EPISODE 3: DEBORAH SIGMUND, CHERYL CSIKY AND CALLAHAN WALSH
Andy Miles: Hello and welcome to "Turning A Million Eyes To Save Lives," a podcast co-production of Innocents at Risk and Studio C.
Innocents at Risk is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2005 to fight child exploitation and human trafficking. Our mission is to educate citizens about the grave issue of global and local human trafficking. We are dedicated to protecting children from all forms of abuse, and work to end child exploitation and child trafficking everywhere. Innocents at Risk conducts educational outreach programs through churches, clubs, organizations, schools, embassies, and now this podcast.
I’m Andy Miles and on this third episode of the series we’ll hear from Deborah Sigmund, Founder and Director of Innocents at Risk; Callahan Walsh, Executive Director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC); and Cheryl Csiky, Executive Director of In Our Backyard. We’ll be talking about efforts made by all three organizations in combating human trafficking and child exploitation at and around the Super Bowl.
As major events in the U. S. attract more people, they also attract more sex traffickers and more buyers. Law enforcement faces overwhelming challenges to try to stay ahead of the traffickers. Unfortunately, the Super Bowl has become a magnet for traffickers. For the past several years, nonprofit organizations have gone to the host city of the Super Bowl to work with law enforcement in numerous ways.
This year, with the Super Bowl in Los Angeles, Kevin Malone, former general manager of the L.A. Dodgers and the co-founder and CEO of The U.S. Institute Against Human Trafficking, is leading efforts to help fight trafficking during the week of the Super Bowl. Mr. Malone formed the Alliance Against Human Trafficking and Exploitation. Some of the organizations that are working with this alliance are A21, It’s A Penalty, Operation Underground Railroad, and Indianapolis Colts head coach Frank Reich and his family. In addition, the NFL has given financial support for this alliance.
We’ll also discuss the EARN IT Act, bipartisan legislation that was recently reintroduced in the Senate by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, and co-sponsored in the House by Representative Sylvia Garcia, Democrat of Texas, and Representative Ann Wagner, Republican of Missouri. The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act -- the EARN IT Act -- will protect children everywhere by eliminating blanket immunity for violations of laws related to online child sexual abuse material. Innocents at Risk believes that tech companies need to be held responsible and no longer turn a blind eye to child sexual material on their websites.
The EARN It Act will also establish a commission of survivors, technology representatives, and government stakeholders to create recommendations and voluntary best practices for tech companies to respond to the global pandemic of online sexual exploitation of children. The EARN IT Act will finally introduce accountability for big tech. Please ask your senators and member of Congress to support this important legislation today. We need the EARN IT Act in order to make the internet a safer place for our children. Thank you.
I’m going to turn things over to Innocents at Risk Founder and Director Deborah Sigmund now. Deborah.
Deborah Sigmund: Thank you, Andy. I’m so very pleased that Cal is with us today and Cheryl also. We’ve been working with both organizations throughout, through our history of Innocents at Risk, since 2005, so we wanted to come to you today – and thank you for joining us, by the way – we wanted you to hear about what groups are doing, what nonprofits are doing, and also church groups, universities, and coaches are doing to help prevent trafficking during the Super Bowl.
Human trafficking, especially child trafficking, is on the rise during major sports events, and the Super Bowl happens to be the major of all sports events, and traffickers take the opportunity during this time and they basically are out marketing children. About eight years ago Innocents at Risk decided, with some of our other partners — after we’d already established the Flight Attendant Initiative in 2008, we had an army of angels ready and willing to do whatever they needed to do to help assist in saving children, so what we would do was have these flight attendants and we would do awareness events. Innocents at Risk has worked previously with Shared Hope International and other groups during the – in hotels surrounding the Super Bowl, and the flight attendants themselves operated in plain clothes with the eyes and ears on the ground in airports and surrounding that. We did the same thing in hotels, and we’re looking for situations of trafficking, which, as we’ve gone over in our previous podcasts, women and children can be identified. If you really look, if you really open your eyes, you can see something if it doesn’t look correct. For instance, girls coming bewildered; they’d never been to a big city; they didn’t know where they were going but someone was going to meet them, so this was reported and these girls were followed. That was one case. But it was very important for us and other organizations to work with hotels and notify the check-in desk. We had trainings for maid services, check-ins at hotels. Marriott Hotels has been a real leader and a partner in this with us, as well as Delta Airlines, and all the organizations and all the airlines have gotten involved and have supported Innocents at Risk and our nongovernment partnerships.
