254: How to Think About Labor Trafficking in the Five P Model with Derek Marsh

Ending Human Trafficking Podcast

Sandie Morgan and Derek Marsh discuss how anti-trafficking efforts can be adjusted to increase the focus on labor trafficking and how the five P model works strictly related to labor trafficking. They go into depth on being victim-centered and trauma-informed when working with labor trafficking victims and how sex trafficking efforts relate to labor trafficking efforts.

Derek Marsh, MA, MPA

Derek Marsh retired from the Westminster PD, CA, after more than 26 years of service. In 2004, Marsh helped start the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force (OCHTTF). He served as the co-chair of the OCHFFT from 2004-12. During that time, he developed and taught courses in human trafficking across the state of California, provided oversight to human trafficking investigations, assisted in creating human trafficking DVDs, wrote multiple grants, and provided Congressional testimony twice as a human trafficking expert witness. He has presented anti-human trafficking trainings across California and the United States, Saipan, Italy, and Argentina. He has taught human trafficking undergraduate courses at Vanguard University from 2009 to present. He has served with the United Nations to train Rwandan immigration officials, law enforcement, prosecutors, and NGOs over four intensive seminars in 2017. Currently, Derek Marsh works as the Assistant Director at the Global Center for Women and Justice. He is researching how human trafficking task forces identify, investigate, and prosecute labor trafficking cases throughout the United States through on-site visits and review of historical task force and federal performance documents. He is helping to develop and provide training and technical assistance through the BIA, TTAC, and OVC-TTAC agencies. His expertise in Criminal Justice will contribute to the research, education, and advocacy mission of the Global Center for Women and Justice.

Keypoints

• Most task forces that are grant-funded are structured similarly, however, day-to-day expressions of their efforts are predominantly through the lens of sex trafficking.
• Both sex trafficking and labor trafficking require a victim-centered and trauma-informed approach due to the trauma experienced.
• In order to fill the gap on labor trafficking requires sharing and developing multi-agency and multidisciplinary expertise and resources.

Resources

• Anti-Human Trafficking Certificate
• Enhanced Collaborative Model (ECM)
• The Five P Model
  • Prevention
  • Protection
  • Prosecution
  • Partnership
  • Policy
• Tulare County Human Trafficking Task Force
• Ep. 187 – Why Is Labor Trafficking So Hard To Find? – Rena Shahandeh and Anh Truong
• National Human Trafficking Hotline
• Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force
• T-Visas for victims of human trafficking
• Ensure Justice Conference – March 4-5, 2022

Transcript

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast, this is episode number 254, How to Think About Labor Trafficking in the Five P Model with Derek Marsh.

Production Credits [00:00:11] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:32] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie Morgan [00:00:38] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:41] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Today, we’re going to be looking at our conversation through the lens of labor trafficking. And Sandie, we have a guest with us today who’s a very close friend and collaborator with us, of course, and a many time pass guest, Derek Marsh. I’m so glad for us to have him back.

Sandie Morgan [00:01:06] Hey, Derek, it’s good to have you here. Derek, for those of our listeners who aren’t up to speed is the Associate Director of the Global Center for Women and Justice. So, Derek, can you give us, first, a little bit of an update on where you’ve been on your journey as to how to respond to labor trafficking?

Derek Marsh [00:01:29] Well, first, thanks for having me back again, Dave and Sandie. So, journey on labor trafficking. Well, obviously, with the Global Center, we’ve been working and expanding our offerings for the AHTC Program, or our Certificate program, to include labor trafficking and some offshoots from that. So we have some courses that relate to that, now. In addition, as some of you may know, I had the opportunity and pleasure to be a fellow with the BJA a few years ago, where I focus on labor trafficking and what the task forces are doing to pursue and investigate and prosecute labor trafficking. And that’s really where a lot of my expertise was actually fine tuned. So that actually helped me a lot to understand the opposite. Some of the task forces, as you know Sandie and Dave, focus on sex trafficking because it’s, I think, a little bit more straightforward and lower, you know, laying fruit, if you will. And so the labor trafficking has always been a challenge for task forces, at least since 2010. So it’s always good to understand a little bit about how we can incorporate tactics and strategies for anti-labor trafficking into our U.S. efforts.

