(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "The Journal."

I'm Steve Kendall.

The BGSU Labor Trafficking Education and Research Initiative is talking about an effort to bridge the gap between the understanding of human trafficking and labor trafficking, specifically labor trafficking in terms of what falls under that large umbrella, and our guests today are Lara Wilken and also Tracy McGinley, both professors at Bowling Green State University.

This initiative, we talk about human trafficking.

Right away, the average person immediately goes to sex trafficking, but under that umbrella of human trafficking, there's a whole array of other trafficking that goes on.

So talk a little about what we talk about and then kind of break down the other areas that fall under that larger umbrella.

- Well, first I'd like to say thank you so much for having us today.

This conversation is so incredibly important and bringing to the forefront of this conversation is this topic of labor trafficking, right?

Because, like you said, many people focus on sex trafficking.

But it's important for everyone to realize that there is actually an intersection between the two, and that labor trafficking occurs just as commonly as sex trafficking does, but it's not something that we're talking enough about.

So our hope with this initiative is to really bring forward that conversation and look at human trafficking as that entire umbrella, which you stated encompassing both sex and labor trafficking.

- [Steve] Because when you look at some statistics, I know that everybody's tracking things in different ways, but they talk about the fact that around the world, they believe there are 25 million people who are involved in human trafficking.

And the larger chunk of that is really things aside from sex trafficking.

And I think that's what we don't think about.

And you see examples, oh, maybe somebody who's waiting on you in a restaurant, maybe somebody who's cooking in a restaurant, somebody who's doing landscaping, you assume they're just, they're going about their daily business, they could actually be a subject of labor trafficking.

Tracy, when you get together with Lara and you talk about this, what was the kind of the initiative to put this together?

Because you saw, obviously a gap in the information chain here between how we view this and what needs to be done and the education part of it.

- So when we started talking about all of this, one of the things that we realized is through our work with survivors, many of the survivors we know and that we work with, they're actually victims of labor trafficking.

And their voices weren't being heard.

So a lot of times, the information that we're seeing is about females who are sex trafficked but there's also a lot of males that could be sex trafficked.

They could be labor trafficked, those females could be labor trafficked.

But there's also even a combination between the two.

Like Lara mentioned, there's an intersection between sex trafficking and labor trafficking also, in which sometimes both is happening too.

Like if you take massage parlors or other things like that into play, sometimes we see that.

And so there could be a variety of ways that this is happening, but that labor trafficking perspective just isn't being talked about enough.

And so we thought it would be really very interesting to start having this research initiative.

We do a lot of education already about this, but we thought we needed to expand upon that.

And so after talking with the university, they agreed that this was a really good opportunity for us.

- When you look at this, the people that are being trafficked, are there similarities among them?

Are there certain things that you can say, "Okay, this person, because of this circumstance, this circumstance, are more likely to be labor trafficked or human trafficked?"

Is there any kind of consistency as the people in, unfortunately, in this situation?

- Well, we know that there are vulnerabilities for both sex trafficking and labor trafficking.

And so we do look for those, but we also wanna make sure that we're looking at the big picture.

Sometimes when we start to talk about vulnerabilities, then it limits people to only looking for those specific types of people or those specific circumstances.

And that might then lead to others being excluded.

So we try to kind of look at the larger scale too.

- [Steve] Because for most of us, it flies below our radar.

I mean, you, again, only when it hits the news, again, generally, it's not other forms of labor trafficking, it's, oh, you know, whatever, as you've described, sex trafficking.

So, yeah, go ahead.

- [Tracy] I was just gonna say, so like, even with labor trafficking, you mentioned restaurants, you mentioned agriculture, construction, those are all businesses that we know that there's labor trafficking that is commonly associated with, and part of what you can look for, if you're trying to identify different factors, say you go to a restaurant all the time, or you go to a gas station all the time, and the same person is working, whether you go at midnight, whether you go at 5:00 AM, whether you go at noon, and you start to have a conversation, and maybe they don't feel comfortable about what their schedule is or how they tell you or what else they're doing.

You know, a lot of times when we go places and we start little conversations with people, they wanna share information.

Those are simple things that you can just look for, and that might identify some factors.

