For the 2023 Caltrans Safety Awareness Week, the Mineta Transportation Institute hosted a webinar on Thursday aiming to bring awareness to efforts from transit organizations to combat human trafficking in the United States
Human trafficking is the fastest growing organized crime that involves the recruitment, transport or transfer of people using force, fraud or coercion to exploit them for acts of labor, services or sex, according to a U.S. Department of Justice webpage.
The webinar included five panelists who are professionals in the transportation field.
Human trafficking relies on transportation to move and recruit victims, making the transportation industry integral in preventing human trafficking.
Aston Greene, chief of system safety and security for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, said empowering transit users is crucial in increasing safety in transportation.
“We’ve all heard of the ‘See something, say something’ campaign, which I think is very important just to increase the awareness of your environment while you’re on our transit,” Greene said. “But there is another thing that should happen right. It’s, ‘See something, say something,’ how about do something.”
Polly Hanson is the senior director of security, risk and emergency management at American Public Transportation Association and the former chief of police for Amtrak.
She said while she was working at Amtrak, she saw how effective human trafficking awareness training could be for staff.
“We know that wherever transit goes, communities grow and it’s only fitting then that your employees would want to help individuals be free from human trafficking in their communities,” Hanson said.
Kezban Yagci Sokat, San Jose State assistant professor of business analytics and research associate at the Mineta Transportation Institute, was one of the expert panelists for the webinar.
“The most important thing a regular citizen can do is . . . awareness, education, training,” Yagci Sokat said. “That was the most important thing.”
Greene said VTAlerts is an app that riders can use to support any observation of suspicious activity. The mobile app lets users write a short description of something they see, which is then sent to security and law enforcement.
“So [the VTA] armed the public with an ability to see something and do something immediately that could address what could be some threatening behaviors,” he said.
Yagci Sokat said her research examines the role of transportation in different stages of human trafficking in California.
In her research, she found that different transportation organizations working together to cross reference their data is another crucial role in combating human trafficking.
Paul Chang, regional anti-human trafficking coordinator for the U.S. Department of Labor, said partnership is essential in creating effective human trafficking task forces.
“There’s also an informal transportation industry that’s really not looked at in many cases,” Chang said.
He said immigrant communities are more likely to use informal forms of transportation, including underground versions of Uber.
“Traffickers learn and adapt so we as the people who are trying to combat human trafficking have to adapt ourselves,” Yagci Sokat said. “We make sure that we learn from our survivors, when we are doing any of these efforts so that they’re actually meaningful and appropriate.”
Evelyn Chumbow, operations manager for Human Trafficking Legal Center, is a survivor of child labor trafficking and an anti-human trafficking advocate.
“Training is important but make sure you’re getting this training from a diverse pool of people [with] live experience,” Chumbow said. “I like to use my experience. I came here at age 9 and I got on the plane . . . [I was with] my trafficker and I seemed like a very happy kid so sometimes the signs might be different.”
