Ending Human Trafficking

Annalisa Enrile joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to turn hope from a feeling into a working tool for anti-trafficking organizations, with three steps for survivor leaders, social workers, students, and anyone who wants to support the movement.Chapters(00:00) - Hope Is More Than a Feeling (01:58) - Hope as a Verb and What to Measure (08:54) - How Traffickers Sell a Better Life (11:54) - Steps One and Two: A Clear Goal and a Mapped Path (15:42) - Step Three: Cultivating Agency (17:20) - Making the Case for Capacity to Funders (25:19) - Mentorship as the Ultimate Capacity Builder (30:10) - Final Thoughts: Operationalize Hope About Annalisa EnrileAnnalisa Enrile, PhD, MSW, is a teaching professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, where she is also course lead for the Doctor of Social Work (DSW) program. Her anti-trafficking work began in the Philippines, and one of her first programs in the field served girls. Today she uses design thinking to build prevention programs and interventions that turn hope into action, and she speaks out against exploitative migrant labor. Her students in the school's Philippines immersion program complete capstone projects with grassroots organizations there. She writes about hope as a daily practice for social workers, activists and communities in Psychology Today, in pieces including "Hope Is a Verb," "The Right Now: Hope in the Present Tense," and "Taking Up Space." She credits her mentors with keeping her in this work, among them the late Uncle Roy Morales, an elder in the Filipino community.Key Points• Decide what success looks like before you pick a metric. A funder asked Annalisa's first anti-trafficking program, a program for girls, to report the girls' GPA, which had nothing to do with its goal. Picture the outcome first, build the measurements from that picture, and teach funders which metrics to look for.• Answer a trafficker's "better life" with questions. A survivor Annalisa learned from asks girls who are being groomed to describe it concretely: where are you living, what are you doing, what will it get you? The answer shows how small that picture is next to the world, and whatever is promised, the bottom line is what is taken.• Step one is a clear goal: name the problem you are solving now. Trafficking is tangled up with so many root causes that it overwhelms people, and a precise goal narrows it to something a team can act on.• Step two is choosing your pathway on purpose. Equifinality means many pathways lead to the same goal; mapping the one you pick gives you guideposts that show you are heading in the right direction.• Step three is cultivating agency before the opportunity arrives, through capacity building, awareness raising, trainings and coalition building. When the moment comes, you know who to call and the car is already charged.• Fund the work between emergencies. Organizations are always preparing, debriefing or somewhere else in the cycle, and an opportunity to help or transform that finds a team unready is lost.• Put capacity on the grant application. The grant form has no line for it now, and Annalisa says the field has to rewrite the application, starting with helping funders see that survivor leaders lead and heal at the same time.• Count people as resources, and look for mentors beyond those senior to you. Uncle Roy Morales told Annalisa that movements succeed on talent and time, not just treasure. She learns from peers and from her 17-year-old niece, and experienced mentors can tell you whether the light at the end of the tunnel is the goal or a train.Resources• Annalisa Enrile (USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work)• Hope Is a Verb (Psychology Today)• The Right Now: Hope in the Present Tense (Psychology Today)• Taking Up Space (Psychology Today)• Ensure Justice (Global Center for Women and Justice)• Amplify (Global Center for Women and Justice)

Lavinia Taumoepeau joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they trace how three young women who left Tonga for what they thought was a new life in China, and walked into marriages they never agreed to, became a viral video, then a police investigation, then a week of trafficking policy meetings across an entire country.Chapters(00:00) - Why It Was Called a Marriage Dispute (01:31) - Three Women, a Viral Video, and an Embassy Call (04:51) - Trafficking Indicators and an Open Investigation (09:27) - Bride Trafficking and Why Social Media Mattered (14:48) - Royal Support, the Five Ps, and Gaps in the Law (19:07) - Helping Media Report Without Doing More Harm (23:03) - Training Counselors and the Technical Working Group (28:12) - Referral Pathways and What Success Looks Like About Lavinia TaumoepeauLavinia Taumoepeau has served as Political Assistant in the POL/ECON section at the U.S. Embassy in Nukuʻalofa since February 2025, researching Tongan domestic politics and supporting embassy engagement with local authorities and NGOs. She writes the embassy's congressional reporting on trafficking