Human Trafficking in Plain Sight

In this episode of Finding Your Voice, Jason Carrasco sits down with Clinical Law Professor Bridgette Carr from the University of Michigan. Professor Carr is one of the nation's leading voices in the fight against human trafficking. She discusses what human trafficking really looks like, challenges common myths, and explains how trafficking often happens much closer to home than people realize. 

Professor Carr shares insights from her years of working with survivors, explaining the importance of trust, dignity, and community in the healing process. The conversation also examines how systems can better support survivors, the realities of labor and sex trafficking, and how technology may help expand access to justice in the future. 

Most importantly, this episode reminds us that people who have experienced trafficking are far more than what happened to them. They are individuals with strength, resilience, hope, and the ability to build meaningful lives beyond their trauma. 

This is a thoughtful and powerful conversation about human dignity, healing, and the importance of seeing people in their full humanity.

University of Michigan Website

https://michigan.law.umich.edu/faculty-and-scholarship/our-faculty/bridgette-carr

National Human Trafficking Hotline

888-373-7888

National Human Trafficking Website

https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, I'm Jason Carrasco, and welcome to Finding Your Voice. I'm a licensed marriage family and child therapist and a lifelong student of human resilience. For years, I've sat with people and some of their hardest moments, moments that have challenged their identity, their spirit, and sometimes their will to keep going. One thing I've learned is that human beings can survive the unthinkable. And with support, a person's pain can become great purpose. This podcast is a home for stories about mental health, human rights, and the courage it takes to move through darkness and toward healing. In these episodes, you'll hear from survivors, clinicians, and everyday people who are brave enough to speak honestly and bold enough to use their voice. You deserve hope, you deserve healing, and you deserve to be heard. Welcome to Finding Your Voice. Let's get started. All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of Finding Your Voice. I'm Jason Carrozko, licensed marriage family and child therapist, and today I have the pleasure of being here with Professor Bridget Carr. Professor Carr, she's a clinical professor of law at the University of Michigan and a nationally recognized leader in the fight against human trafficking. She's the founder of the nation's first human trafficking law clinic, where she and her students have represented hundreds of survivors, men, women, and children, navigating the complex aftermath of labor and sex trafficking with the focus not just on legal outcomes, but on trust, dignity, and long-term healing. Her work has reshaped how we understand trafficking, addressing the realities of coercion, victimization, and what it truly takes to support survivors in rebuilding their lives. That impact has extended globally with clinics modeled after her work that have been established in countries like Mexico, Ethiopia, and Brazil. Today she continues to push the field forward as co-director of the AI Law and Policy Clinic and exploring how technology can expand access to justice and reach those who too often have been unseen. And at the center of all of this, she does this with a commitment to making the law work for people in their full humanity. Professor Carr, extremely happy to be here with you today. Thank you for taking the time.

SPEAKER_04 2:29

I'm delighted to be here. What a lovely intro. That was really lovely. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Yes. I was doing research on you, of course, and reading about you. I was so impressed when I looked at your work and looked at the things that you do. And honestly, I was trying to figure out, I could have gone on with this with this intro, just so everybody knows that's listening. These are just the highlights of the work, the great work that she does. So there's there's so much more. I encourage you to go to her website as well to at University of Michigan. You can see that there as well. So let's let's get into this. So for people listening, this may be the first time they're really hearing about human trafficking, maybe like beyond kind of the headlines or assumptions that maybe they see in the news. So for somebody hearing about this for the first time, how would you explain what human trafficking really is?

SPEAKER_04 3:27

Yes. So I think that there is a push in the media to really make human trafficking rare, exotic, and unique. And if we do that, traffickers win. Because in many ways, human trafficking is just another form of abuse that we've seen all the time in our world, but it has a commercialization element. I often encourage people to think about human trafficking as being compelled service or compelled work. And so the compulsion someone is because of their age, if they're in sex trafficking, or because of force, fraud, or coercion, if they're in labor or sex trafficking, they're compelled to do some form of service. Um, and that service can be landscaping, nails, commercial sex, farm work. It can be in any industry. So they're compelled into a service, and usually someone is making a financial benefit from it, whether that means they don't have to pay for something or they are making money off of that service that someone is compelled into.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

The current reality in terms of trap of trafficking happening in both the US and globally, what does that kind of? I know that's a big question right there.

SPEAKER_04 4:43

Yeah, it's it is a big question. I've been asked it before. Um, so what I often say to people is human trafficking happens in every community. Yes, your community, whatever caveat you're thinking about adding in about your community, it's happening there too. And I often say that if you think you live in a community where drugs aren't being sold, then maybe let's talk about that humans aren't being sold there as well. But I think all of us accept that drugs are sold in every type of community, whether it's a small town or a big city, and humans can be more profitable than drugs. Compelling humans into service can be way more profitable and way less likely that you're going to be criminally penalized for doing it. There's all sorts of incentives for people who want to profit in that way to do it. It happens wherever you are. Whoever's listening, wherever you are, it happens where you are.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Yeah. And I've I've heard that before. You brought up an interesting point that it can be more profitable to do human trafficking versus drugs because you can continue to make money off of what that person is being trafficked for versus the drug. It's something that's sold, it's done, and it's kind of gone. They start. That is true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:50

I think one of the bigger points is though, no one ever blames the drugs for what happens in a criminal case. Lots of people blame the victims or judge the actions, choices, and behaviors of the victims. So if you have a criminal investigation and a trial, you're not going to put the drugs on trial. That's the there that there is a pound of heroin, but we will put the victim on trial in a way that we don't in other spaces. That means lots of victims don't want to participate in these experiences. The criminal legal system is extremely traumatic, even for victims. If you are good at trafficking, you can scare that victim enough not to participate. Let's say it's a foreign national victim and you have power over someone that they love and care for in their home country. Doesn't matter what the US legal system says or does, you may still be so afraid to participate. So you're definitely right. The profitability can be tied to the fact that you can sell someone's services over and over again. But I think we we don't talk enough about like how much pressure popular culture, the media, and even the legal system puts on victims, even when they come forward.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

What about some of the myths or misunderstandings that people have? Because, you know, I mean, you're helping to educate me right now as well, too. And I'm I'm already learning from you. So what do you think are some of the biggest, most common myths and under misunderstandings people have?