The year that the Super Bowl was in Phoenix, for instance, the late Senator John McCain, who had learned about human trafficking – he learned about it years ago from me but he learned more about it from his wife, so he decided to give us the opportunity to talk to a group of CEOs who were coming to Phoenix to meet with him, so we turned this into a big awareness event. Shared Hope was also involved with us, and I was on a panel with NCMEC, Delta Airlines, and some other NGOs. By talking to CEOs from around the world, not just in the United States, they were absolutely flabbergasted to know that the Super Bowl was an attraction for traffickers and they were very glad to learn about it.
So we hope you’re glad to learn about it today and we want you, whether you’re going to the Super Bowl or you’re going to watch it on television with friends or at a party, but to talk about this and to spread this message, because it’s so important. The more eyes we can turn on this issue, the more victims, innocent women and children we can save.
So now we have another expert, a real expert. Cheryl is going to talk to us about her organization, In Our Backyard.
So, Cheryl, thank you for being with us today.
Cheryl Csiky: Thank you, Deborah. I think you nailed it on the head. I heard a lot of wisdom in your experience in joining alongside Super Bowl efforts. Some people are aware, you know, that this is like the big mega-hotspot for human trafficking. Others really still have no idea, so it’s important that we host awareness campaigns, education and training for every single person in the public. It really does matter.
In Our Backyard first started in 2010 in efforts with the Super Bowl campaign, and again, it was organic community need. You know, we’re a nonprofit that fights human trafficking by linking arms across the United States, so when you start out, you’re just saying, how do I help? Right? I think that’s something we all can relate to. You hear about an issue and you want to know, what can I actually do with my hands to do something? So law enforcement had asked us to come alongside around the Super Bowl because what we conducted was a Freedom Sticker outreach. We have Freedom Stickers that have the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline on them.
There’s a 2016 study that said it was the number one way to increase arrests and we also need to find a way to let survivors out there know that there are resources for them, because there’s a lot of fear of calling law enforcement, 911, so this alternative is to help reach them just where they’re at. If there is any fear instilled, you know, by a trafficker or by someone grooming them, usually there's isolation. Right? They want that person to only lean on them and to fear that they’re the ones who will be in trouble if they reached out for help, so we really started with the hotline awareness. Today we have over 500,000 Freedom Stickers posted across America, but Super Bowl kind of started in that general arena for us saying, what’s one thing I can do? Raise awareness about the hotline. We don’t have to think about, like, superhero capes – right? – and like get out there on the ground and think about rescue and all these words, but it was just a very regular, tactile way for us to do our part in the fight because there are a lot of local nonprofits and case managers and things like that who are on the ground, so we started out that way, and what we learned – and everyone learns – right? – when you’re out there learning how you can help – is we found out that convenience stores were the most open-armed to us to help be on the lookout for missing children and maybe someone who’s prostituted, exploited, and trafficked, and that was not news to us, but we didn’t know how well received it would be. They want to know, how can we stay connected after Super Bowl? So that’s kind of what led into our overall outreach with Convenience Stores Against Trafficking, and if we think about that, you know, convenience stores are open long hours. They’re an essential business during the pandemic. They see people at two in the morning – right? – and they see people in and out. They might see someone over months of a period of time, so we started to learn, like, wow, these people really are the eyes and ears of our communities. They’re kind of like that neighborhood watch program, if we would be willing to put that up, and start learning from them on what they see and making sure they know how to report.
