Berkeley Talks: Protecting survivors of sex trafficking

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.

[Music fades out]

Anne Peters: Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us today at our 2023 Gender Forum. My name is Anne Peters and I’m visiting from Washington DC, so it’s a pleasure to be here with you today. I am the University and Community Outreach Director for the Pulitzer Center, which is a journalism and education organization, a global organization, and we are pleased to have organized this forum today with our wonderful partners here at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

We, at the Pulitzer Center, greatly appreciate this partnership that through the years, has produced a range of community programs and offered reporting opportunities for students here. Key among all of that is our shared commitment to the field of journalism and to supporting the most impactful stories of our times. I believe we, the Pulitzer Center and the Graduate School, are both eager to expand the impact of journalism by preparing the next generations of diverse journalists to become excellent fact-finders and storytellers. And I want to thank our Berkeley journalism and our Pulitzer Center colleagues for working diligently to organize today’s forum, of which this is the first of two sessions.

One of my greatest pleasures working with the Pulitzer Center and with our wonderful academic partners is bringing together journalists and scholars, practitioners and policy experts to share their knowledge and to seek solutions in community to some of the most critical issues of the day. And it’s wonderful to know today too, that we have both community members and the first year class of Berkeley’s graduate journalism students. So, thank you for being together with us.

And I hope that our students today will take away ideas on how they might through their own reporting, shed light on aspects of often under-reported issues, including on those we are discussing today. Whether in your own reporting in the years ahead, or perhaps a plug for the Pulitzer Center Berkeley Reporting Fellowship. More on that at a later date. As another way to continue our learning together, please, you’ll see around the room and outside a QR code that we hope you will take a look at and you can share additional thoughts that you might have on other programs we can organize together.

One other point for those to know about the second session, that’ll be later this day, for a conversation between Dean Geeta Anand, from the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, who also herself is a Berkeley journalism alum, as some of you already know that, and also a former Pulitzer Center grantee.

Now, on to our first forum session, which we’ve titled “Failure To Protect: How to Help Survivors of Sex Trafficking.” And we brought the panel that we have here today together to focus on this issue because sex trafficking can appear invisible, if we don’t know where to look and what to look for. Many individuals move through hotels and motels, emergency rooms and transit hubs, and we thought, how could doctors, nurses, police officers, hotel operators, all of us, inform ourselves and do more to protect survivors? Where should we look for the intersections on this issue across our social systems?

I am mindful that portions of this conversation might have triggering content, and I want to acknowledge that before you, before we begin. So, please feel free to step outside if you need to, take care of yourself.

Now, I’d like to introduce our panel. Holly Joshi is the director of the Center for Social Justice at Glide and a nationally recognized expert on gender-based violence, prevention and intervention. She was the executive director of MISSSEY, a direct service organization that supports trafficked youth.

Isabella Gomes is a public health journalist, infectious diseases epidemiologist, and currently a medical student at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s a former Pulitzer Center reporting fellow, as well as a grantee. Her work with the Pulitzer Center included publication of her article, “Healthcare Providers Are Missing Chances to Help Victims of Sex Trafficking.”

And Bernice Yeung is a managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program and a former ProPublica reporter. Her recently published article in the New Yorker is titled “Should Hotel Chains Be Held Liable for Human Trafficking?”

And our moderator for today, Professor Nikki Jones, the H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Department Chair of African American Studies here at Berkeley. She conducted the federally funded study Experience of Youth in the Sex Trade in the Bay Area. And now, Professor Jones.

Nikki Jones: Thank you. And thank you to everyone for being here today. I’m honored to be at the table for this conversation, and thrilled that we have so many students in the room. I want to start with a question. I want to begin by inviting each of you to share a bit more about yourself with the audience, who you are, the work that you do, and your relationship to the issue of sex trafficking. And if you can, I’d like you to help the audience make the distinction between terms like sex trafficking, CSEC, prostitution, and sex work, and why those distinctions matter for the work you do.

Holly Joshi: Hi, I’m Holly Joshi. Thanks everyone for coming in the middle of your week, in the middle of your day. I really appreciate you being here, and always a pleasure to be with you, Dr. Nikki.

So, I came to this work through the police department. In 2001, yes, I’m showing my age, I went to the Oakland Police Academy as a very nontraditional police officer, having been born and raised in Oakland and in an urban environment and exposed to the negative impacts of policing in my family, during the war on drugs. But I went and I joined the police department as a 23-year-old, really believing that I was going to mend all of the ills and relationships between my community and the police department.

And very quickly, I was lured into undercover work because I was young. I didn’t look like a police officer. All of the things that you all can imagine. And the police department at that time was 90% men. Very few women and very, very few women of color and Black women. So, I was taken in to focus on violent crime, undercover work, and disrupting guns being sold in Oakland, etc., etc.

And one day, I was walking through the hallway, getting off work actually, after a 12-hour shift. And a sergeant asked me to work as an undercover prostitute, is what he said at the time, for an undercover operation on International Boulevard.

Those of you from Oakland know that International Boulevard is really a notorious open-air sex trafficking market, and it runs from the lake all the way to the San Leandro border. So, we were going to be standing at 17th Ave. and International that particular evening, and I didn’t want to do it. But there was one other female police officer that was signed up to do it, and her partner had called in sick. And so without a trained female police officer who had gone to the undercover school, they weren’t going to be able to hold the operation. So, I decided to just do it for the night. They gave me a really tiny miniskirt and glass heels that lit up when I walked.

And I stood out at 17th Ave. and International with about 20 cops on corners within a four block radius to back me up. And we started the undercover operation. And mind you, I’d been doing undercover work at this point for a few years. And as I said, I’d been doing it focused on violent crimes in Oakland. So, I didn’t think that this was going to be very intense. I’m like, “I don’t even know why we’re focusing on prostitution. It’s a misdemeanor, it’s consenting adults, and I’m not really interested in this work, but I’m going to do a favor.”

And I had a complete disorienting dilemma. As I was doing the work, the first thing that happened was that the way that the pimps and exploiters were ruling the track was actually frightening. They were extremely violent. They were coming out of cars with pit bulls, they were shooting guns off at windows, etc., to scare the women, it was women, to scare the women that were working on the street corner.

And about two hours into the shift, I looked across the street and saw 14-year-old girls, and realized in that moment that I’m playing pretend and I have a badge and a gun, and I’m a full-grown trained adult with backup on all of the four corners. And these are children and young girls that look like me, that this is their real life, and there’s no one to protect them. The theme of our conversation, failure to protect, and no one’s looking for them.

So, that completely changed the course of my career. And for the next decade, inside the police department, I became an advocate focused on changing local and state policy to actually recognize the victimization of what was mainly young girls of color in Oakland. So, that was my start into trafficking, and that was around 2004.

And to your other question, I’ll briefly respond to the differences between sex trafficking and CSEC, which is commercial sexual exploitation of children, prostitution and sex work. I think it’s a really important question because all of us that have been in the work, know that sex work and sex trafficking are often conflated in conversations. And it can get really ugly in terms of the discussion and the debate.

And so clearly, sex work involves consenting adults and folks that are really choosing to do what they’re choosing to do. I mean, there’s not coercion involved in it, there’s not threats of violence, etc., etc. I mean, sex work in and of itself is obviously still dangerous, but just in terms of the entry points and the day-to-day decision making to engage in that as a profession belongs to the individual. And so I think that’s the difference. Sex trafficking is really coercion, and we can get into a little bit more about how that coercion can look sometimes, but it’s really about force fear or coercion.

And then obviously when we’re talking about children, we worked really hard for years for California state law to recognize that children can’t actually be sex workers. Because for so many years, we had statutory rape laws on the books that said that children couldn’t consent to sex with adults. But the minute $5 or $25 or $105 exchanged hands, California state legislation got very confused, and young people were being taken to the juvenile hall and arrested for their own victimization. And so I think it’s really important to make that distinction because those of us in the work, like I said in the early 2000s, began that push for legislation to change the way that California actually saw and treated children.

Nikki Jones: Thank you. You can clap. Yes, you can clap.