Sandie Morgan [00:02:40] Well, and when you were the fellow for BJA, Bureau of Justice Assistance, you met with task force leaders from across the U.S. And so you really have an understanding about what our current task forces look like, how they’re structured, and how we might do a better job of identifying labor trafficking. I’ve been reading a lot of articles coming out of the United Nations, the European Union, from our own State Department, from Ambassador John Richmond, about the growing awareness of the size that just the magnitude of labor trafficking. And yet our focus has been predominantly sex trafficking. I just saw an evaluation of federal cases in the U.S. during 2020 and 23 percent of the labor trafficking victims were minors, they were children. So this is an area where we need to literally do what we say we’re going to do in the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. We want to study this issue so that we can begin to articulate, to speak up for those victims and make a difference in a structured and consistent manner. So I thought it would be fun for you and I–because we’ve been partnering at the Global Center with three federal task forces and we go and meet with them, we kind of follow what they’re doing. It’s kind of a monitoring and evaluation relationship. But I feel like we’re learning along with our partners. And I would like to look at the five P model and think about how we might structure differently, how we address sex trafficking and labor trafficking. So do you want to take us forward with some context, starting with, like, victim-centered and trauma-informed? How would that be different?

Derek Marsh [00:04:59] Well, sure Sandie. So obviously, traditionally, there’s been a four P model, the prevention, the protection, the prosecution, and the recently added partnership with ECM model and its collaborative model. But as you know, we added an additional policy component because policy really informs everything we do. It actually creates like a cornerstone or a foundation for how we’re able to do things. It creates resources. Governance helps us build capacity for what we’re doing. So when we’re looking at labor trafficking, obviously, of the heart of our collaborative efforts really come from our victim-centered, trauma-informed approach. So sex trafficking obviously lends itself to such an egregious crime. I mean, we understand that the severe trauma people have gone through, through the sexual assaults and abuses and batteries. I think everyone is pretty intuitive that these are horrendous crimes that need to be addressed. And while I don’t think I think everyone is unique in the types of trauma they experience, I think it’s pretty understood and pretty well discussed how we treat those different types of traumas. That labor trafficking victims go through very similar types of trauma. Now, in fairness, they’re not always sexually abused, though some of them are. But a lot of them go through many of the same traumas, in the sense that, you know, they’re separated from family, they’re isolated from friends, their finances are controlled. They’re taken out of situations that they’re comfortable with and placed in isolation. That they’re forced to do things they don’t want to do, granted, it’s not sexual, but it’s the work that they weren’t planning on doing. If they’re forced to stay places that they don’t want to stay, wear clothes they don’t want to wear. All of these things are similar in the sense that what has happened to our sexual trafficking victims. And so when you’re prepping and understanding that is victim-centered trauma-informed approaches need to be taken, there’s not a large leap, if you will, from treating a sex trafficking victim to a labor trafficking victim. The idea obviously being that, sure, you’re not going to be doing a lot of sexual trauma that a sex trafficking victim has taken, but the labor trafficking victims have come and been traumatized because they’re trying to make a better life for their family, whether they’re local, whether they’re child trafficking victims, whether they’re international trafficking victims. So you have to look at it from a labor perspective in the sense that that dream that they’ve been played on, that’s been played on with them, has been taken away from them. And also the fact that the labor that they’re doing, whatever it may be, could be agriculture, it can be, you know, house cleaning, it can be being a nanny, it can be, you know, working in a Save Mart, it can be doing work at a hotel industry or wherever, you know, construction, you name it. That labor that they were counting on, not to support themselves, but to help their families has been taken from them through debt servitude to whatever the case may be. And because of that, they’ve been traumatized in that sense. So when you’re approaching those folks, you’re not looking so much at perhaps, you know, the sexual abuse and the sexual trauma they’ve experienced, but the fact that their dreams of supporting their family have been undermined, have been taken away from them, and those are their feelings of power or their feelings of control or feelings of protecting your family have all been taken away from them. And now they’re unsure of themselves. Their security and their sense of security is undermined. And the fact that they can’t even control where they’re at, where they’re staying, how they’re being fed, feeds into this loop of constant just lack of self confidence and lack of feeling that they’re in control of their life. They feel they are victims in a sense that they have been traumatized with it. Does that make sense to you, Sandie?