SPEAKER_04 7:15

I think that we could spend our entire conversation on myths. In fact, I give trainings just on myths. So I won't, I won't dominate it in that way. But but there are a few themes that connect with all of the myths. One of the themes is that it's always happening other places and the consumption of exploitive service is always by other people. And let me unpack that a little bit. Right. So people will want me to tell them that human trafficking spikes when the Super Bowl comes to town. Well, let's unpack that. One, we're not really talking about human trafficking because we're not asking questions about the labor trafficking that might be attached to the Super Bowl, the people parking cars, the janitorial staff at hotels, the cooks at restaurants. So already we've encountered our first myth, which is that we use human trafficking as a synonym for sex trafficking. And that makes labor trafficking victims invisible. Lau and let's redo that sentence. Does sex trafficking increase when the Super Bowl, a political convention, whatever? Like you could you can sub any event into this sentence comes to town. People, even people who do work in the anti-trafficking space, could get mad at me for pushing back on this myth. But one thing is we don't have any national prevalence data, which means I can't tell you on a non-Super Bowl day where human trafficking is happening or how often it's happening. Which means if you don't have a baseline, I'm only a lawyer, math is not my strong suit. If you don't have a baseline, you can't actually say where the spikes occur. Now, is it true that sometimes around the Super Bowl or other events, we put more law enforcement units on the case and do more raids and more looking and we find more people? 100%. But that is because we have more attention paid to it. The reason I find this myth particularly bad and worrisome is that it feeds the narrative that on any given weekend, we don't have to worry about sex trafficking in our communities because this only comes to town. Another thing is that it also means what we're saying is no one we know buys sex. It's not my husband or my dad or my brother or my friend or my colleague. It's those people who come into town and for the Super Bowl. The reality is that no, people in our town, people we know, buy sex because that's how the industry is sustained. Now, do they all buy sex from sex trafficking victims? No. But we can't act like we are not all part of this economy. And that's really why labor trafficking, I think, is never talked about. Because the reality is that I bridge a car, head of the human trafficking clinic, right, all the things you said, buy goods and services created by labor trafficking victims. I am part of the US economy. I consume those goods. And we all do. And that doesn't feel good, but it's true. And so for us to grapple with human trafficking in its biggest sense, we have to acknowledge that we all participate. Now, some of us may not buy sex, right? I don't buy sex, but if we all participate in some part of the economy that buy exploited goods and services, and so then we have to say, oh, okay, we're all part of the problem. That's how big it is.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Yeah. How do we are there ways? Because you brought up the word baseline, right? Because, like you said, at certain times they're able to identify it more because, of course, there's more attention, there's more eyes on it at that particular time. Are there baseline numbers? Is there a way people are trying to get accurate baseline numbers?

SPEAKER_04 10:46

I know that's probably really difficult to do, but well, there is a global number that a lot of people, including myself, rely on. The International Labor Organization does global data. And I don't know how helpful people find it. There's global data. You can look at it, you can do it. What it just shows is that it happens everywhere. And that forced labor, labor trafficking, is the is the bulk of human trafficking that we see globally. Most people don't, most people can't really connect with the global data, which I understand. It just becomes too large. I'm trying to remember the data off the top of my head, which I can't remember what the global number is. One time it was like 20.4 million people are in uh forced labor annually. I think it's very hard to connect to big numbers like that. What I try to encourage people to do is to think about the things in their own community that would make people more vulnerable to trafficking. Like if people say to me, I want to do anti-trafficking work, and then I say, okay, well, then I'm going to tell you something that's really not sexy. I want you to work for affordable housing in your community. Because when people have a job and people have a house, the chances that they are going to be, you know, a job that meets their financial needs, the chances that they're going to be trafficked are quite low. I think that because we have made human trafficking so unique, so foreign, and so exotic, we don't look to sort of basic social safety net things as the antidote, and they really are.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

How and one thing that you brought up is that we may be participating it and not even realize it. And like you said, that would be hard for I think all of us to accept that we can be actively participating in, of course, without meaning to a lot of times. Are there any signs or patterns that people can recognize or people can identify? Like, hey, I may be engaging in this right now. I may but I might be participating. What would those be, if anything?

SPEAKER_04 12:46

So I will I will answer your question in a minute, but I really want to push on, and it's one of my critiques of the broader like raising awareness. Raising awareness is important, but I want to ask the question of like, what do we think happens after identification? And I'm going to tell you an actual story that happened to me. So, you know, I am an expert on human trafficking. And I, a number of years ago, was having dinner with my husband downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was a gorgeous summer night. My parents were in 10 to take care of my young kids. And we were sitting down outside to eat, and I see these two young boys walking down the street. And one of them has a box of archway cookies. And I turned to my husband and I'm like, oh crap. This could be him attracting. And he's like, seriously, Bridget? Like, you carry a hammer. Not everything is a nail. Blah blah, you know, let's order our food. We never get to get out with, you know, without the kids. Come on, come on.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

Right.

SPEAKER_04 13:40

I said, I know.

SPEAKER_02 13:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 13:42

And oh my gosh. So I said, I'll just ask them a few questions when they come up to the table. And so the older child stands back against the brick wall of the building. The younger child is holding an unopened box of Archway cookies. And he says, in a really flat affect, We're selling cookies for our baseball team from the Y to go to California for a tournament. You want to buy some. So I say, Oh, what position do you play? Picture. Is it the Ann Armor Y? Yes. All of the answers given in a really flat affect.

SPEAKER_02 14:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:10

And he walks away. And I was like, oh, this is gonna look good. So I walk into the, I walk into the restaurant and I ask the manager, I'm like, have you seen these boys before? And he said, I'm so sorry they were bothering you, ma'am. What story are they telling you tonight?

SPEAKER_02 14:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:25

Now that's a sign, right? So he reads it as a sign of these are annoying kids. Sorry that I'm bothering people. I'm like, oh, you've just told me they come around a lot, their stories are shifting. So then I pick up the phone and I call the Ann Arbor Y. They're a baseball team. No, we would never have people fundraise, right? Like I check all the boxes. The other thing that's happening for me is I know what it looks like when kids are fundraising legitimately. Right? Have you ever bought cookies from a Girl Scout?

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:54

The energy is one of two things, and it's usually this one. They're so excited. Sir, sir, we have cookies. Do you want some? Or they're holding on to their mom's hand and don't want to talk to you at all. Right. Right. It's like it's either that that super positive energy, or you see the adult with them, right? And everyone's taking care. So I so I was like, crap, this is likely forced peddling and digging, which is a human trafficking type that we have in the US. So I called the non-emergency number of the Annover police. And I leave a very detailed message who I am, what my expertise is, what I suspect, that I am a white woman calling about two black boys, that they were not bothering me, that I just want to see them helped. I also followed the boys a little bit. 55 minutes later, the cop showed up. Boys are long gone. My husband's frustrated. I have a cold meal. A year goes by, maybe a year and a half. I get a call from an FBI agent, Bridget, you're never gonna believe that horse pedaling and begging ring we just discovered on Main Street Ann Arbor. I'm like, oh yeah, I bet I will. And I bet if you look up this gate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, with the Ann Arbor police. I tell you that story because I'm deeply worried about our awareness campaigns.

SPEAKER_02 16:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:11

I don't need anyone to tell me how to identify human trafficking. I can identify it all the time.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

Right.

SPEAKER_04 16:19

But what is identification if we don't have community systems to respond? When you make human trafficking foreign, exotic, and unique, you tell communities that they need a foreign, exotic, and unique solutions to it. If we instead said this is just another type of abuse, treat it as child abuse, treat it as domestic violence, like there's lots of ways we can treat cases depending on what's happening. And we can put these victims in systems that already exist.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Right.

SPEAKER_04 16:48

So I so I hear you about the like, what are the signs? And I could tell you some. I don't actually repeat many of the ones that are repeated all the time because very few are validated by evidence. I actually say to people, like, you know when something's on. How do you identify that? I know what real stuff looks like. I made an extra phone call. I walked in to talk to the manager. I didn't accept the script that the traffickers gave them. But what is identification if we don't actually have community-based responses? And the reality is we don't. This happened in Ann Arbor, where my clinic lives, where all the work I do is centered. And so I think we have just a bigger issue in the US, which is that we don't actually have ways to respond when we even do identify ways that are victim-centered, don't involve arrest and all those things.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

Yeah. And I'm one, thank you for sharing that story. That's an amazing story. And you are amazing.

SPEAKER_04 17:42

Let me just say, let me just say that the best way, I mean, talk about winning a marital argument like a year and a half later. Like, yes, the traffic is horrible. And I was thinking about the come home and be like, hey, remember that night? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

I was gonna ask how that how that part was as a clinician. I had I had to be curious about it, you know.

SPEAKER_04 18:05

Don't think I didn't come home and say, I was right. I was right.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Right, exactly. The wife is always right.