That’s really where our efforts have, I would say, advanced to real-time tips, specifically around the Super Bowl. When we can reach convenience stores and have them as the first line of awareness and watching out for people, we get direct tips right away when we show up at Super Bowl, so we’ve kind of gone from there and it’s, you know, our 13th year now, so we start out with a huge missing children outreach event. We invite – usually a church will host us. This year it was in Inglewood at the Center of Hope, and we partnered with lots of local nonprofits who were on the ground, like Forgotten Children, Inc., ZOE International, a few other ones, but it was a way for us to let all the advocates know, there are safety issues involved now when you’re out at outreach. We’re in Los Angeles in Inglewood. We did an entire partnership with NCOSE to help safety measures, de-escalate situations, because street outreach, as well know, is where – we know trafficking’s happening. It’s called the track. Right? We know women, girls, men, and boys are on these tracks, and to approach them is actually pretty dangerous, so we wanted to make sure any teams locally going out there, yes, you can train your volunteers to do that but also remember you can utilize convenience stores who are already there on the ground and can keep watch, so that’s kind of our partnership this year, and once that event is finished, all those tips that are created – usually every outreach we have an incident reported instantly; I already made a report to NCMEC – (laughs) – or a missing children is seen, so we usually focus on missing children booklets. We have about 36 missing children from the NCMEC site and referrals that we focus on and we let the community know: If you can look out for these children, you can take these books to convenience store workers, have them pass out to the people even in the store. Convenience stores see half the American population every single day. It’s a great way for an awareness effort, but also, when they leave the store, would that convenience store be willing to post that Freedom Sticker with the hotline on it, once they leave, in their restroom for the rest of the year. We don’t want to show up at Super Bowl and leave the city – you know, just left. Right? That would be not the best way. (Laughs.) So finding these relationships with convenience stores when we leave and every tip that’s created, you know, is sent in to the appropriate local hotline, national hotline, you know, missing kids, and we have an intelligence command post that also takes on those cases and we help law enforcement create cases and really give them something that, you know, human trafficking charges can be placed with. You know, there’s a lot of arrests on the demand side, but our team works diligently with, you know, other NGOs, law enforcement, embedded agencies to make sure we’re all in a room together and we’re there at Super Bowl ready to help any situation that might come up, and it’s just amazing to see when the community gets it. You know, like they can go out and post a Freedom Sticker, hand out booklets, and then they can make reports, teach their community how to report, and then know that there are people on the other side of that phone call – right? – to help people. It’s pretty inspiring. You realize you’re on the goodwill-impact side of vision, especially in, I would say, like, the darkest era of human trafficking being online. What we’re seeing is it’s younger – traffickers are young, victims are younger, and, you know, this whole online strategy for our own, you know, well-being as a community just in general, we don’t stop and look around. I think you said that, Deborah. Like, if I asked you to sit at a convenience store for 30 minutes, imagine what you might see, but everyone’s busy grabbing their gas, looking at their phone, paying at the pump, never going in, and getting out. Even with hotels: You’re checking in; your bags are driving you nuts. (Laughs.) You don’t know where you are and you’re not paying attention to your surroundings either, so at Super Bowl, traffickers are going to use that to their advantage because no one knows where they are, they’re all tourists, no one’s going to accuse or look around, and they’re able to make huge profits off of us just being, you know, pretty much wandering tourists around our own area for Super Bowl, so we have to remember there’s a safety issue out there and we can see something and say something, and trust your gut. Like you said, is there a girl bewildered? Does she not have a purse? Is she looking to meet someone but doesn’t look safe? There’s just – you know, no 14-year-old girl should be by herself looking to meet somebody. That’s a red flag, no matter if it’s a trafficker or just maybe a not great person, you know, who just wants to take advantage of her, so just remember, we are still a neighborhood watch program, even around Super Bowl, and the Super Bowl hosts at least a week of parties. There’s increased entertainment. It’s not the football that’s the problem. Right? It’s a grand event for a whole week before the game. Most people don’t go to the game. (Laughs.) I don’t know one person who’s been to the actual Super Bowl game, to be honest.
Deborah Sigmund: That’s not true. (Laughs.)
Cheryl Csiky: (Laughs.) And we don’t get to go to game. There’s no perks. But, you know, people are there for the party atmosphere, and we just have to make sure we’re being safe and helping women and children and men and boys understand that there are people out there who are watching and who will help, and again, working with NCMEC, you know, we are assigned an analyst from them and they are there next to us linking arms with us, and it makes such a difference to know, like, behind that hotline number, behind that website, there are real people who really help and really care.
Deborah Sigmund: Cal, do you want to add something to that? We have Cal Walsh from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and we are so grateful that you’re here today, Cal.
Callahan Walsh: Thank you. Well, thank you for having me.
