On-Ramps, Intersections, and Exit Routes: A Roadmap for Systems and Industries to Prevent and Disrupt Human Trafficking
Harold D’Souza hardly seemed like an obvious candidate for a five-figure bank loan. He had only just arrived from India, with a wife, two young boys, and a job offer that turned out to be fraudulent. Yet somehow, with just a few signatures on a few dotted lines, Harold walked out the door of a bank with what would have been a small fortune had he been allowed to access it. Of course, he wasn’t. Every dime of that money went to the man who actually arranged for the loan – the trafficker. This was the same man who brought Harold to the United States with the promise of a high-paying professional job and instead forced him to work in a restaurant and live in a virtual prison of debt and desperation. Exactly how the trafficker managed to secure a loan of tens of thousands of dollars in the name of a newly arrived migrant worker with no verifiable source of income remains a mystery to Harold. Clearly though, it was not dumb luck. The trafficker knew exactly how to work within and around a highly regulated and legitimate industry – banking – to maximize the profit he made on Harold and his family. It was all part of his business plan.
The man whose lies and manipulations robbed Harold of his freedom was not unique to his field. A successful trafficker, like any successful entrepreneur, begins with a business plan built on a platform of established business models and best practices. Over time, that plan is chiseled to perfection as the trafficker learns new skills and tests out innovative new ways to monetize the exploitation of human beings.
As with any enterprise, the business plan of a human trafficking venture is not built in a vacuum but rather exists within an ecosystem or matrix, depending on and intersecting with a range of legitimate industries and systems – cultural, governmental, environmental. Examples are abundant. Traffickers use banks to store their earnings and buses to move their victims around; hotel rooms are integral to the operations of some sex traffickers, social media is a vital recruitment trawling ground for others.
This report takes a magnifying glass to such private-sector intersections. The details matter. The more that is known about the business plans of human trafficking, the more possible it becomes to prevent and disrupt the crime and help survivors find freedom. The insights here are gleaned from those in a position to understand the nuances of each business intersection point – the survivors who lived the experience. They are not definitive scientific conclusions but rather valuable baseline narratives that can spark further exploration and collaboration from other sectors.
Each set of insights is followed by detailed recommendations for turning them into action, industry by industry. Like the insights and information that precede them, these recommendations are also not intended to be definitive. They are a beginning; an invitation. What we have learned is only as valuable as the partners who join us in making the recommendations a reality – and by offering more of their own.
This report builds upon Polaris’s 2017 report, The Typology of Modern Slavery, which analyzed data, gleaned from nearly 10 years of operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline, to show that human trafficking in the United States consists of 25 distinct business models. For each, the Typology report illuminated the basic operational plan – the demographics of both victims and traffickers, and how victims are recruited and controlled.
The sectors explored in this report – the financial services industry, social media, transportation industry, hotels & motels, housing & homelessness systems, and health care – are not the only private businesses that intersect with human trafficking. Nor are they “to blame” in some way for human trafficking. Indeed, as you will read, many stakeholders in each of these systems and industries are already doing innovative work or making powerful commitments to becoming part of the solution.
Clearly, engagement from the private sector alone is not enough. Child welfare agencies, schools and teachers, the criminal justice system, and local, state, and federal government actors are the proverbial tip of the spear, essential to the fight against human trafficking.
But human trafficking is a $150 billion global industry that robs 25 million people around the world of their freedom. This report focuses on the private and public-private sector because fighting human trafficking will require participation by business and industry partners with resources at a comparable scale to the size of the problem. Participation, in this context, is not a euphemism for making donations to groups that fight human trafficking. The fight against human trafficking requires not just passive support but actual, active commitment and effort on the part of businesses that unwittingly, but regularly intersect with traffickers, vic- tims, and survivors.
The information about how each of these systems and industries are exploited by traffickers as part of their business plans comes from extensive surveys of, and focus groups with, survivors of all types of human trafficking, as well as from the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Those who participated in this work, and in the sometimes painful process of sharing their own stories, did so not to point fingers, but rather to point out opportunities. We are grateful beyond measure to those with the strength to voluntarily speak their truth, again and again, in hopes of keeping others from suffering.
They did so because they know it is possible. Tanya Street lived it. As a recent high-school graduate, Tanya was vulnerable to the machinations of a pimp who showered her with love and attention, then turned her out on the street programmed to believe she was worthless, invisible, unlovable, without him. Most of the doctors at her local health care clinic simply reinforced his brainwashing. Repeatedly, she showed up with urinary tract infections that had her literally doubled over in pain. She felt frowned upon, disapproved of. No one in the emergency room asked her why this kept happening, if maybe she would like some help beyond antibiotics. She wonders what would have happened if just once during those visits, someone had asked her the right question, or offered her information about getting help or getting out. She wonders how much sooner she would have found her voice, started her life. She wonders what pain she might have avoided.
Harold too knows that if someone at that bank, long ago, had done something a little differently, perhaps everything else would have been different and his family could have avoided some of the pain, fear, and trauma they live with to this day.
Today, Harold and Tanya have been honorably appointed to the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking. They share their experiences because they believe others truly can learn from them, and systemic change can be achieved. But they can- not be everywhere, talking to everyone, in every hospital emergency room, bus terminal, at every hotel front desk, truck stop parking lot, or monitoring the millions of social media conversations that fly through the ether at any given time. What Harold, Tanya, and all the survivors who contributed to this project have done is recognize the value of mapping the intersections where human trafficking meets legitimate businesses and systems. In doing so, they have staked out new territory, recognizing that if human trafficking is a business, requiring intense planning and depending on other businesses and partners to flourish, so too must the fight against trafficking be a collective undertaking that is painstakingly plotted and thoughtfully implemented, in partnership with the businesses that unwittingly make it possible.