SPEAKER_04 18:13

Hilarious. It was awful, frustrating. I mean, I think of course I I'm in some ways, I'm glad that happened to me because it gave me such a perspective about why I would do human trafficking awareness training. I want to make people aware because I I want it to be, I don't want them to think about it as a unicorn. I want them to think about it as a horse. But that's really how I've moved my trainings now. Not like you, individual person, should be identifying people for rescue because we just don't have the responses to that for that.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Yeah. And I'm trying to think, like you mentioned, this is where you live, where you have your clinic, where you do the work. I'm trying, I'm also thinking about big cities. Like I'm I'm in LA. If, and I used to work with LAPD for crisis response, so I'm pretty familiar with their system and how calls work. I'm just trying to think if somebody made this call, honestly, and I'm not trying to talk negative about the law enforcement, but if they made this call, it would probably just kind of honestly go to the side because they have so many things that are going on and so many things that are happening that they wouldn't even have the time to really look into this. So, like you said, how can there maybe be better systems put into place that can follow through and can be able to be available to do the work and respond in the appropriate way?

SPEAKER_04 19:34

Look, law enforcement responds to the priorities that communities set for them. Yes, period. Law enforcement is a reflection of us. And I say this all the time. I say, I am not angry at law enforcement. They are a reflection of what the community says it cares about. And here's a perfect example. Are all individuals in the commercial sex industry trafficked? No. But what message have we clearly sent to law enforcement and community after community? I do not want people who walk the street in the commercial sex industry in my neighborhood.

SPEAKER_02 20:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:04

Not I'm worried some of them may be victimized, not that sort of thing. It's I don't want them on my street. So we have made a very clear statement to law enforcement about what our priorities are about taking care of people who might be victimized. It's that we don't actually care about their victimization. And so if we change those messages and law enforcement doesn't catch up, that's a different model. But I think there was a, I don't know if you read it, but there was a New York Times magazine piece about, I think it was LA. It was definitely it was, I think it was definitely in LA. It could have been San Francisco, LA or San Francisco, about this really, you know, amazing attempt that people were making to try to take youth off the street who are being sex trafficked off of it might have been like Figaro Street or something. And you read the whole article and you're just caught up in the complexity of it, that they take people off and then they get them somewhere and then they go right back. But what was never addressed in the article is that always the first step is law enforcement encounter and arrest. And I'm like, until we change the front door, like I don't think we can change the rest of it. And I understand, but I also understand it. Meaning, if I am standing in front of a 12-year-old and my choices as a law enforcement officer are I arrest her, right? I take her in, or I leave her on the street. Like those, those are my choices. Like those are not great choices to have at 2 a.m.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

No, no, not at all.

SPEAKER_04 21:34

And and then you start to see why law enforcement says I have to arrest them, I don't have another choice. I often say, would you arrest someone who was sexually abused without a commercial element? Would you have the same criteria? Right? What is it about the commercial element? Right? What is it about the money that changes the options you think you have? I think we have to push on that. If that 12, I mean, take away the commercial. Sex component, that 12-year-old can't consent to sex, that 12-year-old is being serially raped. Would you walk into any other space where a 12-year-old was being serially raped and say, my options are to leave you here or to put you in jail or arrest you or detain you? We wouldn't, but there's something about the commercial element that makes us respond differently.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

Wow. I also too, and I think this is a good time to go into it, get into some of the amazing work that you do, especially with the the clinic. You founded one of the first human trafficking clinics in the country, which I thought was amazing. Talk a little bit about if you're willing to, what did what do you think you were seeing that others weren't at the time that the motivation to start that clinic?

SPEAKER_04 22:53

Sure. So first off, I just want to say, so I'm first generation college student, first generation law student. My parents didn't go to college. I grew up in rural Indiana. I think there is a way to tell the story of my career that looks like when I was born, the doctor like held me up to the light and said, She shall do human trafficking work, right? But that's like not it. And I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I went to med school for five days. I dropped out. I didn't know what I was going to do. And when I went to law school, I didn't ever think I would be a practicing lawyer. I just thought it would be a good toolkit to get to help people. While I was there, I really fell in love with refugee law and helping asylum seekers. So my first law clinic gig was really helping asylum seekers, people who are harmed in their country or who fear harm in their country get protection in the US. And it was in doing that work that I was first contacted about taking on a human trafficking case. And I was like, I don't know how to do that. And they're like, well, they don't have, they don't have lawyers. And I was like, well, I'll meet with these women, but I that's not me. I don't have nothing. That case ended up being the first federally prosecuted human trafficking case in Michigan. Those of us who worked on that case ended up being called experts, and we definitely weren't. Right. Um, but we we had done more than almost anyone had. So the trafficking law was passed in 2000. I graduated law school in 2003. I took that case on maybe in 06, 07. Then I started getting all these calls for human trafficking cases because Michigan at the time was the largest federal foster care placement for foreign nationally trafficked youth. If a kid was trafficked somewhere else in the US and was a foreign national, they would be placed in Michigan. So I started, you know, representing clients who were cases in Newark or Dallas, you know, just all over. It was a great viewpoint for me to see how human trafficking cases were being worked on in different locations. And then when I moved to Michigan law, I said to, I mean, I'm sure someone wants me to say, like, it was super intentional. I opened a human trafficking clinic. Actually, what my thought was my foreign national clients have needs beyond immigration law. And US citizens are victims too. I want to have a clinic that can serve their needs.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Right.

SPEAKER_04 25:17

That was the I'm doing something groundbreaking, not now. In and in hindsight, oh my gosh, naivete is a gift at times. What I was essentially doing was opening up a general legal services office for a population, which means we do all sorts of work, custody work, uh expungement, immigration work. Normally, clinics focus in on one area of the law. Instead, we focus in on a population, which is both wonderful and hard because we have to know, we have to practice in all sorts of areas. We're able to do that because we sit at Michigan Law and we have experts, experts in all those areas. We have 19 clinics, so I can ask colleagues in other areas. I'm really glad we do it that way because we see lots of things. Like we see lots of connections. What's not intentional? I'm so grateful that my 20-something self wasn't in charge of dreaming for me because what how my career has evolved has been bigger than anything I could have dreamed of for myself.

SPEAKER_01 26:12

One thing I think that I've seen just kind of in my own life, my own experience, is that a lot of good things that happened, sometimes it's like you said, it's not intentional. It's this organic thing takes place and just the wheels start turning and one thing leads to another, and then here you are with the work that you're doing.

SPEAKER_04 26:32

I mean, I've always been guided. When I dropped out of med school, I did it because I realized it wasn't feeding my soul. And so I think that has been my through line. When I say yes to things, when I say no to things, it really is does this feed my soul? Like, does this light me up? Do I feel like I'm making a contribution? Is there meaning and purpose? And so, yeah, I feel like when you string together a bunch of choices like that, no matter where you land, it's going to be great.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

Yeah. Now I just I want to say real quick, I relate to you when you say that because originally when I started my master's degree, I started with an MBA. And I took, you know, I started with some of the courses and some of the classes, and I'm like, I'm this isn't me. I'm not, I'm not motivated about this, I'm not passionate about this. And then finally the dots connected and it clicked in my head with my own life experience. And I want to start a MFT program. You know what I mean? And then right when I got in, it was just like I was home, right? I was I felt like I felt like I was home. So was there any resistance? And has there been any resistance to things that you are doing at the clinic? Do you know what I mean? Like have outside forces or have you what have you had to push against at times, if anything, I mean maybe not, but I'm just I'm just curious if there's been resistance at different times from people because of the work you're doing.