Sandie Morgan [00:08:42] Absolutely. Absolutely. And it really reinforces that this model is people over programs. It is a victim centered approach. So let’s start looking at breaking down these five P’s. And I think we’re going to start, Derek, with partnership, because partnership influences all the rest of our task force approaches. And in a collaborative model, partnerships goal is to share and develop multi-agency and multidisciplinary expertise and resources. But when I go to task force meetings and I ask about resources for labor trafficking, most of the resources that are provided are about sex trafficking. So how do we fill that gap?

Derek Marsh [00:09:37] Well, sure. And that’s really a challenge, because I think a lot of times historically, a lot of the labor focus type of interagency cooperation has been a result of administrative or civil type of processes. And when you have law enforcement agencies, criminal justice agencies, who’ve been asked to spearhead this type of movement, they’re just not that familiar with administrative or civil agencies. So what happens is, they don’t know who to talk to and they’re not used to interacting with them, and sometimes they don’t view those types of investigations or, you know, view those types of litigations as being as important, perhaps as they need to be. So they don’t think of like working with the Department of Labor, who has more administrative types of mandates as being something they need to do, whether that Department of Labor happens to be the federal Department of Labor or their particular State Department of Labor. And they may not feel that the Department of State happens to deal with, you know, people and their how they work with their identity and their green cards and things of that, may not be something that’s their problem because it has to do with immigration and immigration is more federal problem than a local problem. There’s also the idea that some of these issues are perhaps a political issue, if you will, and that’s the political ramifications for jurisdictions and, you know, chiefs of police and sheriffs, understandably, don’t want to get involved in those issues because sometimes elections depend on those, sometimes selection of chief of police may depend on those. I know when I was working law enforcement, that was a definite concern in our world. And so all of these things can contribute to undermining our jurisdiction’s ability to understand who the proper partnerships should be and the willingness to actually engage some of those partnerships.

Sandie Morgan [00:11:24] I I love the idea of looking at the concepts of connecting and engaging and collaborating. And because we work with other task forces, I just want to give a big shout out to Tulare County’s task force because they actually officially have an MOU, a memorandum of understanding, with Department of Labor. And those kinds of interagency relationships should be formalized. Are there very many other task forces that have formalized a labor trafficking MOU?

Derek Marsh [00:12:02] Not that I’m familiar with. I know that in Seattle that they have, Seattle Police Department officer detective who actually is housed within the federal agency. And so in that sense, there has to be an agreement that that particular detective is allowed to be there and work as an investigator. There, you know, obviously the idea of sharing or co-locating resources is important because as we get into more multiagency work, the idea that you’re able to be in the same room and be able to work with each other consistently on a daily basis increases everybody’s ability to inform each other, to engage with each other, and collectively share information that can act to more better intelligence and more actionable intelligence that can be acted on more immediately. So the idea that an MOU could be brought together is highly important. In fact, most the ECM grants, in fact all the ECM grants, when you have your core partnerships require an MOU because the federal government realizes the importance of having these relationships documented and clarifying the roles of all these different partners. And that’s why Tulare was able to get a formalized MOU was great. And that’s not to minimize that other groups are actively engaging the Department of Labor or Department of State or Homeland Security or other groups. I’m not saying that that’s not important, but the more formalized that partnership is, the more those rules are clarified, then the better it is when you call up that person that’s designated as your department liaison, the people you’re working with and say, hey, we have this investigation, we have this report, we have this particular situation, we need your help. And that person knows what to expect and you know what to expect, and there are no surprises.