Isabella Gomes: Sorry. Can everyone hear me? Good. So, the way that I first came into sex trafficking as a topic for … actually, it started out with my journalism thesis, so I know a lot of you guys are probably working on things like that right now, was I’ve always thought whenever we move something into the healthcare space, then it becomes sort of this universal topic that everyone has an access point to talk about it. We have this common ground.

For so long, I was trying to find a topic that meant something to me. And I felt like trafficking was one of those issues where it is the extreme of every social and structural determinant of health, right? People who are struggling with access to healthcare are struggling within food apartheids, dealing with things like housing instability, undocumented immigrants, people of color. It is the people who experience the worst social support, who are struggling within this country.

I felt like trafficking would be a way for me to show people that we need to pay attention to sexual violence as a public health issue. That this is not a law enforcement issue. This is not just a criminal justice issue, that this is a health violation, this is a human rights violation. And to me, being able to talk about things like sex trafficking and labor trafficking was just a very … it’s an issue in this country that people often think doesn’t happens here.

Whenever you see any images on Google, if you type in sex trafficking, you see an image of a South Asian, a Southeast Asian, East Asian woman, bound in the corner of a basement. And that’s the imagery that we have. It’s highly stylized, it’s very sensationalized. And that myth narrows our point of view of who is at risk for sex trafficking.

And for me, I felt like this was an opportunity to dispel that myth, to reintroduce complexity into that discussion and to use the lens of public health, of individual healthcare, to talk about why this matters and that it’s happening in the U.S. And so that was one reason why I was really motivated to write about it.

Also, as a queer woman of color, also an immigrant, as a survivor of sexual assault and physical violence, to me, that this was an issue that I felt like I would be able to find people who could speak very authentically from this experience, but also be able to talk to healthcare providers, talk to people in law enforcement, talk to lawyers about what their thoughts were and bring that all together.

And so the story that I was focusing on was how healthcare providers were really missing chances to respond to issues of sex trafficking. It actually all came back to this one study in the Annals of Health Law (and Life Sciences) back in 2014, where they found that up to 88% of trafficked victims had seen a healthcare provider while they were being trafficked. Despite that, less than 5% of healthcare providers said that they had ever identified a victim of sex trafficking, less than 3% of emergency department physicians said they were even trained to identify sex trafficking victims, less than 2% of 6,000 hospitals in the U.S. had any sort of guidelines on what to do once a survivor of sex trafficking was identified.

And I’m in medical school now, we have not learned anything about it. In residency programs, you don’t learn anything about it. And these women were being seen in … Sorry, when I say women, I’m also actually including children, as we’ve discussed, and also men, queer people, people of different backgrounds. Everyone can be potentially at risk. But largely, the people that I talked to were women. They were being seen in the emergency departments, they were being seen in ob gyn clinics, but they were also being seen in pediatric clinics. They were seen in orthopedics. They were seen in dentists’ offices.

So there were so many opportunities for them to be identified, and this just wasn’t happening. And I think what I got really frustrated by was every time I looked at some sort of journalism piece about sex trafficking, it was always like, “Oh, right after the Super Bowl, there was this huge sting, this huge raid, and then we apprehended and caught the perpetrators.” And I was like, “What are we doing for victims?”

Yes, I understand that law enforcement and criminal justice have their role, but what happens later? What do we do to sort of deal with the long-term, medical, sexual health, mental health implications of the abuse that these people have endured for literally decades at a time, from childhood? And so I started looking into those health issues, partnered with a lot of advocacy organizations, including MISSSEY actually, and we started talking about the health issues.

And just to reiterate what Anne said, a lot of things I might discuss, will have … I just want to put a content warning out there because I am talking about the health manifestations of violence and abuse. So, if you need to, please feel free to take care of yourself, leave, anything like that. But the things that I started to learn was that it’s not just limited to sexual health issues. I was seeing so many physical manifestations of violence.

For example, there were people who I saw who had TMJ, so the jaw injuries, there were cervical spine injuries from oral sex. There was many women who had lumbar lordosis, so that’s like a lower back injury from wearing high heels chronically. There was this one woman that I met who she was forced to use a makeup sponge instead of a tampon. And that ended up causing toxic shock syndrome. Oftentimes because of recurrent sexual assault, you are also at higher risk for recurrent UTIs. That UTI then moves up ureters into your kidneys, and now you have kidney failure or sepsis, right?

So, there are so many manifestations that you might not immediately think about with something like sexual abuse, especially chronic and recurrent sexual abuse. And I really wanted to write a story that looked at this expanse that brought the complexity back to the conversation to say, “There is no definitive image of what a sex trafficking survivor looks like. There is no definitive medical manifestation presentation that this looks like.” And so this was an incredible way for me to talk to both survivors of sex trafficking, as well as healthcare providers, and figure out what those gaps were.

Nikki Jones: Thank you.

Bernice Yeung: Hi, everyone. I’m Bernice Yeung. I’m the managing editor at the Investigative Reporting Program, where we like to focus on stories that hold power to account. And so when I think about how I got into covering trafficking, it was actually all the way back in 2004. It was because I became aware of a case of a domestic worker from Africa who had been brought by, actually, a journalist, to the United States to live in Palo Alto, California, and was essentially trapped, passport taken away, working incredibly long hours, never given any rest, and just had incredibly unrealistic expectations placed on her.

We understand now sex trafficking to be a form of modern day slavery. And it just blew my mind that right here in Palo Alto, California, there could be modern day slavery. So my journey in journalism covering trafficking continued, I kind of began looking at sex trafficking, did a couple stories about sex trafficking in San Francisco. One of them about young people who are being forced into prostitution and getting caught up in the criminal justice system, as Holly noted, back in the mid-2000s. And I think at that point, we didn’t understand it as trafficking.

In fact, I think the headline says something about underage prostitutes. So we’ve really seen the conversation change, and we’ve seen the legislation and the law change over time. I think what’s really interesting to track, as someone covering trafficking, is that it’s an incredibly bipartisan issue in a moment where we have such deep rifts, politically. It’s an issue that pretty much everybody can get behind. And so we’ve seen bipartisan efforts year after year to strengthen the Trafficking Victim Protection Act.

So, in 2003, for example, they strengthened it to make it possible for trafficking survivors themselves to bring a lawsuit against their trafficker. And then in 2008, they further strengthened it to allow them to sue anybody who has essentially knowingly benefited from their trafficking. And that’s kind of at the crux of the story that I did most recently, looking at hotel franchisers and big chains and asking this question, “Should they be held responsible? Looking at the law, are they responsible?”

It’s been fascinating to kind of come full circle on this issue, since I know there’s some journalists in the group and journalism students. I hope you’ll humor me with some of the backstory and the kind of trade craft behind putting this story together. But I started on the story because the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ICIJ, they were convening a bunch of journalists to put together stories related to trafficking, both labor and sex trafficking. It’s called Trafficking Inc. You can look it up. Some really great stories coming out of there, related to trafficking on U.S. military bases. There was a story that just came out about trafficking, labor trafficking, in McDonald’s and Chuck E. Cheese franchises in Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, the issue is ongoing, and urgent, worldwide.

I started in on the story thinking I was actually going to do a story on nurses who were being trafficked to the United States. And then I got scooped. So, I had to kind of pivot. And an editor that I was working with said, “Hey, I’ve been looking at this database for all the journalists out there.” It’s called the Courthouse News Database. It’s not exactly easy to get ahold of, but one of the great things about it is you can actually keyword-search a number of lawsuits, which is a very difficult thing to do, as you all know. There’s no centralized database. But what kept popping up was that hotels were getting sued, and not just hotels, but hotel franchisers. We’re talking the Marriotts of the world, the Hiltons, the Wyndhams, etc.

So, this editor said, “Well, why don’t you just kind of poke around and see what’s happening here?” And what was really startling was that, beginning in 2019, there was just this complete uptick in these lawsuits filed by survivors against these major hotel corporations. As of this summer, there were about 110 of these lawsuits being filed. About half of them are ongoing. Twelve of them had resulted in settlements, some of them million-dollar plus settlements. And some of them, because this is a new area of law, were terminated by the court. But they are an ongoing case. And there’s still a lot of rich conversation happening around who should be held accountable in these cases.