SPEAKER_04 27:52

Yeah, I mean, I have to say my clinic work has always been extremely well supported at the law school. And I feel so lucky in that students love the clinic and take it. I I think probably the biggest thing is more of a misconception is that people think it's a sex trafficking clinic. Yeah. Um, even then, like we represent, I think, more labor trafficking victims than sex trafficking victims since we started. But no, I think I'm super grateful for Michigan Law always supporting the clinic and the law students. I mean, whenever I talk about the clinic, I always think in my mind, I wish people could see that like it is not me, right? It is like hundreds and hundreds of students who have devoted thousands and thousands of hours of work to show up with their full humanity for like for trafficking victims' full humanity, right? Like that's what we work at so hard in the clinic. I think probably the biggest barrier, and this is a law school issue, not a Michigan law issue, is that so much of legal teaching, I think, makes students feel like they have to leave their humanity at the door when they become a lawyer, right? When they walk in in their lawyer pose. And probably my superpower, if I have one in lawyering, is that I can sit with people as they share the hardest things that they've ever had to share. And I can I can hold that with them and they feel seen and heard, or that's my hope that they feel seen and heard. And that I don't turn my lawyer self on for that, that I am my human self who knows things about the law. And that is actually a different way of being that I see lots of people in these spaces. And I get it from a secondary trauma perspective, like I understand those things, but I work extremely hard and I will quit the moment that my lawyer self walks into that room instead of my human self. Because the moment I do that, I start to discount the humanity of the person in front of me. And then that's just what trafficking is. And so I'm I'm I'm not game for that.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Yeah. A lot of respect for that answer. And yeah, like you said, how important it is to be able to hold space, to be able to be a safe place. Because one of my you pretty much answered my next question because I was gonna ask, you know, what does it take to build trust with somebody who has been deeply exploited? Kind of just answer that question in terms of your human self entering that room first. Yes, your lawyer self being there, but holding space, being able to build that alliance with them, build that rapport with them and that connection and let them know that your first and primary purpose, it sounds like, is how can I help? How can I help you?

SPEAKER_04 30:36

Yes. I mean, we we say it all the time, and I say it when we train our students, our clients are the boss. We drive the bus, right? Because we have the license to drive the bus, but our clients tell us where we can go. We can say, Oh, that road's closed, or we're not allowed to go that route, or that route doesn't actually get you where you think you want to go. But we do nothing without the clients telling us their goals. And sometimes that goal is, I don't actually want this case prosecuted. I love this person, or I don't want to participate in the criminal legal process. Our job really is to help our clients clarify what they want, let them know what we think the legal system can and can't give to them, and then keep them super informed and support them in the process. We are not the heroes of the story. And it's also not our story to determine the ending. Lots of people are frustrated by my frequent talk about how we throw around the word success a lot in human trafficking spaces. I wish we would use that word better because what most people mean is a criminal prosecution. Well, I can tell you lots of stories where the criminal prosecution did not equal success for my client. I don't think it is a success when my client is more traumatized, you know, naked pictures of her are shown in open court, like all that that doesn't equal success to me. So I always push people on their definitions. When you say success, what do you mean? What does that look like? How how how do we have an umbrella of success that actually honors what the victims want? It's really easy. I feel like it's really easy to do press conferences about human trafficking. It's really hard to actually be in the spaces and figure out ways to help meet survivor goals. And I think like that's what we try to do all the time.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

To do the hard part. And I hear what you're saying because yes, there's times, of course, you are that word successful, right? And doing what you're doing. Is it a success that we even have to be here? And do we want to minimize that yes, even though this was a success or this happened, here was a human being that still had to go through this, that still had to sp experience this. So how can we kind of throw that word success around? It's like we shouldn't have to be here in the first place. The reality is that you will be and and will continue to be. This is something that definitely will not go away.

SPEAKER_04 32:56

Right.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Um, it's just I I I hear what you're saying.

SPEAKER_04 33:00

And and even from a secondary trauma perspective, and with my students, I say if you define success as only those times that the criminal legal system prosecutes the perpetrator, you will really struggle to stay in this space. Some of our biggest successes are when a client who has disappeared for 14 months calls us back and says, Hey, my numbers changed. I realize I didn't tell you. Being a stable space that traumatized individuals continue to reach out to and trust is a way bigger success to me than some jail sentence that a perpetrator got.

SPEAKER_02 33:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:36

Because I know that the jail sentence that the perpetrator got is a whole bunch of factors that I don't control or impact or influence, but I do control how I show up for people. My students control how they show up for people and whether we're that place that people know they can call no matter what.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

Yeah. Some of these survivors, what they go through being trafficked, then what they need to go through maybe with the system as well too. I think really, really shows the human resilience that they have. What I don't know if maybe, you know, you could share a story or you could just share a thought about what has this work or what have some some of these people that you've represented, what has it taught you about human resilience?

SPEAKER_04 34:25

I think one thing it's taught me is that is the power of community to increase resilience. Meaning, you know, when I watch how or I hear how survivors survived during their trafficking time. So many times it's about how they built community with each other if they were in in multiple victim scenarios.

SPEAKER_02 34:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:49

Or how there was this one person they encountered who was kind and offered a lifeline in so many ways. I mean, the human capacity for resilience is amazing, but it's also, I just I keep watching how it's almost like fertilizer. Community communities can be fertilizer for it. And watching so much of um what's happening with the Epstein files right now and what's being asked of those survivors, especially after the Department of Justice released so many files that contain survivor names and personal information. And now in an age of AI and Google, you can't crawl, you can't take a lot of that stuff back. And that what will it mean for them? Every single thing they do, applying to be a volunteer at their kids' school, going for a job, dating, all those things, that all of that stuff is available. And I worry for them. I worry like, is there enough community? Is there enough support to overcome just the way I feel like AI and technology can be such drown us? And so, yeah, I don't know. I that's a very long answer to say.

SPEAKER_02 36:00

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 36:02

I know that people are always interested in my client's stories, but when I think of my clients, their exploitation is such a small part of what I know about them because their cases last so long with me, I'm there for the the weddings and the graduations and the babies, and that they're just full self. And so it's it's just there's so much to them that's so much more than that exploit exploitive time. I remember one time I was getting ready to go into Congress. One of my clients was going to testify, and there's lots of debates in the human trafficking field about whether you say survivor or victim, and and you might have thoughts about that. But I remember turning to her and saying, like, how do you want to be introduced? What do you want to be? And she was like, I don't want to be either. My name's and I'm kind of like nice. And and that is such that's the space I try to occupy, which is like, I don't really like these debates do nothing for me. I'm gonna as an advocate, I'm gonna use the word that I think advances my client's goals. And then every other time, I'm gonna call my client by their name because there's so much more than this experience. And I think we can lose sight of that in some of these debates.

SPEAKER_01 37:10

What are your thoughts? Because you said you have your own thoughts. I'm curious, what are your own thoughts on surveillance versus victim?

SPEAKER_04 37:16

Victim is a defined term in the statute. Like it's actually victim traffic like it's a defined term. Many, many of my clients are still arrested rather than seen as victims. And so my position is I am going to keep using the defined statutory term until my clients aren't arrested anymore. I I'm all about empowerment, right? I want people to feel empowered. But I also don't want us as a society to move on and act like we see everyone as a victim because we don't. And happens at press conferences, like, you know, the FBI will make an announcement at operation, save the children. We arrested so many perpetrators and we recovered so many victims. And I'm like, hmm, I bet if I impact that, some of the people in your perpetrator pile would be people I would classify as victims. And so I think what's missed in this empowerment, disempowerment debate is the actual reality that we don't have community-based solutions to trafficking, that the entry, the entry door for a lot of people into systems, even when they're victims, is arrest. And I will be happy to change my language when reality changes.

