Confronting Labor Trafficking Through a Victim-Centered Approach

DARYL FOX: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, National Human Trafficking Prevention Month: Confronting Labor Trafficking Through a Victim-Centered Approach, hosted by the Office for Victims of Crime [OVC]. At this time, it's my pleasure to introduce Brecht Donoghue, Division Director of the Human Trafficking Division within OVC, to begin the presentation. Brecht?

BRECHT DONOGHUE: Thanks, Daryl. And I want to thank all of you for joining us today as we close out the Office for Victims of Crime's commemoration of National Human Trafficking Prevention Month. As Daryl said, my name is Brecht Donoghue, and I'm proud to serve alongside my colleagues in OVC's Human Trafficking Division as the division's director. OVC Director Kristina Rose was so sorry to be unable to give these remarks today, but she is attending the 71st Annual Attorney General Award Ceremony, where OVC's Tribal Team is receiving an award for their amazing work serving American Indians and Alaska Natives. We offer our sincere congratulations to our OVC colleagues.

January is a month of both acknowledgement and reflection for many of us at OVC. I hope you have had an opportunity to read the Presidential Proclamation this year, which calls upon businesses, civil society organizations, communities of faith, families, and all Americans to recognize the vital role we play in combating human trafficking. The proclamation also reaffirms the principles reflected in the 2021 National Action Plan to combat trafficking. I appreciate the strong commitment to giving federal agencies the tools we need to address the harms caused by human trafficking, to bring traffickers to justice, and to support survivors as they access needed services, build positive connections, and thrive in a promising future.

As many of you are aware, OVC is at the forefront of the federal government's response to human trafficking. Currently, we manage the largest amount of anti-trafficking funding across government, directed at combating human trafficking and serving survivors of trafficking across the country. We oversee almost 500 active anti-trafficking projects, representing over $330 million, of which $95 million was awarded this past fiscal year to trafficking programs supporting the delivery of direct services, such as case management, housing, legal assistance, and as well as supporting multidisciplinary collaboration and state-level approaches to identifying and serving survivors of human trafficking. In addition, OVC manages a comprehensive array of training and technical assistance for anti-trafficking victim service providers, law enforcement, and allied professionals, with a focus on building capacity and enhancing the quality and quantity of services available to trafficking survivors.

As I reflect on all that OVC does, I must take a moment to extend my sincere thanks to the dedicated team of professionals in OVC's Human Trafficking Division, many of whom have worked in the anti-trafficking field for decades. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Lindsay Waldrop, who is responsible for overseeing the project we will be discussing today. She and the entire anti-trafficking team at OVC work tirelessly to ensure our work stays true to our agency's mission and to the needs of the field. We have come a long way in the past twenty years since the passage of the original Trafficking Victims Protection Act. However, we must continue to look to the future and assess where we need to go with the field. We must identify and acknowledge the pervasive issues we face and continually reexamine our approaches. This is why for well over a year now, OVC has placed an increased emphasis on the issue of labor trafficking.

As part of OVC's mission to ensure all victims of crime have access to victim services, it is perhaps a given that OVC has always addressed the full scope of human trafficking with both sex and labor trafficking included in our programming. In fact, OVC's trafficking efforts began in the late '90s as a result of several major labor trafficking cases being worked on by the Department of Justice, which brought to light the desperate need for appropriate services for many of the victims identified in these cases. Since then, from the tools and resources we've developed and funded to the expectations in our grant programming that all trafficking victims receive proper services, OVC's work has been inclusive of labor trafficking.

However, we can also see from our own grantee data that there is more that needs to be done, and, in particular, we need to do more to reach survivors of labor trafficking. We understand that our intent to be inclusive is just not enough when it comes to labor trafficking. We need to be intentional in our approach. While the country has made tremendous strides in understanding and responding to sex trafficking, labor trafficking within the United States is something that may--many still do not comprehend. We know there are laws to protect workers in the U.S. and, as a result, many in the public may believe that labor trafficking could not possibly exist here. This is unfortunately exacerbated by a scarcity of research related to labor trafficking in the U.S. and a tremendous lack of public awareness and knowledge of workers' rights.

The very nature of labor trafficking allows its propagation to flourish under the guise of legitimate work, making appropriate victim identification extremely difficult. Labor trafficking in the U.S. can take many forms. It includes documented and undocumented workers exploited or involuntarily made to work to pay off debts, as well as U.S. citizens victimized by employers due to vulnerabilities such as age, disability, insecure housing, or challenges securing employment due to past criminal convictions. As such, it can be hard to identify, even for those of us trained to be on alert.

