Sex Trafficking Survivor Protection on the Agenda at the 2014 Trafficking in America Conference

MIAMI - May 8, 2014 - PRLog -- Child slavery and exploitation is rampant in the United States. The Human Trafficking In America Conferences are designed for the general public to become informed and educated by experts and authorities; to protect their at-risk youth; and to mobilize and engage people across America to help turn this horrendous crime of human trafficking around.

Presenting Wednesday, July 16 on the topic, “Responsible Press Interviews and Survivor Protection”, Sandy Skelaney, a visionary and a leader who has transformed the landscape in Miami and all of Florida for children bought and sold in the sex trade and, for more than a decade, has dedicated her career to eradicating the sex trafficking of children and helping survivors find a path to healing. Prior to moving to Miami, Sandy earned a Master’s degree from Yale University in International Relations and interned with ECPAT International in Bangkok, Thailand (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking in Children for Sexual Purposes). She has worked with the renowned Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS) in New York City, and helped organized the First National Summit of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth and subsequent Congressional Briefing on CSEC. Project GOLD, a program of Kristi House, has been so successful in its first year after launching in 2009, Sandy’s program at Kristi House was named one of three Urban Initiatives in the United States by the National Children’s Alliance and in 2010, As a result of Sandy’s vision and expertise, Kristi House lead the charge to change legislation in Florida that will take children who have been commercially sexually exploited out of the criminal justice system and provide “Safe Harbor” and services for these high risk victims. After three years of advocacy, Safe Harbor passed in Florida in 2012, enabling our state to join a handful of others that have taken this more enlightened approach.

“With the theme of the 2014 Conference, Restoring Humanity From Modern Day Slavery, it is appropriate that Skelaney present on this topic,” said Yvonne Williams, President of Trafficking In America Task Force and coordinator of the annual National Conference. Modern-day slavery victims move into the arena as survivors / over comers once they have been able to escape from their traffickers. The restoration process can not only take many years, but can be brutal, with the goal bringing a former victim to complete and total wholeness. NGO’s unknowingly at times can be responsible for re-wounding a survivor they may be working with, and the press can as well. With the thirst for “interviewing victims” in effort to prove the reality of human trafficking to the public, there is little understanding about their mental and emotional state. Getting the story is the objective. Skelaney will help the attendees at the conference understand protocol for interviews and how to protect survivors throughout their healing journey. “This is a topic we are very interested in hearing,” said Williams.

Another topic high on this year’s conference agenda is the homeless and runaway population that accounts for the vast majority of human trafficking victims. Presenting Wednesday, directly after Skelaney, Tina Kelley co-author of Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, (Wiley October 2012 and a national bestseller), was a reporter at The New York Times for a decade, where she was part of the Metro section team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize in the Public Service category for coverage of the September 11 attacks. She wrote 121 “Portraits of Grief,” short descriptions of the victims. Her first book of poems, The Gospel of Galore, won a Washington State Book Award, and her second book, Precise, was published by Word Press in January 2013. During her 20-year newspaper career she worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts, and The Seattle Times and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and her writing has appeared in Audubon, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Orion, People, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2009.

“If we can address this one aspect of human trafficking alone we can reduce the number of child trafficking victims by 50+%,” states Williams. “I’ve been looking for someone to present on this aspect of domestic trafficking, and now we have someone that is as passionate about it as I am. Imagine being able to actually reduce the number of victims by over half! That is hundreds of thousands of young people spared from a life of pain and suffering. And while the issue of runaways and homelessness is complex, it is not out of the realm of possibility to end it in our lifetime.” There is a source that can help runaways and homeless persons that need assistance and to report suspect human trafficking activity. The Polaris Project National Human Trafficking Resource Center is a national, non-governmental, toll-free hotline, 888-373-7888, available to answer calls and texts from anywhere in the country, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year. Report a tip or connect with anti-traffikcing services in your area.

About Trafficking in America Task Force

Visit www.traffickinginamericaconference.info for more details and to register. Trafficking in America Task Force is a 501c3 non-profit charitable organization and has been working since 2004 to educate the American population about the reality of the sale of American women, men, and children into sexual slavery for the profit and pleasure of their perpetrators, and that the forced labor trafficking of both adults and children is real in this country.

Our vision is to help eliminate the human trafficking of women, men and minor children in America, and to provide a culture for our children free of sexual exploitation and slavery, where people know and own their own intrinsic value.