And why look at hotels? I think a really important nexus point is that according to Polaris, which is an anti-trafficking organization, a survey that they conducted in 2018 of people who called into their hotline, some 60% of people who had been trafficked said that they had been trafficked at some point at a hotel.

And then you look at the criminal cases that have been prosecuted by the federal government and almost half involve a hotel at some point. So if we’re interested in interventions and moments where we can start to have some impact, I think those types of nexus points are important to look at.

Furthermore, in terms of how did I go about reporting this story, I say a lot, and I know some of the students I work with are here, I always say you have to look at the macro and you have to look at the micro. So to look at the macro story, I did the painstaking work of reading every single one of those 110 plus lawsuits that were filed against the hotel corporations. I did that by using a database that the Human Trafficking Legal Center puts together.

They do the painstaking work of collecting all of these cases. And then I went through all of those hundreds of cases to filter out the ones that involved hotel corporations, read them all, sorted them, put them into a spreadsheet so that I could understand what was actually happening on a big picture level. And then in terms of the micro, of course, there’s no story without humans, without people, without understanding the human impact of why this all matters.

I was able to focus on a young woman that we call Elizabeth in the New Yorker story. And the way that I came across her is, again, all of those lawyers that were filing those lawsuits, some of them wanted to talk to me and some really did not. And one of the ones that really did not want to talk to me actually handled this case. But what they did do was notify me that this case existed.

So I did a deep dive into this case. And what’s really interesting about these lawsuits and what I find very challenging sometimes about doing these stories where you know in your gut that there’s such an important story to tell, but nobody wants you to tell it.

So with these lawsuits, everything’s filed under seal. Nobody wants you to look at what’s actually happening at these hotels. So there was a very fortuitous, journalistically speaking, situation that happened, which was, in Elizabeth’s case, there was an insurance company that counter-sued the hotel because they didn’t want to pay the legal fees for defending this company. So in that lawsuit, the insurance company lawyer filed a bunch of those records that I would normally not be able to see. They realized the mistake pretty quickly and they sealed them up again, but I was able to get to them before they were resealed.

And so when you look at those, you get this startling and really fascinating picture that I think offers some really unique insights into how the industry operates and its efforts around trafficking. So what we saw, for instance, was that in this case, it was a Days Inn hotel and they’re owned by Wyndham, which is a mega franchising hotel corporation, and they receive every single complaint to a centralized line. They know every time somebody is upset about breakfast being cold, the sheets being dirty.

And in this instance, they knew that this particular Days Inn in Marietta, Georgia, had chronic safety and health problems. I mean, there were situations where people were banging on the door in the middle of the night. There were people walking into people’s rooms somehow with a key. So they knew that there were concerns there. There was also some emails back and forth in these files between the Days Inn worldwide president and an executive at Wyndham Corporation, where they talked about this arrest of underage prostitutes that was creating a public relations issue.

And what’s really startling about this particular hotel is that when I wrote about Elizabeth, she was 17 at the time that all of this happened, she was among those arrested. So I am sure we will have a conversation about how a lot of survivors are being criminalized in this process as part of the response, but Elizabeth was one of them. So there was a 15-year-old that was also being trafficked in this same hotel by the same traffickers. And Elizabeth, when the police were called, she was booked, her mugshot is all over the internet and she herself was trafficked.

So what’s startling about all of this, too, is that in addition to this very arrest, just five months earlier, there had been another arrest at this very same hotel for underage sex trafficking. And so there’s this question again, Should the corporation be responsible? Should the hotel be responsible? Who’s responsible here?

So I guess I’ll just close by saying that Elizabeth was a really incredible and powerful voice for this story. I’m eager to talk more about what it’s like to interact as a journalist with sources of this type. But she was, I think, in a really great place, where she was ready to unpack a lot of this and was doing a lot of really powerful work herself to be ready and willing to talk about it. And I think one of the most satisfying things for me as a reporter was when I sent her the link to the story, she texted me back and she said, “It’s amazing to see my story written out this way instead of how it was when I was arrested.” Thanks.

Nikki Jones: Thank you. And yes, we’re going to have a chance to go a little bit deeper in our responses, and the audience will have a chance for questions as well toward the end. So a crosscutting theme of your work is clearly vulnerability — and vulnerability that is constructed by multiple system failures and intersecting system failures.

So the title of our panel today is “Failure to Protect, How to Help Survivors of Sex Trafficking.” And in your work, each of you highlight multiple failures, both within and across systems — the criminal justice system, medical systems, private industries, system of capitalism. I’d like each of you to talk a bit more about what failure to protect means to you and the particular form of failures your work exposes and confronts.

And Holly, I’d like you to start. I know that you can help us to think about failure at the intersections of race and age and gender and class, and this shows up in each of the stories as well, but in particular, the ways that Black women and girls have been historically outside of protection and what that means for efforts to protect and help survivors of sex trafficking.

Holly Joshi: Thank you. So many great nuggets are coming up my mind, as Ray is saying, with everything that you all have said, but I think I want to start by saying I completely agree with what Bernice was pointing out in terms of this issue being a bipartisan issue. That has been my experience. I was at a conference about 10 years ago and was surprised that John McCain’s wife was there and wanting to get involved in this issue and using her resources to get involved in this issue.

But to take it a little bit deeper, what I will say is that if we’re just looking at sex trafficking as the issue, then it’s a bipartisan issue. But if we’re really looking at the causes and the historical oppression and the ongoing systemic oppression of women and girls and immigrants and failure to create safe cities for immigrants and anti-Blackness, all of those things equal a failure to protect survivors of sex trafficking.

So to your point about intersectionality, yes, it’s a bipartisan issue if we’re just talking about sex trafficking legislation specifically. But we’re not. We’re really talking about American politics and historic lockout of entire groups of people that is continuing to go on and is creating vulnerable victims in this country. So I just wanted to make sure that we root it there and have a little bit more of a robust discussion about the politics behind it.

In terms of race, I think one of the biggest struggles in this past 20 years of doing this work, because I pivoted out of the police department and then went to MISSSEY and have been doing the work from a community-based organizational perspective for the past, almost nine years now. And the biggest challenge in this work has been getting folks, even other advocates in the movement, to have a racial justice analysis on the work because, let’s be frank, the gender-based violence movement in this country, generally speaking, has really been very white.

And so a lot of folks don’t want to have a racial justice conversation because then it’s no longer a bipartisan conversation and it’s not as easy. It’s not as (much of) a traditional feminist conversation. It requires an intersectional and Black feminist analysis to be quite honest, and a lot of folks are not comfortable with that.

But if we’re not having that conversation, then there’s really no way for us to create solutions and interventions that make sense and that are effective because as we know, the storyteller wins the war, because however we define the issue is how the solutions are crafted. And so if we’re not defining the issue with the real focus on all of the intersections that are creating the vulnerabilities in the first place, then we don’t really have real solutions that we can sink our teeth into. And I think that that’s what we’ve been facing for the past 20 years.

So I’ve been happy to see just around probably the past three to five years that there’ve been panels like this and the work of Dr. Nikki and folks that are willing to go there, but that really has been one of the biggest hurdles in this conversation. And for those of you that are going to do your journalism work in the Bay Area, the Bay Area has very clear statistics that are coming out often about who is identified as sex trafficking survivors, and those are extremely skewed towards Black women and girls. It’s extremely disparate.

And I want to be clear that I’m saying “identified” because I also think that we’re only identifying the tip of the iceberg. And the folks that are probably very invisibilized are immigrants who don’t trust the system at all to talk, to identify themselves. And also I definitely think LGBTQIA folks and men and boys, for all the reasons that we could all probably think of. But when we’re talking about identified victims, it heavily skews towards Black girls, women and girls, and then I would say Southeast Asian and Latinx girls are next, if we’re talking about the Bay Area.

And I would expand it to say, in most urban cities across the country, you see that similar. And even in places that are fairly white, like Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, of all places, I was there training that community on sex trafficking response and intervention, and it was very similar.

