Growing up, I used to think human trafficking happened when young women from poor countries were duped into fake modeling contracts that promised them to escape extreme poverty, only to end up as an escort service or a brothel in another country. Unfortunately, that is still part of it. But by far not all of it.
Once I started working in the homelessness sector, the stories about victimization kept coming. And it was not just women being exploited. It also was day laborers who were picked up at a shelter to do a job and then being stiffed on their promised pay or given $20 for a 10-hour day of hard labor.
Metro’s Office of Family Safety defines human trafficking the following way: “Human trafficking happens when one person uses or exploits another person for their own personal gain.”
And the United Nations defines human trafficking as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit.”
Victims include men, women and children of all ages, and trafficking happens everywhere in the world. Traffickers often use violence — whether physical, sexual, emotional or financial — to force or coerce victims into commercial sex or labor services. While the word trafficking can imply that this crime has to involve movement, crossing borders of states or even countries, human trafficking has many forms.
Tasha Kennard, the CEO of Thistle Farms (see our Q&A here) said people often think that human trafficking is something that happens in faraway places or they envision a kidnapping in a parking lot.
“Most often it’s familial,” Kennard continued. “Most of the individuals that come into the care of Thistle Farms have experienced trafficking and exploitation early in their younger years by someone that they know, either by a parent or a relative or an intimate partner.
“And I think, we’re coming into an understanding in our greater community that human trafficking happens here,” Kinnard said. “It doesn’t just happen in far-off places.”
In our conversation, we spoke about the overlap of housing insecurity and homelessness and how our local systems are starting to coordinate around housing needs. Yet, we are still too fragmented in our approaches, which I believe is due to our overall lack of accessible low-income housing combined with the lack of an actual living wage. This is not a symptom of any community alone, rather it shows the absence of a comprehensive safety net across the nation.
When you look into human trafficking, you will quickly stumble upon the Polaris Project, whose mission is to lead “a survivor-centered, justice- and equity-driven movement to end human trafficking.”
Polaris has operated the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline for nearly 20 years and through that collected data from callers but cautions that these numbers do not reflect the actual occurrences of trafficking. Thus, Polaris reports the “signals” they receive through the national hotline, SMS text messages, online reporting, emails and web chats.
The latest report from 2024 shows that since its inception in 2007, the U.S. Human Trafficking Hotline has received a total of 463,109 signals, most through the hotline, others through the Website, texts, emails or a web chat.
Through these signals, Polaris has identified a total of 112,822 cases of human trafficking and 218,568 victims that were identified in these cases.
The report also provides data for individual states and shows that during the same time period a total of 5,420 signals for Tennessee with 1,696 cases of human trafficking identifying 3,487 victims.
Again, these numbers likely do not even scratch the surface of the problem.
Worldwide an estimated 50 million people are trapped in modern slavery, more than half are stuck in forced labor. In the United States, it is estimated that one million are victims of modern slavery.
However, there is a clear distinction between the terms “human trafficking” and “modern slavery.” Hope for Justice, an organization that also works here in Nashville, explains the difference in the following way: “Modern slavery is where one person controls another for profit by exploiting a vulnerability. The victim can be forced to work or exploited sexually. This control can be physical, financial or psychological. Modern slavery is used internationally and in many legal jurisdictions as an umbrella term covering all forms of slavery, servitude, human trafficking and related exploitation, including forced labour, debt bondage, forced child labour, forced marriage, and commercial sexual exploitation.”
On the other hand, Hope for Justice says, “Under international conventions, for human trafficking to be present, all three of these elements must exist:
The Act is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of people.
The Means can be through threat of or use of force, deception, coercion, abuse of power or position of vulnerability.
The Purpose is for exploitation.
For modern slavery, only two of these elements need to be present, the means and the purpose.”
Simply put, human trafficking is often the action which can lead to modern slavery.
Young people are especially vulnerable to trafficking. A study by Laura T. Murphy that interviewed more than 640 runaway and homeless youth in Canada and the United States found that 1 in 5 of the youth had been a victim of human trafficking. A significant portion of the respondents in this study reported that they had already been trafficked by their family prior to experiencing homelessness.
Service providers are aware, which is also while larger shelters attempt to keep certain populations apart in attempts to protect victims. We see separate programs for youth, Domestic Violence (DV) survivors, and women that were trafficked, all with a special focus on safety.
However, it is not enough. What we need is housing where individuals can lock the door, feel safe, and build their lives back.
Recently I spoke with a local DV provider, and we discussed the occurrence of trafficking in encampments. It is an aspect that is hard to talk about and easy to ignore. But we all know it exists. People are exploited within the encampments.
I heard from a young woman who was forced to pay rent to another camper here in Nashville, just to stay there. She felt trapped but eventually got into housing thanks to the outreach and assistance from a worker from Hope for Justice who took the time to get to know her and build trust with her.
This shows that the way we do street outreach matters. And the way we close encampments also has a huge impact on whether human trafficking is simply moved behind closed doors when we relocate an entire encampment into a 100-unit temporary housing facility.
As I stated many times before, I am not against closing encampments, but it should be done in a coordinated, transparent way over an extended period of time. We need to invest the time to get to know the individuals in the encampments and learn their different needs, then help them obtain housing (even transitional housing if they so wish) with the adequate and right support services.
Instead, Nashville, like so many other cities, follows a new fad that mostly supports well-meaning national consulting firms and presents yet another quick-fix approach that I predict will fade as soon as local politicians realize that our local outcomes are not as great as presented to them. We tend to rush things, implementing promising approaches through shortcuts rather than investing in long-term solutions. The cost is ultimately paid by the most vulnerable people whom we victimize over and over again.
The biggest victims in all of this are the women, men and youth, who are already stuck in the cycle of human trafficking.
Shelter is on top of the service request the Polaris Project receives on the national hotline. But because there is a lack of specific beds for trafficking victims, the best suited places to fill that gap are DV shelters.
For Nashville that means that we ought to provide specialized training for homelessness providers on the different aspects of trafficking and invest into specialized shelter beds, aligning with DV providers.
In addition, landlords are the ones who often are positioned to recognize human trafficking. However, they often do not know where to turn and see themselves forced to evict people including the victims. Establishing resources that landlords could reach out to when they see labor or sex trafficking occurring in their rentals and training landlords about those resources could help break the cycle for many victims.
And above all, there need to be accessible, affordable, long-term/permanent places where victims of human trafficking can get away from their environment, recover, and work on gaining a sustainable, living income.
Kennard, the CEO of Thistle Farms, said that she has learned a lot from the women her organization serves.
“There is so much determination and self-determination to do something, to contribute,” Kennard said. “It’s one of the most beautiful pieces about walking alongside and working with women with lived experience. They can teach us a lot about determination.”
In all the conversations I had and the materials I read, it is clear. It takes a lot for a victim of human trafficking to decide to leave a really dangerous environment. And often, they cannot do it alone.
One of the things that we can do in the homelessness and housing sectors to help is to better align with survivor services and to provide supports that make it a little easier for trafficking victims to overcome their trauma, rebuild their self-worth, and build a new future where they can thrive.
Judith Tackett is a longtime homelessness expert and advocate for housing-focused, person-centered solutions. Opinions in this column are her own.