By: Katie Bahr
Every workday, social worker Pam Lieber walks eight blocks from her house in Capitol Hill, past the shops and cafes of Washington, D.C.’s Barracks Row neighborhood. Her destination is a bright and airy row house on 8th Street S.E., filled with comfortable furniture and colorful artwork. Lieber, B.A. 1993, M.S.W. 1999, works as director of the Sasha Bruce Youthwork, Inc. Youth Drop In Center, where young people who are homeless can come to rest and recuperate, shower, do laundry, and receive guidance and support to get back on their feet. The center opened in February.
Lieber previously spent 20 years working with young people and families who are homeless around D.C. In that time, she has learned how dangerous living on the streets can be. The homeless populations she works with — young people ages 16 to 24 — are among the most vulnerable to human traffickers, who use violence, debt bondage, and other manipulative tactics to force others to engage in commercial sex or to provide labor or services against their will.
According to Lieber, decisions that may seem logical to a desperate young person — going home with a person who offers a warm meal and a safe place to sleep, for instance — can escalate into abusive situations that are hard to escape.
“Everyone has these movie and TV ideas of what they think human trafficking is,” Lieber said. “Really it can be just as simple as, our kids are very vulnerable and there are people out there who want to take advantage of that.”
Although accurate numbers regarding the scope of human trafficking are hard to come by, the International Labour Organization estimates that forced labor and human trafficking is a $150 billion industry worldwide. According to statistics from the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, there were 93 cases of human trafficking reported in Washington, D.C., in 2014 alone. Within her first four months of working at the drop-in center, Lieber estimates, 50 young people came seeking assistance out of homelessness. Of those, she said at least 10 were escaping or had previously left human trafficking situations.
There was the 17-year-old immigrant who moved to this country for a nanny job but ended up being taken hostage by her host family. After the young woman became pregnant resulting from a rape during that time, she worked with police to have her captors arrested. The staff of Sasha Bruce helped her to secure safe housing, pregnancy assistance, and a place to process her trauma.
There is also the case of the young D.C. local who ran away from home and took comfort in the wrong relationship: a man who forced her to have sex for profit for three years. Lieber and her associates are helping the woman find a place to live on her own, but it is not easy. Nearly every affordable home in the city is in a neighborhood where the woman was forced to work as a prostitute. It is difficult for her to start fresh on the same streets where people already know about her past.
“What people don’t realize is that this is happening on the streets that you walk down every day,” Lieber said. “It’s heartbreaking because you definitely see the worst of humanity.”
Lieber hopes she can empower young people in need to be less susceptible to the false promises of traffickers. Instead of offering judgement, she tries to build trust with them so that when they are ready, she can connect them with counseling, housing, and legal services. Though her job is often challenging, Lieber is encouraged by the teachings of Catholic social justice, which she learned about during her time at Catholic University.
Lieber is not the only member of the University community who has chosen to defend those affected by human trafficking. Several alumni, students, and faculty have taken up the cause in the fields of social work, policy, and law. Though their approaches vary, all are determined to protect the dignity of those most vulnerable by putting a stop to human trafficking, which Pope Francis has called “a plague on humanity.”
“I do believe that this is a calling for me and not just a job,” Lieber said. “I feel fortunate to incorporate what I do for a living with my own values and my own beliefs.”
While the definition of human trafficking can vary widely in different states and countries, it is always divided into two categories: sex trafficking, in which an adult person is coerced or a minor is lead into participating in commercial sex; and labor trafficking, in which a person is forced or manipulated to provide labor.
According to Mary Leary, professor in the Columbus School of Law and nationally recognized human trafficking expert and advocate, the crime does not necessarily require chains, cages, or the transportation of victims. What it does involve is a trafficker who uses physical, financial, or emotional manipulation to make victims feel powerless to change their own circumstances.
Though traffickers often target the most vulnerable populations, such as runaways, children who are homeless, or immigrants living here illegally, anyone can become a victim. What all victims have in common, Leary said, is some need that can be exploited.
