>>Good morning and welcome to Global Perspectives.

I'm David Dumke.

Today we are joined by Dr. Roberto Hugh Potter, who is the director of the University of Central Florida's Program for the Study of Human Trafficking in Modern Slavery.

Welcome to the show, Hugh.

>>Thank you.

Nice to be here.

>>So, Hugh, when you say human trafficking, it's an issue that touches virtually everywhere.

But at the same time, people don't see it very often.

Where do you start when you begin this discussion of let's look at human trafficking?

>>Locally, we tend to start with our law enforcement folks moving on out globally.

We tend to see it particularly in industrial type settings from very much in the Marine seafood and other similar seafaring operations.

We see it in mining around the world and in charcoal production, in brick making, all sorts of things like that.

Then you move into the more domestic labor types of situations.

And then, of course, what most people focus on is we move into sex trafficking and the movement, often including human smuggling, which is separate from human trafficking.

But they're often inter-related.

The movement of people across national boundaries or within the nation, across state boundaries and counties to provide sexual services.

But in you know, in the one other area that we often don't talk about here in the U.S. but is important in other nations is the area of organ harvesting.

Whether that's done against a person's will or without their knowledge through some sort of, you know, drugging them or whether it's done with their knowledge.

But because it's one source of cash that maybe they can use to help support a family or whatever.

But those are really the kinds of activities that we're talking about.

Anything where an individual or group appropriate the labor of someone else for their own profit and basically enslave those people or at least keep them in a form of debt bondage.

So that they really cannot leave the situation.

And all or almost all of what they earn is going to that other person, whether that's through physical labor or sexual labor or increasingly, I think we're starting to see some in the intellectual areas like forced coding and other sorts of activities.

>>You yourself, you are you have a Ph.D. and you're in the Department of Criminal Justice.

Is this a law enforcement issue or is it a foreign policy issue or is it a social issue?

>>It's-- >>You're talking about everything here.

>>Yeah, it's all of those things.

And they're intertwined.

At at the larger level.

At the higher levels.

It is a policy issue, a legal issue in terms of, you know, looking at the factors that drive the people who are victimized, but also that drive the people who are profiting.

So, you know, some of my colleagues like to blame everything on capitalism, but we know that human trafficking exists in all economic systems around the world.

And so it's it's really a matter of greed, you know, and if you have laws that do not punish people for stealing the labor of others, enslaving others, then you're going to find that it's much easier or much more likely that you will have this occurring in those situations.

And of course, we cannot forget state sponsored human trafficking, basically enslavement, as we have seen in some areas around the world over the years.

>>What are some of the areas in terms of globally that where you find most prevalence of human trafficking, as as yourre describing?

>>I think it really it depends.

You know, the the State Department puts out a report every year that kind of gives you an overview of what's going on in certain countries around the world, including the United States.

So you see the Chinese are accused of using in forced labor, particularly involving the Uighurs and others, to produce some of what they produce, particularly domestically.

You see in certain areas of Africa where people are enslaved in mining or brick production, you see some in India where people are put out, you know, begging and other things.

And then, of course, sex trafficking where people are forced into prostitution, basically unwillingly.

You have people who are using enslaved people in organized criminal activities.

So, you know, could be theft rings, it could be fraud rings, could be all kinds of things.

And then, of course, domestically here we look at agriculture, which is very big in Florida.

And now where I'm from, you know, we have one of the largest cases of labor trafficking in the state, in Highlands County.

And then on down in Immokalee, you have sex trafficking around many events around the country.

So and then domestic servitude, where we see people brought into the country basically to work for nothing in the houses of rich people.

So those kinds of activities are going on all over the world.

They're concentrated by type in different parts of the world.

And then, like I mentioned, the whole seafood industry is-- >>Explain a little about that.

I think some of our viewers would say why the seafood industry in particular?

>>Well, the seafood industry in some ways is really easy because you've basically got people out at sea where you can control them.

