Episode 200: Screening and Assessing the Needs of Victims of Human Trafficking: 10 Common Areas of Need

In this episode, we equip you with vital knowledge about what to screen and assess for when assisting victims of human trafficking.  Our trusted guide is none other than Dr. Celia Williamson, director of the Human Trafficking and Social Justice Institute at the University of Toledo. She shines a light on a recently revised screening tool designed to identify at-risk and currently trafficked youth. This episode will help you recognize the 10 vital areas where trafficking victims may require assistance, such as basic needs, safety, orientation, education, and legal aid.

Ever puzzled over how to shield at-risk girls from the clutches of human trafficking? We will provide a brief explanation of the transformative 'best life' curriculum, a powerful resource to empower girls to spot perilous situations and individuals. It also assists them in finding secure solutions and evaluating their choices wisely. March on with us as we navigate the complex needs of survivors, from legal and mental health needs to basic needs and sometimes substance abuse needs. We emphasize the necessity of connecting survivors with the right services and supports, empowering them to regain their own individual power. As we wrap up, we delve into the importance of healthcare and preventive care for survivors, giving you crucial insights into their specific needs and the importance of a holistic approach. Don't miss out!

If you are interested in receiving the latest, free, valid screening tool to be used with youth ages 12-17, please email me at celia.williamson@utoledo.edu 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

You know the why human trafficking work is needed To fight for the freedom of modern day slaves. But love, passion, commitment isn't all you need to be an effective and successful anti-trafficking advocate. Learn the how. I'm Dr Celia Williamson, director of the Human Trafficking and Social Justice Institute at the University of Toledo. Welcome to the Emancipation Nation podcast, where I'll provide you with the latest and best methods, policy and practice discussed by experienced experts in the field, so that you can cut through the noise, save time and be about the work of saving lives. Welcome to the Emancipation Nation. I'm Dr Celia Williamson.

Speaker 1: 0:44

This is episode 200. Can you believe it? I'm going to tell you the truth. I really didn't think I would get to five. So one thing I am, I guess, is consistent.

Speaker 1: 1:01

So in the 200th episode, I want to make sure that we give you something. And so you know, for a couple of years we have been working on validating a screening tool for youth young people under the age of 18, to identify those at risk for human trafficking, particularly sex trafficking, and those who are potentially currently being trafficked. Now we validated the tool and that tool is free. But recently we have developed a second iteration of the tool. So if you happen to have the first screening tool, you want to make sure you pick up the second version, the better version, of this valid tool. This is statistically valid, so it's very easy to use. It's written in fifth grade language so you can screen young people, or by asking them questions or, if they have a good reading comprehension, you can give them the tool and they can complete it themselves and hand it back to you. So it's called the focus screening tool and you know I don't do show notes, so I put it in the description of this episode. So if you can copy and paste that link, you can get that valid tool for free and feel free to use it. So now with the tool, make sure that you know on the other side there are instructions and even if somebody doesn't score in the range of likely being trafficked, pay attention to each one of those questions because there are clinical implications for those. So if somebody answers yes to one of those questions, make sure that you attend to that, and that's what we call prevention. You want to lower risk and increase protection. So when you attend to those risk areas, those are risk factors. When somebody says yes, that places them at elevated risk and the way that you help to change that trajectory toward the vulnerability of being trafficked is to attend to those areas where they are at risk. So even if somebody is not scoring in the range of being trafficked but they do say yes to some of those areas, those areas are risk factors. So make sure if somebody says yes, I use drugs or alcohol, then make sure that they get either a more thorough assessment on drugs and alcohol, that they get into a drug and alcohol prevention program or they get into a drug or alcohol treatment program. Make sure you attend to lower the risks that they are showing you in the screening tool. So different screening and assessment. Screening is just enough information to help you get them in the hands of somebody who is an expert in that area so that they can do a thorough assessment to understand if there's an issue there and then where they should refer them for treatment or for prevention Very important. So today I want to talk about the assessment for human trafficking.

Speaker 1: 4:57

There are 10 common areas where human trafficking victims most commonly need support. So I'm going to go over those 10 areas. The first area is basic needs, and most of us know that food, clothing, shelter. We want to make sure that we attend to the basic needs food, clothing, shelter right. We can't build any type of interventions if somebody doesn't have food, clothing, shelter. That's the first thing we have to do. Maslow's hierarchy of need right. We have to take care of those basic needs to survive.

