Survivors of human trafficking should be the main character of any human trafficking story, not a supporting actor. We must trust survivors, listen to their stories, and center both. 

Named after the North Star, an historical symbol of freedom, Polaris leads a survivor-centered, data-informed, and justice and equity-driven movement to end human trafficking. Since 2007, Polaris has operated the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline, connecting victims and survivors to support and services, and helping communities hold traffickers accountable. 

Eliminating human trafficking is a challenge that requires support from all corners of the world, and we welcome everyone who wishes to join the movement. The film Sound of Freedom is a Hollywood depiction based on one person’s stories. It should be seen as exactly that — not a comprehensive view of human trafficking nor a model of how to best end human trafficking. There are many additional perspectives and stories that complete the picture. Polaris has spent two decades listening to survivors. The knowledge that has been shared with us comes from many communities and individuals who are impacted differently, and it is their lived experiences that inform Polaris’s work.

Through our work, Polaris has built the largest known dataset on human trafficking in North America. The data and expertise gained from two decades of working on trafficking situations in real-time helps us to partner with service providers and law enforcement; support survivors on their healing journeys; and address the vulnerabilities that enable the business of stealing freedom for profit.  

Polaris continues to believe that the true heroes in the anti-trafficking movement have been and will always be survivors of sex and labor trafficking. We think the focus of the movement should remain on those with lived experience. 

Polaris’s first priority is to listen to victims and survivors, act based on their recommendations and expertise, and support their empowerment and paths to freedom. While not everyone uses this approach, we know it to be the only approach that provides survivors the support they need, keeps them safe, and truly works towards ending human trafficking.

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The post Responding to Sound of Freedom: Hollywood Needs to Center Survivors and Their Voices first appeared on Polaris.

Photo Credit: change.org.

The release of a National Survivor Study (NSS) by Polaris confirmed what many in the anti-trafficking field have always known – trafficking victims are being arrested and charged for crimes at shocking rates. The NSS data found that of 439 participating trafficking survivors, 62 percent had been cited, arrested, or detained by law enforcement at least once. Digging deeper into the data to see if the arrests might have come before or after the trafficking experience, 80 percent said the arrests came while they were being trafficked.

This study supported the claim that in cases like Zephi Trevino’s upcoming trial in Texas, law enforcement and prosecutors are ignoring a victim’s trafficking experience and going ahead with charges. Zephi was 16 when her adult boyfriend started trafficking her. She was later used by her trafficker as part of a scheme to rob a sex buyer. Her trafficker murdered the would-be sex buyer, and Zephi was then charged as an adult with capital murder for being part of the crime. The Dallas district attorney has continued moving forward with the case in spite of receiving evidence that the crime was a result of minor sex trafficking, ignoring the circumstances that she was a trafficking victim under both state and federal law.

Zephi’s case highlights how policies meant to protect trafficking victims can be disregarded when someone does not fit neatly into someone’s definition of a model trafficking victim. Legal aid organizations across the country are consistently challenged to prove the worthiness of survivors in order to clear criminal records that in many cases were a direct result of trafficking. In some cases, trafficking survivors have had to participate in clemency hearings where they were required to ask for forgiveness for crimes they were forced by traffickers to commit.

Concerned members of the public can contact District Attorney John Creuzot and ask him to drop or reconsider the charges. If you would like to sign up to support additional advocacy efforts on survivor record relief, visit our Take Action page.

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The post Study Confirms Trafficking Victims Like Zephi Trevino Are Being Consistently Criminalized first appeared on Polaris.

From zip ties to car seats to perfumed roses, there are a lot of scary rumors out there about how people get recruited into human trafficking. None of them are true – at least that is what we have learned after 15 years of operating the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline. But the reality is, in some ways, equally frightening: The vast majority of trafficking victims know and often love or trust their traffickers, who are family members, so-called friends, intimate partners, or even prospective employers.

Still that scary stuff in your social media feed can – understandably – begin to make you wonder. After all, it is somehow easier to imagine that strangers will do us harm than someone we know and care about. You can learn more about traffickers’ use of romantic and family love and a sense of belonging to lure people into exploitation by clicking here. As for that other stuff – about being followed around a Target that you saw on Tik Tok … Well, see below: 

The information below is what we learned looking at contacts made to the Trafficking Hotline since 2015 when we began collecting this kind of data. It shows clearly what not to be scared of – stranger danger.

