I sure didn’t know very much about human trafficking. Oh, I’d watched shows about it on CSI and Law & Order and occasionally I’d hear about it on the news, but in my brain human trafficking was about those “other” people and it wasn’t very many of “them”.  Well, I’m here to tell you that I couldn’t have been more ignorant.

There are an obscene amount (in the hundreds of thousands) of immigrants who are kidnapped and forced into sex slave labor and prostitution who are brought to the U.S. with no way out.  There are also tens of thousands of U.S. citizens who are kidnapped and forced into slave labor and prostitution. For statistics about human trafficking you may go to (http://search.conduit.com/ResultsExt.aspx?ctid=CT2720516&SearchSource=3&q=Human+Trafficking+stats)

Today our Universal Human Rights class was privileged to have Dottie Laster join us.  Dottie is an expert on human trafficking as well as a legal advocate for the immigrants who suffer from it’s plight (http://sites.google.com/site/lasterglobalconsulting/Home/training-1/dottie-laster).  Dottie talked about the case of “KiKi” who Mimi Swartz’ wrote about in Texas Monthly on human trafficking called, “The Lost Girls” (April 2010) (http://www.texasmonthly.com/2010-04-01/feature3.php).

To listen to Dottie speak about the hoops and caves and twists and turns that she and her defendants have had to overcome just to find freedom from their imprisonment in a life of unimaginable horrors was very sobering for me.  Dottie is going to be interviewed by television’s “Night Line” later on this week when she will talk about human trafficking going on in our own backyard at a restaurant right there in front of our faces in New Braunfels.  The NB police have thus far not had much interest in the case, we’ll see what happens when their town is all over the nation’s televisions.

Dottie stressed to the students who are getting a good education that it is our privilege (my word) to be able to help those people who have no one else who can help them.  It’s a sticky wicket in the bureaucratic jungle because if I understood her correctly, the way many of the U.S. laws are written, we cannot step in to “help” or “save” someone from this audacity if they do not ask to be helped. The problem is many of the people who are caught up in the human trafficking nightmare are under severe mental and emotional stress and do not have the where with all to know how to ask for help much less who is safe to ask for help.

Things we can do to help:

**  Visit some of the links that are within this blog to find out more info.

**  Evidently, at least in the state of Texas, it is not as hard as you might think to become a legal advocate.

** Bug your policemen, sheriff’s office, council men

** Pay attention to some of the bills coming down the pike pertaining to human trafficking and advocate with your representatives.  There was an article about it on KUT’s NPR.ORG this evening (11-10-10) that you can go to their website and listen to about the human trafficking bill.

** Pay attention.  In the case of the restaurant in New Braunfels it was pretty obvious what was going on with a van pulling up and letting several people out every morning and picking them all up 12 hours later. Dottie followed to where they were dropped off at night and all of the people lived in the same well-guarded house.

** If it smells like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck….it’s probably a duck!

What do you know about human trafficking? What are you willing to do to help?