Speaker 1: 5:38

Along with those basic needs sometimes we forget is safety. That's a basic need. So we always are going to be attending to safety and there are lots of safety plans online for you or your organization to choose from. But you want to make sure that you uncover all of the ways that they may not be safe or feel safe and to develop a plan of action to increase that safety and security. So, basic needs food, clothing, shelter, safety.

Speaker 1: 6:16

Then next, you might want to depending on how much of a crisis it is or an emergency it is, but it's somewhere you want to make sure that you orient the victim or survivor to your services so that they know how to access them, who they should be talking to, when, when they're going to be there with you today, what is expected, their rights to refuse services, all the things they need to be oriented to. And sometimes this is very important but we forget about it because we know the system we're inside, so we forget to orient people to our services, to other people's services that they could potentially access. And along with orientation is education. So you may want to educate your victim or survivor about the law of the land. If the law stands with them, let them know that, because there are some people involved in the commercial sex trade that believe they are committing a crime and so they don't even understand that we have passed laws in many cases to support them and that there are certain rights that they have and there are certain resources that they have the right to access to. Some people educate in our program we educate on various aspects trauma, bonding trauma, those types of things. So orientation education very important.

Speaker 1: 7:55

First, basic needs number one, orientation education number two. They don't have to necessarily go in this order, although basic needs should always be attended to first. Another area that we want to assess is legal needs, not only the trafficking experience, and some people have the right to not pursue prosecution or to wait to pursue prosecution but there are all kinds of legal needs. Perhaps they have a child, by the trafficker or by anybody, and they're not collecting child support. Perhaps this person has opened a bank account, credit cards in their name. This happens sometimes in labor trafficking. So sometimes there may be theft that they've been charged with and all the things that they didn't really have control of, but the trafficker may have manipulated or forced them to get involved in other illegal activities. Perhaps they have drug charges. There may be a bunch of legal needs. So we want to assess those, make sure that we address those Mental health needs. We know that disproportionately, survivors of human trafficking may experience post-traumatic stress disorder, mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, those types of things. So we want to make sure that we screen for those and then assess those and then, of course, with any of these, we have to put them in the hands of the expert.

Speaker 1: 9:38

Hey, I want to break into this episode to let you know that if you're interested in getting ahead of the problem of human trafficking by engaging in prevention and changing the trajectory of the lives of at-risk youth, then listen and learn about what really works in the field of anti-trafficking prevention curriculum. Follow me here. The first issue is to understand that every youth is not at the same level of risk. There are youth at higher risk than other youth. Second, for those at higher risk. Education doesn't necessarily translate into lowered risk. Youth at high risk will be educated and will remain at high risk because there are other factors keeping them at high risk. Third, understand that sex traffickers don't commonly snatch youth off the street and chain their risks and ankles. They manipulate them and chain their minds and hearts in what we call trauma bonding. If that's true, then we need to train youth to see the manipulation coming, assess it for what it is and do something preemptively about it.

Speaker 1: 10:45

My best life human trafficking prevention curriculum for at-risk girls uses the safer method to teach girls how to see risky situations and risky people, assess the situation, find suitable and safe solutions, evaluate those solutions and respond. We talk about support and relationships and boundaries and we reduce the risk factors that increase the opportunities for someone to remain vulnerable and to be trafficked. If you're interested in lowering risk and perhaps changing the trajectory of someone's life for the better, check out my free webinar on the best life curriculum at CeliaWiliamsoncom. Learn how to become a trained best life facilitator today and now on with the podcast. So they have legal needs we need to put them in the hands of a good, trauma-informed lawyer. Mental health needs we need to link them up with a good mental health center in person and not just give them the name and the phone number, but a soft handoff where we are introducing them to the person and making sure they feel comfortable with this mental health advocate.