SPEAKER_01 38:20

Yeah. Excellent. This I think too, you already answered this question. You're just kind of reading my movies with my next question. No, well, that's nice. That's good. Because I was gonna ask, what do you wish people understood about survivors that often gets overlooked? I think you were you were talking about that when you were saying, like, this isn't just a survivor, this is this person, you know, whose name is that, this is that person. And they have a life, they have these moments, they have a career they're trying to do, they have a they're getting married. This is this is somebody's daughter, this is somebody's sister, cousin.

SPEAKER_04 38:57

And they have so much joy. I'm you know, like, and I think that's one of the things I try to have so much joy. People who meet me often say, You have way more joy than I thought possible for someone who did such heavy work. And I said, Well, I think I almost feel like compelled, right, to make sure I'm finding joy because I see my clients who have experienced such hard things, who are still finding joy, then I sure better be finding joy. I wish we, I feel like our human brains are not great with complexity and ambiguity. Because it's also for me in this work, which I know is not a popular answer, and it's one of my red lines, is if I ever get to a point where I can't be curious about what happened to a perpetrator, right? If I ever get to a point where I demonize, dehumanize, or say they are a monster, then we have done monstrous things 100%. But the moment I am willing to say they are something less than human is the moment I have to stop doing this work.

SPEAKER_02 39:56

Right.

SPEAKER_04 39:57

Because compassion, seeing that everyone suffers, it's an all or nothing game. I can't just have it for people who've been exploited. I think that curiosity, that openness to say, like, you know, everyone's complex. And I think it's one of the issues we're having with some of these cases where people who are exploited harmed other people in exploitation, right? Which makes total sense to me. If I think I could do something to someone else when I'm being harmed and have less harm to me. And then we want really bright lines. Like I actually have something in my inbox right now from a reporter saying, I want you to unpack for me the line between when someone stops being a victim and and you know becomes a perpetrator. And and I'll be like, well, one line I might suggest is when they're no longer under the power and control of the original perpetrator. That might be a good line. Um, people don't like that. They they're like, but they were harmful and they turned 18. And I was like, yeah, let's see. Epstein got her when she was 14, and then magically on her 18th birthday, she became super powerful and not under his control. Not at all. Again, because we want Epstein to be a monster rather than he did monstrous things. I think he did monstrous things.

SPEAKER_01 41:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:06

But if he's a monster, that means there's some number of things that other people can do to be a monster rather than saying, let's look at situations, look at power imbalances, let's look at accountability. We can hold people who do monstrous things accountable a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:23

And some people who do monstrous things are doing them because someone else is forcing them to. Do we want accountability there? I don't think I do in the same way that I want it for someone who's not being controlled. Let's have an accountability conversation. But when it we turn them into monsters, I think we're all losing.

SPEAKER_01 41:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:42

Which I know does not make me popular when I say that.

SPEAKER_01 41:44

At the same time, it would make you a great clinician, though, because I mean that's the way it is. And it's true. It's it takes a lot of it just takes a lot to be able to view people based on their actions and not turn that into who they are. Do you know, do you know what I mean? Yes.

SPEAKER_04 42:06

And let me be clear. Yeah, I just talked about this vis-a-vis Epstein, and I have some colleagues that I'm not very good at doing this with. It is a journey that we are all on, right? Sometimes the closest people to us we cannot give that perspective to. It's something I'm always working, working on. But I think from you know, when we're talking about human trafficking, and so many times I give talks on human trafficking, and someone comes up to me and says, that trafficker essentially is a monster or doesn't deserve to be human or should be taken apart limb by limb. And I'm like, yeah, I you know, I get that that feeling. And yet, what does that do to us?

SPEAKER_01 42:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 42:44

And as individuals and as a society, right, when we're willing to dehumanize some people. Because that's what traffickers need. They need us all to sign into that bargain that some people are commodities and not humans.

SPEAKER_01 42:56

Yeah. And looking at kind of these these people through a lens clinically, it's like, what has that person been through? What has that person been?

SPEAKER_04 43:07

What happened to you?

SPEAKER_01 43:08

What type of abuse did they possibly suffer from? What type of power imbalances were they involved in? What were their environmental circumstances that led to this?

SPEAKER_04 43:19

Because healthy people don't hurt people. Right. People don't hurt people. Yeah.

unknown 43:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 43:24

So or at least systemically hurt people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

Right. Yeah. So I I I hear you on that. I I agree. One thing I was going to ask that kind of popped in my head while you were talking is is it common for somebody that's been a part of trafficking to, if they've gotten out, to regress and to go back voluntarily?

SPEAKER_04 43:51

So there's a lot in that question. So I'll unpack some of that just so one is what does getting out look like? If you have substance abuse issues. Do you have support for that? Do you actually, because lots of times your perpetrator, at least in sex trafficking, even sometimes in labor trafficking, is your source of income, your source for housing, sometimes your source for attachment and connection. I would really want to unpack what truly getting out looks like. I also would question about what return looks like. Does it mean return to doing the same thing? If someone has been sex trafficked, let's say they've been sex trafficked at a sex trafficked, and then they leave that perpetrator and then they decide to sell themselves for sex. Is that regressing because they're returning to the same industry? Would we feel the same way about a landscaper who's going back to do landscaping but doesn't have a perpetrator? I don't know where your question was in that way I've unpacked it and all of those things.

SPEAKER_02 44:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:50

But trafficking is really about people who have a vulnerability being exploited by someone who has power over them in some way. And it may not be a whole bunch of power. And so my answer would be if their original vulnerability or new vulnerability that's been created from being trafficked, which happens lots of times, the trauma, the arrests, maybe your immigration status, if that vulnerability hasn't gone away, then their risk of being exploited hasn't gone away. So a return to exploitation is not shocking to me. If the vulnerability has gone away, has been solved either through therapy or other supports or social safety nets, I almost never see people be back in exploitation. Which is probably more complex of an answer than you were looking for.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Yeah, yeah. No, but it's also no, I I thank you because it's it's very educational too at the same time. And I don't think it's just helping me kind of put on a new lens, looking at it in a certain way, but I think it'll help people that are listening be able to put on a new lens, you know. So so thank you. I mean, I I love the information that you're you're giving me. I'm I'm learning a lot myself by this conversation, so I'm sure anybody listening would hopefully be learning as well, too. You focused not just on justice, but reintegration. What are some of the biggest challengers survivors face after escaping trafficking?

SPEAKER_04 46:19

Yeah, so I think that we want to make trafficking be about things that are really exotic, but lots of times it's just about people need a job to meet their financial needs. For stress trafficking victims, many of them have arrest records that are connected with their time in trafficking. And that makes it really hard. The stories my clients tell about like trying to get a job or even rent an apartment with prostitution convictions on their record, it's enraging. I mean, if you talk about the times I get most enraged in my work, it's often in those spaces where someone went to rent an apartment and they were called into the manager's office. And, you know, they have 13 prostitution convictions, and the apartment manager says, Yeah, I'm not going to rent an apartment to you, but I just wanted to see what a whore looked like. Wow, horrible. Yeah, I know. That's just one of many, many stories like that. You know, and the reality is the law tries to do some things to correct those types of arrests, but you have to go back to the criminal legal system to correct it. And it's really hard. I mean, Michigan, I can't remember the year now, passed a law, an expungement law, which is when we can go back and sort of say, like, because someone was a victim, this shouldn't have happened and we can erase it. That's a very simplification of what happens. I remember when the human trafficking expungement law passed here. We fully expected to hear from lots of individuals who were in their 20s and 30s. The first five calls we got were from women in their 60s who were older, who no longer needed this expungement to get a job or to find an apartment, but just had lived with this label for so long.