• Trafficking rarely begins with abduction. In the cases reported to the Trafficking Hotline during this time period, only 6 percent of victims, where entry method into trafficking was known, reported being abducted into their trafficking situation.
• Kidnappers/abductors are not necessarily strangers: Abductions/kidnappings as a precursor to trafficking can be perpetrated by people known to the victims, such as people involved in gangs, members of the victim’s family or an intimate partner.
• Trafficking recruitment methods popularized on social media do not match the reality of what we’re seeing. Despite several, recurring viral social media posts warning about the use of zip ties being used to mark the vehicles of potential victims, car seats being used to lure people into trafficking situations, or drug-laced flowers to incapacitate potential victims, there are no mentions of any of these methods being used to recruit or lure people into trafficking situations. 
• Traffickers generally leverage an existing relationship to recruit victims. As we’ve highlighted in previous years, our data from 2015-2021 shows that traffickers most commonly exploit a familial relationship (21%), an intimate partnership (23%), or recruit their victims through a legitimate job offer or advertisement (36%).

Bottom line: If you are concerned about human trafficking, take time to learn and understand what makes people vulnerable and how you can keep yourself and your community safe. And if you see a rumor about human trafficking in your feed that sounds a little off, check a reliable source – not someone who is trying to rack up views on their social media channel! Then share the real story of human trafficking, not the rumors. 

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The post Valentine’s Day and Human Trafficking: Love Weaponized for Exploitation first appeared on Polaris.

Social media personality Andrew Tate is behind bars in Romania, amid rape and human trafficking allegations. In the press release about Tate’s arrest, Romanian officials said that Tate and his brother Tristan recruited victims by making them believe they were interested in having real romantic relationships with them, transporting them to live in houses where they were forced to act in porn videos that were sold online.

Tate has told news media he is no trafficker – since he didn’t physically force the victims to come to his home. Clearly, the Tates do not understand how trafficking works – at least under U.S law and – apparently, in Romania.

In the United States, what the Tate brothers are accused of is sometimes called Romeo pimping. A Romeo pimp lures vulnerable individuals – in this case young women – into commercial sex by luring them into romantic relationships. They target victims on social media and form relationships, on and off line. They look for people who are awed by their image and the lifestyle they represent. They promise not just love but a lifestyle.

This intentional building of a fraudulent, coercive relationship has long been a common method of recruitment into trafficking. But social media has clearly made it easier. 

“My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her… get her to fall in love with me, to where she’d do anything I say, and then get her on web-cam so we could become rich together.”

– Andrew Tate

In recent years the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline, which Polaris operates, has recorded a considerable increase in online recruitment for human trafficking. In 2020 there was a 125% increase in reports of recruitment on Facebook and a 95% increase on Instagram compared with 2019. While some of that is recruitment into labor trafficking situations via online ads, much of it is recruitment that begins with a false relationship – love, used as a weapon.

To hear how real survivors were trafficked by people they had been defrauded into loving and trusting, head to our page on love and trafficking.

Stop human trafficking today

Help fix the broken systems that make trafficking possible so we can prevent it from happening in the first place.

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The post The Tate Brothers and the Basics of “Romeo Pimping” first appeared on Polaris.

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Do it anyway.

It may help keep someone out of a painful trafficking situation. Here’s why:

In the hands of human traffickers, love is one of the most powerful weapons. While the myths and stereotypes about human trafficking make it seem like most trafficking begins with kidnapping and violence, the reality is that a huge percentage of sex trafficking victims were trafficked by someone they loved and trusted.

The way love is weaponized and wielded depends on the type of trafficking situation. In a familial situation, a child is sold by a parent who the child depends on for both financial and, more importantly, emotional support. The child is groomed through the natural process of children growing up and attaching to family members. They have been taught what love is supposed to look like, in some cases, by the very people who then exploit them. To maintain the love of their families, or uphold family norms, they agree to sell sex.

Romantic love is also a powerful part of the trafficking arsenal. The classic scenario involves Romeo pimps who purposefully target women or girls and sweep them off their proverbial feet, then slowly, carefully, convince the victim that their love requires her to sell sexual services.

The ways in which this process plays out is not always the same and not always blatant. But if you understand how sex traffickers groom their targets through manipulation of love, you can see it happening.

These are the moments when you have to be THAT friend. It is not a matter of snatching your friend out of harm’s way. Your friend probably won’t thank you and probably won’t break up with the person, or maybe even give it any thought. But eventually, what you told your friend, about how traffickers operate, will come back and help make things clear and maybe keep them safe.

