Why sharing survivor stories is critical to ending human trafficking, even at nonprofit fundraising galas
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When Richard Schoeberl, the US team Lead for Hope for Justice, speaks at an event, he doesn’t view at it as entertainment. He wants people to leave with a better grasp of a horrendous crime of human trafficking.
He recently was in Iowa to speak at their fundraiser. Some audience members were crying, they were so moved by the stories he shared of individuals — young girls, older women, and others — who had been enslaved.
In this podcast, Nonprofit Storytellers Host Mackenzie Walters talks with Richard about:
How the “Hollywood version” of trafficking isn’t accurate
How the nonprofit helps transforms people from victims to survivors
How he decides which stories to share at different events
How he protects survivors when sharing their story publicly
Why he seeks out speaking events that touch a broad spectrum of the community
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This was edited for clarity, listen to the Nonprofit Storytellers Podcast for the full interview.
Tell me a little bit about Hope for Justice.
Hope for Justice is an international nonprofit. The mission is to end modern-day slavery or human trafficking. We build that mission on pillars of prevention: To restore, rescue, and reform. We’ve got offices across the United States working to eradicate, educate, rescue, and recover victims and prosecute traffickers.
What personally inspires you about their mission? Why get involved with Hope for Justice?
I know these victims of human trafficking are someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, or someone’s mother.
And when I became involved with Hope for Justice, I had recently retired from the government, where I had worked with the FBI and the National Counter-Terrorism Center as a unit chief, and I started teaching college as a research professor at the University of Tennessee system.
When I did, I was looking for jobs for students, and I saw an ad Hope for Justice. It clicked in my head. I was like, what is Hope for Justice?
I started doing some research on Hope for Justice and what they do, and I reached out to them and said:
“Hey, listen. I was looking at your jobs, and I was looking at what you guys do, and I’m really behind your mission, and I wanted to know if I could set up a meeting to discuss internships for students and how I could get involved in this organization.”
The individual I spoke with was also a retired FBI agent who worked there. He and I connected, and he gave me a book to take home with their facts and figures, their annual report.
It shared how many people they trained, how many people they recovered and rescued, and some of the reform efforts they had.
On the front cover was a picture of a 12-year-old girl who was rescued. She was sexually exploited since the age of six. That resonated with me. At the time, I had a 13-year-old daughter, and I realized this girl on the front cover was somebody’s daughter.
I had that sitting on my coffee table at home for a day or so, and I sat down on the couch to watch the evening news and my daughter, who was 13, came bebopping down the stairs. She sat down beside me on the couch and picked up this book.
“Hey, I was looking through this book yesterday,” she said. “Is this something you’re thinking about getting involved in?”
I said, yes. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and she said, “Well, I’m very proud of you dad.” Then she gets up and leaves the room.
My wife leans over from the kitchen and she saiud, “I don’t guess you’re thinking about doing this anymore, are you?”
My eyes filled tears, it was very emotional for me to realize that I had a skillset that I wasn’t fully utilizing, that I could put to use and help somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s mother.
It gives you such a feeling of reward knowing that you lay your head down at night and you did some good that day.
And the numbers, when you look at this, are so staggering. It’s a $150 billion a year business. It’s no wonder why it’s such a successful business model. With drug trafficking, you can only sell that drug once, but a person you can sell over and over and over again.
For large organizations like cartels and organized crime networks down to your street level dealer, this happens on every extreme. No neighborhood, no city, no county is immune to this, this crime. It’s everywhere.
My husband and I have been involved with Break The Cycle — the fundraising arm for Hope for Justice — for a few years.
Their flagship event is this 200 mile bike ride, which I think is crazy. But my husband raises money for human trafficking by riding it.
He’s in the National Guard, so he’s shared a little bit about the trainings he’s received on human trafficking with me, but it wasn’t until I heard you speak at this gala that I really started to understand what human trafficking was, the impacts, and how it human trafficking can be so prevalent.
When you went to speak at the gala, what did you want to communicate? What was the story that you wanted to share?
The organization, Hope for Justice is so fortunate to have supporters out there like your husband and you and everyone who attended the gala. Raising money is awesome because it does take money to fund programs.
When we rescue a victim, we have to put them somewhere. We have to transport them there, there are costs and stuff that are associated with that. But I want people to know there’s more than just writing a check. I want them to know where their money is going.
I want to personalize it with real stories, because statistics are great, but they’re tied to an actual name. And I wanted to let people know that we often think of human trafficking as Hollywood-esque, or the videos that you see on TikTok. And that’s just not the way it is.
Abductions are extremely rare and there’s more to trafficking than just sex trafficking. You have online exploitation, you’ve got labor trafficking, you’ve got domestic servitude.
I went there with so many stories in my head to try to convey, and you’re trying to talk to an audience, to get them to understand your mission, your goals, and the stories you tell them are about real people, real families, real victims.