And we cannot talk about labor trafficking in the U.S. without acknowledging the overwhelming impact it has had on historically marginalized communities. The quote from the OVC sponsor-supported TTA provider Framework, who you'll be hearing from more momentarily, "Labor trafficking is a criminal issue but it's also a human rights issue, a worker's rights issue, an immigration issue, an economic issue, a women's issue.” We need to address the root causes and to center our efforts in an approach that focuses on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. This is why I’m grateful that this year’s proclamations specifically pointed to efforts made to strengthen public awareness and provide protections and relief for those who may suffer the most from labor trafficking, including ending forced labor in global supply chains and supporting people disproportionately affected by human trafficking, including members of racial and ethnic minorities, women and girls, the LGBTQI+ community, and migrants.

Internally, within the Office of Justice Programs and OVC itself, we have committed to expanding diversity and equity efforts, including factoring applicants' meaningful actions to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion into our funding decisions. We also continue to partner with the National Institute of Justice [NIJ] to fund research to help us understand more about the root causes of human trafficking and what works to address it. This year in our effort to be intentional when it comes to addressing labor trafficking, we also gave consideration in our funding opportunities to applicants who demonstrated that they were serving survivors of labor trafficking in their community or were committed to expanding their capacity to do so.

We know that our grantees already do so much, and we understand that asking grantees who are already stretched to the limit to intentionally stretch even more is a lot to ask. This is why we are committed to providing comprehensive training and technical assistance to support those of you willing to embark on this journey with us. We hope you will be inspired as we were reading a featured article on the Office of Justice website [www.ojp.gov]--it came out yesterday--entitled Spotlight on Organizations Leading the Charge. It featured five examples of OVC grantees and their tremendous work with survivors of labor trafficking. And we hope OVC's recently created Raising Awareness of Child Labor Trafficking Outreach Guide, which is also available on our website [ovc.ojp.gov], will be useful to you. It contains outreach tools and sample materials to help you develop and carry out your awareness campaigns throughout the year.

Additionally, not too long ago, OVC published one-of-a-kind, developmentally-appropriate graphic novels for young people to help them better understand the crime of human trafficking, their rights, and how to navigate the justice system. One of these graphic novels features the story of Sergio, a young victim of labor trafficking in a federal case. The graphic novels are available in five languages in addition to English and then audiobook form. To further enhance accessibility to these resources and ensure these materials get directly into the hands of young people, OVC is now supporting a project to allow organizations to apply for funds of up to $10,000 to print these materials so you can literally have them at your fingertips to use with those you serve. More information about this opportunity will be posted on our website in just a few days.

We want to encourage all of our grantees to take intentional steps forward with support and assistance from OVC. We know that work on labor trafficking can be daunting and you may be asking yourselves, "Where do we even begin, and how do we prioritize labor trafficking when we have difficulty identifying these individuals, and when we have so many others to serve?” In order to assist our newly-funded grantees who met our challenge to expand and stretch, OVC is providing new tools and assistance to support grantees in operationalizing their labor trafficking plans. I’m pleased to announce that the International Rescue Committee [IRC] was recently awarded a cooperative agreement to assist both OVC-funded grantees, as well as stakeholders working with potential labor trafficking survivors with training and resources. IRC will do this through their Framework project, which was established previously with OVC funding. Framework has produced foundational resources and industry-and population-specific materials, all of which could be accessed on their website [FrameworkTA.org]. Notably, Framework supports the creation of labor trafficking resources specifically focused on lifting up survivor voices, a critical element to ethically guiding our work.

I am pleased to introduce Charlee Borg and Kristina Bailey from IRC today about--to talk about the relaunch of this work. We have been affectionately calling it Framework 2.0. Charlee is Framework's Deputy Director and a survivor leader who has worked in the field for over fifteen years. Kristina is a Program Officer on the Framework team. And together they bring a wealth of knowledge in direct services and systems navigation to this project. Charlee, Kristina, thank you both so much for the work you do on behalf of OVC and survivors of labor trafficking. I'm so excited for you to share more about your plans for Framework and I will now turn it over to you.