So I just wanted to just start us off with grounding in that hard reality that sex trafficking is not the issue. Sex trafficking is a symptom. Sex trafficking is a symptom. And so as we’re going into reporting, as you’re trying to tell your story, a complex analysis, I like how you’re talking about the complexities, a complex analysis, in my opinion that misses a racial justice conversation, is missing the story and is really doing more harm than good. And I would say the same thing in your interactions with victims and survivors.

If you’re not going into it with that perspective and reflection on who you are, who you are, that’s the first part of the work. Who are you in relation to this? What power do you hold? And what they have probably experienced in their lives, in addition to all of the suffering that we’re all discussing, that’s related to sex trafficking. But in most cases, the suffering that’s related to sex trafficking is being layered on top of historical trauma, generational trauma. And so that’s why it’s complex trauma because it is, like you were stating, it is habitual ongoing rape and abuse, and it’s all of the other things that come along with being a part of a marginalized community in this country.

Nikki Jones: And I want to stay with you for just one more moment because in the documentary film Still I Rise, it documents a moment where you recognize the failure of the criminal justice system and policing to address the problem with sex trafficking. And I wonder if that’s something you would be willing to share, either that moment or what you see as the failure to protect within that institution, and then I want us to think about that across these institutional domains.

Holly Joshi: Yeah, I mean, I think I had a few moments of really beginning to recognize the failures of the criminal justice system in many ways. But the first one was that we at the Oakland Police Department in the Bay Area, a fairly diverse police department in relation to the rest of America’s policing, there was a lot of space for officer discretion, in terms of the ways in which they respond in the field.

And particularly this was showing up with sex trafficking victims and children in missing children’s reports. Because if a child is missing and is over 14, then it leaves the discretion to the officer on whether or not they’re going to do an all-points bulletin callout. If the child is under 14, it’s a mandate, it’s an all-point bulletin, it’s a callout, no one goes home until you find the child. If the child is over 14, that allows for officer discretion and what the officer discretion looks like in practice is the officers and the biases that they come with making a determination on victimhood.

And I would always say to my colleagues, you’re using a Disney princess lens. You want her to be a Disney princess, white with access to resources, completely innocent, whatever that means in your eyes. And if she doesn’t fit that description, which most victims and survivors do not, then she doesn’t get a callout and you’re not classifying her as a victim or a survivor. And so that discretion inside the police department is, I fought really hard for that discretion to be taken away from police officers because we were just seeing disparities in terms of Black and brown girls going missing at 14 and 15 years old and nothing happening and everyone going home every night. And then we were seeing white girls from Montclair go missing, and it was, no one goes home.

I mean, I’m just being honest with you. It’s very similar to what we see in journalism in America’s response and reporting to missing Black women versus missing white women. It’s the same dynamic. I mean, the police department was just a microcosm of everything else that’s happening in society. And so that was happening.

The other thing I think is really important is that even when they were able to somewhat recognize the victimization, the treatment was just still … It wasn’t how you would imagine a victim or survivor would be treated, and not how I saw traditional survivors of domestic violence and things like that treated. So the treatment was still problematic. And I hear folks constantly saying, “It’s not a law enforcement issue. It’s not a law enforcement issue. It really needs to be a public health issue,” and that is a hundred percent true, and I absolutely agree with that.

And we pay the police a lot of money. I mean, I’m from Oakland, and the law enforcement budget is more than half of the city’s budget. And so if we’re paying an agency $350 million a year to serve and protect, then the expectation needs to be that they’re at least trained to be able to do the entry level work when they come in contact with victims and survivors, because oftentimes, they’re the folks that are out there at 3 a.m. in the morning and they’re coming into contact with folks.

So I want to agree that it is a public health issue and that it’s really a social issue generally speaking. And I like what you said about it being a human rights issue, and we need to hold a very high expectation for law enforcement. We don’t want them over-policing and criminalizing survivors, and we also don’t want them washing their hands of serving and protecting Black and brown 13-year-olds that are standing on International Boulevard every night.

Nikki Jones: Thank you. Thank you. And so just to touch back to the question, what does failure to protect mean for each of you in the work that you do? And if you can also pull out the ways that intersectionality matters, including the intersections with citizenship, which comes up in each of your stories.

Isabella Gomes: So whenever I think about the failure to protect from the American healthcare system standpoint, there’s never a more stark example than how we respond to child abuse when it enters the hospital. So just a couple of weeks ago, I had a patient who was a victim of child abuse. This young girl who was in the foster care system, her foster father came in with her. And we are mandatory reporters. Once we identify a child, we are then linking them with social work, with case managers, we involve CPS, we involve the Department of Family and Health Services. There’s literally two fellows who are … They got their fellowship in child abuse response. There is a framework for how we respond to child abuse in this country. And those guidelines, that framework just hasn’t been translated to sex trafficking, which is just such a missed opportunity to me.

Like I was saying before, only 2% of hospitals in the U.S. have any sort of guidelines. And so when I was writing this story, it was this real conflict of thinking like, “OK, I’m saying there are all of these signs to look out for when you see a victim of sex trafficking, these potential red flags.”

And of course, they’re not comprehensive. People present in different ways, they present with different intersectionalities that we can’t possibly know all of them. But even once they’re identified, if we can’t do anything for them, then what was that point of that identification process? That could actually just put a survivor more at risk.

So if someone is currently being victimized by a trafficker, and then we write in the electronic health record that they’re a victim of sex trafficking, and that trafficker sees that electronic health record, they have access to it, they said they were their guardian or something like that, did I just put that person in harm’s way because I thought, “Oh, I was doing a good thing. I identified them. Good for me, a pat on the back?”

And so to me, this is such a systematic, systemic issue because we are simply unprepared. And what’s so upsetting is that there’s literally evidence. There’s evidence for frameworks that might not work perfectly, but they’re getting towards that direction. They’re trying to figure out, Where can we find those social services? How can we involve law enforcement and criminal justice in a way that is not more traumatizing to these victims? How can we ensure that they have long-term medical care that they’re able to get access to things like the trafficking visa or all of these different services, and it just doesn’t exist.

And I’m brought back to this concept that is often talked about in medicine. It’s called the “30-year bench to bedside.” And it’s talking about the delay in time between basic discoveries being made in the scientific field, and then when they’re actually implemented into an FDA-approved therapy.

But this also exists in the healthcare space and social determinants of health as well, where every time some law comes in that is talking about healthcare reform, it might take 30 years before we see the results of those findings, the results of that legislation, in practice. So the TVPA, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, it was in 2000. And so we’re still within that 30-year mark. But what angers me so much is that the frameworks exist. It is not starting from scratch. There are ways for us to take that infrastructure and not necessarily repurpose it, but have it be more inclusive to include these survivors, as well. And I think that failure is very apparent to me when I think about issues like child abuse and elder abuse, domestic violence.

Bernice Yeung: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So failure to protect, I guess looking first maybe at the hotel industry, I think when you look at these lawsuits that I was describing earlier, and you look at what the argument of the hotel corporations is, is that actually it’s not their responsibility. It’s because they are the franchiser. They oversee things like the thread count of the sheets, what’s served at breakfast, what position the shampoo bottle should be in the bathroom, but they do not oversee the day-to-day operations of each individual hotel.

So if you want to take issue with there being trafficking at a hotel, you should go to the hotel owner. Of course, the hotel franchiser, the big chain, does oversee quality control. It does have an ability to dictate certain standards, including around safety if it chose to, through its franchise agreements. But really that’s where things get stuck with the hotel industry is this kind of, well, whose job is it really to make sure that trafficking isn’t happening?

And I can tell you that the hotel corporations could know if they wanted to know, because I’m aware that they collect information digitally, related to the bookings of each guest. So they know when people are paying in cash. They know when there are two rooms that are rented right next to each other for weeks at a time. They could know that there is a high rate of calls for police service to this particular hotel.