Sharing their story helps us transform that person from a victim to a survivor. And I think that’s the most important thing. We recently had a lady that we worked an investigation on, and it’s on our Hope for Justice website. She came forward after many years of being a victim as a child.
She was able to get justice in the end. The person who had exploited her was her stepfather. He was sentenced many years later, after the event happened.
When she left the courtroom, she called me on her phone and she said, “I know what you mean now, going from victim to survivor. I didn’t know what you meant until today. I got justice and now I’m a survivor. I’m no longer a victim.”
Those are the type of stories that resonate with people when you tell them actual factual, real stories about real people who were affected by this crime. By this heinous human rights violation that exists. My whole point was to get there and be truthful.
It’s not an easy topic to talk about. You don’t leave there laughing because you were entertained. You hope you leave there with: This is a problem and it’s in my community and how can I help? What can I do to make an impact?
And I think that’s what we all need to do, from a humanitarian side. And, if you’re a Christian, like I am, from that side as well. I think God wants us to help our neighbor. God wants us to help those people who need to be to be brought up, to be picked up, after they’ve been kicked down.
When we were talking earlier, you talked about this concept of moving from being a victim to being a survivor and how telling that story can help in the healing process.
But then some people maybe don’t want their name shared.
How do you navigate those types of situations where telling the story can be helpful to your mission, to share what’s happening out in the world, but you also want to protect the people who have experienced this trauma?
At no point do we ever talk about stories where we have used the real names of the victims. We don’t even use their real location. This was a unique story as the survivor wanted to use her real name.
She wanted to be an example for others who might have been victimized and not come forward. That you still can come forward even after all these years to get justice.
We know traffickers and those individuals who exploit people don’t just do it to one person, right? So it’s more than just recovering or rescuing that victim, it’s also going after the perpetrator. Their story can help us get to that point where we can prosecute and turn these investigations over to prosecutors.
One thing that we always look at is a victim-centered approach. We would never put the victim in any harm whatsoever. Their well-being is our number one priority. Some of them want to tell their story because they want the world to know that this crime does exist in your backyard.
In wealthy neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods. The common denominator to this is vulnerability, not wealth, but vulnerability.
I was a journalist for 14 years, and many times we would run a story in the newspaper about a sexual abuse that happened in public or with a public figure.
After the first story, there would be other victims that came forward. I’m curious if you’ve seen that play out in your own work?
Oh, certainly. We’ve seen that happen. A lot of times these individuals, when we look at human trafficking, we have to think about the elements of it being forced fraud and coercion.
And the victims are pushed into this trafficking scenario through psychological manipulation or physical manipulation, or force.
They’re scared of their trafficker, they’re scared of coming forward, they’re scared that they may do some harm to them or their family. So they keep quiet. They tend not to come forward, but when they see other people come forward, they tend to also raise their hand.
One of the things that really impressed me about your speech was how you connected with different audiences.
So you related to people who were parents, you talked about small towns, rural Iowa and how it is happening there. You talked about industries like banking and hospitality.
You talked about law enforcement and then the defund the police movement that might draw someone else’s attention to this.
Will you talk a little bit about how you share stories that might resonate with different audiences?
I think it’s important to note, when you talk to groups and you give these speeches or lectures or whatever terminology we want to use for it, you’ve got to make sure that you’re not just doing a broad stroke.
A broad stroke doesn’t garnish the attention that it should. You have to make it specific. And in a topic like human trafficking, it’s easy to dissect those sectors where human trafficking exists. It exists in all walks of life.
You can’t say the hospitality industry’s not a part of it when we know that a majority of these victims are being trafficked through hotels and motels. You can’t say banking industry isn’t a part of it because it’s $150 billion a year business.
We can’t say education is not a part of it because the average age of exploitation for females is between the ages of 12 and 14.
We can’t say law enforcement doesn’t intersect law enforcement or prosecution because we know the statistics show that, over the past 20 years, 93% of trafficking cases have been prosecuted for sexual exploitation versus only 7% for labor trafficking. We know that labor trafficking exists at a higher level.
So when we start breaking it down into those different sectors, you hope it catches everybody’s attention because one group may just tune you out because they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have any kids, so I’m not really worried about my daughter being exploited online,” or, “I don’t work in the banking industry, I work at a hotel or a motel.”
Being a research professor, I always rely heavily on facts and on data, because just because someone says it doesn’t make it true. And just because someone says it over and over doesn’t even make it any more true.
We really have to rely heavily on what the research says and what the research points us to. When someone challenges me and says, “Where did you see that?” I’m like, “Here, I’ll give you 25 citations right now.”
If you want to see it, you can convey your message to a broad group of people if they believe that what you’re telling them is factual and not embellished in any way.
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