- Because I guess if you say, "Oh, wait a minute, this guy's here 24/7."

- [Tracy] Exactly.

- [Steve] Seven days a week.

- [Tracy] Exactly.

- [Steve] That's not a normal schedule.

That would not be assumed to be, "Oh, he's just one of the regular workers."

He's being coerced into working all those extra hours.

- [Tracy]} Exactly.

- [ Any day, any time, whenever, and doesn't have a choice.

And I think that's when you look at this stuff, threats of violence, coercion, extortion, whatever it happens to be, those people have no place to go.

Especially if there are other situations involved that they're afraid to go to the authorities, they're afraid to go to law enforcement.

They're afraid to go to an agent, say, you know, I'm working 100 hours a week and this isn't right.

When you look at those kind of situations, obviously this is, we're all a part of this because we're consumers.

So we're encouraging in our own way, businesses that do this to basically be part of this human trafficking industry.

Is there any way for us to, I mean, as a regular, just a citizen, where do I go if I think, well, wait a minute, this is strange.

This woman works every hour of the day at this restaurant.

She seems like she lives here.

What do I do with that information if I think that something's not, doesn't feel right here?

Where do I go with that?

Do I call the attorney general?

Do I call the local sheriff?

Do I call the police department in my town?

What's the right place to go if I think something might not be exactly right?

And then by doing that, am I creating more of a problem for the person, or should that not be part of the equation?

- [Lara] So I think one of the most important things to think about here is this an emergent situation or is it not?

Obviously, if you suspect that anyone is in any kind of imminent danger, you're gonna immediately call 911.

But you brought into the conversation a great resource.

So the State of Ohio, the Ohio Attorney General's Office does have the Human Trafficking Initiative.

And they have a website that you can go to that has a resource where you can reach out to them if you wanted to call.

But you can also call your local law enforcement agency, the non-emergent line and say, "These are some indicators that I'm seeing, some concerns that I'm having."

So that way they can investigate the situation and look into it a little bit more.

You know, I really think if you're always erring on the side of good intentions, caution and safety, you're never going to be putting someone at risk.

As a matter of fact, you might be doing something to truly help them, something that they might not even recognize that they need.

- Yeah, yeah.

And they're already at risk, I guess if you look at that too.

When we come back, we can talk a little bit more about, get down, drill down into some of the details of the initiative you guys were, because obviously you've been at this for a number of years.

This isn't just something that popped up in the last couple of months in terms of this initiative.

It's been a long, long journey.

Back in just a moment with Tracy McGinley and Lara Wilken from Bowling Green State University, our subject is labor trafficking.

Back in just a moment.

Thank you for staying with us here on "The Journal."

Our guests are Tracy McGinley and Lara Wilken from Bowling Green State University.

And Tracy, the University has this initiative, which is an effort to provide education, illumination about human trafficking and specifically labor trafficking.

Why did you guys, how did this come about?

Why did you think this is a topic we really need to get into?

It's important.

How did that come about?

Was the genesis of you guys getting together to put this initiative together?

- So Lara and I have been doing research and education for well over a decade.

Both of us individually, and then we've also more recently even started doing it together.

And we've been doing this now together for, I don't know, probably five or six years, if I'm not mistaken.

So Lara talks a lot about what's going on in the nursing field and does a lot of education within nursing.

I'm obviously criminal justice, so I talk with law enforcement and in that field, in that realm.

And one of the things that we found was when we came together, there was so much more information that we could share and that we could start developing ways to look at things through kind of an interprofessional lens.

We wanted to be able to look at it from both a nursing perspective, but also a criminal justice perspective, as well as other perspectives to try and start bringing in this understanding of how does labor trafficking fit into all of this.

We knew that we've, like you've said earlier, we know that sex trafficking is usually the first thing people think about when they think about what's happening with human trafficking.

But more and more we're finding that labor trafficking cases have been identified and they need to be more identified, and they aren't really being brought out and the getting the attention they need to.

And so we got together and we talked with various people at the college to see what we could do.

And we've had a lot of support from Bowling Green, both at the Firelands Campus and here at the Main Campus.

So that's been wonderful.