CHARLEE BORG: Hello. We are so happy to be here today with all of you and with OVC. We are happy to be back as Framework 2.0. I am Charlee Borg, the Deputy Director. And I will tell you a little bit more about myself in a bit, but we are excited to get started and discuss how Framework uses a victim-or survivor-centered approach at the heart of everything that we do and how our resources come to life. We're going to talk a little bit about what labor trafficking is as an introduction, practice our skills together, in case you are a starting professional, but hopefully, even for the seasoned individuals out there, we will have some resources available that are of interest to you at our website. So I'm going to hand it over to Kristina.

KRISTINA BAILEY: Hi, everybody. Welcome. And thank you for having us and thank you, Brecht, for such an awesome introduction of everything OVC is doing and has done to highlight and spotlight labor trafficking. I'm Kristina Bailey, Program Officer for Anti-Trafficking Programs with the International Rescue Committee. Been in the anti-trafficking space with IRC for almost five years now and have been working with OVC, either funded by OVC or--you know, with service delivery or training and technical assistance in some way that whole time. So very familiar with OVC and very happy to now be on this end of the collaboration. Next slide. Thank you. 

So before we jump in, I wanted to just make a quick note on language for everybody in attendance on a couple of terms you will hear us use, one of them being survivor. So you'll hear many terms used in the anti-trafficking space: victim, survivor, person with lived experience, et cetera. So we just wanted to note that Framework--we at Framework do use the term survivor, so you will hear and see that throughout today's presentation. We'd also like to consider the term vulnerability while you're with us today. Framework sometimes will use this term, vulnerable, as an adjective. 

So to describe what may create a higher risk of being targeted for labor trafficking. We're attempting to transition our language but we do want to make note of when this word is used in our trainings and topics. We believe that no group is inherently vulnerable; instead vulnerability exists simply because of systems and people and situations that produce that vulnerability. So an individual, for example, with a cognitive difference could not be victimized if there was no perpetrator, right? So a non-English speaker that, you know, has a dream of working in another country, does--that in and of itself doesn't make you vulnerable. That vulnerability is produced by a trafficker or someone out there who is going to use language or lack of the English language knowledge as a tool to exploit said person. So, essentially, no group would be vulnerable to labor trafficking without said labor traffickers or systemic factors that cause people to have these increased needs, so we just wanted to make note of the term vulnerability and how we will be using it today.

CHARLEE BORG: Thanks, Kristina. Let's go to the next slide and talk a little bit about Framework, one of my all-time favorite subjects. As I said, I am Charlee Borg, the Deputy Director of Framework, a program that is dedicated to providing tools to increase collaboration, improve service delivery, and enhance survivor engagement so that together we, as a community, can combat labor trafficking.

I cannot tell you how glad I am to be with you here today and have all of you on the call. We are excited with OVC's invigorated dedication to labor trafficking and anti-labor trafficking efforts and serving all survivors of human trafficking. So, whether or not, that's something that you're already doing, no matter what organization you're coming from today, this is going to be information that is relevant to you and Framework is here to support in your endeavors however we can.

So a little bit about us. As Brecht said, this is Framework 2.0, and we had the honor of working with survivors and other professionals for--from 2020 to the beginning of 2023 to create materials that were relevant to help individuals engage, serve, and collaborate to meet the needs of survivors. And we believe that by prioritizing the needs and wellbeing of survivors, we will [won't] risk retraumatization and empower survivors to actively participate in the decision-making process, which is at the heart of a victim-centered or survivor-centered approach.

So over those years, we were able to engage with over 1,500 individuals through online events such as this. And we are happy to say that a third of those individuals honored us by participating in multiple events (typically three). So, hopefully, we hook you today to join our bandwagon. There will be opportunities to join our listserv at the end of this and to engage with us in case consultation, in guidance on organizational policies, or training on how to identify labor trafficking, how to work with survivor consultants, or how to engage in regional initiatives like an outreach campaign or training members of your taskforce. We are here for all of those things and always--only an email away. We can also be accessed at FrameworkTA.org where you will be able to see our resources and access our resource libraries. We actually have two as of right now. So let's talk a little bit about those resources on our next slide. Thank you.

So Framework offers live event, individual consultation, help in bringing case studies to life if you have seen something unique to your area. An example of this is that New Jersey had a large group case. Large group cases are less common. It was 45 individuals from India that were found in a shipping container on the border of New Jersey and New York. And Framework was reached out to to ask for best practices in serving that many individuals, especially when regional resources get tapped pretty quickly. We can create case studies or resources to help other individuals, other organizations in your area do exactly that. Another example is the state office of Colorado contacted us. They were seeing a lot of individuals that were seemingly forced to steal cars and they were curious, is this labor trafficking? We were able to give them some of the tools to go through an assessment with some of these minors and find out that it was indeed labor trafficking.

