Stuck in Traffick: Human Trafficking Awareness in Community
By Charlette Daigneault

Behind closed doors hides the unknown. One is unaware of what goes on, or what is kept within concealed walls. Human trafficking is an issue that often remains undetected. However, in San Luis Obispo County, there are various individuals in MbA (Mountainbrook Abolitionists) who strive to open every closed door hiding a human trafficking case.
MbA is a local organization that is modeled after the Grace Network in Sacramento, California. It is composed of individuals who are able to provide anything that is essential for helping someone go from a victim to a survivor.
Rebecca Turner, the Executive Director of MbA, explained how it came to be and how they spread human trafficking awareness.
“I intern at Mountainbrook Community Church with Outreach,” Turner said. “We started MbA in the summer of 2012. We had a guest speaker come in who spoke about the issue and also had sign-up sheets to join our group. Then we started meeting weekly.”
While the members of MbA spend a significant amount of time fighting against human trafficking, the members do so on their own time.
“We are all volunteers,” Turner said. “Our main goals are to spread awareness, education, and help survivors in practical ways. For example, one girl needed to be relocated to a different county because it was no longer safe where she was at. We were able to help her find housing, get a job and get her license.”
Luke Adams, a Cal Poly junior and cofounder of MbA, shared how human trafficking is often misrepresented.
“Human trafficking is not all about someone being smuggled into the United States, as people often think,” Adams said. “It’s not just about someone moving. It’s about the exploitation of people. That exploitation does not necessarily have to be labor. It’s domestic servitude and can be a whole range of things.”
The state of California itself harbors three of the FBI’s highest sex trafficking areas in the nation. These cities are San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.
Turner explained how the Central Coast is a plausible area for many human trafficking incidents.
“There is a route where women are trafficked, and we’re in the middle of it,” Turner said. “We are right on the 101. The women stay here and some of them post advertisements on websites. There are certain keywords indicating that the women are underage, such as ‘new’ or ‘fresh,’ which automatically makes it commercial sex trafficking.”
Human trafficking is a 32 billion dollar annual criminal-driven industry. The majority of traffickers come from the United States itself.
“We have a demand in this county,” Adams said. “There is exploitation with sex trafficking and labor trafficking. We don’t know the exact number of human trafficking victims in the county, but we know it is an issue.”
Danielle Veatch, a member of MbA, traveled to Brazil to work with human trafficking victims.
“Last year I was connected to Exodus Cry, which is a human trafficking organization out of Kansas City,” Veatch said. “My friend connected me to one of the coordinators there in Brazil during the World Cup. [The coordinator] reached out to me and asked me what my story was and how I wanted to get involved. They had twelve different teams go to the twelve different cities where the World Cup was hosted. I was placed in Curitiba. Essentially, what we did is we ran a house of prayer for 32 days, 24/7.”
Outreach developed a training program to inform individuals about the issue of human trafficking to help bring trafficking to a stop.
“Six days a week we would do Outreach on the streets,” Veatch said. “My responsibility was to do the Outreach trainings. Me and my team leader would both do the trainings and split them up, so I would do them three days a week. We would train the locals in the city because our goal was to equip the locals so they could continue [fighting against human trafficking] after we left. We equiped about 200 locals altogether. During training, we would juggle between the topic of human trafficking, Outreach and the restoration and rescue process.”
Outreach is a hands-on organization that will go to the places where various issues, such as human trafficking, are happening.
“We would go out on the streets for about two to three hours at a time,” Veatch said. “My team and I would assess the atmosphere because in prostitution areas you would also deal with gang members, pimps and traffickers. You never knew what you were going to get. One night might be completely fine while the next could be crazy. One night we couldn’t go out because there was rioting in the streets.”
Veatch was able to get to know the girls involved with prostitution and human trafficking on a more personal level.
“The cool part was that while we were doing Outreach, we would talk to the girls and go to where they were working,” Veatch said. “That’s where we reach [the girls]. You don’t go to them while they are sleeping or eating. We would begin a conversation with them because part of the process of Outreach and rescue is to form a relationship with [the girls]. For them, they’ve been exploited and they’ve been treated like they are something to be used. When we go reach out to them, we have to go in with a completely different perspective and attitude. We were there to get to know the girls and build up a relationship and trust.”
Outreach attempts to build a relationship with the girls involved in trafficking and prostitution to assist them in finding a better life.
“One girl was able to get out of her [trafficking] situation in about a week,” Veatch said. “The other 49 I worked with are still going through the process [to get out of trafficking]. Getting them out really comes down to building that trust and letting the girls know that there is a better life other than being exploited.”
The legal age of consent is 14 in Brazil. There is no legal infrastructure that keeps children from being sexually exploited. Exodus Cry is currently working with the Federal Government to make prostitution in Brazil illegal.
“In my particular city there was a lot of adult prostitution, meaning the girls were 18 and older,” Veatch said. “We couldn’t necessarily rescue them out of brothels like you could with children. According to the UN policy and standards, if you are under 18 then you are being exploited. Even with parent consent, [the children] are still being exploited. It’s called child trafficking. But if [individuals] are 18 or older, then trafficking is much more difficult to prove.”
For many of the girls involved in prostitution, it is not the occupation they chose for themselves.
“Some of the girls were not there on their own free will,” Veatch said. “There’s usually something that is putting them [in prostitution], whether it’s poverty, a lack of education, or something else. Sometimes prostitution is all they know. To a lot of the girls, prostitution is a history in their family, so they don’t know anything else.”
While numerous prostitutes did not become prostitutes on their own free will, leaving their occupation is no easy task.
“Statistics show that the majority of prostitutes would leave if they knew how to,” Veatch said. “They would leave if they didn’t have the shame, guilt and other horrible emotions that they have to deal with. We really have to deal with girls that have had severe physical and emotional trauma done to them. Almost 90% of all the girls have PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)  on the same level as war veterans and torture victims. You think about being raped once and how traumatic that is, but this is happening to these girls somewhere between ten to 30 times a day.”
Emotional trauma is not the only hardship that individuals involved in prostitution and/or  human trafficking victims have to fear. WomensLaw.org states that “women in prostitution have a death rate that is 40 times higher than women who are not involved in prostitution.”

