Imagine being far from home.
You were promised a good (or at least better) paying job that would allow you to support your children back home.
Instead, you find yourself working in a brothel, servicing up to 20 “clients” a day out of fear that your traffickers will hurt your family if you try to leave.
This is the reality for an untold number of people who have been trafficked from places around the world, possibly to a location in your own backyard.
According to the US Department of State, trafficking is a blanket term for activities involved when one person obtains or holds another person in compelled service.
These activities include involuntary servitude, slavery, debt bondage, and forced labor, which encompasses: child sex trafficking, child soldiers, forced child labor, involuntary domestic servitude, debt bondage among migrant laborers, bonded labor, forced labor, and sex trafficking.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime identifies 161 countries that are affected by human trafficking. Most, if not all, of the countries that have hosted listeners for our Trauma series are included in this country count.
While those of us in the health and mental health communities are perhaps not the best people to break these trafficking rings, we are perfectly placed to help those who have already survived it.
We can start by learning how to treat the trauma that these survivors overwhelming suffer.
Project Reach, part of Bessel van der Kolk’s Trauma Center program in Brookline, Massachusetts, is one of the few US organizations that offer specialized mental health services for trafficking survivors.
Project Reach personnel travel to sites where human trafficking has been identified in order to provide crisis-oriented mental health services to survivors.
They also provide seminars for practitioners in how to treat trafficking survivors so that the wider health and mental health community is more able to effectively help any trafficking survivors they may encounter.
Because this is such an important, yet poorly known topic, I interviewed Project Reach’s Program Director, Elizabeth Hopper, PhD to find out more about their work and also to discuss some of the special clinical issues involved when treating a survivor of trafficking.
Please listen below to our short interview.
For more on Project Reach, you can visit their website here.
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Have you come across human trafficking in your work? How can the practitioner community help in the larger issues of trafficking prevention and identification? Please leave a comment below.
You must try and not let your feelings of fear overtake you. You may have to be put on some medications to see how they work. If they help you, you wouldn’t have to go to a hospital. Why not ask the Lord to come into your heart? He loves you and wants to share your life with Him. God can help you lots !
I just finished reading Girls Like Us, Rachel Lloyd’s moving story of life on the streets for girls who are victims of commercial sexual exploitation. To learn the degree to which this criminal enslavement of girls is taking place in the U.S. and the world was shocking. I applaud the courageous work being done to help the traumatized victims. And I look forward to the day when someone somewhere puts the spotlight on the “why” of it all. Who is selling and buying these children? Why are these men not in prison? How can we change the mentality that creates such a tragic problem?
Thank you so much for shining light on this dark corner of human misery. At Free the Slaves, we have been exploring partnering with mental health groups to do exactly what Elizabeth Hopper tells us Project Reach does. We know how very difficult it is to help build local capacity in areas that may lack anyone trained in mental health generally or trauma specifically. When I did a training for program personnel ministering to restavek children in Haiti, I asked what might be a symptom of PTSD. The first responder volunteered “egoism”. Having researched the mental health practices for former slaves in Togo, Cote D’Ivoire, India and Haiti, I rejoice to know that a solid program like Project Reach now exists.
Hi Pam somehow I maenagd to miss your emails, but I found them after seeing your comment here. That is amazing news! woohoo! Thank you very much for all your help with this!