Training In A World of Trauma and Trafficking

Written By: Susan McKelvy, MS, LPC-S, NFNL National Conference Director

I’ve spent most of my career working in non-profit and educational settings, specifically focused on working with women, children, and families that have experienced trauma. What I’ve learned over this time is that trauma manifests many ways, but there are physiological changes that take place after trauma that can lead to sadness, agitation, dissociation, anxiety, behavioral changes, and even PTSD. Working with members at New Friends New Life has again shown me that the long-term effects of trauma are deep and long-lasting, often starting from a young age and continually compounding over time.

How Many People Does Trauma Actually Affect?

Statistics tells us that over 70% of adults in the U.S. will experience trauma. This can be from one-time events such as a car accident, or it can come from complex trauma that takes place over longer periods of time such as abusive relationships or being trafficked. Of this 70%, around 8% of women and 4% of men will develop PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). This is a more severe form of trauma that causes nightmares, flashbacks, and periods of re-experiencing the traumatic events. These statistics are for the general population. When looking at trauma in trafficking groups, 39% of adults and 27% of children were diagnosed with PTSD. That’s quite a jump!

How Can Licensed Professionals Help?

As licensed professionals, we are required to receive a set number of hours of training each year. This helps show that the license holder is always staying on top of cutting-edge information and providing the best care to their clients or patients. And while this sounds like an amazing way to ensure that everyone’s provider, therapist, attorney, etc. is always informed on best practice and dedicated to providing well-informed care, there are few required topics that must be covered for most licenses.

Some of the topics that are mandatory for many professions now are ethics, rules and regulations of the license held, and human trafficking. This leaves a lot of room for license holders to explore their interests related to their work, which is wonderful!  But, it also leaves room for people to find quick trainings that can be completed with minimal attention just to check a box.

One of the things that makes New Friends New Life’s approach to trauma unique and necessary is the training of its therapists and staff. Our therapists are trained in trauma-informed approaches including EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), TF-CBT (Trauma Focused – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) and others. Our staff (even those not in a direct member role) receive training on the effects of trauma and we prioritize using this information to shape all our interactions with our members.

 In fact, even our use of the word “member” in place of “client” to describe those we serve is a trauma-informed approach, because “client” can be a trigger word for women in the world of trafficking.

Where Do I Find Trauma Informed Training?

If you are someone who works with people in any format, trauma informed training is a must.

This may seem obvious when you know that you are working in a field with high trauma statistics such as trafficking, domestic violence, or child abuse. But with 70% of the U.S. population having experienced trauma, you probably interact with people who have experienced trauma more often than you might think.

Thankfully, you have many options. A simple internet search can help you find more information on ways to increase your knowledge on what trauma looks like, the long-term effects, and treatment options. More specifically, New Friends New Life offers a virtual conference each year on trafficking (a training topic required for many licenses now), that includes several topics on addressing trauma. We are also beginning a local, in-person training series that will cover trauma informed care. Stay tuned for dates and details on our website.

Whatever your field, whatever your license, the most important thing to remember is that the more knowledge the world has on trauma, the better off we will all be.

Trafficking Survivors Need a Safe Space, Not a Savior

Written By: Rana Amini, MS, LPC, EMDR-Trained, Clinical Program Director at NFNL

Photo by Molly Blackbird on Unsplash

A survivor of human trafficking. Who is she in your mind? Is she a woman or a girl who is imprisoned and chained up in a dark basement? Is she a damsel in distress waiting for a knight in shining armor? Is she someone who is powerless and waiting for someone to rescue her from despair?

No, that isn’t her.

She is a woman or a girl who has endured a lifetime of horrors, likely starting as a small child. She is a woman who in her earliest and most formative years of life likely learned she could not trust her caregivers. She experienced trauma. Lots of it. Trauma that looked like neglect, domestic violence in the home, substance use in the home, or caregivers with their own severe mental health struggles. She endured uncertainty, fear, instability, and minimal to no moments where she felt any periods of safety in her environment.

The people who were meant to keep her safe were the very people she had to try to keep herself safe from.

When Her World Is Not Safe

When most little girls were learning to explore their creativity, make friends with their classmates and learn about the latest trends, she was learning how to keep herself safe by taking up as little space as possible, learning how to attenuate to the needs of her abusers, and escaping her reality in whatever way she knew how.

We hope that little girls are told and shown how strong, brave, confident and smart they are. She was being told no such thing. She was being shown and told that she is not worthy, that she is not wanted, that she is not good enough and that she is not safe.

What does that do to a young child?

It immediately creates vulnerabilities that if not addressed or bolstered with protective factors will surely bleed into adulthood and gravely impact the way she views herself, others, and the world around her.

These early experiences paint a trajectory of despair and struggle.

So, when she is approached by her neighbor and experiences childhood sexual abuse… she expects it.

When she is physically assaulted by her abusive father... she thinks she deserves it.

And when she runs away from home in the search for a better existence because it is no longer tolerable to endure one more minute of the torment … she is desperate for a different way of living.

 So, within 48 hours of being a runaway, when she is approached by a trafficker who offers her a roof over her head, stability, and false promises of safety and love? She believes him.