Sometimes it’s very obvious, such as lacking basic services or being drug-addicted,” Leary said. “But some vulnerabilities aren’t as obvious. Sometimes that vulnerability is an emotional one.”
Leary said she has studied sex trafficking cases in which the victim perceives her abuser as her boyfriend. Other times, victims get sucked into dangerous situations because they feel a connection to what is described as a “family.”
Labor trafficking can be found in many industries around the world, including the fishing industry, the chocolate industry, cleaning crews, hair braiding, migrant farming, and domestic servitude. Often, Leary said, traffickers will manipulate victims into servitude by twisting cultural norms and ideas about debt, honor, and personal pride.
Though trafficking is often associated with foreign countries or big cities, it is spreading to the suburbs. A 2012 case in Alexandria, Va., involved an underage sex ring at T.C. Williams High School. The teenage girls were recruited through flattering Facebook messages or in-person interactions, and given access to drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, and cash for their involvement. Some were beaten or threatened with violence when they tried to quit.
“What’s remarkable is that these children were not obvious victims at first sight,” Leary said. “This image many have of sex trafficking victims as beaten adults in the inner city is far too narrow.”
In July 2015, Leary was one of the presenters at a two-day conference addressing human trafficking hosted by Catholic University’s National Catholic School of Social Service (NCSSS), in conjunction with Catholic Charities and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. More than 300 representatives of Catholic social services organizations and parishes from across the country attended the conference, which was titled “Answering Pope Francis’s Call: An American Catholic Response to Modern-Day Slavery.”
Among topics covered at the conference were accessing public benefits and resources for victims, recognizing the signs of a victim, and building parish engagement. Leary said the Catholic Church — especially women’s religious groups — has played an important role in standing up against human trafficking, thanks to its global network of churches and charities.
“Exploiting people is using a human being for one’s own purposes, which is at the core of what Jesus says is wrong,” she said. “This is something that we all play a role in as consumers. As we become a more global society and we take on these societal sins, thinking about ways in which we can combat them is important.”
One of the most well-known organizations on the frontlines of fighting human trafficking is Covenant House, which operates homeless youth shelters and reaches approximately 50,000 trafficked and homeless youth each year in 29 cities across six countries. Each location offers assistance with health care, educational support, job readiness, legal services, mental health services, and more.
Kevin Ryan, B.A. 1999, has served as CEO of Covenant House International since 2009. In that position, he encounters situations of human trafficking every single day.
“A quarter of the kids that we work with have had experiences that match the federal description of human trafficking or were being sexually exploited,” Ryan said. “If you expand that math to all of our cities across the United States, it’s thousands and thousands of young people who are being bought and sold.” In addition to helping young people off the street, the employees of Covenant House work as advocates to improve conditions for those who have been victimized by human traffickers, while educating law enforcement and public officials about the realities of rafficking. Ryan said he was inspired to do this work by his time at Catholic University, where he realized how important it is to bring his faith into action outside of the church walls. He loves working in a job that ties so closely with his belief in God and a respect for the dignity of all life.
“Our mission at Covenant House is to be icons of Christ’s love in the world for desperate kids and to restore in them a sense of dignity amid the ruins of human suffering,” he said.
Ruth White, a NCSSS faculty member who is pursuing her Ph.D. in social work, has also dedicated herself to speaking up for those affected by human trafficking. White, who came to Washington, D.C., in 1999 after earning degrees from Ohio State and Case Western University, works on federal public policy to improve services that can prevent or rapidly respond to trafficking.
Prior to coming to Catholic University, White ran a family homeless shelter for five years in Columbus, Ohio, and held positions at the Child Welfare League of America and Catholic Charities, U.S.A., where she worked as director of housing and development.
During her time at the University, she founded the nonprofit National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, which works to provide services for young people who age out of the foster care system, including safe and affordable long-term housing.
“Young people in the foster care system are at a very high risk for trafficking and sexual exploitation because there’s a phenomenon of people aging out of foster care directly into homelessness,” White said. “We work so that every person who ages out of child welfare has access to affordable housing.”