Sandie Morgan [00:13:48] And we have listeners in a lot of different places where the model looks a little different. But in the end, whether you’re called a task force or a coalition or a working group, the idea of sitting down and looking around the table and asking the question, who isn’t here? Who isn’t sitting at this table? Who are we not partnering with? How are we going to find a labor trafficking cases if most of the law enforcement people, for example, are from the vice unit? So thinking through those kinds of questions will help us expand our capacity to identify. I’m going to take the P’s out of order, Derek, and I know you are law enforcement perspective is so much stronger than mine. And so when I go to things and people ask me questions about the prosecution P, I have no idea what to really say. I always end up looking at it from the, well, I’ll come and be your victim service provider to make sure that your victim gets everything they need. But if I’m looking at labor trafficking through the eyes of a law enforcement investigator on a task force, what do I need to be thinking about to improve the results?

Derek Marsh [00:15:15] Well, I think the first thing you need to understand as one of our investigators, this is what I learned after three years of my fellowship with the BJA, and again, I had a great time doing it. I met a lot of great people, both in ECM task forces and in informal task forces that didn’t yet have a government funding, was that, we need to expand the idea of what results and what performance measures are and what constitutes a success? Because as law enforcement, you know, criminal justice folks, we seem to hold the high standard we set in our mind, is putting somebody and holding somebody accountable so that they go to prison or they go to a federal prison and are held accountable for the crime of human trafficking. And I don’t, I’m not minimizing that at all. I think that’s a great deal. But in many of these cases, labor trafficking cases are notoriously long term investigations, prosecutions that can last five to seven years sometimes, and can have multiple survivor victims as well as multiple suspects. And so there needs to be a patience that goes with that that may not translate into local law enforcement working with this. Even though I’ve always encouraged local law enforcement to go with local laws, via labor trafficking, because I think they would curtail the length of those investigations a lot. I mean, to taking five to seven year investigation down to two to three or one to two years even, would be a dramatic change that I think would encourage not just our victims survivors, but also law enforcement to engage more in labor trafficing investigations. That set aside, redefining our definitions of success is huge. So we talk about, you know, we define prosecution, I talk about litigation, not just prosecution in the sense of putting people behind bars in a criminal justice sense, but holding them administratively responsible, holding them civilly responsible. Because here’s the deal, if you’re holding people responsible or holding groups responsible, holding corporations responsible is very difficult to point to one person and say that person is legally responsible for this. You’ve trafficking event is labor trafficking event. And so, who are we going to put behind bars? The CEO, you know, the person, the CFO, you know the board? I mean, who are you going to hold accountable? What matters to them is financials, because financials, finance is a huge element in this trafficking crime, especially with labor trafficking. They’re trying to minimize their labor costs to create a greater profit margin. And so when you hit these people for their financial gains and you penalize them and give the money back to the worker who lost their financial aid through the labor trafficking, labor exploitation, it is a huge win. And the law, local law enforcement may not see it that way right now because it’s not a criminal justice response. It is a trauma-informed, victim-centered justice response. It is a survivor justice response. And so they do get something out of it. They do feel that they are justified. They do feel that justice has been served to them and they get money to recompense them for the time that they’ve been exploited and trafficked. They have a way of starting a new life. They have, and it’s a big deal to them. And people are held accountable, you know, so all these play together so that this redefinition of what a success is, should include civil, should include administrative, should include, you know, from a protection perspective, should include getting that T-Visa, you know, helping them get their their shelter. I’m jumping P’s. I’m sorry, but–

Sandie Morgan [00:18:51] No, no, it’s all connected.

Derek Marsh [00:18:52] It’s all connected, right? So the idea that we’re so locked in, and especially for law enforcement being being if that person, if the person responsible or the people responsible didn’t go to jail, then we failed. I get it. I feel the same way. I still do even being retired. But, there are other ways to still be successful and still considered successful that don’t always necessarily have to be criminal justice related.

Sandie Morgan [00:19:15] So just because I know some of our listeners don’t really understand the difference between criminal, civil, and administrative resolutions, can you do like a one sentence description for each of those?