No one wakes up one day and hopes for and choses a life of sexual exploitation but it happens. And it happens to the 320 women and girls we serve each year.

These women and girls have endured the most unimaginable horrors. And yet, they want nothing more than to come out on the other side. They want nothing more than to get another chance at having the life they have always wanted and the life they deserve. A life of stability, safety and support. But, even when they get the small window of opportunity to access the life they want, the path to stability and safety is paved with endless barriers.

With no safe support or place to live, where can they go? With no money, no education and no employment history, where can they turn?

It is daunting. And yet, they don’t need a savior. They don’t need someone to swoop in and rescue them.

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

Survivors Need Access, Choice, and Resources

Survivors are remarkable, hardworking and compassionate. Despite the darkness they have endured, they are full of light. They are women of grace, dedication, fervent tenacity and invincible resilience. They have faced the world’s greatest horrors and yet their hearts are still soft. They have every reason to want to give up and never trust another human being, again and yet they fight tirelessly to create a new life and move forward.

What do they need? They need access, choice, and resources.

When we play the role of savior or rescuer, we send a very harmful message to these women that they aren’t enough. We inadvertently disempower them, even when we are well intentioned. And in doing so, we re-create the devastating cycle that they have experienced since childhood.

They need us to understand that they are not fragile, they are not weak, and they are not without choice. They don’t need us as caregivers, allies, or advocates to recreate the abusive dynamic where they are void of choice.

They need an assortment of choices. They need access to safe and supportive environments with individuals that understand that they have done the very best with the very limited choices they have. They need access to fair and affordable housing in safe neighborhoods where they aren’t vulnerable of being re-victimized or re-exploited. They need access to a multitude of employment opportunities that pay them fairly and allow them to make choices based on what kind of work they want to do, instead of having to settle for a few limited options that pay them minimum wage and take advantage of them once again. They need access to trauma informed counseling where they can begin to heal from their nightmares, their flashbacks and their complex PTSD.

Survivors do not need us to save them. They have been able to do it on their own all along. They just need the chance and options to do so.

The Toppling Tower: Black Women’s Vulnerabilities to Becoming Trafficking Victims

Written By: Bianca Davis, NFNL CEO.

If you’ve ever played Jenga®, you’ve likely had a moment where you’ve leant in and closed one eye to focus on your next move or held your breath as you’ve steadied your fingers. Though the rules are simple, the game is not easy to win. It can be downright nerve-wracking trying to move a single block from beneath the weight and support of all the others to place it atop the shaky, swaying tower. Inevitably, without being able to touch the other blocks, the tower collapses. Game over. You’ve lost.

The tower topples because it becomes impossible to move one block without affecting all the others.

The Weight of Intersecting Points

Researchers are brilliant at identifying points of intersection to help explain why certain populations are more vulnerable than others to becoming victims of various social ills. When it comes to the issue of sex trafficking, Black women and girls are disproportionally affected, making up  40% of all trafficking victims in the U.S. Some of these points of intersection include living in poverty, having a history of childhood sexual abuse, experiencing domestic violence, and spending time in foster care, all of which Black women and girls experience at alarmingly high rates:

• Black women represent 22.3 percent of women in poverty in the U.S., while only making up 12.8 percent of the population

• Black women are three times more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than White women

• Black children are overrepresented in the foster care system

This national data mirrors what we see at New Friends New Life where 53 percent of our women and 38 percent of our teen girls are Black. In addition:

• 85 percent of our members live below the poverty line,

• 81 percent have experienced non-fatal strangulation by a pimp or john, and

• 47 percent of our teen girls have a history of interaction with CPS or the foster care system.

I once heard someone say that by the time a girl or woman is actually sold for sex, being trafficked isn’t the first bad thing that has happened to her.

What these numbers prove is that each intersecting point represents a block that sits atop another, creating a shaky, swaying tower that increases Black women and girls’ vulnerability to being victimized. Traffickers will often show up as a solution to a problem, posing as someone who can prevent the toppling, while actually being the cause of the inevitable collapse.

Building Stable Towers

The theme for Black History Month February 2022 is Black Health & Wellness. Sometimes, when we think of health and wellness, we focus on ways to improve our physical health like through exercise and diet, or maybe emotional wellness activities like therapy and self-expression to address our mental health. Sex trafficking is a looming health crisis of a different kind that is also particularly devastating and threatening to the Black community, and it sits at the intersection of other societal ills like poverty, domestic violence and childhood sexual abuse – issues that we must also address if we are going to make a move against sex trafficking.

The word Jenga is derived from the Swahili term meaning “to build.” The person who loses the game is the one who moves a block without successfully understanding the interconnectedness and impact of the surrounding blocks. Focusing on one block without taking into consideration all the neighboring factors topples the tower.

The tower topples because it becomes impossible to move one block without affecting the others.

When a group is overrepresented in ways that harm and destroy their ability to thrive, when we see this group standing beneath a shaky, swaying tower of intersecting points, or worse yet - crouching beneath the rubble of an already toppled tower, we must examine all the blocks that contribute to the collapse.  Then collectively, collaboratively, and in concert, we can build new towers – sectors, agencies, and societies - that are stable, safe, and strong.