So, you know, you may we go back back to the days of, you know, days of old and waylaying people and putting them on a ship or you get them drunk or you get them high or whatever, and you put them on a ship and you take them out to sea.

They're out in the middle of nowhere, literally, and you tell them to go to work.

So, you know, and keep in mind that a lot of modern fishing is really large scale industrial practice where you need lots of people to operate these large scale industrial processes on board ships, not just, you know, you don't think about it as as the small shrimpers out here, you know, tending their nets.

This is really, you know, is these huge ships that take these they may be using boats like that to catch the fish, but then they're being processed on their ships.

So basically you're out of sight.

You're out of sight of land, you're out of sight of anybody else.

And people just force you to work.

>Is it a question on the international level and I'll ask this later on a state and local level, you have laws in place clearly is it a question of enforcement or will.

I mean, obviously, when you have a state sponsor of these things, that's one thing.

But on a day to day level, you're talking about the sea where you have some areas where there is >>Lax enforcement.

>>Yes, for sure.

But but that's not it's not just exclusive to the sea.

>>No.

No, it is, you know, partially again, it's a it's a matter of observability.

It's a matter of if you're operating in international waters, whose jurisdiction is it?

So, you know, when when you when you get a ship that's out in international waters that's basically using enslaved workers, who's going to come out and say that?

So, you know, unless you have somebody like Greenpeace running up against whalers or something, I don't think that we really have that kind of thing going on where you have a Greenpeace like organization that's, you know, going out and buzzing the the big ships on on, you know, in the in the sea lanes to look for, you know, enslaved people and then try to get them off.

So it it really does come to there's there are jurisdictional issues there in international waters.

Whose responsibility is it to go out there?

And I don't know that that's a clear there's a clear answer on that.

>>Victims who are caught in this cycle, whether they're farm and in Immokalee, as you mentioned, or they're out on a sea working on a boat or stuck in an in a sex operation, what kind of services are out there and where?

Let me put it in a different way.

>>Yeah.

>>There's lots of different services out there, obviously.

What are the most effective ways to reach these folks?

>>Well, if this is where we get into some problems with the way we measure things and we often find ourselves looking at one set of numbers that say we have this number of complaints, but then we look at the number of enforcement operations against them and they're much smaller.

So part of part of the problem is and I think we have to bring in one of the other things people really traffic and often co-traffic, and that's drugs.

Drugs are used quite effectively to keep people in line, particularly in sex trafficking.

So they make it difficult through a combination of what we call chemical restraints, various trauma bonding and other forms of emotional abuse.

They make it very different, difficult for a victim to report and to leave the situation.

Pardon me and we have services, well, not nearly as many as we think we need and the types of services that we have are not always geared toward dealing with the multiple traumas, what we call complex trauma of the victims of these crimes.

And that's especially true in sex, but it's also true in a lot of labor.

We have services out there.

We are building more capacity.

But often these services are not the kinds of things that are really covered by any of our social safety networks.

They're, you know, covered oftentimes by the nonprofit sector, the non-governmental organizational sector.

And so their resources are quite strained.

>>I'd imagine a lot of these people are in situations where they're particularly vulnerable, too.

So you have people who are working here illegally, for example, and their families are also with them.

So I guess if you are a farm worker, for example, how do you get away?

You know, you know, this is a problem.

You you you understand that there is victim services there.

But if that help, doesn't materialize quickly, you're increasingly vulnerable.

I imagine that's a deterrent.

>>Yes.

And in all of these things, you know, the people who are trafficking, look for vulnerabilities.

They exploit those vulnerabilities.

I don't want anybody to think that these people are mastermind criminals.

They're not.

They're just you know, they recognize a vulnerability and they act on it.

It's a numbers game.

Sometimes it can work, sometimes it isn't.

Most times, you know, when it does work, you make a good score.

The vulnerabilities that we see internationally.

First and foremost, economic, wars, they are things that push people into situations where they are vulnerable.

