Olivia Messina represents young community leaders in Nashville who get the job done. She is the program lead for Tennessee for the Hope for Justice and Slave-Free Alliance, an international organization based in the United Kingdom.
Messina, who is originally from Philadelphia, came to Nashville to study at Trevecca Nazarene University. She started her career working in Metro’s Office of Family Services. While working there to serve survivors of domestic violence (DV), she completed her master’s degree in social work, then took the job heading up the Hope for Justice programs to fight human trafficking right here in Tennessee.
What got you into the field of helping people who are being abused, whether in domestic violence situations or human trafficking?
To give you a little bit of context, I come from a family of social workers, so I’ve been around social work for as long as I can remember. My grandfather was the executive director of a domestic violence organization in Delaware. And I actually had said I never want to work with any victims of crime or violence or domestic violence. I just always said, “It’s too much for me.”
But then my entire career so far has been working with people who are either incarcerated or survivors or victims of crime or within that realm. So now I tell everyone never say never, because you’re going to end up doing it.
What was your turning point where you decided that this kind of career is for you?
When I was in college, I was interning with the [Nashville] Public Defender’s Office for the Juvenile Court. Right before that, I had one semester left of college, and I was having an identity crisis. I was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t think I’m cut out for this”.
So, within the first week, I walked into the detention center, and I sat down, and I remember the first youth that I talked to. That young person’s whole story stuck with me for my entire career. That was the first person I had ever really worked with. Throughout that internship experience, I continued to see the same individual and that really had an impact on me, just their story and what they had been through.
As I was working with this person, I was sitting there talking to them, and I [realized] this is where I need to be. This is what I need to do. I just didn’t have a doubt in my mind. Then I worked with Office of Family Safety after that, which is all domestic violence and sexual assault trafficking. I guess the best way to say it is, in my soul, I just felt I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and I’ve never looked back.
What is the difference between DV and human trafficking?
We see a lot of overlap with domestic violence and trafficking. But the three core things that we look for with trafficking are force, fraud and coercion. Those are the three elements of trafficking. While there is a lot of overlap and people can be in a domestic violence relationship and be trafficked, those three core elements distinguish trafficking from a domestic violence situation.
Hope for Justice is an international organization. How did you get involved with them, and what exactly do they do?
So, I just finished my master’s program, which I completed while I was working at the Office of Family Safety. I had a lot of people on my caseload who had experienced domestic violence that had also been trafficked. This goes back to the domestic violence/human trafficking overlap, and that [theme] continued to pop up for me, and it piqued my interest. It was something that I didn’t really know a lot about. So, I started to do some research on human trafficking.
Then I got approached by somebody at Hope for Justice when we were working together for a client. I was the case manager from the Office of Family Safety, and she was the case manager with Hope for Justice, and when something opened up to specifically work with human trafficking survivors, I jumped on it. It was something that I had become passionate about through working in DV. So that’s how I got involved with Hope for Justice.
Hope for Justice is an international organization. Our headquarters is in the United Kingdom. We have programs all over internationally and all over the US. For example, we have our Iowa Investigative Team; we have our North Carolina RISE program and investigators; and we have our Middle Tennessee program, which is the program that I run.
We provide case management services, advocacy, training, long term support for survivors, and investigative services. At Hope for Justice, we have a person for survivors to talk to who is not law enforcement, but we’re working right alongside law enforcement to get [survivors] the care and support that they need. We offer all of those elements across all our programs whether it’s long-term support for a survivor, advocacy within the court or legal system, investigative services and training.
How would you describe the human trafficking situation in Nashville and Tennessee, and how much does human trafficking, in your estimation, affect people who experience homelessness?
In the last couple of years, there’s been human trafficking reported in every single county in Tennessee, which I think is really significant because when people think of trafficking, they may not think that it’s happening here. It absolutely is happening here. Even in our rural counties and in our smaller, less densely populated areas, there’s trafficking happening. That goes to show that it’s occurring everywhere, and it’s a very real thing.