There are a lot of ways where if they wanted to know, they could be more aware. But again, their legal position is that it is not their responsibility because they are the franchiser. So again, my story asks the question, should they be held responsible? And I think then there are, beyond that, I think that you’re going to have to think about legislative legal responses to create a situation where a franchiser would feel comfortable feeling more proactive, is the bottom line. But beyond that, I think there are still small things that came up through the reporting that could be done very easily if we wanted to be more proactive as the hospitality industry or even as everyday citizens. One is that hotels could routinely check, the idea of everybody coming in to their hotel and making sure that everybody is, for instance, of age to rent a hotel room.

Some hotels are now doing wellness checks after three days with the no disturb sign on the door, just making sure everybody’s OK. Holly and I had a brief conversation before this one, and I think she made a really powerful point there, those kind of administrative things that can be done.

But really at the end of the day, we have to also ask the question, Why are people being groomed and succumbing to the coercion, and the force and the fear to be trafficked in the first place? And if you look at the case studies of even the two women that were featured in the story that I wrote about the hotel industry, they were living in poverty, they were coming out of foster care. They had been sexually abused, they had been physically abused. They just had all the constellation of trauma and vulnerabilities that then, as Elizabeth from the story pointed out, her pimps used and mined, in order to pull her into her trafficking.

So these are big mega, macro pictures and responses, is that we have to, as Holly says, really think about, How do we have more of a kind of systemic and institutional analysis of why all of these people are being pulled into trafficking in the first place?

I’ll just also add, from a journalist perspective, what is a failure to protect? Obviously, we are always trying to minimize harm to our sources in whatever way we can. And so I think the biggest failure to protect would be, is in this particular instance, is if the identity of the source became apparent to a trafficker, that they were trying to remain away from and hidden from. So there was a lot of care, I’d like to think, taken in this particular case, to make sure that that didn’t happen.

Nikki Jones: Yeah, sure.

Isabella Gomes: Sorry, one question that I had about your story was, What are your thoughts? I had a colleague who had written a story about how … Is it Motel Six? Yeah. They said that hotel managers from Motel Six were sending the list of the people who were living there to ICE, and they were saying that ICE would then come to the hotel and basically arrest and then deport undocumented immigrants. And one thing that I was wondering when I was reading your story was, What are your thoughts? Like let’s say we ask hotel managers to be more involved, more accountable, but then what are some of your thoughts with how that might put people who are undocumented immigrants, other people at risk?

Bernice Yeung: Yeah, I thought about that a lot in terms of this recommendation around asking everybody for their ID. Then, what if you don’t have one? Or it would put you in this kind of situation where you would be outed and put it immigration risk for some reason? I think that ultimately, what the hotel operators need to do is less trying to be in everybody’s business. There is a premium put on privacy in hotels, in the hospitality industry in general. It’s why it happens in hotels, because we’re supposed to leave people alone in their hotel rooms and whatever happens there is their own business.

But I spoke to a security expert at the extended-stay hotels, and he said that one thing that they try to make very clear at every one of their hotels, and of course they’re not always perfect, but is to make it clear that there is someone watching, at least in the hallways, at least in the lobby. And that they would be willing to report something that seemed really out of bounds. So I don’t think that we should be going in and ferreting out people and trying to get into their private lives. But if there’s something overt, some of these cues that we’ve all, we’ve just talked about, making it clear that that will not be tolerated at this particular establishment, this security expert seemed to believe that that would be at least a first step.

Isabella Gomes: Thank you.

Holly Joshi: Can I just say something?

Nikki Jones: Yeah, of course.

Holly Joshi: Yeah. I love the work that you did with hotels. That hotel that I was talking about during my first undercover operation at 17th Ave. in International that I stood in front of, a few years later, we ended up actually closing that hotel, working directly with survivors and community members in the San Antonio Park neighborhood in Oakland to close that hotel.

I actually went undercover to understand the hotel’s involvement in the trade. And the owners and operators of the hotel were actually involved in the sex trade. So I think that that’s another complexity. And then it happened. And so we successfully, with the city attorney’s office, closed that hotel down and sued the owners, and then we replicated that same model and did it at another hotel that was similarly involved at Second Ave. and East 12th near the lake. And so I think that that’s another complexity, is that sometimes the people that we’re expecting to be responsible in its legislatures, judges, attorneys, are often involved in the sex trade themselves.

And I learned that the hard way, really in my advocacy efforts. We just kept running into so many blocks, in terms of being able to put resources and legislation towards holding the demand side of this equation accountable. Folks were more comfortable focusing on, How do we decriminalize survivors? How do we hold pimps more accountable? But when it came to conversations about how do we actually hold johns and purchasers more accountable, that became a conversation folks didn’t want to have.

And in my years posing as a working girl on International, there’s really no profile, in terms of a purchaser. It was folks from all walks of life, all socioeconomic backgrounds, all races, all relationship status, etc. I’m not exaggerating. We literally arrested a judge. We’ve arrested police officers and firefighters and pastors, etc. And so we’re talking about the guy next door. And so there’s really not a lot of accountability, in terms of purchasers. And we know that demand is driving a supply. So I just wanted to add that layer of complexity is that oftentimes … Well, sometimes — I won’t say oftentimes. Sometimes the hotel owners and managers are also involved in the purchasing of women and girls.

Nikki Jones: Thank you. I’m thinking about the power of stories and storytelling. I’m an ethnographer. One of my mentors, the late Howard Becker, told us that people remember stories. And I think that’s why media and journalism is so important and so powerful. You mentioned stories that you’re confronting that live in people’s mind, like the Disney princess story.

In journalism, you’re also, I imagine, confronting a gap. So your stories are so powerful in part because they’re filling a gap or they’re a corrective of some sort, that doesn’t exist in other spaces, in other outlets. Perhaps you can speak more about that. And I’m curious about the barriers to storytelling. So Bernice, you said, “Nobody wants you to tell it.” And you could say that three times. Nobody wants you to tell it. And so what barriers do you confront and how did you handle confronting those barriers and overcoming those barriers and the telling of this story?

Isabella Gomes: Oh, that’s neat. OK. So I’m so grateful to be here with Bernice and just to have been in her presence, but I am a very early-career reporter. So my immediate thought is always, “I’m not the first journalist to be writing about this story. I’m certainly not going to be the last person to interview this person.”

And the worst-case scenario is not that no one reads my story; it’s that it hurts the people that I’m reporting and now they don’t trust journalists anymore. And so I would ruin that opportunity from someone like Bernice to be able to do a meaningful story that actually causes some incredible sort of impact. And so I think the barriers for me was trying to … And I don’t actually know that I followed all of the journalism editorial rules for this, but it at least followed my values. So throughout my reporting process, I was working with one of the activists, she’s a survivor activist. She leads this organization called MENTARI in New York.

And I was working with her, as well as other leader activists across the country. And basically, I would ask them, Are there any people, any women that you work with who would be willing to share their story? We did a very thorough, informed consent process.

But we also said, in order to provide essentially a patient advocate in the room, we let every single woman that I interviewed have one of these survivor activists in the room with them. And so anytime they felt like, “Hey, I don’t want to talk anymore,” but they didn’t feel comfortable with telling that to me, saying, “This interview is over,” or, “I don’t want you to share this part of the story,” they might’ve already had that relationship with her and she could tell me, or we could end that interview short. And so that was one of the things that we did.

I also interviewed maybe 35 survivors of trafficking. Two showed up in my final story. And the reason why I thought that was so … I think that’s a really important thing is, and this is also through the help of the Pulitzer Center, by providing me with essentially a grant to work on this for six months, is someone once told me, “Never be too desperate. Make sure you do enough work so that at the last minute when you’re close to your deadline, you’re not just like,” Oh, someone dropped out of the story, but I have to turn it in.””

I wanted to be in a place where I felt comfortable enough with the amount of research I did with the amount of reporting that I did, that if someone the day before … Well, not the day before, but fairly close to when things are being edited, say, “I’m no longer comfortable with you sharing my story,” that I could be like, “OK, well thank you for at least providing background. Thank you for generally informing the many stories that will go into this.”

And we did have cases where that was the case. And hopefully, if they weren’t comfortable in being my story, which is completely their prerogative, they might feel more comfortable being in someone else’s story, because they know that journalists have that sort of relationship. And so that was something that was incredibly important for me. I don’t know if that answered your question though.