in persons, and served as control officer for this visit. Before the embassy, she spent nearly two years as Tonga's first Safety and Protection Cluster Coordinator at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, building the standard operating procedures for disaster cluster response and managing $300,000 in international recovery funding. She holds a master's degree in international emergency and disaster management from Georgetown University, and two bachelor's degrees from the University of Utah in political science and international studies. She is a U.S. Fulbright Alumni Ambassador, has trained with UN Women and UNITAR on gender and disaster response across the Pacific, and contributed research for a Parliament for Women report through the Office of the Legislative Assembly of Tonga.Key Points• Framing a case as a transnational marriage dispute instead of trafficking moves the blame onto the women. In Tonga it produced open victim-blaming until people learned the legal definition.• Run the action-means-purpose test before arguing about labels. Recruiting and obtaining the women was the action, fraud about a new life and money sent home was the means, and servile marriage was the purpose.• A relative's social media post can do what official channels do not. An aunt went online asking for help, and the video broke a silence that had held for years, pulling in the embassy, the State Department and the police.• Prevention training belongs with migrant workers before they travel. Tongans work abroad in large numbers, and the diaspora is the practical safety net in countries where few Tongans are around to help.• An investigation stalls where the law is narrower than the facts. Tonga's case is still open partly because what was identified as trafficking has to be matched to policy and legislation that still has gaps.• Brief journalists on how to cover a case without interviewing survivors. Tonga's reporters shifted to the people who assisted, which let the coverage create no harm while still moving public understanding.• Ask who is missing from the table. That one prompt in the first policy roundtable sent the technical working group looking for stakeholders it had not yet connected with.• A national action plan does not fund itself. Until each ministry writes trafficking into its own annual plan it stays an afterthought, and referral pathways stay unclear to everyone outside the technical working group.Resources• U.S. Embassy in Tonga• Women and Children Crisis Centre (WCCC) Tonga• Tonga Launches First National Action Plan to Combat Trafficking in Persons with IOM Support• 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report: Tonga (U.S. Department of State)

Zahra Nader joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss why, for nearly every five women killed in Afghanistan by their own families, only one man is ever arrested, and how a newsroom of journalists writing under pseudonyms is building the record no one else is keeping.Chapters(00:00) - Why Afghanistan Is the Battleground for Women's Rights (02:07) - Founding a Newsroom in Exile (08:23) - How Zan Times Protects Its Journalists (11:59) - Child Marriage and the Laws That Enable It (19:22) - The Collapse of Maternity Care (24:53) - Afghanistan as a Global Bellwether (29:20) - Femicide, Impunity, and the Zan Times Fellowship (31:35) - What Listeners Can Do About Zahra NaderZahra Nader is the founder and editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a women-led newsroom in exile reporting on human rights violations in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. She began her journalism career in Kabul in 2011, and in 2016 joined the New York Times bureau there, becoming the first Afghan woman to work with mainstream Western media inside the country. She moved to Canada in 2017 for graduate study and was still a doctoral student in gender and women's studies at York University when the Taliban retook Afghanistan in August 2021. She founded Zan Times in August 2022 with $30,000 she had saved to build a home in Kabul, and now runs it from Edmonton alongside a network of journalists who report from inside Afghanistan under pseudonyms. She briefed the UN Security Council in October 2022, and was a 2024–2025 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she studied sustainable funding models for exiled newsrooms.Key Points• Five years of Afghan women losing basic rights with no international consequence lowers the floor for what can be denied to women anywhere. International law has not prevented it, and that is the precedent that travels.• A newsroom reporting under an authoritarian regime protects people by compartmenting them. Zan Times journalists inside Afghanistan publish under pseudonyms, connect only to an editor, and do not know each other, so one arrest cannot expose the rest.• The Taliban's Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses removes any minimum marriage age. A father or grandfather can give a child into marriage without her consent, at any age.