And we decided that starting this initiative would really be an important component, and we decided to house it at the Firelands Campus because of its more rural area and the fact that we know that the agricultural industry and things like that are part of it.

And oftentimes we think of big cities as being the areas, but we don't think about the rural communities.

And especially with the labor trafficking, we feel that it's very important to include those more rural communities and make it kind of an area for education and research.

- Well, and that's another area you said we focus on the larger metropolitan areas, but the reality is this goes on everywhere.

- [Tracy] Everywhere.

- [Steve] It could be, it's a small town, it's a rural area, it's a city, it's whatever.

And we have a tendency to not notice so much if it's not concentrated in one area.

The other thing, of course, you mentioned Firelands because of the agricultural bend.

And not that we're picking on agriculture, but the reality is there is some of that is part of this issue.

Plus we're at the crossroads of two major interstate highways in the center of the country, which means getting people in, getting people out, whatever is very easy.

Obviously, too, and you mentioned the criminal justice aspect and the nursing side, from the nursing side, how does that kind of work, because obviously those are industries too that hire a lot of people.

It's labor intensive, some of it isn't, some of it's not high skill set compared to what we would think sometimes.

How big an issue is that on the medical side, in terms of people being forced labor in doing medical related things and whether it's nursing homes or assisted care, that kind of thing.

Is that actually a problem too?

- So that's a really great question.

From the patient perspective side of things, and what really drove me to be passionate about this work is that nearly 90% of individuals who have been recovered from the life of trafficking stated that during their time of exploitation, they were seen and treated by a healthcare provider.

So we know that healthcare providers are seeing these individuals in the clinical setting, but now shifting the narrative a little bit more and trying to look at the bigger picture of both sex and labor trafficking, we know that historically, people come to the United States for an opportunity at having a better life.

And right now, with the shortages that we are seeing in healthcare, there's a lot of opportunities to make money in regards to travel nursing.

And so this is something that we do wanna look at with our initiative to see if people are being recruited with the promise of coming to the United States for an opportunity to work in the healthcare field, but then potentially being exploited once they get here.

- Once they get here, yeah.

That's an interesting thing now.

And it's interesting you mentioned that the medical professionals, because they're sort of on the front line of this, so obviously educating them and helping them understand to recognize signs or indications of, oh, this person might be subject to this.

When you look at this, I mean, the range of this is pretty incredible because again, our mindset is very narrow on who's involved in this.

And the reality is probably if we touch a consumer good, somewhere along the line, there's probably a pretty good chance that there was forced labor involved whether it's something that's come from internationally or created here in the US because of, as you said, the demand for people, for employees.

How do you, when you talk with people in the medical profession, what kind of education you do with them to say, "Hey, if someone comes in and they're saying these things, or you read their body language a certain way, or they're hesitant to talk about specific things," are there tells there that go, "Oh, this is something that I need to then bring to somebody else's attention?"

- [Lara] Well, one of the things I can share in my experience is that when I first started doing this work, I recognized that we were seeing these individuals, but we weren't recognizing human trafficking.

So in 2017, I actually created a simulation to help healthcare providers recognize what human trafficking might look like in the clinical setting.

Now, there is no textbook set of indicators.

A person may not identify or disclose that they're a victim of trafficking, but there could be subtle hints to it.

And since using the simulation and that debriefing process, it has really opened up the conversation that now every single time afterwards, people will come up and they say, "I remember this one patient this one time."

And the start of that has led to the development of policies.

And now the Ohio Attorney General, on their website, they actually have simulations available that can be utilized by healthcare providers to help recognize what human trafficking might look like in the clinical setting.

- Yeah, now we've got just a moment in this segment.

We'll follow up the next one, but Tracy, from the criminal justice side, obviously there's a lot of education that needs to be done there, is ongoing there because obviously law enforcement looking at all sorts of things, this is one more thing now, "Oh, here's something else you need to pay attention to.

If you see this or hear this, this is what this might mean."

So that's an educational trail as well.

- [Tracy] Absolutely.

We definitely see that there needs to be more understanding and also just even in understanding the cultural differences and being able to understand getting an interpreter.