Nikki Jones: Holly or Bernice, if you want to respond to that question?

Bernice Yeung: Let’s see. Barriers to the storytelling. I have mentioned some of them from this particular story. I think locating the survivors to share their particular experience, getting to the point where they would really start to go on this journey with me over a period of time. I think the other thing about a lot of these stories is that they take months, sometimes a year.

And so it’s how do you set expectations, provide transparency, so that those very key sources are with you that entire journey? They’re not giving up on you. They understand why you’re taking so long. Their expectations are realistic about how they will appear in the story, what aspects of their story will be included, that we have lots of conversations around how to make sure that they stay safe as a result of the story being out in the world. But I think also another very huge, very formidable challenge is when you’re covering corporations, there’s just often a black box these days.

There’s often even an unwillingness for the corporation to engage, even on an interview level. I’ve even seen it change in my career. There used to be at least the requisite, no comment or response of some sort. Now, it’s just radio silence often or an off-the-record conversation that never leads to anything substantive. And that’s frankly, for me as a reporter, very frustrating because I am genuinely curious about the realities and challenges that that particular entity might be facing. I’m always interested in what makes things more complicated and nuanced and gray. I don’t believe in black-and-white stories.

And so when one side of the story won’t engage, it makes it incredibly challenging. We’re having to fill it in. And we’re having to fill it in with documents that I got that I wasn’t supposed to have, but was put out into the public record for a short period of time. And is that the full picture? No. But it’s a view in. And unfortunately, that was the only view I could get in.

Nikki Jones: Thank you. Do you want to add to that, Holly?

Holly Joshi: No, it sounds beautiful. I mean, these ladies are doing incredible journalism. It’s just come a long way. I’ll say that it’s come a really, really long way from the early days of reporters calling me consistently and wanting to come out on ride-alongs because I was running the human trafficking unit in the early 2000s.

And I was for a while, very excited and engaged in wanting to work with these journalists. Some were local and some were national. I won’t name them, but yes, they were national. And just really became disillusioned because the story was always focused on just the salaciousness of sex and cops and busts. Those were the stories. And so I actually stopped engaging with journalists for quite some time. So I’m just really happy to see the work that you all are doing and the thought that’s going into it and the care and the complexities of the stories that you’re telling.

The only thing that’s popping into my mind that seems important for me to say is that I see a lot of debate in conversation around language. And how do we address … Do we call her a victim? Do we call her a survivor? I think the best thing that I’ve learned is to ask her, how she wants to be identified. Because some folks are at a point where they still feel like a victim and they want to be acknowledged as a victim.

And again, going back to our racial justice analysis, I think especially for Black women, if she’s in her victim stage, and that’s how she wants us to recognize her pain and her experience, skipping over to survivor very quickly can be silencing. And because of America’s history and the tropes about strong, angry Black women, without an ability to hold vulnerability in full humanity, I think it’s really important for us to just go with her own definition of how she sees her experience and how she sees herself at this moment.

Nikki Jones: Thank you. And so I think we have about seven minutes or so, five minutes or so, until … What’s that? Six minutes. Thank you. And I want to close this portion of it out with this question about care. It is clear you care about the people that you advocate for. I hear frustration, I hear anger, I hear grief, and certainly encounter that in your stories. I think it’s really useful to acknowledge that for students and to share how you hold that in the strategies that you may have developed. I know I didn’t do a good job of this when I was a younger assistant professor, and I have more strategies at my disposal now. How do you deal with the secondary trauma of being exposed to these stories, either for a short period of time or over the course of a career?

Isabella Gomes: Sorry. As soon as you asked that, I immediately had just this very vivid flashback. So one of my sources during the time … I reported on the story very heavily for six months, but had been working on this issue for about four years since I was in journalism school, too. And during my reporting, one of the women that I became very close to was killed during my reporting process. And I think this goes back to what I was saying, is put yourself in a position where you don’t have to be too desperate.

She was just such a cornerstone of that community, of not only providing support to so many people, so many survivors, as well, but she was also an activist herself. And so when she died, the whole community was reeling. It would’ve been very invasive and exploitative if I had gone in and said, “Well, let’s do another interview.” Or, “Well, what about this question that I’m missing? Can I call you just to confirm this quote?” So thanks to the Pulitzer Center, thanks to being able to do long-form journalism, just for having that time, which it makes me really sad when we’re supposed to turn a story like talking about an issue like this within what, two days? Insane.

But we took a month off of reporting on this story. And I was really lucky to have editors both at the Pulitzer Center and the institution I was working for the freelance story, who not only saw the value in that not only accepted that decision of ours, but consistently throughout the reporting process would challenge different aspects of how I reported things or what stories we were included. And that conscientiousness.

I can’t speak highly enough of this, but be very careful about who you allow to mentor you. Be very careful about who you allow to guide your reporting. And be very involved in what that final product looks like, whether it’s what images are included, whether it’s the title. Oh gosh, the number of times I fought over a title. It all matters. It’s all yours. Don’t pass it off to anyone. This is your work. It’s a work of a team. But at the end of the day, don’t be the reason why another journalist cannot write about this story, about this issue.

Bernice Yeung: I’ll just make a quick plug for one of our colleagues here at the Berkeley Journalism School. Andrea has just written a co-written a book called Graphic that gets exactly at this very topic, of how do you deal with secondary trauma, and in the context of looking at very graphic human rights violations. So I encourage you all to check that out.

I personally have come to use certain coping mechanisms. I have one of my dear colleagues in the back there, (inaudible), we’ve gone through a lot of traumatic reporting together. I think there’s something about having someone that you can talk to that’s a little bit of a release valve, whether it’s your editor or somebody. Also, I watch a lot of cooking shows on YouTube. It’s just the way … Everybody needs to turn their brain off at some point. And whatever that way is for you, you got to find it and actually do it. And I also choose to think about these as stories of resiliency.

I think I take Holly’s point absolutely, that we shouldn’t gloss over that trope of like, “Oh, everyone is just strong. They figured this out.” But there is something about that incredibly powerful human experience that you have with a source, where they’re sharing all of this with you. And they have lived it, and they’re sharing it with you, and they have made it through, and they’re still totally figuring it out and fighting their way through. But isn’t that an incredible moment to share with somebody? It’s so special. And so these moments where they can share with you and where you can listen and help just by listening, motivates me forever to do these stories.

Nikki Jones: Thank you. (Audience applause) Holly, if you wanted to share?

Holly Joshi: Sure. I’ll just be really brief. I think so many self-care strategies for sure. But just in terms of career longevity, because I’ve seen so many folks, brilliant, smart, beautiful people in this work burnout really quickly and leave it forever and unable to engage in it.

So for me, what has been really helpful is pivoting. People, my family says I have nine work lives, but I pivot. I did the undercover work and then I did the investigative work, and then I ran a nonprofit, and then I focused on policy. How do you get at this issue from different angles? Because the day-to-day grind of doing the same thing from one angle for years and years, I think can wear away. It can really wear away. And so being able to pivot and learn new tools and think creatively about different ways to get at this issue has been my particular saving grace.

Nikki Jones: Yes. Thank you. OK. Oh, let’s thank our panelists one more time.

Bernice Yeung: Oh my God, I totally didn’t … Glossed over Daffodil Altan, too, another dear colleague who … You got to have your core people that you can talk this stuff through with.

Nikki Jones: Yes. And I want to encourage us to take a breath and find our feet and find our bodies. I know as I tell my students, this in some ways can be theoretical, and many of us are impacted by this in very real ways. And so take the moment if you need it. For students here, there’s a resource called Path to Care. And so if you feel like you need a resource to reach out to after today’s event, now or in the future, I’d recommend that as a starting point. And so now we’re going to open it up to Q&A. I don’t know if I’m the person or we have a cue … Me? OK. All right.

Cue. Me? OK. All right. Down here, yes. We’re right here, right here, right here. Yeah. And then we’re going to come to you because I did see your hand. Yes.