Yeah, I’ve been involved with the Center almost my whole life. My parents co-founded the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children when my brother Adam was kidnapped and murdered in south Florida in 1981, and back then, local law enforcement, federal law enforcement just did not know how to look for missing children at that time. There was no national response. Local law enforcement, you know, helped in the immediacy but there really wasn’t much that they knew how to do. You know, they were well intended, but they just didn’t have the training; they didn’t have the experience to deal with cases like this, so my parents founded the National Center – it started as the Adam Walsh Resource Center – in their garage just off a card table and a landline telephone, and my parents, time and time again, would travel to Washington, D.C., try to lobby on behalf of victims rights, and it was in 1984, when President Reagan appropriated federal funding to create the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where we changed the name, we moved the headquarters up to Washington, D.C., and we started to work on the issues that we’re currently working on today, 37 years later.
We’ve helped in the recovery of over 350,000 missing children. We serve as the clearinghouse for these types of issues. But while many people understand and know the missing side of what we do, the exploitation is just as big and if not ramping up even more. I mean, we’ve seen the reports coming into our CyberTipline, which the CyberTipline is a program that we run at the National Center. It’s a reporting mechanism for any internet service provider, so your Microsoft, Facebook, Google, you know, all the rest, they’re mandated by law to report any incidences of suspected child sexual abuse that happens online. Law enforcement, victims themselves, and family members, the public can also make reports.
In 2019, we received 16.9 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation. In 2020, we received 21.7 million reports, an increase of about 26 percent, so we’re seeing the exploitation online just increase rapidly. Especially during this lockdown stage that we’re in, everybody’s experiencing increased screen time, and this increases the opportunities for exploiters to harm and prey on children. We’ve seen chatter on the dark web amongst these predators, amongst these exploiters sharing best practices, tips on how to groom and lure children away from the home. In fact, online enticement, that category alone grew by 100 percent from 2019 to 2020, and it’s just – it’s an alarming rate that we’re seeing at the National Center on the exploitation side, and that’s often where we come in – trafficking victims come into our crosshairs because they go missing and then they become exploited, and they don’t often go missing by a stranger, abduction, somebody snatching them off the street; in fact, that’s the lowest category percentage of missing children’s cases we deal with at the National Center. The majority of cases that we work on are endangered runaways, children who have left their home on their own volition. But the problem with that and where we see that cross-section with trafficking victims is many of these children who are caught up in trafficking are groomed from the home by an exploiter, by a predator, and when they’re groomed and lured from the home, when they’re leaving the home on their own recognizance, they’re categorized as a runaway, even though they’re going right into the open arms of a child predator, and we know law enforcement and the media and the public don’t look at runaways the same that they look at abducted children or kidnapped children, yet these are missing kids and this is the issue.
We see these children go missing, whether it’s running away from home or the foster care system, which is even more difficult because those children don’t have the support system that children living in traditional families have. Oftentimes, when they go missing, the only people that are looking for them are people looking to exploit them, so you see children missing from care, you see children who are groomed and lured from the home that go missing, and then we see them pop up online in an escort ad somewhere and that’s when we see them being trafficked, so we have this cross-section between our two different divisions of our Missing Children’s Division and our Exploited Children’s [Division] of children going missing and then becoming trafficked, and it was really something that we needed to start taking a look at and really connecting the dots, and last year we had over 17,000 reports of child sex trafficking cases reported to us at the National Center, and we are operationally heavy. Right? So we work directly with the families, directly with law enforcement to locate missing children and help in their recovery, or to end child victimization and to fight it online, so we are heavy in the operation side. In fact, there’s a lot that we’re doing around the Super Bowl with federal and local law enforcement that, unfortunately, I can’t talk about because, one, we don’t want the predators to know how we’re tracking them and how we’re working with law enforcement, because they are early adopters of technology; they’re trying to stay 10 steps ahead of law enforcement and legislature. But a lot of that, as well, is awareness and prevention education, whether that’s to the public or to potential victims themselves.
Prevention education for children is just so important because we want to make sure children don’t go missing or become exploited in the first place, and serving as the clearinghouse for missing and exploited children’s issues we sit on this mountain of data, so we want to look at that; we want to extrapolate, see the trends, find out the best practices, share those tips and that information with other NGOs that are, you know, in these areas, that are boots on the ground. I mean, we work with so many – we’ve mentioned many of the different groups today, but that’s what we do. We play well in the sandbox. We want to, you know, use these other NGOs as a force multiplier, because even though we’re 400-plus employees, we’re the, you know, the nation’s, you know, larger nonprofit for this type of stuff, it’s about collaborating, it’s about sharing information, sharing technology, sharing resources and training and information, and doing that in a way that we can create trauma-informed resources, whether it’s prevention or after-care, for our survivors to really make sure that everything in all the resources really are in place and these survivors are not re-victimized once they come out of the life.
