A Hidden Crime

January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. This is an issue that merits empathy and investment year round, but now is an excellent time to brush up on warning signs, the latest research and the work our city has done to address trafficking.

We reached out to Minal Patel Davis, Special Advisor to the Houston Mayor's Office on Human Trafficking, for her take on the state of trafficking in Houston. The numbers are startling; however, the city’s response and the impact that’s having on other cities and nations is deeply inspiring. You can learn more about Minal, her office and the vital work being done locally on their website.

It is when someone uses force, fraud or coercion to compel a commercial sex or labor act. Examples that people will understand are a pimp selling a person for sex. The pimp can be someone who beats the person or withholds food – looks like prostitution but it’s not because someone is forcing them to sell sex. Another example is when someone overseas is promised a job and the person finds themselves working in an illicit massage parlor under the threat of harm to their family if they leave. More and more, you see young Americans being lured online, romanced and then sold for sex – the “boyfriend” turns out to be a pimp/trafficker. It is also important to note that smuggling is not trafficking. In a case of human smuggling, the person is consenting to a crime and crossing a political border and in human trafficking, the person is a victim and while the term implies it, movement of the victim is not a requirement for human trafficking like it is for smuggling. Trafficking is the worst form of human to human cruelty, fueled by greed and an utter disregard for human life.

The most surprising statistic is that there are 40 million people enslaved in the world and more than 24 million of them are trapped in forced labor. The other one often used is that there are an estimated 313,000 victims of trafficking in the state of Texas. If that is the case, we need to do more to find them and fix the broken systems that produce them like Child Protective Services. We need to make sure that we are screening for trafficking at every government touchpoint possible, going beyond a dependence on law enforcement investigations alone to recover victims. The burden to end trafficking cannot be on law enforcement alone. If I add up the major groups that obtain trafficking disclosures in Houston, while we have more than doubled numbers in past years, I would estimate that less than 1,200 victims are recovered each year. Many refuse to talk to law enforcement but do receive services, and few cases rise to a prosecutable level. Even with those challenges we need to do more to increase victim identification, especially when it comes to labor trafficking.

The state of human trafficking when it comes to the number of initiatives and level of community awareness and engagement is good. Victim identification has also increased. The Mayor’s office work is embodied in the City’s Anti-Trafficking Strategic Plan and we have completed 95% of phase 1 and are currently working on phase 2 of the plan. Our approach from the start has been to assess the gaps and fill in where we can with the power and political will of the Mayor’s office – because of the exceptional leader we have in Mayor Turner.

We assessed the local and national landscape and did a SWOT analysis to understand what we can do well and made sure we understood what systems were under our purview. We learned that we had an advantage when it came to institutionalizing our response across city departments and made sure that anti-trafficking responses are woven into the fabric of our city. To this end, we have done ordinance work where necessary – we worked on the massage establishment ordinance to get at the illicit parlors in our city, stopped the sex-bot store from coming to our city based on constituent concerns and are working on an additional ordinance now. Our Health Department trains its 1,200 employees annually and their food inspectors serve as eyes and ears when they inspect the 13,000 food establishments in our city each year since restaurants are a common site for labor trafficking. Second, raise awareness at scale which translates into hosting high level events like one we had for the corporate community called Conscientious Capitalism: Labor Trafficking and Supply Chains, Mitigating Risk to ensure that while the corporate community may understand sex trafficking as community citizens, there is something they need to do as corporate citizens and leverage their sphere of influence at work to address labor trafficking. We also deployed our Watch for Traffick media campaign across TV, radio, billboards, taxis and all 950 METRO buses generating over 90 million impressions and miles driven and later rolled out our anti-luring social media campaign with 4 million engagements.

Coordinating victim services in a way that was reflective of the gaps that service providers were facing was another thing we focused on. They identified 3 challenges: lack of systematic access to shelter, psychological and medical care. Based on that, the city, with the help of a private donor, negotiated a shelter agreement with the largest shelter provider in Houston; not only do the outreach agencies placing those they encounter in crisis immediately increase their operational efficiency but being placed in this shelter means clients have an opportunity to access long term housing options. We obtained grant funding and placed the first Human Trafficking Psychology Fellow and Hospital Case Manager within the County hospital system. We engage in continual process improvement for all of our programs and initiatives - so we added two case managers to our services team that work in an annex office at the shelter coordinating care with the fellow and hospital case manager and the clients that other agencies place. In addition to providing psychological services and coordinating medical appointments on clients’ behalf, they also screen for trafficking within the vulnerable population that the County system serves.

Finally, we wanted to be diligent about collecting data on everything we did from the start because we knew that if we did well here, we would have to use this data to persuade other U.S. Cities to engage – and we did. We hosted 3 sessions of our Ten/Ten Human Trafficking Response Fellowship, a 2-day immersion program for Mayor’s office representatives and had 18 U.S. cities and 4 international governments participate. We are tracking their replication efforts and the results have been fantastic!

Even though we have a plan, we remain limber. When Hurricane Harvey hit, knowing that there is nexus between natural disasters and trafficking, we did cot to cot outreach in the shelter dorms, got billboards up to educate people about the nexus, ran a social media campaign and the Mayor signed an Executive Order 1-56 Zero Tolerance for Human Trafficking in the City’s Purchasing and Service Contracts. When there is a disaster there is a movement of people, especially in a tight labor market for rebuilding efforts – we wanted to do our best to get ahead of that. We developed and presented Corporate Risk Mitigation presentations to over 40 corporations in the year following Hurricane Harvey.

Not only are we the first Mayor’s office in the country to examine all government touch points through a municipal lens but there are non-profits that run a drop in center for people in the commercial sex industry that has doubled in size every year since it opened 3 years ago, there are groups in the oil and gas industry that focus on sex trafficking awareness; one non-profit leads a coalition of 70 other non-profits and businesses engaged in the fight.

I recommend they get an idea of what is happening which will tell them what is missing and step up to fill that need, be it financial or skill set driven. There are so many ways to engage, it is definitely a learning journey to see what is best for an individual.

Know the signs and do not hesitate to report it, even if they are not sure – they should call 888.373.7888 to report a tip. There are also some organizations that take donations of clothing and toiletries. You can organize drives with your friends but you should check with them first to see what they need.

We have the most robust response in the U.S. and every day, the Mayor’s office is working to do more. I wish that people were active listeners and readers and that they questioned the sources of information and news reports that they come across. For instance, it is often said that Houston is a hub for trafficking and sometimes the hub for trafficking. There is a big difference between these two statements. Do we have a problem, yes, we are the 4th largest city in America – but do we have a problem bigger than New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, I doubt that. We get this reputation from the fact that we have the highest number of calls to the national human trafficking hotline; calls are an indicator of awareness – for instance, during our media campaign, we increased calls to the tip hotline by 80% compared to the same time the prior year; this is a good thing but it perpetuated the hub language. Anticipating this, we did not shy back from running the much-needed campaign. I would also say that this is an extremely emotional issue and it is important to remain calm and rational so we can make clear headed decisions – people’s lives are on the line.

Looking for in-person opportunities to learn more or connect with other local advocates? Check out this community calendar from City of Houston Anti-Human Trafficking / United Against Human Trafficking.