Derek Marsh [00:19:29] Sure. Criminal justice has to do with whether it’s a felony, a misdemeanor, or an infraction that you’re held to some degree or someone could be arrested or put in jail or prison or have some kind of punitive response. There’s also a punitive responsibility in administrative as well. But administrative doesn’t necessarily put you in jail, but you can get high fines. It’s against a some type of sanction that the government puts together for wherever it happens to be, whether it be environmental. It can be against working law, which we’re looking at here in labor trafficking. It can be any of that stuff. Civil has to do with violating a person’s rights. And that’s where you get some large lawsuits. EEOC, Equal Employment Opportunity Group, they sue employers all the time and it’s many times they’ve sued human trafficking out of California’s. They’ve been very successful with getting multimillion dollar settlements from folks. So not just beyond the administrative responsibilities, that they violated administrative laws, against violating workers rights, but also civil violations, or they, you know, violated the right to work, if you will, verses their rights as far as administrative, as far as their, you know, legal rights, if you will, that aren’t criminal justice level. They’ll get rights to be recompensed form the emotional trauma that they’ve had to go through. And that’s the civil level. So if you’re civil, your administrative level and then your criminal. So, again, think of criminals being go to jail, you know, because you’ve created a criminal offense. Administrative is more, oh, so you violated that code so we’re going to hold you, you know, we’re going to fine you or hold you accountable for that as may be. And civil is when you violate someone’s rights. And so, the best thing I can think of is not only did you violate, you know, you make it so that you didn’t pay them, but they were emotionally traumatized and they didn’t get to exercise any other rights upon that. So you get not just a judgment against them, but a judgment for the emotional trauma and other trauma they experienced.

Sandie Morgan [00:21:29] OK, so I’ve over the years have, like, when I sit down and I’m having coffee with a group of survivors, I like to ask this question about what justice is. And it started after I followed a trial where a really horrific case was on the docket. The perpetrator was prosecuted, convicted and going to prison for a very long time. A few weeks later, when I was trying to figure out what had happened to the victim, we discovered no one knew where the victim was. She didn’t have secure housing. She didn’t have employment. And so I started asking those kinds of questions because we celebrate that, wow, we got 20 years, we got 25 years, that we got 17 years for the perpetrator. But when I start talking to survivors, the one thing they define as justice is restitution. And they don’t have a lot of great success stories with restoration and restitution.

Derek Marsh [00:22:45] Right. And that’s ironic because a lot of restitution is actually criminally, through the criminal justice system is mandated. And that’s where you get the confusion between civil liability, right? The idea of getting holding someone civilly liable for some of the things they’ve done to people or indirectly done to people through subcontractors, things like that, or the restitution was required by law. So I think for a while when restitution was required in some statutes, I think judges felt they had the option, of like, I won’t require restitution or they can do a modicum of this restitution or some percentage of it. But most restitution, I think, is understood to be the complete. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who are perpetrating these crimes don’t have the money to pay off restitution. So criminally speaking, you might be able to say, well, pay off a half a million dollars restitution as what’s required in the law. But these people never see it because you can require it, but if these people don’t have it, or if they’ve hidden their money or they’ve sent it somewhere else, or they spent it all, then it’s over. Or they, you can sell a house, but then by the time it’s been auctioned off and all the different people have been paid off or their creditors, things like that, they may only get a small percentage of that. So, yeah, that’s it’s unfortunate because the restitution is usually tied to the criminal justice process, whereas a civil process, if it had been pursued, would usually produce a much greater amount of financial renumeration.

Sandie Morgan [00:24:11] We interviewed the city attorneys, L.A. City Attorney’s Office Anh Truong and Rena in a former podcast. So you might want to look that up or we’ll put it in the show notes if you’re listening. OK, so I want to go than to protection and the idea you started hitting on that. But what are some of the main things we’re going to need to shift our perspectives on if we’re going to serve labor trafficking victims well?