Audience 1: Hi. My question is more tailored to Bernice, but I feel like all of you guys could answer it. And do you think, because in your story you say that a lot of victims don’t see themselves as such, based off of the trauma and such. So do you think writing helps them see that, that it’s more than just a product of life that it isn’t and that it helps them move forward? Or how do you navigate that when they don’t see that, but you do?

Bernice Yeung: That’s a really great question. I think in some ways, and like Holly said earlier, I use the terminology and I meet them where they are with it. So the sources in this particular story, one of them was at a point where she was 10 years out, she had done a lot of work. She saw herself as a survivor. Elizabeth was beginning to see herself as someone who had been exploited and was in a space where she could articulate it in deeply profound way, but was still in process. So I just listened and really took cues from her and tried not to define anything for her. She knew obviously by filing this lawsuit that she was bringing a grievance, that she was trying to push back on this industry, on hotels, and that she had been wronged in some way. But this idea that she had been a trafficking victim or becoming a trafficking survivor was still definitely something she was in the middle of. And yeah, we just let it be what it was.

Holly Joshi: One of the things that we learned at MISSSEY was, to your point about does a reflective process or a safe holding space support deeper reflections about their experience? One of the things that we learned at MISSSEY is we were doing transformative education and really politicizing survivors. We’re politicizing folks once they had their basic needs met because we had a drop-in center, we had case management, we had systems navigation, all the traditional social services, but we also had transformative education.

And so instead of trying to tell folks about what their own experience was, we were really talking broadly about historic oppression and political realities in this country. And that was supporting their reflection and reframing of their circumstances because a lot of folks were internalizing their oppression and really using the language of the system. To your point about her beautiful comment about seeing her story written from your lens as opposed to seeing it in a police report.

And so I’ve had many, many girls tell me that, “I always thought I was a ho because that’s what everybody said I was. The cops, the system, my social worker or the child welfare, the pimp, everybody told me that I was a ho.”

And so then once you start to really have a conversation about how is the system set up, how is the system rigged for your family and generations of your family to be in this situation where the only choice feels like these things? Then the clarity starts to come around. This isn’t actually my fault or my choice, and it’s also not my mama’s fault and my mama’s choice, and it’s not those types of things. So we were really invested in this idea of transformative education and offering political education to our young people at MISSSEY for that reason.

Bernice Yeung: Thank you. And that was making me think, if I can just add that one thing that came up in our conversations, my conversations with Elizabeth was that she didn’t feel judged. So I try to go into every conversation that way, just totally open book. I have no judgment for you. I’m here to listen to your story. And I think that helped a lot.

Audience 2: Hi, my name is Agni. And so I have reported on human trafficking from back in India. And the minors, basically, they have suffered a lot of social and societal and legal hurdles to getting their cases being brought to court.

And one of the problems they faced was that they couldn’t … Sometimes the cases were lodged in another state because they were trafficked from one state to another. So they did not have the transportation fee to travel from one state to another. And I read in a newspaper that last month, Governor Newsom, sorry, he passed a bill that students in colleges and universities in America, in California, sorry, will be able to have free transportation from and to from sexual assault treatment centers.

So the more I see of the world, I feel like the more the problems remain the same to varying degrees. And so I feel like, How do we do justice to our stories? How do we do justice to the survivors to bring their stories to the front and to bring about a structural change?

Bernice Yeung: This question of impact of journalism is something that I’ve been talking to my colleagues quite a bit about lately, and I think it’s something that I think the industry is talking about quite a bit right now. I think we’ve been steered in the direction of thinking that we can have impact immediately because that’s what fuels award applications and often is really looked favorably upon by donors.

But I think the reality is we are writing stories that will hopefully create change incrementally, that no one single story is going to be the panacea and solve the problem. It’s got to be baby step by baby step, story by story. And I think all we can do is just tell those truths and hopefully it starts to seep into culture, into the ether, into as many brains as possible. And that shift starts to happen. But I think it is frustrating if we’re expecting a law to change or a policy to change or someone to get fired every single time we write a story. I just don’t think that’s realistic. I think it’s about that incremental iterative coverage.

Nikki Jones: Do either of you want to add to it?

Isabella Gomes: Yeah. I think towards your point, I feel like one thing that I really was terrified of is human trafficking just seems … It’s just such an overwhelming topic. It affects so many people from different backgrounds. It affects the legal system, the immigration system, conversations about abortion. So many controversial topics are touched upon when you discuss sex trafficking. And as someone with clinically diagnosed anxiety, I recognize that when you make an issue that big, we’re trying to install more complexity, more nuance into the story, that it can also seem completely intimidating for any reader.

And I think one thing, like we were saying before that was really helpful was being able to say, “No, there’s literally frameworks that have existed for other things.” So like you were saying, where they were providing free transportation to victims of sexual assault so that they could go and seek care. Similarly, those are things that are translatable, that are transferable. And I think once you put these topics into the space, no, we’ve been here before. There are avenues for how we can do this. I think it becomes more digestible so that you bring up that complexity, but you also say, “No, there are things that we can do. There are actionable things that we can do.” And I think that is motivating to people, but it also provides a new dimension to that nuance as well.

Holly Joshi: Yeah, I would just very briefly add that as journalists, to Bernice’s point, telling that real story from the survivor’s perspective is so critical because we don’t have to hold the weight of the solutions on our shoulders because what I’ve learned the hard way is that the survivors actually know the solutions. They know what they need. We don’t have to make it up. So in addition to utilizing frameworks that exist for other things, there’s also this very real idea that survivors have the answers to this issue and to their own individual healing.

And so I think that lifts the weight off my shoulders too, because then my responsibility is not, How do I solve everything? It’s really how do I build deep relationships with survivors and then use my power and positionality to amplify their voices. And as journalists, you have the perfect opportunity to do those things as these two ladies have done.

Audience 3: OK, so my name is Cecile…

Nikki Jones: One second. I think we had one follow up and then we’re going to go back to you.

Isabella Gomes: Yeah. Just to her point, as well, I think one thing that you should also recognize that survivors are not just here to provide that story of trauma. They’re activists. They have so many moments to talk about resilience and joy or literally any other part of their lives. So I think one of the big things that makes me really frustrated with a lot of stories related to sexual violence is that the survivor’s only used as a vehicle for depicting trauma. And I think being as cognizant of that and trying to incorporate the many facets of their lives, the many facets of their advocacy work, is so important to the story, as well.

Nikki Jones: That’s great. Thank you.

Audience 3: OK, so my name is Cecile. So basically what I’ll be talking about, I have a couple of points here, but I’ll try to as much as possible put it all together. The issue of sex trafficking drives home to me because I’m from Nigeria and my home state in Nigeria is said to be one of the primary states where these sex traffickers in Nigeria come from. So we have a lot of these stories. Some have returned and they are willing to share the story. And the funny thing about it is that many of those who were trafficked are now being the traffickers.

And you go back, you go home. We talked about the root cause of this problem. Back home, one of the major causes would be poverty. Now you hear the parents tell their daughter … There’s a thin line now between a sex worker and the trafficker because now you think that this person is being trafficked, but the person is willing to do it. The parents, the parents tell their daughters, “Go and do it.” Because when the others who have gone before them, when they come back, they build beautiful mansions, they have made money. So it’s a thing of pride now to the parents back home. So they encourage their daughters to go and do these things.

So you now wonder, is it trafficking now or are they just going there as sex workers? Because they still have the whole hotel, they have the chain, they have the godfather who takes them and brings them from one point to another.

So when we talked about hotels, hotels, many hotels indeed are compromised, especially some of these global brands, for instance. I’ll give you my personal story. I traveled out of my country. I went somewhere else. Along the line, I lost my passport. I had to go to Nigerian embassy, “This is the problem I’m having.” “Oh.” They attended to me very well. They gave me a hotel room. I locked the hotel. What’s it called now? The chain? I locked it.

So at about after midnight, around 2:00 a.m., I saw someone open the door of my hotel room and I’m wondering, “I signed my name into this room. Who else would have the key?” The next morning, the officer who actually helped me get a room said, “Oh, I came to check on you at night to be sure that you are OK.” And I went like, “Are you for real?” So if I had not locked the door from inside, he would’ve had access into my room. So after that, I was very scared.