SPEAKER_02 48:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 48:02

And it was important to them to get it corrected. And then in Michigan, our prostitution laws, up until maybe 2014, were gendered, meaning only women could be arrested for the prostitution charge. Yeah, it was written as she. When men were arrested, it was a different charge, like public indecency, just whatever, whatever the system came up with a public indecency, something like that. So when the expungement law happened, someone reached out to us who was getting their master's in social work. He said, This happened to me when I was a kid. You know, I have this charge. Can you help me? And we were like, technically, no, because the statute says you can only go back and erase prostitution charges. Like it's tied to those charges. I'm like, but let's try. It was a fascinating case that technically really probably shouldn't have gone through. I'll never forget we were, it was a rural court. We drove there, and I was just thinking, I don't know how this is gonna go for this, for this now adult man who has to stand up in court, open court, people aren't in there. Like, I just I just don't know how this is gonna go. And normally students would do this, but it was a it was during the overlap time where we didn't have students, and so I was doing the case, and I'll never forget we walked in and the case gets called, and already like I'm one of the few women in this room of of all these people who know each other and everything. And the judge calls the case and I said, Good morning, Your Honor. We're here hoping for expungement. And he's like, Yes, this is, and you can tell it's kind of the first time he's read, you know, he's reading it. And I made a strategic decision to just be quiet, which most lawyers don't make that decision most times. And I was like, you know what? I want to just give space for this judge to stop his day-to-day motion and see the person standing next to me, understand the words in front of him in connection with the person standing next to me. I just want to give him space to do that without me adding in. And so I was just really quiet. And then it started to it started to grow kind of uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_02 50:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 50:14

And I was still like, he's still reading. And so I just, I just didn't talk.

SPEAKER_00 50:20

Nice.

SPEAKER_04 50:21

And after what felt like a really long time, but probably wasn't a really long time, the judge looked up and said, And now mind you, I haven't asked for anything. I haven't made my case. And I'm purposely kind of don't want to have to put this man's business out in front of, you know, in front of all the other people. Right. And he looked up and he said, Your order is granted. And he turned to my client and he was like, I'm so impressed with you. Because we had put in there like he's gonna graduate with his master's, and good luck with your graduation in a couple of weeks.

SPEAKER_01 50:52

Wow, that's so amazing.

SPEAKER_04 50:54

And the whole court is like, what just what you know, what just happened? What just happened? And it was so beautiful because there's so much the legal system can't do, it can't solve all the trauma that that man has been through. It can't give that person back a life where he hasn't been a victim of exploitation. But you know what? He didn't he saw him as so human in that moment, he recognized his full humanity in that moment and didn't make him have to beg or say more in that space. And it was just, it was so beautiful. And so I think those are the moments that you that was such a huge victory, that was such a huge success. It's never gonna make the paper. Woman woman appeared in royal court and said nothing, right?

SPEAKER_00 51:43

Yeah, there's no there's no drama there. There's no drama there.

SPEAKER_04 51:48

It it was so beautiful, and yeah, and I'm so grateful to that judge. Yeah, and now in my now self, I would write him a thank you note. Maybe I'll look him up, but I wouldn't know at that time. But I now would just be like, thank you for seeing my client in his full humanity. Because I'll never appear in front again. We don't appear on that court very often.

SPEAKER_01 52:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's that's an amazing story. Thank you for sharing that. And that judge, too, he was obviously very thoughtful. He was very open-minded. Again, it seems like he was the type of person that you do in your work, as you know, I try to do in my work. These are our humans in front of us. These are and it can be hard.

SPEAKER_04 52:29

Days are busy, court dockets are overwhelming, you know, there's so many things pulling on people, and then you add in digital distraction of iPhone, you know, like it's all there. There's so many reasons why we can be distracted and not see people fully, and yet it's so important that we do.

SPEAKER_01 52:46

Just finishing or putting the, you know, kind of closing the loop on court part of it or the the legal system part of it in this in this sense. What are the biggest ways that you think sometimes systems fail the survivors? I know that that's there's probably a lot there, but kind of like maybe some of your top things that come to mind.

SPEAKER_04 53:11

So I think that what is always true in human trafficking cases is that it always involves and maybe there's one that's different, but like let's just say like 99.9% of all human trafficking cases involve multiple or at least more than two people, more than the perpetrator and the victim. And yet when we go to prosecute them, we pretend as if my clients for sex trafficking cases are in hotel rooms performing sex acts on themselves. I am exhausted by this narrative of well, if the victim doesn't come forward and do this, or the victim doesn't do this, the case can't move forward. My gosh, there are a lot of other people involved, a lot of phone numbers on her cell phone, right? A lot, like a lot of hotel checks. And so and and it's true even, you know, it's true for me too in in supply chain work and in labor trafficking, where people are like, oh, supply chains are opaque. I'm like, are you telling me that when an item moves from one country to another through multiple modes of transportation, through multiple warehouses, through like multiple hands, and perhaps even 500 sets of eyes and hands touch something, that that is opaque. It may be complex, but complexity and opacity are not the same thing. And I'm just exhausted by the excuses that are really us saying, well, this is too complex or this is too much work. And instead we say, Well, it's opaque, or only that victim can do it. And so I think like that theme just like emerges through all of the things. We can do hard things, we can do complex things, we can fly people around the moon. If this was our priority, we would approach it differently. Like a perfect example of that is there was a big, big forced labor indictment called Blooming Onion, and it was the largest ever forced labor indictment in the US. It involves growers in Georgia, predominantly onion growers, who sold like a huge percentage of onions, bad, I think it's badalions, that are sold in the US. Despite this massive indictment, which is a document that says these people are implicated and there's been convictions and pleas and all that stuff. So this massive indictment, not one supermarket has been publicly tied to this case.

SPEAKER_02 55:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:34

And so I was like, well, that's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_02 55:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:38

So I said to my students, let's try using only publicly available data, not anything inside baseball, not relying on workers, not relying on corporate disclosure. Let's see if we can connect soil to supermarket shelf. And we could. In tons of cases, we could, whether through Facebook postings or Google Maps things or whatever, we were able to show that from this farm where there was forced labor, it went to this supermarket. And that didn't shock me, but I'm also so frustrated by that. Because if we can do that, you know, using publicly available data, what's possible using just student labor? What's possible for people who have more money, more power, more recesses, more resources, and more access? So much as possible. And it just means we're not doing it. And that makes me feel.

SPEAKER_01 56:30

Yeah. Yeah, completely understandable. Because like these are, like you said, these are things if the motivation was there, if the drive was there, the willingness was there. Because the resources are there, right? In terms of money, I would imagine.

SPEAKER_04 56:43

I mean, I mean, we find resources when we want to do something, we just do.

SPEAKER_01 56:48

Yeah, like you said, flew around the moon.

SPEAKER_04 56:50

Yeah, which I want us to do. I'm so happy we do.

SPEAKER_01 56:53

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 56:54

Like we can do complex things.

SPEAKER_00 56:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 56:57

And again, that's why I think it's just it's back to where we started. But if you train people that human trafficking is a unicorn, you don't throw resources to finding unicorns. We just don't. But if instead we said, nope, it's just like horses, we gotta, we gotta do stuff, we gotta have resources. It just so I think we really, really, really uh uh uh made a mistake uh by making it exotic and unique and a unicorn.

SPEAKER_01 57:25

Do you think that a lot of these like TV shows and series, a lot of these things play a bit social media news play a big part in that about how they do make it exotic?