Her organization also works to provide services to unaccompanied children. “We want to increase the amount of resources available to them,” White said. “These kids are eligible for foster care, but they’re not told that. My organization is working on reauthorization on a couple of pieces of legislation that would expand resources for them.”
Like Lieber and Ryan, White says she is inspired to do her job because of her Catholic faith. For her, part of the benefit of studying at Catholic University has been the opportunity to immerse herself in the Church’s teachings about human dignity, social justice, and the importance of family.
“It’s funny because on the one hand, what I see and hear in my job can keep me up at night, but on a deeper level, I can sleep well because I know I am working on something that is so important,” White said. “I’m very often lobbying right alongside somebody who has or is currently experiencing how policy plays out in the real world. It’s such a privilege for me that they feel comfortable sharing their stories.”
Rebecca Neville, who earned her joint M.S.W. and J.D. this May, can remember when she first became passionate about human trafficking. Prior to pursuing graduate degrees at Catholic University, Neville worked at a drug treatment facility for teenagers and young adults.
Once she got to Catholic University, she found a legal internship at Salvation Army, where she was tasked with writing issue briefs about some of the current efforts to change human trafficking laws. In learning about trafficking and the associated trauma, Neville began to realize how many of the teens she had previously worked with showed signs of trafficking.
“Hearing the girls talk about how their boyfriends were treating them or what they were being asked to do …, it was recognized as trauma, but we didn’t recognize the cycle they were stuck in,” Neville said. “Not being able to say the words ‘human trafficking’ or understanding this very complex trauma left me at a very big disadvantage.”
To learn more about the missing puzzle piece in her experiences, Neville kept studying human trafficking. She worked as an intern with the Amara Legal Center, a law clinic housed within the Columbus School of Law that works with sex trafficking victims to expunge their criminal records so they can find employment and housing. She held an internship at the Department of Justice Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, where she learned about the challenges of finding evidence and taking trafficking cases to court. And she was one of the lead organizers of NCSSS’s human trafficking conference last summer.
In the future, Neville said she would love to use the knowledge she gained at NCSSS to provide legal help or advocacy for human trafficking victims. She is motivated by her belief that human trafficking is a crime in which everyone can unwittingly play a role.
“We would like to think that it doesn’t happen here, that it doesn’t happen in Northern Virginia or Washington, D.C., but it does,” she said. “The traffickers are people we interact with; we might see victims every day; and they might be people who go home at the end of the day. They’re people in our community and what affects them should affect us too.”
Neville said she has been inspired by the strength of the human trafficking survivors.
“People really like to think of victims as people who are cowering in corners, but that’s not the case,” Neville said. “These are very strong women, and these are very strong men who have gone through a lot and come out the other side, and they are still looking forward.”
The resilience of human trafficking survivors is something Pam Lieber has noticed as well, during her work at the youth drop in center. She has also realized how blessed she really is, and how even a few small differences could have changed her life completely.
“Any one of us has had struggles or faced challenges, but maybe because we had a great support network or group of friends or because we went to a school that supported us, somehow we made a different choice,” Lieber said. “These young people have the same dreams, the same hopes, the same desires for careers or families or love, but they just didn’t know how to get there.”
Though the scope of human trafficking around the world is overwhelming, Lieber has learned to find hope and inspiration in the small changes her clients make each day toward building a better life — whether it’s avoiding a certain party over the weekend or taking small steps toward a new job.
“I love celebrating those tiny victories because it’s those baby steps that get you to the bigger ones — the graduations, the first jobs. All of that stuff that’s great, but there’s a whole lot of footwork that comes before,” she said. “If all you ever felt good about were the big victories, you would miss so much.”
As she and other alumni continue to chip away at the global crime of human trafficking, Lieber says she will continue to focus on providing a space of safety and guidance for young people in need.
“I like to recognize that we can create a space where they can begin to feel unconditional love, where they can take all the crap they’ve been through and we can help them deal with it,” she said. “I like to stay in that hopeful place.”