That’s why we are asking you to pledge to be the kind of friend who has these hard conversations and shares what they learned. Spread it around. #LoveIsnt

The post Love & Trafficking: Being THAT Friend first appeared on Polaris.

Twenty years ago, the most urgent task in awareness was helping law enforcement shift their view of people in the sex trades to see them not as criminals but as people, and as potential victims. At the same time, policymakers had to be shown the magnitude of labor abuse and exploitation still happening in this country – decades after the era many thought belonged in history books with pictures of factories on fire and waifish child laborers.

Perhaps most importantly, people in general – from all walks of life and from all our diverse and intersectional communities – had to know so that people would care, and would make their voices heard. And so efforts like “Human Trafficking Awareness Day” were born, so that we could build and resource a movement to end this horrific abuse and support those who had fought their way through it – and come out as survivors on the other side.

It worked. People became aware and then they became horrified and then they wanted to know how to help. They too were asked to spread awareness, to help build the critical mass required to tackle a difficult, complex problem.

There is still work to be done, of course. We need to reach every, single, law enforcement agency in the country to provide them with the tools they need to prosecute traffickers. We need to reach more policymakers to help them understand how to prevent trafficking in the first place within the communities they serve.

And we need, urgently, to reach out to the public once again, to move past awareness, to a deeper understanding of how trafficking really happens and who it happens to. We need to replace simple awareness with meaningful understanding because we are tired of the slow pace of change. We must shift from smaller-scale individual response strategies to mass prevention strategies, like investment in safe, decent, affordable housing; a foster care system that actually provides children in need with stable, loving homes, equitable economic and criminal justice policies, and an end to gender-based violence.

But before the public can understand the complexity of this, we have to help undo some of the unintended consequences of all those early awareness campaigns: mythology, misunderstanding and misinformation. These errors spread through increasing awareness in much the same way as the end result of a game of telephone – where one child whispers something to another, who whispers what they heard to the next, and so on. What comes out at the end sounds like nothing the original speaker intended.

And so we have myths, spreading through the internet, about children being sold through complex schemes, shipped in overpriced file cabinets or preyed upon by a secretive cabal run by political operatives and Hollywood stars who are both pedophiles and cannibals.

These myths have real world consequences. Resources like the National Human Trafficking Hotline, like local police departments, like survivor-led, local organizations, are flooded with false reports. Responding thoughtfully takes a huge toll on the ability to serve others in the community who are either being trafficked or need assistance once they break themselves free.

These reports also mislead policymakers into believing in and supporting solutions that bear little relationship to the problem. For example, misinformation about the role of unauthorized border crossing and human trafficking is leading some in Congress to call for physical barriers between Mexico and the United States, though data shows most immigrant trafficking victims in the United States arrive through legal ports of entry.

During National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, to celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are asking you to join us in moving past awareness, to true understanding. Take this short training, become a myth buster in your community, share it with your friends, your colleagues, those you worship with, learn and volunteer with. We need you now more than ever.

The post Awareness vs. Understanding of Human Trafficking first appeared on Polaris.

For this reason, Polaris has created an interactive, online training program: Human Trafficking 101. The training is comprised of six modules which address what human trafficking is, how it happens, who the victims and traffickers are, highlights the importance of knowing the story vs. knowing the signs, and discusses what we can all do in the fight against human trafficking.

There are also brief quizzes after each module to reinforce participants’ knowledge as they go, along with videos of survivors sharing their experience to provide additional insight into how sex and labor trafficking can happen, and what can be done to prevent it from the perspective of those with lived experience. Upon completing the online training, participants receive a certificate indicating that they have completed the training and are encouraged to share it with their networks.

We are asking you to spread the word about this training as far and as wide as you can. It has never been more urgent.

In the summer of 2020, conspiracy theories ranging from children being sold on furniture websites to rumors about text messages being used as a sex trafficking recruitment tool, flooded the Polaris-operated National Human Trafficking Hotline with calls and concerns that were simply not true. The barrage crowded out calls and contacts from people who truly needed help.

That has slowed down considerably, but the countless well-meaning people who learned about trafficking for the first time as result of those rumors are still out there – an untapped resource of well-meaning, compassionate people like you who can help to make real change.

The training can also be helpful for people who have been in the anti trafficking movement for a long time, who know that white vans and zip-ties are not part of the reality of how trafficking operates, but want the latest knowledge on how to help. As the anti trafficking movement has evolved over the past 20 years, we have learned more from survivor leaders about the real-life situations that made them vulnerable to trafficking. Armed with this knowledge we can work together to prevent trafficking in the first place.