We do case study practice videos. Confidence and comfort in serving survivors is one of our main areas of focus. Empowering you to empower the individuals you work with. We offer webinars and training recordings on our website, actually, of which have been viewed a total of 1,100 hours. So another area of pride for Framework and we'd love for you to check out those resources that other people found to be useful for their programs.

We provide tip sheets and survivor-created resources. Every single thing that goes through Framework is seen by diverse survivor eyes and experts within the field. So we work with professionals, with survivor leaders in a variety of ways to brainstorm, create, and execute our materials, trainings, past instances of long-term organizational support. And on our website, FrameworkTA.org, you can also access things like our Healing from Trauma Online Gallery, where survivors, for a past National Human Trafficking Awareness Month, shared through art how they healed from the trauma that they experienced. So visit our website to see how one's--a representation of one survivor's pets, who are so important to their healing, or different pieces of artwork that represented the turmoil of going through a labor trafficking experience.

We also offer online E-learning and certificate courses. These are focused on kind of a Labor Trafficking 101, if you will, but this might be something that's a little different than what you've seen historically. We're not just talking about definitions and legal jargon. We want you to be able to understand the personal experiences of survivors going through things like intake processes. We want you to understand what they seek when they look at outreach, which Kristina will help you practice and see today. We go through low-wage work and how things like low-paying jobs create exploitation opportunities within our country and culture. We talk about the history of labor trafficking in the United States, post-slavery era. What did immigration look like? What were the policies? What were the procedures? And how did labor trafficking move from the transatlantic slave trade to the trafficking of Irish, Chinese, and other immigrants, including indigenous folks within the United States up until the 1980s with residential schools and what did that forced labor of indigenous youth look like through our federal government? You can follow survivors' experiences in a kind of "choose your own adventure." I don't think that's the most appropriate term but it's just what it is called in the general world. You can follow two survivors and see what experiences are presented in front of them and where it takes them in their experience of exploitation, force, fraud, coercion, and labor trafficking.

We are also hoping, in the fall, to deploy two new initiatives. These will be focused on individuals that receive specific OVC anti-trafficking funding first, but please let us know at the end of this presentation if you're interested in joining because those could potentially expand. What those will look like will be one-on-one guidance and a community of learning, coaching to increase organizational capacity to serve labor trafficking survivors.

All right. Let's look at the next slide. All right. Because we're a nonprofit and we need a little opportunity for shameless self-promotion, here are some things that people are saying about Framework. But again, really, our resources are not special because Framework employees--though fantastic, passionate, and very dedicated--not because of us but because of the survivor leaders and the diverse community of professionals that we constantly collaborate with to bring all of these resources to life. So thank you, especially if you are a survivor leader or past consultant that's on this call.

All right. And we can go to the next slide. I talked a little bit about how Framework really hopes to build confidence and comfort in in serving labor trafficking survivors. We know that Americans, in general, believe that sex trafficking is a larger problem than labor trafficking within the United States. That was found in a 2015 study. And within that same study, it was found that individuals believe that human trafficking--but also when we're saying human trafficking, colloquially, we're often thinking sex trafficking. So when we ask who is impacted by trafficking, people say predominantly women or individuals who are undocumented. We know that this is paralleled in criminal prosecution and in identification rates when you look at the international or national numbers, whether--and it's not--whether it's by the Global Labor Organization, the United Nations, or organizations like OVC, we see disproportionate rates of sex trafficking to labor trafficking, though sex work is only one form of trade out of all realms of work that-where individuals can experience exploitation and forced labor.

So thinking of that and thinking critically, I want you to consider, as we move through, that the rates of trafficking that we see might not paint the full picture. And to increase those rates, we are hoping to make our providers more comfortable in identifying, screening, and seeing, and serving survivors of all forms of human trafficking. So one area of pride is that, from 2019 to 2021, individuals, organizations that connected with Framework increased in their confidence in identifying labor trafficking. From 2019, moving from fourteen percent of people being not very confident at all in identifying labor trafficking to only eight percent. So we saw a decrease in not being able to identify labor trafficking and an increase in feeling entirely confident, which is a big jump from zero to a hundred of 40-47% of the providers working with Framework feeling very confident in serving survivors.
All right. Let's look a little bit at what human trafficking is.