• School was the brake on early marriage, and it is gone. Parents used to defer marriage until a daughter finished school; with girls out of classrooms, Zan Times found families selling one-year-olds and two-year-olds for future marriage to settle debts.• The penalties encode the asymmetry. A man who beats his wife to visible injury, a broken bone, serves 15 days if she can prove it in court. A woman who goes to her parents and refuses to return, along with her parents, serves 3 months. Sandie converts it on air: 90 days against 15.• The 2025 US funding cut closed 445 clinics and hospitals and cut more than 3 million people off from healthcare. Rural women lost the mobile teams that were their only access to a midwife or a blood pressure check.• Restrictions push women out of healthcare even where they are still permitted to work. A Kandahar midwife supporting three children and a paralyzed father paid half her salary to a distant relative to pose as her brother, then stopped going in when the Taliban started asking for ID.• The countermeasure is documentation. Zan Times' femicide investigation across 10 provinces found roughly one arrest for every five women killed by a family member, with deaths certified as suicide despite visible signs of abuse. Subscribing to the newsletter at zantimes.com is the step the episode asks for.Resources• Zan Times• 'When she turns eight they will take her': rising number of Afghan girls being sold into child marriage• 'I don't know how to save my daughter from her husband': the brutal reality of the Taliban's new marriage law• Inside the deadly collapse of maternity care in Afghanistan• 'Her face was beaten in': how Taliban rule ushered in a new era of women being killed• Statement by Zahra Nader at the UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security (NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security)

Cecilia Gonzalez joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to talk about the ten years she spent in an abusive relationship that started at fourteen, and how she now teaches teens to catch the first yellow flag before it happens to them.Chapters(00:00) - Introduction (03:20) - Why Love Has to Start at Home (07:15) - Control That Looked Like Protection (10:42) - Jealousy, La Tóxica, and the Stages of Love (14:29) - The Wrong Bus: Love Bombing and the Phone Cycle (17:56) - Blame, Eggshells, and "I Can Fix It" (24:01) - The Music Video That Made Her Leave (27:51) - Three Skills: Communication, Equality, Rights About Cecilia GonzalezCecilia Gonzalez is the Human Trafficking Prevention Coordinator at Higher Ground Youth and Family Services in Orange County. Her students know her as Ceci. She is part of a team that delivers near peer prevention in local middle and high schools, teaching from lived experience rather than from a textbook, and she builds her presentations around quotes and stories that teens recognize from their own lives. She entered an abusive relationship at fourteen with an older partner and stayed in it for ten years, a decade she now uses to show students how control can arrive disguised as protection. She left at twenty-four, when her oldest daughter was two months old. Today she is raising three daughters, and she talks with students about la tóxica, love bombing, the silent treatment, and the rights every young person has: to feel safe at home, to be a kid, and to be loved in a healthy way.Key Points• Control often arrives in the language of protection, which is why it survives the first look. Ceci's partner came to her soccer practices to walk her home safely, and that became the reason she should stop playing.• The silent treatment is the first flag most teens miss. Someone who cares will have the conversation about what went wrong; withholding it is a punishment, and it shows up long before anything physical does.• An apology that arrives as a gift is one more turn of the cycle. He broke her phone whenever he got angry and replaced it within hours with one her parents could not have afforded, which made the next break easier to absorb.• Time in the wrong relationship is the cost that compounds. Ceci tells students, "If you get on the wrong bus, make sure you get off on the first stop," because she stayed on from fourteen to twenty-four.• Blame does its damage by moving the rules off the record. Once she was reading his face for permission he never had to forbid anything out loud, and she started deciding for herself not to see her friends.• A teen's playlist is a way in, and calling it bad music closes the door. Ceci wanted her mother to ask why she loved the sad, heartbroken songs she played loud enough to get told to turn them down.• Home sets the first model of love, so prevention starts before any relationship does. Ceci grew up without a picture of what affection looks like and assembled one from television, the same gap she now watches teens fill with Euphoria.• Teens act on rights before they act on warning signs. Ceci says the first two skills would have been lost on her at fourteen, but "Hey, Ceci, you have rights" would have landed: the right to feel safe at home, to be a kid, and to be loved in a healthy way.Resources• Higher Ground Youth & Family Services• Higher Ground's Human Trafficking Prevention Program (HTPP)• Global Center for Women and Justice• Safe Communities, Safe Kids (GCWJ, Samueli Foundation grant)• Lil Wayne, "How to Love" (official music video)

