Emancipation Nation

Send a text Teaching kids ages 7 to 11 how to watch out for cars as they cross the street is our responsibility. Also teaching them how to watch out for those who would exploit them is also our responsibility. Gayle Bunting’s organization “Invisible Traffick” does it through age-appropriate education in schools and stories that parents read to their children. These stories and conversations with y...

Send a text As 2020 comes to an end, the wish for the new year is that we move ourselves and nations closer to ending human trafficking. Listen to the six critical ways we can all work toward eliminating human trafficking and promoting freedom for others in our own community and around the world.

Send a text Survivors have had difficult and traumatic experiences. Practitioners can experience vicarious trauma from spending extended time supporting a client’s recovery. However, learning to laugh keeps us from succumbing to the tragedies we see each day.  Alexandra Stevenson discusses the critical need for laughter and the power in finding moments of joy, happiness, and even recognizing the i...

Send a text The Pottershands Foundation opened a home for women survivors in 2018 and they currently have openings for survivors who need a great home and quality programming to help heal. The programming is amazing and the home is lovely. Learn how Deb Kuehner took her vision from concept to actually having a 9,000 square foot home on 5 acres of land. Use her process and wise tips to open your ow...

Send a text If 99% of youth who run away from home return home any way, why is it a big deal? How many youth run away from home each year? At what age are youth most likely to run away? Why are foster youth most at risk of being successfully recruited when they run? These questions and many more answered along with ideas to addressing runaways in your community.

Send a text This week we reveal the components and secret sauce involved in hosting our annual high school human trafficking and human-rights day full of workshops and engaging interactions for teens to best understand human trafficking, human rights, rape myths, toxic masculinity and more. We interview one of our teen poets highlighted at the conference who has found her voice in this movement. W...

Send a text Armand King, former pimp, provides us with an individual and sociological perspective of limited experiences and blocked opportunities leading to pimping, gang membership, and drug sales for some young men in low-income, high crime communities. Together with his survivor sisters in San Diego, he works to educate anti-trafficking advocates and increase opportunities for young black and...

Send a text In this solo episode we will learn about “The Game” including the levels of pimping, some rules of the game and will get to know those outside of the game such as Renegades and Outlaws. Strap yourself in to learn the tools, the terms, and pimp philosophy. 

Send a text Rita survived repeated and horrific abuse at the hands of her father and a group of men her community believed upheld the very virtues of trust, safety, and honor. This personal betrayal robbed Rita of her innocence and her faith in her fellow man. The abuse went unknown and unchecked in her community. Rita now puts her faith in God and uses her skills as a master level clinical social...

Send a text Two teen poets present their poems and talk about how they see the world, us, and the issue of human trafficking. Nothing water downed, no chaser. They ask us why we prioritize capital over human beings. Why our hands are full, but our hearts are empty, and why we continue to ignore girls that are vulnerable and remain largely silent about them “dating” older men. They are tired of try...

Send a text The fact is it's difficult to traffic educated and empowered youth. Because human trafficking thrives on vulnerable youth and conditions of inequity, Aura Freedom in Toronto Canada made the decision to take a deep and focused dive by training a select number of youth on human trafficking related anti-oppressive topics and then employed them to go into schools, group homes, migrant...

Send a text High School teacher Kim Hogan made a dramatic change in her life by moving across the country, becoming a doctor student, and embedding herself and new career deeply in research, advocacy, and clinical anti-trafficking work with survivors. As a result she schools us on ways to effectively produce change. Are you familiar with the term “hit-a-lick"? Do you know what a "trick-r...

Send a text In Part II, we talk very honestly and openly about how we put the conference on each year, the presentations we each really loved, some of our mishaps and mistakes, and the lessons we learned.  We finish the podcast by talking about next year’s conference including what we look for in a good abstract and when we will be accepting abstracts for next year's presenters. I provide som...

Send a text Our 17th annual International Human Trafficking and Social Justice Conference this year was a huge success with over 99 presenters and 2,300 in attendance from a total of 43 U.S. states and 19 countries. Listen to how the conference got started, the structure, how we plan it, and highlights from this massive three-day event, all virtual this year.

Send a text This is a short 8-minute episode devoted to you! Come on! You’ve worked hard. Open your heart and allow someone to genuinely and sincerely say thank you to you. Also, please feel free to share this with others in the fight and let them know you appreciate them and what they do to help others. 

Send a text Rhonelle Bruder is an award-winning international speaker, advocate, writer, and founder of the RISE Program in Canada. RISE is a grassroots initiative that empowers vulnerable youth. Rhonelle discusses her life as a survivor and the RISE program, which is a survivor-led project that is trauma-informed and culturally responsive. They work to be inclusive and to empower survivors to thr...

Send a text The week we present the second half of our interview with Breyonna Jones, a victim of sex trafficking who was raped, beaten, and traumatized by family, friends, and traffickers, only to later be convicted for a trafficking-related offense. Get an inside view of what happens to a trafficker’s life and what we produce when we rush to pass trafficking laws that inadvertently incarcerate t...

Send a text Imagine a little girl with hopes and dreams of living a safe, healthy and productive life of healing animals as a veterinarian. Then imagine being molested and silenced by your family, raped as an adolescent, blamed for your rape, rejected and abandoned by your family as a result, trafficked, physically brutalized, and made you give all of your money and time to your trafficker. The on...

Send a text In 2010, Tom Perez began his anti-trafficking fight and noticed that while men are the primary drivers behind the demand for sexual exploitation, very few were involved in combating it. The EPIK Project brings men into the fight in effective and sustainable ways. In collaboration with the Portland Police Bureau, Tom took the hard road to build and lead an all-volunteer effort that’s gr...

Send a text Getting your message across is just as important as the message itself. Learning to be a great public speaker is a skill. We all have blind spots and could become better presenters. Perhaps you have a great message, are passionate about the work, and are making a difference, but your presentation skills could be improved. A poor presentation baffles your audience, diminishes your effor...

Send a text The need to move from a rescue and restore paradigm to a human rights paradigm is ever present. Early on in the U.S. the human trafficking movement began as a white movement made up of second wave feminists and evangelicals who saw criminal justice as allies in an attempt to solve the problem of slavery. This led to a doubling down of white privilege, enforcement, and patrol of people...

Send a text Within his series of books, “The Good Drone”, “What Slaveholders Think”, and “From Human Trafficking to Human Rights”, scholar Dr. Choi-Fitzpatrick challenges us to think about slavery and forced labor in a deeper and more complex way. From using Drones to count brick kilns In India as a way of developing prevalence to shifting our perspective from “rescue and restore” to “human rights...

Send a text Sex trafficking involves wealthy girls who leave the country only to be trafficked by foreigners with no one else to save them except Liam Neeson because they have been "TAKEN" right? Blockbuster hit, reality disaster! "The Turn Out", new film by Director Pearl Gluck, lays out the realities of sex trafficking and how it happens in small town America. After several m...

Send a text Through focused research, the Human Rights Legal Center found that many times victims, in the U.S., have been forced to testify against their trafficker in order for the state to win the case, regardless of the trauma the victim suffered or their willingness to testify. This “force” is in direct opposition to a victim-centered and trauma informed approach and is seemingly more aligned...

Send a text When survivors have lawyers, survivors have rights: This is the mission of the Human Trafficking Legal Center located in Washington, DC. The Legal Center has a database of every federal civil and criminal human trafficking case in the U.S. since 2009. They use this information to study trends in human trafficking, identify gaps, and advocate for change. In this episode, Deputy Director...