If you work with a corporation interested in adapting this training for your employees, please contact us at corporateengagement@polarisproject.org.

The post Human Trafficking 101: Combating Misinformation with Education first appeared on Polaris.

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In a statement before a judge about her court-ordered conservatorship, pop icon Britney Spears likened her situation to a form of human trafficking.

So is it?

U.S. law defines human trafficking as the use of force, fraud, or coercion to compel a person into commercial sex acts or to work against their will.

We don’t know the full extent of Spears’ situation and cannot definitively say whether or not it amounts to trafficking. Nor does it appear – at least from Spears’ statement – that she was compelled to provide sex acts in exchange for something of value. But the degree of financial and personal control Spears described resembles the forms of control and coercion tactics used by traffickers in situations of labor trafficking.

This is not as unique a situation as it may seem. Traffickers prey on vulnerable people. In the United States, recent immigrants are particularly vulnerable to labor trafficking because of the ease with which traffickers can control them through threats of deportation. The second most common vulnerability to labor trafficking is having some kind of disability including, but not limited to, mental and physical health concerns and substance use issues. Exploiters defraud people struggling with these conditions with promises of good jobs or safe places to live, or threaten them with further losses of freedom and rights if they try to change their situation.

If Spears didn’t necessarily know the official terminology to attach to the abuse she was experiencing, she is not alone. While sex trafficking has gained some attention in recent years, labor trafficking remains misunderstood and too often overlooked.

Based on the limited information available, here are some of the parallels between Spears’ situation, as described in her statement, and how labor trafficking situations play out in the United States:

• Taking advantage of legal loopholes: Under the rules of Spears’ conservatorship, everything Spears alleges her team and family did was technically legal. Often, traffickers work within legal boundaries to exploit their victims. Whether it’s prison labor for profit or the lack of visa portability in temporary work visas, the technical legality of something does not necessarily mean that it can’t or won’t lead to exploitation or trafficking.
• Exploitation of mental illnesses and/or disabilities: In the mid-2000s, Spears experienced very public mental health struggles that led to her father taking control as her conservator in 2008. Since then, her father has been granted the power to make decisions on her behalf while profiting from her career. In her statement, Spears referenced feeling like she would be punished if she didn’t attend rehabilitation programs or rehearsals. There have been multiple documented trafficking cases of people with disabilities, and those with mental illnesses are also increasingly vulnerable to victimization. As was the case for Spears, it is not uncommon for individuals with disabilities and/or mental illnesses to rely on a caregiver to meet their basic needs, and this caregiver can take advantage of this dependency to force them to work.
• Physical and emotional isolation: In her statement, Spears referenced not being able to see her friends (physical isolation) and expressed feeling “left out and alone” (emotional isolation). A key method employed by traffickers involves isolating their victims from family, friends, or other external resources that may provide them with support. By making their victims entirely dependent on them, traffickers can continue to maintain control.
• Constant Surveillance: While giving her statement, Spears discussed living in her home with nurses, security personnel, and other staff who constantly monitored her and denied her privacy – going as far as to watch her change. Surveillance is another key method that traffickers use to control their victims. By keeping a close eye on their whereabouts and interactions with external parties, traffickers can make it harder for their victims to ask for help or leave.
• Withholding of money or identity documents: Spears claimed that she did not have access to her credit card, cash, or passport. She also stated that if she refused to attend therapy sessions, she would be threatened with not being able to access her own money to go on vacation. The withholding of documents or pay are very common in labor trafficking situations as a way to keep victims in the situation out of fear that they could lose their documents or never come back to claim what they are owed.
• Coercive Contracts: In her statement, Spears recounted a “threatening and scary” encounter where she was handed a piece of paper to sign by her management to agree to go on tour in 2018, despite the fact that she did not want to go. In trafficking situations, contracts can be a big part of how victims are coerced into staying in their situations. This is often something we see in cases involving migrant visa workers who come to the United States on contract-based jobs. Whether victims sign a contract upfront that is not in a language they understand, or are threatened or coerced into signing a contract without reading it out of fear of losing their jobs – this is a key method for traffickers to control their victims.

While we await the decision in Spears’ most recent hearing, reading and hearing about her experience in her own words highlights the importance of listening to survivors and provides an opportunity to reflect and educate ourselves on what labor trafficking looks like.

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The post Is Britney Spears a Trafficking Victim? first appeared on Polaris.