SPEAKER_04 57:41

A huge part, a huge part. I mean, there have been some wonderful, I mean, I can think of one actually. I'm not a big consumer of media. Gray's Anatomy years ago had had a couple shows about human trafficking, and it was so well done. It was so I like watched it in awe. It was so well done. But normally I'm really frustrated. Like the movie Taken to me is actually just a symbol of all the ways the US approaches trafficking, right?

SPEAKER_02 58:06

Right.

SPEAKER_04 58:07

We only care about white virgin girls who have made no bad choices. We expect there to be some super secret team that can come in and save them. It's always bad men who are not white doing the trafficking, and we run past girls who are being harmed all of the time. Like when Liam Meeson's like pulling aside those curves. That's me. Like, if you want a depiction of sort of the worst way America approaches trafficking, it's that movie.

SPEAKER_00 58:32

That's it.

SPEAKER_04 58:33

I appreciate it for that perspective that I can just kind of point to it in that way. It's really hard, I feel like, to work against our brains who don't like complexity. We we have to do it. Like we just we have to, we have to do better. And I think I get asked lots of times in these types of interviews because I have children. And one time someone was asking me, Aren't you afraid? Because I have a daughter, a young daughter, aren't you afraid when you walk in a mall parking lot with your daughter? And I understood from the question that she meant, like, aren't I afraid she's gonna be like snatched by men in a white van?

SPEAKER_02 59:08

Right.

SPEAKER_04 59:08

And I was like, Well, I'm deeply afraid she's gonna get hit by a car. Like she's short, people don't pay attention in parking lots. So I hold her hand so she's not hit by a car. But if trafficking really occurred the way you're describing, we would have so much video of it. I mean, I push people on this all the time. If trafficking was the men in white vans, I just wouldn't have to do anything. Everywhere in society has a camera now. Like, I wish, I wish traffickers like wrote little codes on people's cars. I wish they were that coordinated because then we could take them down easier. I wish, right? Like, I wish they all drove white vans. That would be so much like this idea again that somehow trafficking is is about this brute force and instead isn't about relationship. Almost like 98% of my clients had a relationship with their trafficker before they were trafficked.

SPEAKER_00 59:59

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:00

Whether it was family, friends, employer, employee, it's very rare that someone was snatched. I used to be able to say 100%. I've now had a case where someone was snatched. Again, this idea, I rail against even the concept of stranger danger in my parenting. This idea that there are bad people who are gonna do bad things to you rather than everyone is capable of making good and bad choices. And when we tell people to only look for the quote unquote bad people, they don't think about reporting the coach who's grooming them for sex trafficking. We don't think about the employer, gosh, he's crossed my boundaries a number of times, but he wants me to take this trip with him. And we actually we're not doing our children, ourselves, any service by making it about men in white vans, rather than saying everyone has the capacity to be a perpetrator. Really, they do. And good people can make bad choices. I think that we we're not helping ourselves with these narratives. I think maybe it makes people sleep better at night, but it's a false sense of false sense of safety, false sense of safety. You know, the number of times people have said to me, like, should I allow my eighth grader to go on spring break to Mexico? And I'm like, Well, I'd probably say yes to that before I give them a smartphone that's completely open and free.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:20

Where they can have certain people start to send them messages, and they can even go into certain things and start looking like curiosity, and the next thing you know, yeah, it could be a rabbit hole.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:30

When trafficking is about relationship and connection for someone else's financial benefit, and that's what it is, you begin to go like, oh, now I can see how it can exist in so many more spaces.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:42

That's that's so interesting to me that you said that a lot of times there can be a relationship to the person, and very, very similar, of course, in a way of sexual abuse and how that takes place, where most often that's going to come from somebody that's related to them in some way or somebody that they know.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:04

Exactly. Trafficking is the same, at least in our cases, right? There's been no big meta studies, but we looked through all our cases and said, like, did this person know the trafficker for a good amount of time before they were trafficked?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:16

And the answer is out of curiosity, were they trafficked by that person, or did that person that they knew were they helping other people who then trafficked them? Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 1:02:28

So usually they were trafficked by that person that they knew. Whether it's like you take a job and this coworker you meet then becomes your trafficker, or your parents' good friend that you live in a village in Togo, and your parents' good friend, who you call auntie, offers to take you to the US to go to school, and you think you're gonna go to school, your parents think that you are going to get the benefit of a US education, and instead you're forced to, instead, you're forced to braid hair in a hair salon. Yeah. You know, sex traffickers especially really prey on people's attachment. Kids in foster care. You don't have someone taking care of you. Well, I will love you. And when some when you don't, when your sense of attachment isn't met, and someone offers you that, gosh, that is hard to turn away from.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:18

So many of my clients talk about, you know, you asked about regression, and that's and I unpack the question a bit. So many of my clients talk about no one has ever bailed me out of jail except for my trafficker. Is that a return? And our clinic, we, you know, we have met clients at midnight who are walking out of jail to make sure they get to the hotel without their traffickers showing up. We have met clients at all hours with clothes and food and booked a hotel for them. Because if we can't meet those immediate front needs for them when they're walking out of jail, you bet the trafficker will.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:53

A hundred percent. And that's why I just I don't view it as a regression. If you don't have those needs met in another way, yeah, you're gonna get them met.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:03

You're gonna get them met. Absolutely. I do want to ask a question because I know that you're integrating AI a lot into some of the work, and I think this is pretty fascinating. And I mean, I would imagine this is new. You're integrating AI into legal work. How can this technology help and expand, I guess, access to justice? Can you talk about that a little bit?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:30

I mean, who knows? At the end of the day, maybe it won't. I'm not a fortune teller. I think anyone right now who's telling you that they know what's going to happen with this technology and in these spaces is just making things up. But really, that that project I mentioned earlier about my students using publicly available information to connect soil to supermarket shelf for cases involving forced labor, it was a painful process of manual labor. But I immediately realized that it could be automated. And that actually was the impetus to make me think, well, if this could be automated and now AI, and this is we started this project kind of before ChatGPT dropped into all of our worlds. And then now AI is on the scene. I think I, along with my colleague Fabek Sankren, really started the AI Law and Policy Clinic to say there have to be people at the pace at the table who have served vulnerable individuals. If not, our clients are going to be left even farther behind. Are we technologists? No. Am I married to a computer science and engineering professor at Michigan? I am. Is it the joke of my household that I am the one leading the AI clinic? It is.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:40

I imagine.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:42

And yet, it has to be that there's space at the table. We have to be there. We have to bring our clients to the table. We have to, have to, have to make sure that this technology doesn't just make those more powerful and have more, have even more and have even more and more power. We have really decided in the Clinic is that we are partnering with courts to try to say how can because you know courts are already trying to manage so many people who don't have lawyers. 92% of civil legal needs in the US go unmet because they don't have lawyers, which means that our legal system, our civil legal system, is only helping 8% of the legal need. We're trying to say, like, can we begin to put a dent in the 92%? Because we're not going to make more lawyers, right? Right. Like this problem has been around for a long time. What might it look like if we somehow made systems easier, even if it means form fillers or, you know, whatever it is, really basic stuff. Every time we reduce vulnerability, legal vulnerability, every time we empower someone to have guardianship of their kids or custody of their kids, and their maybe their co-parent is their trafficker. Every time we make access to legal tools easier for the vulnerable, we're doing anti-trafficking work. Yeah. So that's what I'm doing. And we'll see how it goes.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:02

