Alia Azariah joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss her journey from being an online victim of trafficking to becoming an advocate for youth and aftercare.

Alia Azariah

Alia Azariah is a passionate advocate and survivor dedicated to ending human trafficking and empowering those affected by this grave violation of human rights. Her focus lies in creating safe and sustainable communities through education and advocacy, service provision, and social justice. With a combination of professional knowledge, personal experience, and compassion, she works diligently at both local and national levels to create lasting change in the lives of trafficking survivors through specialized training and safe housing initiatives.

Key Points

• Alia shares her personal experience of being groomed and trafficked through social media, emphasizing how vulnerabilities prior to being online contributed to her exploitation.


• She describes how traffickers use psychological tactics, such as fulfilling unmet emotional needs, to build trust and manipulate victims.


• The lack of awareness about the dangers of social media during the early days of platforms like MySpace contributed to the ease of exploitation.


• Alia explains how Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs helps in understanding vulnerability beyond just economic hardship, showing how traffickers exploit various unmet needs.


• Traffickers deliberately create or exploit a sense of dependence, offering victims what seems like support or love to gain control.


• She discusses the importance of community and long-term support in a survivor’s healing journey, highlighting that recovery requires more than just therapy or shelter.


• Alia emphasizes the need for survivor inclusion in leadership roles, pushing for organizations to provide survivors with professional development opportunities rather than limiting them to direct care roles.


• She challenges organizations to evaluate their approach to survivor leadership, advocating for hiring based on character and potential rather than just experience.


• The conversation highlights the gaps in services for minors exiting trafficking, emphasizing the critical need for effective emergency stabilization solutions in the first six months post-exploitation.


• Alia advocates for policy changes at local, state, and national levels to improve services for trafficking survivors, particularly minors.


• As a mother, she applies her knowledge by implementing strict social media guidelines for her children and having ongoing discussions about online safety.


• She will be participating in the Insure Justice conference, where discussions on improving survivor resources and policy will continue.

Resources

• Alia Azariah on LinkedIn


• Safe House Project

Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Sandie: Welcome to the ending human trafficking podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. This is episode number 338 survivor alia Azariah, from online victim to serving youth and aftercare. My name is Dr. Sandy Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice and make a difference in ending human trafficking.

[00:00:35 ] Alia Azariah is a passionate advocate and survivor dedicated to ending human trafficking and empowering those affected by this grave violation of human rights.

[00:00:49 ] Her focus lies in creating safe and sustainable communities through education, advocacy, service provision, and social justice with a combination of professional knowledge, personal experience, and compassion. She works diligently at both local and national levels to create lasting change in the lives of trafficking survivors through specialized training and safe housing initiatives.

[00:01:22 ] Alia, it is such a delight to have you on the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. And as I was reading your bio, it sounded like you’ve been part of Global Center for Women and Justice for years. use a lot of the same language that we do in our work against human trafficking. So welcome to the show.

[00:01:47 ] Alia: Thank you.

[00:01:48 ] Sandie: So let’s start out withy experience go back a few years

[00:01:56 ] to when you were a young person and you were online on MySpace and tell us about that part of your story.

[00:02:09 ] Alia: Yeah, so I was vulnerable before I ever got on the computer, right? And so that’s important because I was already, like, experiencing a lot of bullying at school. I was already, lacking family support. I was involved in a group of students at school who were very young and yet making really scary choices already.

[00:02:31 ] And this was about 6th grade, and so I had a lot of vulnerabilities before I ever got to social media, and so when you mixed those things together, it was really a prime, situation for exploitation and for meeting people who were looking to fill a need, and I was going to social media Hoping to get a need met, right?

[00:02:52 ] So my, my goal for social media wasn’t to talk to the friends that I already had, wasn’t to communicate with family. My goal entering social media was to fulfill my needs of, one, having people who cared about me. I already had like mixed messages in my mind about how people were supposed to care about you.

[00:03:14 ] So that was really, really priming me for exploitation. So I was already, even outside of social media, looking for my needs to be met by adult men, believing that that was like how I could best get those needs met. And so social media seemed like a more streamlined version to a way of having those needs met.

[00:03:35 ] And then I was looking for people to, to, buy me new shoes and, and things that, most teens want, right, but are getting from their parents or the people that take care of them, usually. and so, this was also just a dangerous time, as it is even now, but in a different way with social media, in that at least now we know what the dangers are.

[00:03:55 ] And we have things to prevent some of those dangers. When MySpace launched, nobody knew what social media could present. Nobody knew or thought of what the dangers were because it was brand new. Right. And so these weren’t conversations we were having in schools or with parents or things like that.

[00:04:14 ] And so, nobody even really knew to know if I had a social, a social media page. nobody was wondering if I had a MySpace and, creating rules and boundaries around what that looked like. And so when I created a MySpace, I was going on there. To connect with people that I didn’t know, because I thought that that would, that would fill my needs.

[00:04:34 ] and in many ways, I think the hard thing is like it did. It fulfilled them in ways that were really unhealthy and really unsafe and led me to being trafficked. But that was the kind of the tool that my trafficker used was the fact that he was able to fulfill those needs for somebody who cared about me.

[00:04:50 ] He was able to say those things to me that he needed, to. And so I was already meeting up with people via MySpace when I met my trafficker. I was running away outside of social media. And I would find myself in situations that were really, really scary. When I would run away, when I would just meet people on the street.

[00:05:11 ] and so I, I was using, you know, now I look back and go like, look at my little 12, 13 year old self. doing harm reduction in my own life, you know, and, and I felt like, okay, if I meet people on social media, at least I know who I’m meeting with. And I can kind of like, maybe get a vibe from them was what I was trying to do.

[00:05:32 ] It was actually trying to keep myself safe and, but of course, safety is really skewed when you’ve grown up in a vulnerable home and things. So, I was meeting people on social media, and I would run away, and at least I would have a place to stay, and I would have, like, a roof over my head when I would run away, and then I would come back home, and, you know, a couple weeks later, I would do it again.

[00:05:53 ] and, one time, this one time, I was communicating with somebody over social media that I was planning on running away with, and it, I didn’t know this. You know, we didn’t talk about trafficking. This was probably like 2004. and I was communicating with him over social media and the person on the other side of the computer was someone who had a history of trafficking girls.

[00:06:17 ] He’d been doing this. He was 28 at the time that I was messaging him. I think he had started trafficking girls when he was like 17. and so he’d been doing this for, a decade. And, what he struck me as different than the other people that I had been really being exploited by as well, but not in this like third party trafficker kind of way.

[00:06:40 ] he struck me as different because his goal was not to meet with me that day. Whereas everyone else that I had been, like, it was like very clearly, I know what their goal is. I’m just trying to find a place to stay. that was my goal. They had their goal. He showed me that his goal was to get to know me.

[00:06:59 ] His goal was to find out like who I was and to tell me that he cared about me and to talk to me. And that was like the most enticing thing. And the thing that I didn’t, I didn’t have a dad. I didn’t have real men in my life who were taking care of me and were showing interest in me. And so. It instantly, even over social media, created a, like an extreme bond that his goal was not to get me to meet up that day.

[00:07:30 ] His goal w