KRISTINA BAILEY: Yeah. So we've heard a little bit about Framework and all the resources offered. We will continue more with that in just a little bit. But to go back to the very, very basics, if you're newer to the anti-trafficking space and you're on this call, maybe newer to OVC, what have you, a very basic definition of human trafficking from the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 defines human trafficking as a crime involving the exploitation of a person for either labor services or commercial sex. And, again, we know that within that, we have two main types of trafficking, being sex trafficking and labor trafficking. And while Framework is focused on labor trafficking as the labor trafficking training and technical assistance provider, there's often crossover and co-occurrence between both sex trafficking and labor trafficking, so I'd like to highlight this little QR code. If you have your phone out, feel free to scan it and you can look through that later. But it'll lead you to a resource that Framework has. It's a tip sheet and it highlights some of the main points from a survivor-led panel that was held a few years back on the crossover of labor and sex trafficking. And in that, it covers the importance of co-identification of labor and sex trafficking, reflections on some of the survivor experiences that they noticed are often overlooked by the anti-trafficking movement, and also will provide an analysis of how you all and we all as providers can better impact identification and direct service needs without necessarily having to segregate by trafficking type.

Next slide please. Thank you. And furthermore into definitions, the labor trafficking definition as defined again by the TVPA, defines forced labor as recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of or subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, and slavery. This is as we know it to be the lovely AMP model: action, means, and purpose. And I'd like to note that with labor trafficking, again, if you're more familiar working with sex trafficking or that's what you see most often, in sex trafficking, minors that are experiencing sex trafficking do not need to prove the force, fraud, or coercion piece of the definition simply because they are minors and sex under 18 is wrong regardless; there's no force, fraud, or coercion to prove. But for labor trafficking, it is a little bit different. Minors experiencing labor trafficking, you will need to have and prove that force, fraud, or coercion piece of the definition to have a labor trafficking case against a minor. Next slide please. Thank you.

CHARLEE BORG: All right. So, thinking of the individuals that we are currently seeing, in 2023, OVC served over 10,000 individuals that were identified as experiencing human trafficking, 26% of whom were identified as experiencing some sort of labor trafficking. And what I want to point out is that this doesn't necessarily mean that only 26% of survivors did experience labor trafficking. Some things that we do not know is whether or not a hundred percent of all survivors were screened for labor trafficking or the way that we view labor trafficking at different organizations. One example of this is that, historically, I have worked as a crisis manager, as a direct service provider, individual therapist, group therapist, in housing projects, in hospital accompaniment programs. I have worked with survivors of human trafficking pretty much consistently since 2009. 

I identified my first labor trafficking case, I would say, in 2014, two years after I worked with a client of the case that I identified. I failed my client. Historically, I was focused only on sex trafficking and on sex work, being in different environments like strip clubs or online, through things like massage parlors. Even when I worked with those clients, I did not understand that they were also experiencing labor trafficking and that that was a missed opportunity for things like salary reparations. So just a quick moment of authenticity that I have gone through this process myself and that in looking back on intimate partner violence clients that I have had, on survivors of familial abuse who ran away from their home, sex trafficking survivors, that now that I look back, now that I have this information and this ability to see these cases, I understand that there was labor trafficking. 

And I understand that, as a provider, to some extent, I did my client a disservice in not helping them to name their traumatic experience and not helping to connect them to resources that might have been able to be useful in criminal convictions, in things like crime victim compensation, and in resource linkage overall. So I wanted to just quickly share that and make it known that we are, as providers, continually learning and growing, and that's a piece of this, and if labor trafficking hasn't been a focus of yours historically, that it can make a difference in the lives of the individuals that you work with.

So let's look at who the 26% of that 10,000 identified human trafficking survivors served by OVC were. Of the about 2,600 individuals, nineteen were identified as experiencing only labor trafficking and seven percent were identified as experiencing labor and sex trafficking. Let's go to the next slide.

And think of what we could do, what we could do if we are screening 100% of the clients that you're working with. And I know that this is a little bit nouveau, I have worked with organizations like refugee resettlement, immigration orgs that have not screened for things like sex trafficking but work with labor trafficking survivors every single day. Also, sometimes not considering the fact that a 2016 study found that one-third of labor trafficking survivors experienced sexual violence. 