Yeah, no, I look and I look forward to seeing how that goes. And I think it's it's amazing that you're taking the risk to be able to do that. And again, that's how that's how good things happen when people are willing to say, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna give this a try. This is kind of the vision I have. Try to execute, yeah, try to execute it and see what happens, and it could turn into something that's absolutely amazing. I mean, it seems from from my research on you, from my talking to you, that one thing you have been able to do is to help create new things, help create new ideas, help start new ideas. So I think this can, again, hopefully be another one that you have that you can take and and that you can move forward.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:45

That's the hope. I mean, I think the other big push for me and my colleague Vivek is that we don't want AI to turn lawyers into robots. Meaning, if we're saving time, does that give us more time? What does that give us more time to be human for? There's so much substance abuse, mental health issues, et cetera, et cetera, in lawyers. We don't want the only conversation about AI to be do more, be more productive, be more efficient. Yes, be more efficient, but use that time to create, to take a walk, to connect with people that you love. We have a substack, More Time to Be Human, that we kind of write about these issues of compassion and legal tech and AI and how do we create more space to hold our full humanity, especially in an age where AI is running so fast. I think it may look like my work has fundamentally changed, but what I feel like what I've always been grappling with is how do I make sure there's space for people to feel seen and heard? And whether that's in like sitting across from vulnerable clients or it's saying AI is moving so fast and it's it's promising so much, but how do we not forget the humans that it's supposed to be serving in in all the ways?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:58

Yeah, amazing. And again, I look forward to seeing how it goes and yeah, how that how that turns out. I also want to ask you a couple questions before we get ready to wrap about you. And that you've talked about your joy and the joy that that you have, and we've talked a lot about holding space for clients who are very vulnerable, the stories that you hear, the the trauma that you but you also sit with.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:29

Yes. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:30

How do you how do you take care of yourself? How do you keep your yourself in a good place emotionally, spiritually, physically, whatever that looks like for you?

SPEAKER_04 1:09:39

Yeah. Well, first I would say to stay in the work this long, it is a lot of work. And and I take it seriously and I take it as part of my workday. If I am doing things that I need to do to keep my brain healthy, then it is part of my workday for that, because the work is what is making my brain less healthy. I think for me, early on, I thought I could just do this work and I was just amazing at it without any secondary trauma. And then I had my first child. And boy, did the volume of violence and danger in the world get turned up. And the therapist who was in our clinic at that time said, Bridget, it makes total sense. Before you had your first baby, you were doing more things with friends, you were moving your body more, you know, like I was stuck in the newborn hardness, right? And and so now all your brain has is that the world is unsafe. The world is unsafe. You know, it was at that point, and I had probably been running the clinic two years at that point when I had had my first child, but representing survivors much longer than that. And I was like, oh, I need a trauma therapist. And I need a trauma therapist on my team forever, just like I have a general practitioner, is part of my healthcare team. And that was wonderful. And at that time, I was kind of dealing with it's a longer story, maybe for part two, but one of the traffickers in our cases worked on the maternity ward where I delivered my child. Oh wow. As a janitor. And I was just having dreams about delivering him and then that guy taking my baby. Anyway, it was a whole thing. But I needed to, I needed to the dream when when I dream about my cases repeatedly, that's a sign that I'm not in a great place. And so my trauma therapist taught me about EMDR and I and I do it in EMDR sessions. Yes. And I don't even know what those letters stand for, but it's a technique that was developed for people returning from war. And it has been the biggest gift. I mean, I may, I don't think I've done an EMDR session in like the past four years, even. But when I need it, I really need it. And then the other thing I need, which is hate that it's true and it's true for my mental health, it's true for perimenopause, it's true for all the things. I have to move my body every day in some way. And I have to practice mindfulness, whether that's formal meditation practice or paying attention to what I see and what I hear and what I touch. And that's if I want to do this work and do it in a way that doesn't affect my kids negatively, because my trauma represents itself as hypervigilance. And if I didn't take care of myself, I would have three homeschooled children who only left the house when I was with them. And that is not healthy. And that's kind of a line for me that that I chose to do this work. They did not. So they they the deal I make for them is they get a healthy mom. They don't get a mom who brings home her trauma and transmits it to them. My job is to transform the trauma and not transmit it. And that's that's the approach I've taken. Am I perfect at it? Not at all. Like there are times I haven't worked out or I'm really grumpy because work was just really hard. And I have kids complaining about ridiculous things, and I've just walked away from a person who, you know, is going back to her trafficker. And so I just, you know, apologize and repair. The kids, as they get older, know a little bit more and more about the work that I do. I also really know when I'm answering something and I worry it might be from hypervigilance. So I, you know, I check with my spouse. I'm like, my inclination is no here, but that might not be from a healthy brain perspective. Like, let's let's check on that sort of thing. And so I have friends who, you know, I'm open about it. My friends who are saying, like, you seem to be falling into a pattern, or that's not the way you normally talk about something. Are you having nightmares sort of thing? It takes a community for my clients to be resilient, and it takes a community for for me to be resilient.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:23

Excellent. Yeah, no, you you not only do your work, but you do the work for for you. It sounds like you do an amazing job because, yeah, and I love that you talk about EMDR therapy for people who don't know what that is. Yeah, it's it's eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing. But it's great for trauma. Actually, my wife is a clinician and she specializes in EMDR. It's amazing in terms of treatment and helping with trauma. And then, like you said, I love how you talked about you have your community, you have your support around you, you have people that you can be honest and you can be transparent with, and the movement. Trauma lives in the body, so when we move, like you said, we're able to release, and then obviously mindfulness and grounding techniques as well, too. So you are definitely doing the work. Uh yeah. Yeah, like you said, you know, none of us are perfect at it. Do the best we can. People who do the work stay well, and it's apparent that you, you know, stay, stay well. I mean, I could see that just by you could you can see the the joy that that you carry as well, too. And you can see a healthy, a very healthy woman. So all right. So I usually, in terms of wrapping up, have four questions I ask, and you know, just kind of like a one or two second sentence response for those questions. Okay, so if someone were listening to this podcast right now, you know, whether it's somebody that's just going through life or maybe even somebody that's a survivor or a victim, and they feel powerless right now, what would you say to them? Powerless in terms of like using their voice and and being able to get help.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:05

Yeah, you are enough.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:08

Excellent. All right. What's one thing an everyday person can do to make a real impact?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:18

See everyone as someone's beloved.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:24

Yeah. I like that. We talked about that, yeah. Who did you become because some of the pain that maybe you've experienced or that you've lived through?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:43

I think right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:46

If you need a little bit more to answer, that's okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:50

So my mom was really sick when I was a kid. Like she was supposed to die, and my parents said goodbye to each other.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:59

And so I think growing up with a love like that, both between them but also to us as kids, really made me live in the power of every moment and every day.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:16

Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, that's powerful. Thank you for sharing that. What do you want your legacy to be? And I'm not talking about in terms of necessarily your career, but in terms of your own soul work. What do you want your legacy to be?

SPEAKER_04 1:16:37

She showed up.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:42

So good. So good. Yeah. Nice. Well, Professor Carr, it has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Your humanness, your knowledge, your information. I mean, I've learned so much just speaking with you. If people want to get into contact with you, do you want to say how they the best way to go about doing that? What do you sure?

SPEAKER_04 1:17:08

I'm on LinkedIn, but also I have a website, Michigan Law, and can reach our clinic at human trafficking at umish.edu.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:16

All right. Excellent. So, yes, contact information. And hopefully at some point, maybe you'll come back and because it's good, because there's again so much more that we can talk about, so much more that we can discuss. And I really, really like the lens that you kind of view things. So I want to say thank you, and I want to say thank you, everybody, for listening to another episode of Finding Your Voice.