There’s a long road to recovery for many of our survivors, but that’s why the survivor voices are just so incredibly important so that that can inform our prevention education and it can help create the appropriate response and training for law enforcement, for first responders, to medical professionals who are oftentimes the first touchpoint that these trafficking survivors are interacting with. There’s so many programs. I mean, I could talk about the center forever. (Laughs.) I know I’m long-winded so I won’t continue. But there are so many programs that we run at the National Center, so many ways that we try to, you know, continue the mission of finding missing children and reducing victimization, and a huge part of that is working with other nonprofit organizations and other groups, boots on the ground. You know, whether it’s from the 30,000-foot view or right there on the street level, it really is just so important sharing all those resources and really coming together to be the solution to this problem.
Deborah Sigmund: Cal, we appreciate you being with us today, and I would also like to tell you that Innocents at Risk has partnered with the National Center since 2005 and we value that partnership. We’ve used your materials and your posters when we’ve gone into schools and it’s been a wonderful, wonderful arm for us.
Callahan Walsh: Well, that’s why those resources exist so people like yourself can go out there, organizations like yours can go out there and use them and get them into the hands of the potential, you know, the children that are potentially at risk. You know, we want to empower them with that safe and smart decision making.
Deborah Sigmund: It’s a $150 billion industry and there are people on the take everywhere, and so no one wants to claim that this is happening, but it’s happening absolutely everywhere.
Callahan Walsh: And that’s a great point and I think that’s, you know, something to talk about as well. You know, we focus on events like the Super Bowl and we know that there is an uptick. At the National Center we keep track of online escort ads that are placed in and around the areas where the Super Bowl is happening. We see an uptick in those ads, as well, too, many of them being, you know, underage girls, and so we know that this is a thing that happens around Super Bowl; it’s a time that it happens more. But it also happens in every small town across the country not during the Super Bowl, and this is why it’s so important to really do a push and highlight times like the Super Bowl because I think it’s a great opportunity to really capture people’s attention and to let them know that this issue exists, but don’t for one second think that once everybody goes home at the end of the Super Bowl week that it ends, you know. It continues.
Deborah Sigmund: Exactly.
Callahan Walsh: And those girls and boys are then trafficked to another state, another town, and the cycle continues. But, you know, that’s not always the case either. That’s why it’s important for the public to understand the issues of trafficking because not every child is trafficked in a geographic location. We know children who are trafficked and sleep in their own bed every night.
Deborah Sigmund: Absolutely. I know, and I think because of the work on the ground last year at the Super Bowl, NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, was able to recover I think over 200 children. Cal, is that right?
Callahan Walsh: The Super Bowl is a big push for us. You know, it’s something we really want to dedicate our time and efforts towards, again, whether that’s the direct work that we’re doing with local and federal law enforcement for these apprehensions, recovery sting-type things, or it’s the prevention, education, and the just sending out the images of missing children in that area. It’s all important; every sort of step, every little facet is just as important as the next because while we’re recovering, you know, victims and survivors, we want to of course prevent the next generation as well, so we work, again, with many different groups that are on the ground as other NGOs, but we work directly with law enforcement at the same time, so, again, a multi-pronged approach, even just for one event like the Super Bowl. We worked with It’s a Penalty last year; they did targeted poster distribution of our missing children’s posters targeted to, you know, convenience stores, hotels, rental car places, as well, too, and what’s important is, you know, I think a lot of times people think, oh, I’m going to look at these images of these missing children, I’m going to memorize their face, and then I’m going to spot them out in the wild. That order of operations doesn’t always happen that way. A lot of times, it’s someone who sees the image of the missing child and go, wait, they just moved down the street from me, or that’s the family in the hotel room next to ours. They’ve oftentimes had that person, that child already in their life at some point and they’ve seen them as a sort of 3-D, you know, rendered individual and then they see their missing poster, so it’s not necessarily about, oh, I’m going to scan these missing children’s images and try to burn their image into my brain, but it is about getting those posters out there because all’s it takes is one person. All it takes is one person to do the right thing and say, you know what, I think I saw that kid, and do the right thing and make that tip, whether it’s to an NGO, local law enforcement, or what have you. Doing the right thing and being that individual that says you know what, this doesn’t sit right; I’m going to trust my gut and I’m going to say something, and you know, oftentimes we get tips from people who think the information they have might not even be very significant and think, oh, you know, this is dumb that I’m even making this tip and it turns out that that tip was the key that law enforcement was looking for the whole time, something that broke the case wide open, and so really, again, harnessing the power of the public because law enforcement can’t be everywhere, the National Center can’t be everywhere, but the public is and they’re the eyes and ears, and whether it’s, you know, empowering flight attendants or health care providers or just your average citizen, it’s really about everybody coming together and doing what we can because we have seen some incredible recoveries around Super Bowl and elsewhere, and those only happen through collaboration with the public, with NGOs, and with law enforcement.