One of the first cases of labor trafficking that I worked on actually, we connected because of labor trafficking and crime victim compensation of missing home (she was from China), of experiencing physical abuse, of the trauma of not being able to leave a restaurant for almost a year where she was forced to live and work. But the thing that I didn't get in my report that was sent over was the incredible amount of sexual violence that she experienced every single day. This isn't something necessarily that historically immigration resettlement organizations, legal organizations have worked with, but it can be incredibly relevant. Similarly, intimate partner violence organizations, sexual assault organizations are very likely already serving labor trafficking survivors. And when we're not screening, we're not seeing, and we might be missing opportunities for our clients to name, heal, and grow. Let's go to the next slide.

KRISTINA BAILEY: All right. So where does labor trafficking happen? Short answer, everywhere, anywhere. Long answer, just a few points on this slide. Of course, we all know labor trafficking can happen essentially anywhere where labor or work is present, right? So agriculture. We see it in farms. I mean, HEAL [HEAL Trafficking] just recently released a publication on exploitation within marijuana farms, with the growing cannabis industry. We see it in hospitality, in hotels, restaurants, massage and bodyworks parlor. Even street performance or online, oftentimes we see, you know, street performers on the street and we enjoy it and the kids have a good time. But I don't think anyone truly ever stops to think, right, that that could also potentially, that person could be out there, doing forced work and not out there by their own will.

One thing I did want to point out here is you'll see illicit industries such as drug sales and identity theft. I think there's often a miscommunication or a misconceptualization of the fact that labor trafficking is any type of forced work. So I've heard before, like, labor trafficking is only if it's forced legal work, right? So they're being forced to work as a server or forced to work as a bartender. But it can also be forced illegal work. So if someone is being forced to traffic drugs or somebody is being forced to commit identity theft, that is still labor trafficking because that is still forced work. So, make sure when you are doing screenings or doing an intake and you're trying to listen out for key words that you're keeping that in mind, right? So any type of forced work is forced work. It doesn't matter if it's considerably [considered] legal or illegal by definition. Next slide, please.

All right. And who connects with labor trafficking survivors? So if we can see trafficking in any space, pretty much anybody can also connect with labor trafficking survivors. So of course you have law enforcement and investigations anywhere from the local to the federal level. You have service providers, so many of us here, right? So state-funded by OVC or OTIP [Office on Trafficking in Persons] or DSHS [Department of State Health Services]. Also mental health providers, medical providers, substance use disorder providers, any type of service provider out there. Many of you, many of your partners are likely going to connect with labor trafficking survivors.

As well as Charlee mentioned, legal assistance. So most trafficking survivors, labor trafficking survivors will have some type of legal needs, whether that be immigration and they're seeking immigration services or they have some type of civil or criminal things to settle. Pretty much anybody in the legal space could come across a labor trafficking survivor any day and any way with the variety of needs out there.

Of course anyone serving minor clients, so the school system, you know, the--I know there's recently been a push into age-appropriate training within school systems all across the nation, even some funding surrounding that. So anybody that works at an office of child welfare, department of children and families, school system, any type of child's community group could potentially come across a minor survivor of labor trafficking.

And then really just additional partners is anyone: you, me, our pastor, our landlord, somebody at your local embassy. So really anybody--if anybody out there can be trafficked in any kind of setting or place, then on the flipside of that, anybody can connect with a labor trafficking survivor. So our goal and aim here at Framework is to make sure that anyone and everyone--focus on OVC grantees--but anyone and anyone can receive that training on screening identification of a labor trafficking survivor. Next slide, please. 

Awesome. So a little bit into experiences of labor trafficking survivors. We talked a little bit on it earlier. Looking at the definition, we see that we have the action and means and purpose piece of that definition, right? And we wanted to focus a little bit more today on that means part, which is that force, fraud, or coercion piece I mentioned earlier since that does play a big role in labor trafficking identification simply because it's present for both minors and adults.

CHARLEE BORG: Thanks, Kristina. So, when we're thinking of that means, we're thinking of force, fraud, and coercion, things that you are probably very familiar with if you're already [coughs] serving survivors of human trafficking. Going to grab some water [drinks water]. One thing I do not want you to do is feel like you need to memorize what's force, what's fraud, and what is coercion. Absolutely, especially if you are a case manager, if you are a therapist, if you are an educator within your community, these things are not necessary to, like, memorize and be able to quote verbatim. What I want you to do is to be sitting with a client in front of you, to be hearing your colleague talk about a case, and to think, "Is that force, fraud, or coercion?" 