Derek Marsh [00:24:40] Well, I would say that labor trafficking cases can take a very long time to pursue, especially if you’re going after criminals and so on. And obviously, civil cases take years to pursue as well. So immediately, especially if your cases deal with foreign nationals who are in the country who were brought here legally or illegally, either way, they’re going to need to have some kind of status, they’re going to need to have some kind of shelter and housing. They probably need some kind of language skills. They’re going to need some kind of way if you have some job skills created for them or people to pursue the job you originally wanted to pursue, all those things would need to be done. So short term housing is going to be paramount. The idea of housing labor trafficking victims with sex trafficking victims slash survivors has usually turned out to be pretty counterproductive because they just have a whole different set of needs too predominantly to the sexual trauma issues. And as a result of that, you almost see different places to go or a severe, like a a hard line between the different locations, to make sure that they don’t cross connect. So you really need to have a longer term shelter and support system in place to have your labor trafficking survivors. In addition, it seems to be almost always, I mean, minus your domestic servitude issues, we usually have one or two people at the most. Most of your other cases seem to have like 5, 10, 20. We’ve had literally, in some cases, 100 to 200 victims all at once potentially show up. And in those cases, it’s a question of capacity that we’ve oftentimes what happens if you had 20 people right now show up, where would you house them? And most people in the country, we have no clue. And so the idea of capacity is a huge issue for anti-labor trafficking support shelters these days, finding where you can house folks not just in the short term, but also in the long term to make sure they have somewhere to locate and be able to call home, if you will, at least for 6 to 12 months until they’re able to establish themselves, get on their feet and be able to move forward. And again, I would say that the idea of being able to support them psychologically and someone who understands their psychological dynamic, which in many ways is parallel to our sex trafficking survivor victims. But also there are some deviations when it comes to the impact of withholding finances from them and not being able to support their families and the trauma that goes with that. And again, some of them have been physically abused, like our sex trafficking victims, and some have also been sexually abused as well. So that’s an issue as well.

Sandie Morgan [00:27:21] All right. I think we could have done a podcast about each one of the Ps, but we didn’t plan it that way. So let’s jump then back to prevention. I heard you speak and I wrote down some notes where you talked about prevention can be the best investment of resources. But my experience with task forces is it’s usually the most overlooked investment of resources. What can we do?

Derek Marsh [00:27:51] Well, I agree. So, you know actually, the Global Center for Women and Justice has always looked at prevention as being a primary form. It’s always better to keep them from becoming a victim survivor than having to work with the victim survivors. To work through all the exploitation and trauma and, you know, issues that they’ve had to endure. Not to, you know, obviously it’s important to work through those issues with the victim survivors. Rather they didn’t have to become victims to begin with. So I would say the first thing you need to do is you need to target your audience. You need to figure out where are these places? Where are the communities of interest that these people are? Where are your vulnerable populations? Where are your at risk people? And you need to focus your outreach, focus your awareness programs in those areas. And then if you find that they’re needing food, shelter or poverty issues, there are outreach issues, their connection to education issues. And you need to come up with programs in your communities that will help bridge those gaps for those folks, whether they’re adults or whether they’re juveniles or kids, to help give them opportunities to move forward without having to rely or to depend on potential people who are potentially, you know, situations where people could potentially exploit them, saying, hey, if you take my job, I’ll make you so much money, you’ll be able to support your family and then actually believe that’s a viable opportunity when reality it’s not.

Sandie Morgan [00:29:13] So, are you saying that instead of having a big awareness event where we all go to this, we actually go someplace where there are social, cultural and personal vulnerabilities and do awareness events in another language even?

Derek Marsh [00:29:30] Well, I think there’s a multi-pronged approach, absolutely. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all type of approach. So I think that especially with labor trafficking where you know that a majority of the victim survivors that we’ve come across are foreign nationals and have come from different cultures and ethnic mixes. And if we don’t approach our ethnic communities and approach their cultural issues with cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity and balance those with our culture, and to have them understand and bridge those issues, I try to give them the opportunities they need to be successful, that we’re just like creating more opportunities for people to become vulnerable to those folks who are willing to exploit and traffick them and then make potential victims even more victimizable, if that makes sense. You know, it just gives them an opportunity not to be smart. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but just not to be wise in how they make their decisions when it comes to potential job offers and decisions or who their friends are, and decisions, as far as, what is a good job offer? What’s a good job opportunity? What are my strengths and weaknesses? What do I do to move forward to make money and live a happy, balanced life?