And to the second part of your question, we already know that being unhoused is a huge risk factor for trafficking. A lot of the outreach that we do specifically targets our unhoused friends and encampments. We are working with some of the local organizations that support individuals who are unhoused to provide services because we know that they’re incredibly vulnerable and at high risk for trafficking.
I also want to loop in the term “survival sex” where a lot of people think that that’s not trafficking. But survival sex is essentially people using sex to survive, to meet a need. And trafficking and exploitation in and of itself is somebody looking to exploit another person for a basic need. So if somebody is saying, “Hey, I don’t have housing and I don’t have food and I’m homeless and I need somewhere to stay” and using sex as a means to get housing for the night and somebody [else] is using that to control them and hold it over their head — that is absolutely exploitation and trafficking. So we see that a lot with our unhoused folks, especially in Nashville.
Do people usually realize that they are being trafficked?
I would say it’s a 50-50 mix on some level. For example, when somebody is in a relationship with someone, often times because of the intimate relationship, they may not realize they’re being trafficked or being exploited. We try to do a lot of education not only in the general public but also with the people we’re working with. We may talk about what a healthy relationship looks like, and then people may start to identify that what they experience is not normal relationship behavior. We see that a lot.
When we’ve done trainings or outreach, through conversation, some people will come up to us after and say, “I never realized that what I experienced was trafficking, but I absolutely was trafficked.” So people start putting the pieces together. With other people, they are aware of what they have experienced and identify “Yeah, I was trafficked, and this is a very real thing for me.”
But I think trafficking in and of itself is a really big label. So sometimes people are scared to use that term, which is why we include language about exploitation or really break down the myths of what people think trafficking is.
What does your outreach look like? How do you reach people who are trafficked?
A couple of different ways. One obviously is through our amazing community partners that we work with. We get a lot of referrals through our partners, whether it be the Office of Homeless Services, People Loving Nashville, The Next Door, or any of the treatment facilities. So that’s one way.
Then, as far as outreach goes, we participate in a variety of different outreach settings. We work a lot with the Metro Police Department and do outreach with them, whether it’s with their overdose prevention team or with their quality-of-life team. We’ll go out with them and go to some of our high-risk and vulnerable areas and just build relationships with community members.
The consistency in which we show up and see people is important. That’s when people start to open up to you, and they start to trust you. That’s when we start to get some referrals through word of mouth about people who have friends they know of who have been trafficked or experienced exploitation.
We also go to a lot of resource fairs, set up tables, provide information to the community and get referrals that way, too.
Do you focus on sex trafficking or other areas of human trafficking like labor trafficking as well?
We work with sex trafficking and labor trafficking and then also general exploitation or people who are at risk of exploitation. We target specific populations we know are at high risk for trafficking. Risk factors like being unhoused, using drugs, being a runaway youth, aging out of foster care, etc.
We try to do preventative services before we have to provide intervention services. That’s also part of the reason that we conduct outreach to try and bring them services, help them get connected to housing and food and other resources before they get into a situation where they’re being trafficked.
Online exploitation and sextortion are new terms that are used now. We also do training and a lot of work with youth aging out of foster care and the organizations serving youth to bring awareness to online exploitation and online trafficking and what that looks like.
Can you put into perspective the size of the human trafficking industry?
There is a chart from Walk Free, an international human rights group that focuses on modern slavery, that I like to quote from. Based on their 2022 report, 49.6 million people live in modern-day slavery globally. This translates to one out of every 150 people globally — 1.1 million of those people are living in the United States.
And the chart I referenced provides a visual that shows that the slave trade results in $236 billion in annual profits. It compares the size of the modern slave-trade industry to companies such as Apple ($96.9 billion in annual profits), Google (73.8 billion in annual profits), and Amazon ($30.4 billion in annual profits).
Human trafficking in all of its forms is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and it is happening right in our backyard.