I want this to just be a moment where you are able to seek supervision to connect with a colleague to consider what your client is going through. Force being the use of physical or psychological harm or restraint. This can include sexual emotional abuse, torture, monitoring, confinement. We do not see confinement in this kind of sensationalized version very often. The individual that I said wasn't able to leave a restaurant for almost a year, the door wasn't locked. This was psychological fear and an environment of hostility. And those are the things that made it so that this individual did not walk out. This individual was not chained. The doors were not locked. They were not kept in a basement. They were interacting with people on a regular basis, people that didn't see them, and maybe in part through that, didn't believe that they could be seen. Things in force that can be included are being assaulted, being drugged--that we very often see, that drug addiction is created and then used as an area to continue to provide a need, to keep control by the trafficker.

Fraud is the use of misinformation, things like lying, deceit, false contracts or promises, to control situations, promises of a better life, of new circumstances. And I want to say that individuals are not naive. We have a lot of information that human trafficking survivors often know that this might be too good to be true, but there are no other pathways to safety, to access, to opportunity. It is kind of oftentimes seen as a last-ditch effort, and they give it a shot because they need to provide for their family. Because they need to provide for themselves, they need to escape a dangerous home--country, or home environment. And then we also see coercion, the use of psychological, physical, or environmental threat against the person or their loved ones. These can be things like holding someone, even an additional external person at knifepoint or causing harm to others so that we kind of stay in our place.

Let's look at some examples of this that clients have shared. So some examples of force being that, "My body shut down. I was sick all the time. I was only given noodles twice a day and nothing else to eat." We see this form of kind of bodily force--individuals being forced to work 17 hours a day on low calorie, non-nutritious diets. These individuals are tired, they are hungry, they are not thinking straight. They're not able to regulate their emotions. Our brain, our body changes in these environments. Things like, "They're always watching me. I can't leave." That can be through kind of this virtual or in-person environment.

Let's look at some examples of fraud. "I was told that my dreams would come true, but I'm not working as a model. I'm working in a massage parlor." Fraud is one of the areas that I think is most interesting because we think of it relating only to money. And it can relate to money, but it can be a labor trafficking situation, a job that you are forced to work, that you cannot quit, that you cannot leave, that you cannot change, and you could be making a substantial amount of money. There is a criminal course--a criminal court conviction of a very prominent survivor leader who was told that that he was going to be working as a software engineer and making $75,000 a year. The work environment was hostile, it was dangerous, it was not safe, it was not software engineering. He was making $45,000 a year. And then additionally, the trafficker who brought them on a visa, which is typically how individuals enter the US--majority of people come on legal work visas that their traffickers let lapse because there are not enough monitoring systems in place and there are no repercussions for the employers. So just an example, this person made $45,000 a year, but actually was able to get a conviction of that owed money and a labor trafficking case.

Let's see some examples of coercion. "She said if I didn't listen to her, she wouldn't love me anymore." We think of things like trauma bonding in sex trafficking, but less often it comes to us with labor trafficking. Trauma bonds can be used in any scenario. We can see labor trafficking through romantic relationships of adults and of minors, and we can also see it through familial relationships. Unfortunately, that's especially true for individuals under the age of 18, that their trafficker might be someone that they identify as their romantic partner or a caregiver. If you're interested on our website, FrameworkTA.org, you can access our resource library and see James Dold, a survivor leader, talk about his experience of minor domestic servitude forced labor through the use of a romantic, traumatic bond. Let's go to the next slide and I'll hand it off to Kristina.

KRISTINA BAILEY: Yeah. Thank you. All right. So I wanted--now that we've talked a little bit about force, fraud, and coercion, I wanted to give you guys a chance to practice the skills of identifying these experiences yourself. So we have here, we're about to watch Anna's story. It's a very quick short little video, and these are just a few questions to kind of prompt your thinking as you watch some clues that her experience might be labor trafficking. What do you notice? Do you notice any barriers to Anna's self-identification? What do you think would motivate Anna to reach out to a provider? And where are some places that she did interact with outreach during the clip? Next slide, please, if we could play that video?

[Plays video]

Awesome, thank you. If you could go to the next slide? Thank you. All right. So that's just one example of some of the little resources we have available. We joked earlier we're going to say this a lot, on FrameworkTA.org we have multiple, you know, self-guided little learning tests and checks that you can practice either just by yourself or throw them into a training for staff or for partners during your trainings. All of the case studies that we have in the resources come with prompts and questions, as well as, for example here, which is the one we just watched.

