By SARAH CLARK
News Editor
Members of the community gathered at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Church on Sept. 21 to listen to panelists present a symposium on human trafficking and how people can survive. The event was sponsored by the Schenectady County Safe Harbour Anti-trafficking Program.
“It is our hope that by shedding light on this human welfare issue, we as a society will gain a better understanding of the complex nature of human trafficking,” said Olga Delorey, the president of the Ladies Philoptochos Society. “Only then can we begin to clearly see the silent victims in our communities who are in need of our help.”
The symposium was moderated by Elaine Houston, a co-anchor and news reporter for WNYT.
“People in the U.S are trafficked in a variety of different ways,” said Mary Armistead, Esq., Equal Justice Works Crime Victims Justice Corps Fellow at The Legal Project. “I see it most often in domestic servitude, where an individual is being coerced to basically be someone’s domestic servant in their home.”
A common misconception addressed at the synposium is that human trafficking is performed by strangers. However, anyone can be human trafficked by family, friends, or significant others, as the perpetrators use force, fraud, or coercion in order to satisfy their needs.
“There are a lot of things that make an individual at increased risk for being trafficking,” said Armistead. “That is because, as I mentioned, traffickers really like to determine a person’s vulnerability and exploit that vulnerability.”
“The money doesn’t always stretch as far as it needs to,” said Karen Sessions, a youth development specialist for the New York State Office of Children and Family Services. “We challenge counties to think about how they can work together to close those gaps and connect the services for young people.”
Sex trafficking is often seen with lower socioeconomic classes, however, some recorded cases do fall in the higher classes. Sessions also said how the funding that counties get for fighting human trafficking relies on the population, highways, and borders in New York State.
Drug addictions also play a role in human trafficking, as the traffickers will often give the victim drugs if they meet their demands. In some cases, traffickers make their victims addicted to drugs so they become dependent.
“Every time we get a client in the door, that comes to our facility, our goal is to end homelessness for that client,” said Nettie Cossman, the president of Safe, Inc. of Schenectady. “We’re in the fight to end trafficking.”
Cossman said how Safe, Inc. provides shelter, outreach, counseling, and other services that were created to help exploited victims escape their situation and trafficking.
“These are the women we have opened our doors for,” said Debbie Fowler, president and founder of “Eyes Wide Open,” an organization that is for women who need to heal from trauma caused by human trafficking. “There’s got to be a different way rather than having these older women, they’re the ones on the streets, under the bridges, in the abandoned houses because there’s nothing there for them.”
Women who are trafficked often have to have intercourse with 20 or 30 men per night in order to make the quota the trafficker has set for them. If the quota is not made, usually those women are physically abused or face other consequences.
“It’s not just on the law, this is our community, this is our home, this is where the brokenness happens,” said Fowler. “Together we can start saying ‘We know about it, we’re gonna say something when we see something about it’ because that, this illegal enterprise is about money, it’s about power.”
“It takes a village to investigate sex trafficking crimes,” said Amy Kowalski, an investigator in the Albany County Sheriff’s Office. “Sex trafficking is tough for law enforcement, there’s not just a specific group that we can target.”
Kowalski said how law enforcers need members of the community to say something if they see suspicious activity occurring in their community.
“It’s not just in the inner cities, it’s not just African American men,” said Kowalski. “It’s white men of power, it’s in your high class neighborhoods, it’s in your suburban neighborhoods, it’s in the inner cities. It does not discriminate.”
A lot of survivors can come from abusive and unstable homes. Salka Valerio, a human trafficking survivor, told her story of how she became trapped in teenage sex trafficking at 14 years old after running away from her family in Virginia.
“Victims don’t usually come out and say ‘hey, I’m a victim of human trafficking’ because they don’t know what’s going on,” said Valerio. “So it gets harder for law enforcement to kind of track some of those things down.”
The synoposium struck emotions throughout the crowd of people who attended, but it also educated everyone on the tools to help those who might be victims of human trafficking. “If I had these curriculums and I had seen them, I would have been able to keep myself safe, and as a community there is always something you could do,” said Valerio.