And then, like you say, if you have someone who has entered not only the U.S. but Australia, Europe and European countries and others illegally, if I'm a trafficker, I'm going to take all of your documentation from you.

So and I'm going to use that to threaten you, that if you don't do what I tell you to do, I'll turn you over to the officials and you will get sent back to wherever you came from.

And of course, like you say, if you have a family that's dependent on you, then you keep going.

It it is one of those things where one of the first things we look for is who's controlling your documentation.

So undocumented nonresidents or non-citizens, I think that's the current term, you know, are very vulnerable to being exploited and trafficked.

And again, exploitation is really the core of all of this.

So it becomes very difficult for people in that situation of being some place without proper authority.

But it also that, you know, using more things like sex trafficking and such, it also becomes one where threats are used to control people, either physical cutting off drugs, you know, embarrassment, extortion of that kind are used.

>>You're talking about the documentation.

And if there are situations where these people are working fairly open, but no one kind of knows the story, if you go buy a farm or if you're go to someone's house and there's you never quite know who who does the law say is responsible for checking documentation in these cases or who is responsible?

Who's held responsible by the law?

>>Well, you kind of bring up one of our one of our touchier situations here, and that is the role of third party contractors.

So let's let's take a labor trafficking example.

I go to a big resort and, you know, I, I grew up in the horticulture horticultural areas of Florida.

So you see these beautifully kept grounds.

You see, you know, all of this and you see this bevy of workers around.

The people at the resort may not know who hired them.

They may not know their status.

So ultimately, we kind of get to this point where the question you're asking is very important, because who do we hold responsible?

Do we hold the manager of the resort responsible?

Do we hold their HR director responsible or do we hold the third party contractor responsible?

And, you know, again, from a from a more legal perspective, you can go after everybody, but you kind of see who who winds up holding the can.

But it it's one of those really tough things.

You know, when you get into sex trafficking, it's a little bit clearer.

You know, it's whoever is acting in the role of the exploiter that is going to be responsible.

But also, increasingly, we are trying to get people to understand the role of the consumer.

What we generally in sex trafficking call a John or a punter in other areas.

You know, can we hold them responsible but not the person who is being exploited, not the person who's being trafficked?

You know, so we're trying to move in that direction that we hold harmless the people who are being victimized and go after the people who are either driving the demand or making the supply.

>>So I want to ask about the state of Florida, because this is considered a hotspot for human trafficking.

And when you're describing labor trafficking, we've already been talking about agriculture workers and domestic workers.

You're talking about sex trafficking, that that is also here you have a tourism industry that, of course, relies upon labor low, low paid, low skilled labor.

You also have a lot of people who are fleeing political refugees and other refugees of all kinds here.

So how would you describe the problem in Florida and which area is particularly more most problematic?

They all are problematic, obviously, in their own right, but.

>>Right.

Well, I think in labor we're really looking at some of the greedier growers, often agribusinesses.

And again, you can kind of cover your tracks by using third party contractors or crew chiefs.

You know, I come from a family where we had people who were crew chiefs back in the back long ago.

And I hope that they were not doing what some of these modern crew chiefs are doing, you know, which is basically making people work and then taking all their money or making them so indebted to you that they can't get out of serving you.

So we kind of have to look at those that that goes from fieldwork to sort of horticultural landscaping, but also into restaurants and other things.

And our Rosen School, we have faculty down there who are really doing some innovative things in using technology to try to identify labor trafficking as well as sex trafficking.

When it comes to, you know, so so basically anywhere in Florida that you have high demand for agricultural workers or landscape workers, that sort of thing, you're going to probably have higher rates of labor trafficking.

On the sex side, you know, we know that multiple events drive sex trafficking on an episodic basis and people are brought in from other places.

But also here locally.

We know, for example, that most of the trafficking victims that have been processed through our Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation work are locals.

They don't come from far flung places most of the time, except around those special events.

The big events.

They're locals.

They're local people being exploited by local people, often people they know and sometimes family.