Don't let family members interpret, simple things like that that maybe are more convenient to allow somebody else there to be the interpreter.

But many cases, the interpreter could also be the trafficker.

And so there's just little things that we need to think about that aren't always considered.

- [Steve] Okay.

When we come back, we can talk more about that because obviously all of these things, and as I say, I saw the picture there you guys had with the turnpike people, the law enforcement people, health-related things, because it touches everybody on that side of it as well as touching us as citizens as well.

Back in just a moment with Tracy McGinley and Lara Wilken.

We're talking human trafficking and labor trafficking here on "The Journal."

Back in a moment.

You're with us here on "The Journal."

We're talking human trafficking, specifically labor trafficking.

We left that last segment, Tracy, we were talking about the fact that law enforcement is now a big part of this because they tend to be first responders, frontline people.

It's one more thing though that they now require additional training, additional skills.

Another thing they have to deal with that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, that wasn't on their menu to deal with.

So what's the kind of training and what are kind of the skills that you try to make sure that law enforcement people have since they're gonna be frontline on a lot of this?

- So when we're looking at the human trafficking aspect with law enforcement, one of the things I always mention is like if you're a drug trafficker and you're driving down the road and you have all your drugs sitting on your front seat and the police pull you over, they know immediately that a crime's been committed.

And so that's easy for them to identify.

But if you're driving down the road and you have a 14-year-old girl, or a 16-year-old male, or even a 30-year-old male in the car with you.

What's to say they're actually doing anything illegal?

That could be your brother, your sister, your aunt, your uncle.

It could be anybody, right, that's driving with you.

And so a lot of what we look at is just that extension of law enforcement being aware.

They have to know to ask questions.

They watch body language, they watch to see how nervous somebody gets when certain questions are asked.

And that can be a helpful tip, not only for human trafficking, but for identifying many crimes.

And so if they're talking to the driver, but they notice the person in the backseat is very uncomfortable, keeping their eyes down, not trying to do- - [Steve] Pretend they're not there.

- Exactly, exactly.

That's one of the main things that we look at.

And so, especially when you're making traffic stops, you never know what's gonna happen.

There have been traffic stops throughout the United States where it's a van full of people that are being trafficked and they identify, or it could be a truck, one of the box trucks, and there's somebody in the, there's a group of people in the back and they hear a noise and that then leads to a level of suspicion.

You know, there's a lot of things.

So it's really being aware and just knowing how to ask questions.

And law enforcement, there is a lot of training that they're starting to see now.

And so there's various programs.

One of the things that we do emphasize though, even with law enforcement is it's great when we identify and we make the arrest of the traffickers, but we also wanna make sure there's resources available for the survivors and we wanna make sure that they know that information.

So when we do training, we try to make sure that they know what their local resources are and so who to contact if they need to get help for that survivor too, because that's as important as making the arrest of the perpetrator.

We wanna make sure that we're also helping those survivors.

- That they then are treated correctly and are given, yeah, are able to remove them from that situation and put them in a better situation while this all sorts itself out.

When we talk about this and we like to, we always like to think it happens somewhere else, but are there instances locally, regionally, that we would know about where a company or an organization or a trafficking organization was found to be doing this in our own backyard?

Does it happen in Ohio?

- [Lara] That's a really great question.

And honestly, human trafficking can happen anywhere at any given time.

And it's great that we're bringing up the topic of Ohio specifically because one of the most important things that we do in this work is we ensure that everything that we're doing is survivor-informed because they are absolutely the experts, and a survivor that we work very closely with, Harold D'Souza, he and his family were trafficked from India to Cincinnati, Ohio and forced into labor in a restaurant.

He has since started the non-profit Eyes Open International, so people can look up his story and learn more about what human trafficking looks like in the state of Ohio.

But then another survivor that we work with was brought into the United States as a child and forced into labor and they were actually identified in the school system as being a victim.

So it's really important to understand that when we think about labor trafficking and how it looks, it can be anyone, any age, any gender, race, ethnicity.

And that it does happen nearly in every community, not only within our state, but in all states within the US.

- Well, and that's a good point too, that we're also now talking the educational side of this.