You know, like I said, we do a lot of work around the Super Bowl, but people just need to be vigilant and understand that hey, you need to pay attention, eyes and ears all the time – any time you’re at that convenience store or gas station. I love the fact that you brought up, Cheryl, the convenience stores because we’ve found absolutely the same thing. We started working with GSTV – GSTV is Gas Station TV, you know, the monitors that you see at the pump. Hardly anybody goes in the store anymore; you know, you can pay right there and you get your gas and go. But we have missing children’s alerts on GSTV through our runaway train program; it deals a lot with runaway victims. We know at the National Center one in six of our runaways are likely a sex trafficking victim. They don’t have that support system. One in six of our runaways, and runaways represent 92 percent of our missing children’s cases, so we know those are the hotspots that traffickers are frequenting; this is where children who are being trafficked are frequenting as well, and so we have the GSTV video right there, audio video, you’re getting it, and we’ve had absolute recoveries directly related to those videos, tips that have come in directly from those videos. In fact, one of them was the child themself that saw themselves on that video and said, oh, my god, I had no idea that my family was even looking for me. You know, kids aren’t always leaving the best scenario situation; they’re not always leaving, you know, the ideal home. A lot of times children are running from something, and this child then realized, hey, there’s other people out there that care about me, that care about my well-being and they called the National Center, and they’re now in a safe place. But it was one of these children who actually saw themselves on one of these posters and thought, wow, oh, my god, people actually are looking for me; I didn’t know that anybody even cared.
Deborah Sigmund: That’s wonderful.
Cheryl, it is a brilliant idea about the convenience stores. I think that’s an excellent point. But I also want to say, you know, the trafficking – it’s not just at Super Bowls; it happens in all major sports. It happens at the Kentucky Derby. We worked with law enforcement at the Kentucky Derby sending them training materials before so they could be on the lookout, and they did the same thing; they had stakeouts at the airport looking for potential victims. It’s anything that draws people.
But, as Cal said, it happens every day of the week and it happens countless, countless times. I mean, it’s over $150 billion industry, and right now, since COVID, I mean, the increase of children that have been trafficked online has definitely increased, and all of us are working to get some legislation passed and I think it’s coming up this week, so we hope everyone – Innocents at Risk has been sending out information constantly to contact your member [of Congress] or contact Congress, and say, we want you to support the EARN IT Act, because what it does is it makes big tech companies responsible for these horrible images of children that are being abused and violated on the internet. Children should never see those things, never see those images, let alone be part of them, so we’re hoping that this legislation is passed, and I know you are, Cheryl. I think it’s very important that we do everything we can to protect our children, and that includes online.
Cheryl Csiky: Yeah, 100 percent. You know, there’s a few things going on in the legislative world. You know, our office is based in Oregon and, you know, we’re supporting the EARN IT Act and one of our programs is legislative advising, so, you know, we’re always trying to encourage people to reach out to the legislature and really voice — I mean, we’re talking about some — this problem’s not going to go away and it is hard. The road to recovery is atrocious for people. I always say prevention matters. Like, we have to do better. We need to shift and say, you know what, there are survivors, including myself, who can speak up and feel safe enough to say, no more. You know, we can speak for ourselves. We know there’s so many similarities in our experiences of the grooming process, of the access — right? — to traffic and exploit someone, especially children, and the more we can speak up about these things and support the EARN IT Act and to step up and say consent between two adults is candy for a trafficker to exploit, in any type of law. We have to do better to create these safeguards to make sure children are never going to be approached by traffickers any easier through our own laws that we make.