So, you know, it's it's one of those things where sex trafficking probably occurs everywhere.

It's just a matter of, you know, degree as to how much the person is being controlled by the “pimp ” or by their their trafficker.

Labor is going to be, again, more concentrated in agricultural and and tourist areas.

But even then, getting a solid number is really difficult because we wind up either relying on anonymous complaints made to a hotline that are never really verified, or we wind up looking at arrest and prosecution statistics which are going to be depressed because of the way the system works.

>>We don't want to imply that employers are not ethical in this either.

But there's also a question of like what you don't know, you you don't necessarily want to know.

Is that is that a problem here?

>>I think so.

You know, I'm I'm a sociologist, so we like to think in continuum.

So exploitation exists on a continuum, you know, and we sort of put human slavery up at this really big end.

And then but then, you know, most of us do some exploitation in our lives.

And I think it really is a matter you have people who are willing to make profit and they don't care how it's made.

And, you know, those are hopefully fewer and further between.

But we're always going to have those people who are out to make money and they're not really too concerned with what it takes to make that money.

So if they're using a third party contractor.

>>So, Hugh, you're center.

You've worked with law enforcement, you've worked with community advocacy groups, groups of all sorts, students.

These educate and you've done a lot of education campaigns for the public.

Has that given employers and others who unwittingly are engaged in human trafficking some pause as to whether their practices are perpetuating this system?

>>We want to think so, but the reality is we haven't really done good, solid evaluations of long term behavioral changes on the part of anybody or whether they really change their practices at a corporate level or whatever.

Again, we we we tend to do very short term.

What what knowledge did you gain or, you know, how satisfied were you with the training or whatever, but not as much.

Okay.

What did you actually change?

Are you are you doing more vetting of your third party contractors, etc.?

So it's a hard question to answer.

There are people who do training in schools and other things.

They probably have a little bit better data than most of us do at the broader level.

So it you know, we're hoping with changes in the law that have happened in Florida in particular over the last seven years or so, that we will see more corporate education.

While we do see more corporate education, whether it's effective or not, I don't know.

Again, that's that's some work that I think the folks down at Rosen College are really working on.

>>So if you were going to come up with an agenda and let's assume resources were not an issue, what are one or two or three things that that could be done to make a difference on the issue of human trafficking, I know it's not an issue.

It's a thousand issues.

>>Yeah, well, my my personal area of interest is in the whole notion of demand.

You know, at at the labor level, I can see the demand very clearly.

And I fear that it will move up the sort of skill ladder just because there are fewer people going on for school and training and other things.

So I would I would like to look at what what can we do to reduce the demand for the kinds of services both labor and sexual that are provided through trafficking.

I really think one of the things that we are working on, at least in Florida, is really changing the approach of law enforcement, prosecution and others to a victim centered approach.

So I would I would like to see us continue with that, both at the statutory policy level and then the programmatic responses that we have at the local level and in law enforcement training.

And I think, you know, again, law enforcement and I'm including prosecutors in that law enforcement training, along with other first responders, really is about recognizing the victim as a victim and then getting the victims services.

So hopefully we will see more of that and less emphasis on just straight, you know, criminal justice, criminal legal process.

>>Sure.

>>Activities.

And finally, again, working on the vulnerabilities we we talk a lot now about adverse childhood experiences, what we used to just call significant life events and the vulnerabilities that those create for people.

And, you know, we we live in an area, particularly here in the from the Caribbean north where we have a lot of natural disasters.

And we know that after natural disasters, people become more vulnerable to trafficking.

So I would like to see more work for us in this area, Latin America and the southeastern and south, the Gulf states really on how do we organize around disasters to reduce the likelihood that people are going to get trafficked for a variety of reasons.

>>Well, Hugh Potter, it's been wonderful having you on on this very important subject in a subject that I've often I think is overlooked or looked at in a in a in an incomplete manner.

So thank you.

And we wish you the best of luck in your work.

>>Thank you.

Appreciate you having us.

>>And thank you.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.