The educational professionals have to be skilled in this as well, to identify children that may be either themselves being trafficked or their family is, which again, it's, yeah, it's kind of an amazing thing that this touches literally every aspect of our lives.

We're not aware of it to the same degree that we should be.

When you look at what's being done in the state of Ohio, obviously the Attorney General is involved in this.

I know that you both serve on subcommittees and things that deal with this.

The state has taken a pretty aggressive stance about trying to deal with this because it affects the economy, it affects lives, it affects the way people live, that sort of thing.

So talk about some of the things that the AG has done and the things that are available through the Attorney General to deal with this issue.

If you see something, if you wanna report something, what are the tools that are available there?

- So back earlier, we talked a little bit about resources.

The Ohio Attorney General has a website for their Human Trafficking Initiative.

This website is composed of a variety of different resources.

There was mention of the healthcare simulations.

In addition to this, there's also a resource tool.

So if anyone is in need of finding services specific to survivors, they can actually go onto the website, type in the type of information that they need or that they're requesting and they can find exactly what they're looking for.

In addition to this, there's also a number of different subcommittees, which include a survivor-led initiative that helps to inform all of this work because at the end of the day, the survivors, they are the experts and they are the ones that we are learning from.

Linda and Mary Kate, who are the lead of the initiative, are willing to go out and provide education throughout the state.

So if anyone is in need of any type of education, they can request that as well.

It is amazing to see over the evolution of this work, what is being done in our state, particularly by the Ohio Attorney General's Office.

- Because I think a lot of people would think, oh, this is a federal issue.

The federal government deals with all this.

The states aren't involved or haven't been involved because it's a federal thing.

But it really is a local and agency situation.

Tracy, with educating law enforcement people, especially because as we said, they're on the front line of this, is there an ongoing, and if I'm a law enforcement agency and I haven't for whatever reason gotten involved in this, what's the best way for them to reach out to you or someone that they can get training in this?

Because obviously we probably look and go, "Ah, you know, it's a small police department in rural Ohio.

We're never gonna see this."

But the reality is they probably have it and may not know it.

- Well, one of the things that I was just gonna point out is when you said many people think federal level, this really is a grassroots level.

There are a lot of local coalitions that are doing a lot of wonderful things.

And just recently we hosted an event at Kalahari and our audience was law enforcement, but not only just law enforcement officers who were out on the streets, but also we had jail personnel, we had probation, we had parole, we had judges as well as nurses and people that worked in the hotel industry because we were specifically looking at that.

And so one of the things that we try to do in the training is make them realize how important it is for everybody to work together also.

Because this does happen everywhere and everybody needs to be aware of what's taking place.

So when we do our training for law enforcement, it does come from a local level, it comes from a very collaborative focus that we need to have everybody together working on this to develop better policies and to develop better understanding so that we can make better use of not only, like we said earlier, the arrest, but also that idea of that helping the survivors- - [Steve] And follow up afterwards.

- Right.

And so that's one of the things that we do, really try to emphasize in our training.

And obviously, you know, we have an initiative, the Research Initiative here on campus has our own webpage that people can look at too.

And they can, you know, we have also just recently started Seeds of Empowerment, which is our nonprofit.

And so we have Empowerment Seeds, that is our Gmail email address that people can reach out to us for training and things too.

- [Steve] Well that, yeah, and I say it's, and as you were talking about the research part of it, getting that information, the data that says, "Okay, look, here's what's going on, also helps you then feed the training to understand how to go about training.

What are the issues that are out there?

What are we experiencing?"

So good, cool.

Thank you so much for being here and you're welcome back anytime in the future to talk about this because it's a human issue obviously, and we've got issues with awareness and training and that sort of thing that more of us need to be aware of of what is going on with this.

We like to think that, "Oh, it doesn't touch us.

We're not involved."

But the reality is, everything we do during the day, probably somewhere we've come in contact probably with somebody who might be trafficked in some way.

And we just don't, we're not aware of the signs maybe, or if we are, we don't know what to do.

So anything we can do to help get that information out there will be great.

So thank you so much.

- [Tracy] Thank you.

- [Lara] Thank you.

- And we'll check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at 8:00 PM on WBGU-PBS.

We will see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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