Sandie Morgan [00:30:46] That’s wise advice for everybody. I think the other aspect on prevention that I picked up when we talked about labor trafficking with the city attorney’s office in L.A. is they often talk about eyes and ears in the community. And so I don’t want listeners to feel like you can’t be part of prevention. You can become eyes and ears and you can identify and report, not engage, but you can identify and report to your local law enforcement. But if not, to our national hotline [phone]. Now I got to wrap this up with the last P, policy. How does policy drive labor trafficking identification and intervention?

Derek Marsh [00:31:39] So obviously policies are really a cornerstone issue because our ECM model comes from policies that have been legislated at our federal level. And we, you know, you and I worked on it when we were working with the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, and we based all of our modeling of our task force put it together based on the ECM models. So really, you know, that is where you get your legislation and informs and funds both your criminal justice approach, your task force approach, your intervention and protection approach as they decide what can be funded, how you focus your efforts, and then the different types of collaboration that are required that can be expected from your federal agencies as well as your local and your nonprofit and your protection agencies. So they are, you know, really just instrumental to make these things work, to support them both financially and through other types of support in the sense of T-Visas, you know, shelter opportunities, things like that. Also the idea of policy, because, you know, when you think of legislation protecting federal, but there’s also policy work at the local level, too. So how we work at a policy level in each task force or each community is important. So how we think of it from a community level, we just how we approach human trafficking, the idea that we want to make sure that we want to make sure our population is not vulnerable to people who want to exploit or traffick them. So if we have that model for them, then what you’re talking about, those big events you were talking about, those aren’t bad ideas. That’s not a bad thing at all. Is that we’re putting people out there. We’re the eyes and ears to be able to observe and report appropriately and safely so they don’t, you know, endanger themselves. They don’t endanger potential victims, but they’re able to comment on what they see, report it to someone who has the ability to triage the situation, to report it to the proper agencies and to potentially intervene where it could help and mitigate any potential harm to people involved in that situation.

Sandie Morgan [00:33:43] Thank you so much, Derek. I really recommend that if you are part of a community, a coalition, a task force, that you stop and think about how you might have entrenched practices that only are looking for sex trafficking victims. And the reason we’re not finding labor trafficking victims is because, as people have been saying for a very long time, we may not be looking for them. And we want to adapt and increase our capacity to serve every trafficking victim.

Derek Marsh [00:34:20] Amen.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:23] Thank you both for this conversation. There’s so much more here. As you mentioned, Sandie, we could do a conversation and an episode probably on each of the Ps, and in fact, we have reference that many times before. And so we’ll link to some of the past conversations on the five P’s that will be helpful to support today’s episode. Thank you, Derek. Thank you so much, Sandie. And if you would like to find out more about the resources we’ve mentioned today, links and some of those past episodes, endinghumantrafficking.org is the very best place to go. And maybe you have a question that’s come out of this conversation. You can always email us feedback at endinghumantrafficking.org is the best place to go. And while you’re online, we’d invite you to take the first ,or maybe next step, is to download a copy of Sandie’s guide, The Five Things You Must Know: A Quick Start Guide to Ending Human Trafficking. It’ll teach you the five critical things that Sandie’s identified in her work here at the Global Center for Women and Justice that you should know before you join the fight against trafficking. You can get access to it by going over to endinghumantrafficking.org. It’s also the best place to find the notes, as I mentioned, and all the other resources, including our annual Ensure Justice conference. The next one’s coming up March 4th and 5th, 2022. Details on our website at ensurejustice.com. And of course, we will be back again in two weeks for our next conversation. Sandie, thank you as always.

Sandie Morgan [00:35:47] Thank you, Dave. And Derek, thanks for being willing to come on this show so regularly. We really appreciate your insights.

Derek Marsh [00:35:56] Thank you for having me again. Always enjoy it. Always a pleasure to be with you both.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:59] Thanks to you both. And see you in two weeks.