Now, some hotels, there’s a particular hotel I know back home in Nigeria, one of the global brands. In an effort to try to stop sex workers from coming in, because the sex workers going to the hotel, they are the lobby trying to see how they can get customers or patrons. So the hotel decided that any single lady coming into the hotel unaccompanied by a man cannot go into the hotel. I wasn’t aware of that. I went to the hotel. They said, “Sorry, you cannot enter.” I said, “I don’t understand.” They said, “You have to be accompanied by a male.” I was like, “How? Since when? From where?” They said, “Well, that’s a company policy.” I showed him my ID. They said, “I’m sorry, madame. There’s nothing we can do about it. You need to call the man from outside to get you in.” And I wonder where and how does that even happen?

Nikki Jones: So I’m going to pause you there because I want the panelists to be able to respond in …

Audience 3: Thank you.

Nikki Jones: … in some way in the time that we have. And I think that the point that all of it is quite provocative and thought-provoking. And that point that you started with, I wonder, and because anyone who’s done this work understands how those roles might shift over time and it can look almost consensual and the coercion gets lost. And so I wonder if there are ways that you could talk about that. And Holly, we can start.

Holly Joshi: It’s extremely complex. I think we probably need a whole other panel, right?

Nikki Jones: Yes, yes.

Holly Joshi: I’ll try to answer just with a few examples. I think first I want to say from a public health perspective, the legal transition that happens from a child being trafficked to now you’re 18 and you’re consenting.

From a public health perspective, the trauma is the same. So I want to just acknowledge that. The trauma is still going to be the same. It becomes very difficult and complicated from a legal perspective when we have to deal with it in that manner. I mean, that’s what I found in my work at MISSSEY, going from policing where everything was looked at through a legislative lens and the California penal code and having to categorize people and their behavior was really very … It was focused on that.

When we got to MISSSEY and it was about social services, it mattered less, what transitions and when people turned 18 and whether or not they were coerced to recruit other girls because that’s really a part of the trafficking. It’s a part of the trauma. And almost every girl that I’ve ever talked to at some point has been asked and coerced into recruiting other girls into the trade.

I mean, because an exploiter knows that even moms that are struggling to parent have at least told a 13- or 14-year-old girl not to trust strange men. And so they know that. And so they’re going to use another 14-year-old girl to recruit the girls, whether it’s in foster care or in her after-school program or in the classroom. And that’s just really common part of the abuse. And so in MISSSEY, we didn’t really pay attention to that specifically as different than the rest of the trauma and the exploitation.

But at the police department, it would become an issue because when you’re running an investigation and the district attorney is saying, “Well, you’re telling me that this person is a victim in this case, but she was doing all of these things.” Then you have to provide expert testimony in a courtroom to try to explain to a jury why this is just part of the exploitation.

And to add another layer of complexity, I would say, and I talk about this in the film Still I Rise, is the moment when I actually realized that the exploiters have the same background as the victims in most cases. It’s just a gendered manifestation of the same trauma. And I realized that after doing the work for so long, sometimes your brain is only able to take into what it can take in.

So I’m a little embarrassed to tell you all how long I’d been doing the work when this really clicked for me in a concrete way. But it’s what happened. And I was in the middle of an investigation and I just interviewed a 14-year-old girl and she had laid out her entire childhood experience, and I had access to the database and was able to see the Child Protective Services reports and all of that.

And everything that she told me about the neglect and abuse from age 4 on was all documented in there. And I left that obviously feeling really raw from that interview. And I walked in a couple rooms down ready to interview the suspect because he was in custody. And I was like, “Yeah, I’m taking him down.” Because when I was a police investigator, I was very much focused on putting exploiters in prison. That’s what I was before this day. And I walked into the room and a kid looked up at me and he was 22 years old but he looked 16, a Black boy with a baby face and a kid, a scared kid, looked up at me. And I sat down at the interview table and he told me the same story and it wasn’t rehearsed. And I went to the database and looked at the same Child Protective and Social Services history that she had.

And that moment was another disorienting dilemma and changed the course of my career. I was no longer the hard investigator that was specifically just committed and focused on putting people under the prison for double digits. And that eventually led to me leaving the police department and working at MISSSEY.

But it gets very complicated to your point about families being involved. And that’s why we’re saying the complex social justice analysis is really important because we are literally putting people in situations in which they believe that the underground economy is the only way to survive. And so people are making really difficult choices, that we can have a whole other conversation about the word choice and what that really looks like. But I’ll stop there and see if anyone else wants to add on.

Nikki Jones: Oh, OK. Well just to respect the time because I saw that there’s some disjuncture between … OK, but I’m getting this sign. But I do want to give our panelists, I want to say a thank you. I want to give them an opportunity for a final comment, something that they want to leave the audience with briefly, and then we will give them their due thanks. And then we will move to a reception. One comment that you would want to leave this group with, one thought.

Isabella Gomes: I think the theme of this conversation has been: Don’t be afraid of complexity. Lean into it. Also be aware of how you’re contributing to that literature. Like I was saying before, if you look up Google imagery of what sex trafficking looks like, it is very narrow-minded. Don’t get me wrong, definitely those images are included in the conversation, but it’s very narrow.

And I think it’s out of a desire socially for us to be able to divide things into black-and-white and not lean into the gray. And so I think really try to figure out how you’re adding to that conversation, how you’re dispelling myths. I think one of the hardest parts of my reporting process was figuring out how to do photographs for it. I’m not a photographer. I’m not a storyteller that uses visual media, and I didn’t want to provide photos that’s forced a survivor to be looking like they were traumatized or any sort of this thing, which is the image you see. And so what we ended up doing was just asking every survivor, “What is something you do most days? Let’s go there. Let’s just take a photo.”

So my main photo of the main person that I was interviewing, it’s a photo of this woman named Margo, and we were just walking her guide dog. She’s blind and it’s a result of uncontrolled diabetes throughout the time she was being victimized. So she ended up getting diabetic retinopathy. She ended up losing her sight. And so the photo of her is just her walking her dog.

And a lot of people, the response to that story was all of these past photos of Margo had been with her in just this very stylized, sensationalized backgrounds with very dim lighting, that overlay filter that they love to use whenever they talk about various crises. But it just looked like a happy vacation family photo. And she was just like, “That’s how I feel right now. That’s where I am in my life.” And why is that photo not as moving as another photo that is deeply traumatic? Why can’t that be part of the portfolio of imagery that we use when we think of survivorship?

Nikki Jones: Thank you. And I did notice that in the photo, so I’m glad that you mentioned that …

Isabella Gomes: Yeah, she looks great.

Bernice Yeung: So I guess I would encourage everybody to, as Isabella put it, lean into the nuance and lean into the complexity. I think sometimes when we’re thinking about journalism, we’re thinking about, What’s the news that’s breaking? What is the news? Trafficking’s been happening forever. How is this news? How is this an investigation? And actually my question is, Why is it still happening? So that’s the reporting question, and that’s the opportunity to really investigate the systemic and structural problems that facilitate and enable this to continue happening. So there is a story there. There’s an investigation to do as long as this is happening.

Nikki Jones: Thank you. Yes.

Holly Joshi: I just want to say thank you, and just looking around the room at all of the diversity in the room is really inspiring, and I’m just so excited for you all to hit the street and hit the beat. So thank you.

Nikki Jones: Yes, thank you. Thank you.

Anne Peters: Another round of applause, please, for our panelists. And our moderator. Thank you so much and to all of you as well. And I saw a lot of hands go up and we didn’t get to all the questions, so we do have time. Now I know some of you may have to go to class or have other obligations, but those of you who can, please, just don’t go to class. No, don’t. That’s being recorded. I apologize.

But please stay, mingle, talk to folks. We’ve got some refreshments in the back. So thank you again for joining us and for this evening, the second half of our gender forum at 5:45 p.m. We’ll have Michelle Goldberg and Dean Geeta Anand in conversation about democracy, authoritarianism, gender, race, and identity in the U.S. So please join us if you can. Thank you.

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Outro: You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.