You know, just as a survivor myself, it’s the most intimidating thing when you see, like, let’s say a rape survivor, a rape victim have to stand up and testify. When all eyes are on you at the darkest moments of your life, it’s not fun. You know, it’s almost just re-victimizing, so as we look at these laws together and look for survivor voices and understand that for survivors to lead, we really need to join arms together and be one collective voice because we’re going to watch laws come into place that aren’t helping. We hope the public learns to rely on our voice and really take our wisdom. We know how these situations happen. Just as Cal said, I went to my own bed every night. I didn’t have to run away. It was within my own, you know, one-mile radius of my community, and by the age of 10 I was set up on dates inside cars. Nowhere in my situation was I going to raise my hand at 10 years old and say, I’m being trafficked. (Laughs.) I mean, the vocabulary is not going to work. A trafficker isn’t, you know, always – (word inaudible) – you up. They have a way of manipulation and grooming that’s super confusing for a child, so prevention matters and understanding how traffickers work and how they utilize tech companies. We need to hold tech companies accountable too.
And like you said, Deborah, most everyone I talk to, once they hear about the issue, they want to help. They want to do something, so we want to keep the bridge positive but also have boundaries that we do hold tech companies and others accountable, especially whoever is your local legislator; you need to speak up and say something. They see a lot of issues, a lot of topics, and when we come together and voice our concerns to protect survivors and prevent human trafficking, we are making our world a better place.
Deborah Sigmund: Absolutely. Thank you for your remarks and thank you for coming forward. I appreciate that, and everyone does, and you’re not alone and no one is. We are here to stand with you and say it’s enough and we are working together and we’re protecting young victims before it happens, potential victims, so it’s really very important. Thank you.
Cheryl Csiky: Thank you.
Deborah Sigmund: We hope that stories you’ve heard today are helpful in a way – in a big way – and we hope that you can take this knowledge and spread it and let people know, you know, human trafficking is happening everywhere, especially for children, and we need to keep our eyes open and we need to keep our children safe and we need to watch what they’re doing on the internet and we need to make the internet a safe place for them, and that’s what the EARN It Act can do if we get the EARN IT Act passed. We can eliminate a lot of the horrible images that the children see and actually the horrible intruders that have gone on and approached children. I mean, there have been children that have actually been taken online by talking to a predator that they thought was 12 years old, their age.
Callahan Walsh: Yeah. Without the EARN IT Act it will make it so much easier for exploiters to harm our children. We need that passed to safeguard our kids online. We need the EARN IT Act to pass and really work with the tech industry to come up with those solutions and those safeguards for kids, because the internet isn’t going away. It’s a great tool. It’s created life for the better in so many ways but so many new ways to harm our children, and without the EARN IT Act it’s going to make it even a lot tougher for law enforcement to act in the ways that they should to protect children and for organizations like the National Center, as well, too, these exploiters will have free rein online and that’s just something that we never want to see happen. These children are our most precious commodity. You know, they need the protection, and with the EARN It Act we can do that, so to all the listeners out there, yeah, please contact your representative and make sure that they vote to pass the EARN IT Act.
Deborah Sigmund: Yes, this is something that the country definitely needs to unite on, to protect our children.
Andy Miles: You've been listening to "Turning a Million Eyes To Save Lives," a podcast by Innocents at Risk to prevent children and women from falling victim to human trafficking. We'll have another episode next month.
If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story for this podcast, please email dsigmund@innocentsatrisk.org, and please share this podcast, rate it, and subscribe.
I'm Andy Miles and I'd like to thank Deborah Sigmund, Cheryl Csiky, and Callahan Walsh for sharing their stories and expertise, and I'd like to thank you for listening.
The number to report suspected human trafficking is 1-866-347-2423; that's 1-866-DHS-2-ICE.
Before we go, I'd like to ask you to please consider making a gift to Innocents at Risk that will support our educational outreach awareness campaign to keep children safe online and everywhere else. All donations are tax-deductible, and 100 percent of funds go directly to making a difference. Your donation will help Innocents at Risk keep children safe online with educational outreach to parents and students, lobby members of Congress for much-needed legislation to protect children and facilitate the prosecution of traffickers, and support service providers like Beulah's Place, International Network of Hearts, Crossway Community, Youth for Tomorrow, FAIR Girls, Courtney's House, and others who take care of rescued children from trafficking and at-risk youth. We need your help to Turn a Million Eyes on Children.
To make your tax-deductible contribution to Innocents at Risk, please visit innocentsatrisk.org. Thank you. Your support is greatly appreciated.