U.S. law defines human trafficking as “the use of force, fraud, or coercion to compel a person into commercial sex acts or labor or services against his or her will.” Inducing a minor into commercial sex is considered human trafficking regardless of the presence of force, fraud or coercion. Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center is one of the few organizations in the city that works specifically with children who are victims of human trafficking.
For January’s Human Trafficking Awareness Month, we interviewed Human Trafficking Specialist Laura Ng about her team’s important work at ChicagoCAC.
At ChicagoCAC we have intake coordinators, family advocates, and family support specialists. For my teammate Tiffany (CSEC Specialist) and me, all of those roles are sort of combined into one. I’ve been working with Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center for over a year, but I’ve been in the anti-trafficking field for nearly a decade.
On top of responding to direct allegations of human trafficking, our job is also to review every single case that’s scheduled for a forensic interview at ChicagoCAC and look for any of the red flags that indicate somebody might be a victim of human trafficking, or cases that might be ‘more than’ a sexual abuse case. Once those red flags are confirmed by the child, caregiver, or anyone else on the investigative team, we’ll screen that case for human trafficking or the risk of human trafficking, and depending on the result of our screening, we’ll accept the child into our program.
A big part of my job is providing intensive advocacy, support and mentorship for kids who have been identified as victims of human trafficking or who are at high risk of it in the future. Individuals stay in “the Life,” a common term used to indicate someone is engaged in commercial sex, because they see their trafficker as someone who loves them or who is providing for them in some other emotional or tangible way. They see it as a relationship. We’re intervening and helping kids resist trafficking by creating an alternate, healthy relationship that can support both them and their caregivers.
Restoring a sense of agency and empowerment to survivors is essential. I tell my clients from the get-go that they’re in charge and I report to them. It’s not just another service provider saying ‘we need to meet Monday at 6pm.’ Tiffany and I are available whenever the child wants to talk – over text message, phone calls, anything. A lot of times our conversations are quick check-ins, and every so often we might go a little deeper into some of the needs and dreams they have. Before COVID we’d go to their plays, their basketball games, wherever they needed us to be.
In addition to our work directly with clients, Tiffany and I are both on several task forces that look at victim services and how to be better informed for human trafficking work, legislative goals to push through, and cases that are worthy to note for how the system has worked or not worked for victims. Recently, I’ve been helping Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) rethink how the agency reviews human trafficking cases. Currently, DCFS only investigates cases when an offender is in a caregiving role, such as a family member or babysitter. By changing or expanding that language, more trafficking cases could fall under DCFS’s purview, which could lead to more support and services for survivors. I really thrive on creating this kind of larger change.
The isolation caused by COVID-19 has also led to a sharp increase in online exploitation, which includes children being coerced or threatened in different ways to share increasingly explicit images or videos. Kids get bored in lockdown, and then go on the run, meeting in person with people they’ve encountered online and who are offering them a place to go that’s not their family or home, their same boring four walls. It’s devastating for the relationships we’re trying to foster, unless law enforcement finds the child and we’re able to reconnect with them. Still, the relationship with that kid has no end date until they choose to end it. If they go on the run and then come back and want to restart the relationship with us, their willingness to keep talking to us is a huge strength.
Tiffany and I have seen an uptick in the number of cases referred to us, so an ongoing challenge is to educate people on what Human Trafficking looks like and what the red flags are. We’ll keep hearing things like ‘Oh, this kid is self-advertising; they don’t have a pimp; no one’s holding them against their will’. Those are the harmful ideas we continually need to combat.
When you’re working with youth, you thrive on watching them grow. I’m excited to keep building ChicagoCAC’s human trafficking programming, and to keep making change on a greater level.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Find out more about potential red flags for child human trafficking, such as:
- Frequently meeting up with someone they met online
- A child keeps coming home with gifts from unknown sources
- Frequent periods of the child going on run
- Repeated allegations of older boyfriends
- A caregiver describes child as “‘just being promiscuous’
ChicagoCAC’s trafficking specialists also offer trainings for professionals, faith communities, parent groups and others. Request a training from Laura and her team to raise awareness of warning signs and learn ways how to help minor victims of sex or labor trafficking.