Speaker 1: 12:07

Substance abuse Many survivors may get involved in substance abuse as a method of coping. So whether they might need substance abuse treatment in terms of detox and then inpatient treatment or intensive outpatient treatment or ANA meetings, whatever they might need, we want to make sure that we ask questions around that and their needs. Let's see. So we've done. Basic needs orientation, education, legal mental health, sums, abuse that's five. We want to assess for injury and impairment. Has there been any acute injuries that they need tended to, or chronic injury or impairment? And when I say impairment I mean disabilities, intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities. For instance, over 40% of women we surveyed in my community experienced a significant head or neck injury during their trafficking experience. So that alerts us to the possibility that they could have experienced a traumatic brain injury. So I might then screen. Well, I don't do direct service anymore, but someone might screen for traumatic brain injury and there are free tools online TBI, free tools that you can just screen somebody and again, that just alerts you so that you can get them to a neurologist for a full workup and then maybe to a neuropsychologist to develop a treatment plan.

Speaker 1: 13:59

Next, we want to assess for services for dependence. Some survivors may be taking care of an elderly mother or father, children, those types of things, and we know that if we don't attend to that, if we ignore that that they will, they're going to do whatever possible, just like you to take care of loved ones. So we need to support them in that. We need to help them with that. Next is life skills and supports. You know, some survivors have been under the control of someone else and so they may have missed those daily living skills that we all have and we take for granted.

Speaker 1: 14:42

When we talk about supports, we're talking about that can be broken down into two things Formal supports. So formal supports are agencies, organizations, faith-based organizations that are currently in their lives, whether it's government run programs, Medicaid, church folk, whatever it is that those formal support systems help them in. We need to know who those are in case we want to be able to supplement or further support by connecting them to other formal support systems that we realize they need and that they said that they would love to have in their life. Then there are informal support systems, and those are friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, and that informal support system is very important. I mean, if you think about your informal support system, you know like who do you call when your car breaks down, who do you borrow $20 from when you're broken to your next paycheck, who makes you laugh, who do you go out to dinner with to, just you know, de-stress? Those informal supports are very important.

Speaker 1: 16:02

And so when, sometimes, when survivors come out of a trafficking experience, they don't have an informal support system, not a healthy one. So helping them establish an informal support system is a way of eventually working yourself out of a job. They won't have to depend on you. They will have a formal support system and an informal support system. The ninth one is empowerment, and it's not like they may have never been empowered. We have to help them reclaim their power, and that may be a job. That may be going back to school, that may be as simple as helping them connect to the people who have the services they need, role-playing with them, maybe talking on the phone first, and then eventually they're taking care of their own business and you're just standing there to support and then eventually you're not there at all. They have reclaimed their power and they can take care of business.

Speaker 1: 17:13

The last one is healthcare. We wanna make sure that any acute issues or chronic issues you know, we did a study of 1,000 women in my community who had been incarcerated. We separated those who had been incarcerated for prostitution at any time in their life and those who had been involved or accused, convicted, of other crimes. We ran the analysis and we found that women who had been involved in prostitution suffered way more mental health issues and way more health conditions, such chronic health conditions such as diabetes, way more asthma, heart conditions, those type of things. So healthcare, not only like bumps and bruises and cuts and things that need immediate attention, but chronic conditions, and we wanna get them likely to a clinic as soon as possible, but then over time, a primary care physician and eventually we wanna work on preventive care. The healthier they get, the more we start to look at the other end, not victim survivor, but becoming a thriver. So some of the preventive care is gonna be important.

Speaker 1: 18:45

So those are the 10 areas of assessment that may be specific to those involved in human trafficking and then we can do deeper assessments by getting them in front of experts to take care of these issues. So, running through them again basic needs, which includes food, clothing, shelter and safety that's number one. Orientation and education, legal needs, mental health needs, substance abuse needs, assessing for injury and impairment, services for dependence, life skills and formal and informal supports, empowerment and healthcare. If you have a screening tool or assessment tool, depending on your agency, that covers these common areas, then you are on the right track and some of your clients will need perhaps one, three, seven, eight. Others will need two, six, four and 10. So your intervention, the treatment plan, the work that you do together, is still very much individualized to the client's needs and particularly those issues the client wants to work on. So we want to empower them always to make choices, even though we might think you really need to work on this area, if they wanna work on a different area. We want to empower that because we want to respect that and empower our survivors to make choices. So those are the 10 areas.

Speaker 1: 20:34

I hope you enjoyed the 200th episode. I hope you will get access to our focus screening tool for youth about 12 to 17 years old is what this tool is designed for, and continue the great work that you do. Till next time the fight continues. Let's not just do something, let's do the best thing. If you liked this episode of Emancipation Nation, please subscribe and I'll send you the weekly podcast. Until then, the fight continues.