So some clues that her experience might be labor trafficking. We saw that she was working more hours and days than is legal. She was saying she had 10-hour days. We saw the pay slip with the illegal deductions such as breaks and sick time and safety equipment. She had mentioned, "Oh, you know, I saw what happened to the people that quit and didn't pay their debt." So some rumors of bad things happening, mentions of owing that debt. And some of the barriers to her self-identification, the portrayal, if you noticed, the posters were all, you know, white women chained to the floor. Not really relatable to Anna and her situation at all. Again, the use of chains, there was words without examples, and no understanding that labor trafficking victims, even if they're still being paid, like Charlee mentioned earlier with a survivor that was promised $75,000, but making $45,000, so still making a, you know, considerably decent salary in today's world, but all the other factors that add up to it can still make that a labor trafficking case. So, having paid does not mean it's not labor trafficking. Next slide, please.

And the final thing I wanted to touch on today, similarly to the resources and things you've seen was mentioned earlier. We have two really wonderful eLearning, they're self-paced, self-guided. You can stop and start if you need to. You can jump around modules. They're all available online for free, accessible by anyone. Once this PowerPoint is loaded up on the OVC website, all of these links will be clickable, so you can just click these images and it'll take you right to Javier and Aisha's stories that you can learn about in the eLearning.

CHARLEE BORG: All right. She's right, we say it a lot. FrameworkTA.org. Come visit us, request our technical assistance. Let us know what you're seeing in your area. Join our listserv, and hopefully in one week you'll be able to apply to collaborate with us as a professional in a survivor leader capacity, or as a kind of expert consultant. We are very excited to have been able to connect with you today. We'd like to keep that connection going. If you go to our next slide?

Please scan this QR code. We want to know who's on this call today and we also are curious: are people screening for labor trafficking already? If you are, what questions are you using? Let us know. Sign up for our listserv. We'd love to stay connected. And we are always an email away at FrameworkTA.org.

I also shared our eLearning course within the chat. And I have been picking through some of the Q&A questions. Someone asked a question about wage. "Sometimes I have difficulty explaining the difference between wage theft, poor working conditions, and labor trafficking. Would you be able to clarify the difference?" So wage theft, poor working conditions, hostile work environments, things like that. Not being able to pay-not being paid for breaks is an example of wage theft. Those are things that we often see as indicators that this might be a labor trafficking situation. But if you add force, fraud, or coercion, that is when we get labor trafficking. So all of those things, wage theft, poor working conditions, hostile work environment, sexual harassment, those can all exist independently. They can all exist in a labor trafficking scenario. It's only a labor trafficking scenario if the individual cannot quit the job for whatever reason. And I'm going to also share our eLearning because one thing that we go over in our eLearning is the difference between wage theft and labor trafficking. We talk about poor working conditions. We talk about the individuals who are more--most susceptible within American culture, which are people of color and gender minorities. So take a look at our eLearning. As Kristina said, it's something that you can do. Just one module, which I believe this is module two that you should be looking at. Or you can do the whole course and gain a certificate.

Someone also asked a question, "What tools can we use to screen labor trafficking better?" And I'm noticing that we are running out of time. I appreciate all of the fantastic questions. But I will share a resource to one of our past events where you can not only see an expert in the field, Cris Perez, share his perspective on labor trafficking screenings, but also see it play out between a case manager and a simulated client. And with that, I'm going to hand it back to OVC.

BRECHT DONOGHUE: Thanks, Charlee and Kristina. This was a great presentation. And I do see we had a number of questions we were unable to get to. So the good news about them repeating their website over and over again is that that gives you contact with them. And I encourage all of you to reach out and get your questions answered and take a look at their resources and connect on the expertise that they can provide on labor trafficking.

I also just want to share two final slides I had mentioned during my opening remarks, OVC's close collaboration with the National Institute of Justice. If you are a data or research junkie like myself, I encourage you to check out this QR code. It will take you directly to NIJ's publications on human trafficking, including what is available on labor trafficking. I will say that what is out there, NIJ is really leading the charge in that area.

And if we can go to the final slide, we're just reiterating some of the links that--and resources that I and others have talked about earlier today. This will all be available again when these slides are up online on the OVC website. So again, thanks to everyone for joining us today. I'm looking so forward to the work ahead with Framework. And I hope you all enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.

DARYL FOX: Great. So on behalf of the Office for Victims of Crime and our panelists, we want to thank you for joining today's webinar. This will end today's presentation.