“I was talking to this one girl, and she said that she had been working at a brothel for eight years,” Veatch said. “Most of the other girls she worked with had died during the time she was there. She said that they had either died of a drug overdose, disease or murder.”
While Veatch and her team tried to reach out the girls, many of them were fearful of the gestures.
“There was this one night where we didn’t talk to anybody,” Veatch said. “Every single girl we saw that night would just run away. They didn’t trust anyone. The girls would also be fearful of retaliation from their pimp or trafficker.”
Human trafficking is more common of an issue than some individuals might think. Turner explained the risk factors for being trafficked.
“It can happen to anyone,” Turner said. “For what some call prostitution, the average age  is 12-14. But it’s not prostitution, it’s trafficking. Traffickers are targeters of youth, and runaways are at the biggest risk. Every 48 hours one-in-three runaways will be approached by a trafficker.”
Adams also explained the work that MbA does to spread human trafficking awareness on the Central Coast.
“A huge part of what we do is spread awareness to the community and professionals,” Adams said. “We are growing in our services. We want people to be able to identify that there are victims so that they can report suspicious activity related to human trafficking so the law enforcement can step in. Law enforcement should change the common mentality that these victims are not prostitutes, but victims who need the proper support.”
“[The rescue process] is not a one time thing,” Veatch said. “It really is a process. Some of the girls we dealt with had traffickers while others didn’t. However, [the untrafficked] girls were still being exploited through prostitution.”
While human trafficking may seem like an overwhelming situation to some individuals, there are small ways to help fight it.
“Everyone can do something to fight [human trafficking],” Turner said. “For instance, you could buy fair trade products. Language usage matters as well to spread cultural awareness. The word ‘pimp’ should be changed to ‘trafficker’ and ‘john’ should be changed to ‘buyer.”
“Human trafficking is a real issue,” Veatch said. “What people need to realize is that trafficking is an issue here in our own backyard. Every single person can make a difference in this fight against human trafficking. There is a lot to know and a lot to learn. It will take more then one individual to put an end [to trafficking]. It will take a whole society and culture. Awareness is the first step.”

AGHS senior Charlette Daigneault is a human paradox. She is an extroverted introvert, a realistic idealist, playfully studious, flexibly stubborn, passionately objective, sentimentally progressive, and is critically forgiving. But one thing is certain: she is herself. She loves the chill of diving into the ocean’s waters, the sensation of the wind stroking her face, and the sound of winter’s rain. Charlette has spent two years on the staff of the Eagle Times, the student-run newspaper of Arroyo Grande High School. This year she serves as the Copy/ OP-Ed Editor. She also had the opportunity to intern at the Santa Maria Sun during the summer. Her plans after graduating include attending Humboldt State University as a double communications and English major. She also plans to do some humanitarian relief work in Africa. While she is not entirely certain where life will take her, Charlette plans to do something beautiful with it.