and the parents didn't know until she was older. That's what happens with grooming — it's very easy to manipulate kids, create a sense of normalcy and foster secrecy.
Her mom knew that something was off but just had no idea that this was happening. She has since become a powerful advocate within the school district to talk about this and some of the misconceptions. People think the primary way that you're trafficked is at the border or you're kidnapped, but it's really happening in everyday communities, and this case was a very powerful example of that. The school district has since identified a group of several kids who are at risk of exploitation or are being exploited, and they've been able to respond to that, so that's really good.
Peck: Human trafficking was defined in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which meant that before 2000, there really was no legal definition or response framework specific to human trafficking. There are a lot of different kinds of trafficking that can occur — child soldiering, child brides, organ trafficking — but here in the United States the two primary methods are sex trafficking and labor trafficking. Labor trafficking is actually more prevalent and less reported than sex trafficking. It’s a common public misconception to use the term “trafficking” as synonymous with just sex trafficking, and there's a real lack of awareness for labor trafficking that persists throughout the literature and response efforts. If you look at advocacy organizations and resource organizations, the victims are underrepresented by the services that are available.
For example, there are many organizations that help female victims of sex trafficking, but looking at male victims, the resources are almost nonexistent. And then looking at resources for victims of labor trafficking, they're not nearly as representative. We have a lot of work to do in making sure that we elevate awareness of both sex and labor trafficking.
Peck: Well, it can happen in a lot of different ways. It can happen to foreign nationals. It can also happen to people who are here already in the United States. COVID-19 created significant economic distress for a lot of people who lost their jobs. When people are desperate for money, they are more likely to accept offers of employment that can lead to labor trafficking — or that are labor trafficking in disguise.
I'll give you a couple of examples of that. If we're talking about foreign nationals, an example that's been in the courts recently is a group of nurses who were recruited from another country. They're told to come and work in the United States, and you can make a lot of money, support your family and have great professional advancement. But once they get here, their wages are garnished, their papers are confiscated, their living conditions are abhorrent and there is a curated, cultivated trauma bond that happens between the trafficker and the victim.
They threaten their families and misrepresent
what might happen to them or make them afraid of law enforcement. They just go
and work every day among us and around us without saying anything. And we don't
know. Also, migrant farm work is something that is really prolific for labor
trafficking … day laborers. The possibilities are endless. Another intersection
that we see between labor trafficking and sex trafficking is in massage
businesses, and sometimes there can be an overlap of both.
Peck: When I was president of NAPNAP, I helped to create the alliance for children and trafficking, which is a group of NPs, nurses and other health care professionals who are creating an interprofessional coalition to respond to trafficking. They are really doing tremendous work.
They call themselves the Alliance for
Children in Trafficking (ACT), and they are always looking for what they call ‘champions’
to join their group — it’s a roundtable discussion of NPs who create a
strategic plan to advance education and advocacy resources against human
trafficking. It’s a great way to be looped in to see recent research that’s
coming out, to have a group of scholars to talk with that about, to share
successes, to share challenges. That’s a great way to go. They have a program
called ACT advocates, where you can take a deeper dive into training. We'll
give you a slide deck and empower you to be a community resource, and to go to
either professional audiences or lay audiences and raise their awareness about
trafficking while also equipping them to respond.
If you’d like to hear more from Peck on human trafficking, the activity Human Trafficking: Nurse Practitioners Leading the Clinical Response is available now in the AANP CE Center and offers two contact hours of continuing education (CE) credit. This CE activity meets the "Human Trafficking" CE Requirement for several State Boards of Nursing (BON) and organizations with human trafficking requirements.