Leanne McCallum Desselle joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore what happens when a hurricane knocks out the very systems built to catch trafficking — from a child abuse hotline down for three weeks after Hurricane Ida to the disaster recovery jobs where exploitation quietly takes hold.Chapters(00:00) - Introduction (01:39) - An International Lens on a Uniquely American Blind Spot (04:17) - The Signal International Case After Katrina (07:36) - From the Ground in Louisiana to a Researcher's Path (11:13) - Why Research Doesn't Reach the People Who Need It (14:50) - Who Disasters Make Vulnerable to Trafficking (20:18) - Responding in the First Days — and How to Prepare Before the Storm (25:22) - Creative Partnerships That Kept Services Running (28:27) - Turning Research Into Policy and Practice (34:32) - Advice for Researchers Entering This Space About Leanne McCallum DesselleLeanne McCallum Desselle is a Research Analyst and Training & Technical Assistance Provider at RTI International, a role she has held since August 2022. She spent nearly a decade in frontline anti-trafficking work in Louisiana, coordinating the Greater New Orleans Human Trafficking Task Force for more than three years and later managing a statewide child and youth trafficking initiative for the Louisiana Alliance of Children's Advocacy Centers. In 2018 she was appointed Chair of the Labor Trafficking Committee for the Louisiana Governor's Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board. At RTI, she leads technical assistance for a U.S. Office for Victims of Crime initiative on child and youth trafficking outcomes and contributes to research on labor trafficking prosecutions and the effects of disasters on trafficking vulnerability. She holds a Master of Arts in International Studies, concentrating in Human Rights and Human Trafficking, from the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Linfield University.Key Points• Hurricane Katrina's Signal International case, in which hundreds of Indian guest workers were defrauded and trafficked into labor repairing Gulf oil rigs, became one of the largest labor trafficking settlements at the time and helped drive Louisiana's first designated federal anti-trafficking funding in 2007-2008.• Housing instability is one of the biggest drivers of post-disaster trafficking risk — when people lose their community, school, and church, they become far more vulnerable to someone who says, "Don't worry, I'll take care of everything. I'll get you a job."• Disasters disproportionately hit communities already made vulnerable by redlining, the historical practice of confining people of color and poor families to lower-lying land that's more exposed to flooding and severe weather.• In interviews with 46 disaster and trafficking responders, foreign national day laborers doing disaster recovery work and isolated children in disrupted households emerged as two of the populations most vulnerable to exploitation after a storm.• After Hurricane Ida, Louisiana's child abuse hotline — the mandated channel for reporting child trafficking — was down for at least three weeks, leaving responders with no way to report what they saw.• Preparation has to happen before a disaster, not during one: without a plan already tested and rehearsed, coordinating a trafficking response becomes nearly impossible once phones, power, and staff are all unreachable at once.• Louisiana responders found creative workarounds under pressure, from standing up a mobile forensic interview unit in a neighboring parish within 24 hours to running child trafficking response operations out of a partner's building after their own offices were destroyed.• Leanne and her RTI colleagues sent their findings directly to the Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board, which is now recommending changes to state labor procurement practices to help prevent forced labor.Resources• RTI International• Human Trafficking in the Wake of Natural Disasters (RTI research project page)• Human Trafficking in the Wake of Natural Disasters: A Case Study of Preparedness and Response in Louisiana (Violence and Victims, 2026)• The Intersection of Human Trafficking and Natural Disasters: A Scoping Review (Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 2024)• Advancing the Field: Human Trafficking and Natural Disasters — Recommendations for the Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board• Labor Trafficking in Construction During the Recovery and Reconstruction from a Natural Disaster (OPRE Report, Barrick & Pfeffer)• Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board• David, et al. v. Signal International, LLC, et al. (ACLU case page)