377: What Happens to Trafficking Risk When a Hurricane Hits?

Leanne McCallum Desselle joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore what happens when a hurricane knocks out the very systems built to catch trafficking — from a child abuse hotline down for three weeks after Hurricane Ida to the disaster recovery jobs where exploitation quietly takes hold.

Leanne McCallum Desselle

Leanne McCallum Desselle is a Research Analyst and Training & Technical Assistance Provider at RTI International, a role she has held since August 2022. She spent nearly a decade in frontline anti-trafficking work in Louisiana, coordinating the Greater New Orleans Human Trafficking Task Force for more than three years and later managing a statewide child and youth trafficking initiative for the Louisiana Alliance of Children’s Advocacy Centers. In 2018 she was appointed Chair of the Labor Trafficking Committee for the Louisiana Governor’s Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board. At RTI, she leads technical assistance for a U.S. Office for Victims of Crime initiative on child and youth trafficking outcomes and contributes to research on labor trafficking prosecutions and the effects of disasters on trafficking vulnerability. She holds a Master of Arts in International Studies, concentrating in Human Rights and Human Trafficking, from the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Linfield University.

Key Points

Hurricane Katrina’s Signal International case, in which hundreds of Indian guest workers were defrauded and trafficked into labor repairing Gulf oil rigs, became one of the largest labor trafficking settlements at the time and helped drive Louisiana’s first designated federal anti-trafficking funding in 2007-2008.
Housing instability is one of the biggest drivers of post-disaster trafficking risk — when people lose their community, school, and church, they become far more vulnerable to someone who says, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything. I’ll get you a job.”
Disasters disproportionately hit communities already made vulnerable by redlining, the historical practice of confining people of color and poor families to lower-lying land that’s more exposed to flooding and severe weather.
In interviews with 46 disaster and trafficking responders, foreign national day laborers doing disaster recovery work and isolated children in disrupted households emerged as two of the populations most vulnerable to exploitation after a storm.
After Hurricane Ida, Louisiana’s child abuse hotline — the mandated channel for reporting child trafficking — was down for at least three weeks, leaving responders with no way to report what they saw.
Preparation has to happen before a disaster, not during one: without a plan already tested and rehearsed, coordinating a trafficking response becomes nearly impossible once phones, power, and staff are all unreachable at once.
Louisiana responders found creative workarounds under pressure, from standing up a mobile forensic interview unit in a neighboring parish within 24 hours to running child trafficking response operations out of a partner’s building after their own offices were destroyed.
Leanne and her RTI colleagues sent their findings directly to the Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board, which is now recommending changes to state labor procurement practices to help prevent forced labor.

Resources

Transcript

[00:00:00] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Traffickers take advantage of needs. And so in that time with disaster responders or folks who are helping, the best thing we can do is meet the needs of people who are presenting to us. If they need water, shelter, support, they need help accessing documents, we should treat what they’re presenting with, because if we don’t, someone else will. Somebody else will say, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll get you a job. Don’t worry. You just have to come with me right now.” And so that is the easiest way to help, is to treat those needs.

[00:00:34]

[00:00:39] Jamie: After Hurricane Ida, Louisiana’s child abuse hotline was down for three weeks. That’s three weeks with no way to report a child being trafficked. It’s the kind of gap that’s easy to miss when you’re not living through it, but disaster responders see it happen every time. Hi, I’m Jamie Macintosh, the program director for Safe Communities, Safe Kids at the Global Center for Women and Justice.

[00:01:02] Today, Sandie talks with Leanne McCallum Desselle, a research analyst at RTI International who spent nearly a decade doing frontline anti-trafficking work in Louisiana before turning her focus to studying what happens to trafficking risks after a hurricane hits. And now, here’s their conversation.

[00:01:19]

[00:01:21] Sandie Morgan: I am so happy to have Leanne Desselle, research analyst and training and technical assistant for RTI International, with me today. Welcome, Leanne.

[00:01:37] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:39] Sandie Morgan: I am fascinated. I started following anti-human trafficking responses to disaster relief because we know people in crisis are always much more vulnerable to being lured into really challenging circumstances. So when I saw your article, I saw your research. And you’re working in Louisiana, where that crisis was really ground zero for serious study and publication in the anti-trafficking work around disaster relief.

[00:02:23] So welcome.

[00:02:24] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Thank you so much. Yes, a lot of places say that Louisiana, and Southeast Louisiana specifically, is the canary in the coal mine for climate change and natural disasters, and I think that that’s certainly true in this space as well, at that intersection with human trafficking.

[00:02:44] Sandie Morgan: And what really inspired you to connect the two, human trafficking and disaster relief?

[00:02:53] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Great question. My journey before I moved to New Orleans: I went to grad school at the University of Denver Korbel School of International Studies, and I was thinking that I would go into international anti-human trafficking work. And in the international space, when you look at humanitarian response, there is this linkage and understanding that disasters and human trafficking intersect, and it’s built into that cluster system response.

[00:03:27] But in the United States, because our disaster response is markedly different, it sort of was missing. And so when I took this job in New Orleans, I brought that international lens with me, and I started to think about, what is it that’s missing here? Why is this missing in the United States?

[00:03:48] We’re not exceptional. Unfortunately, we’re not exempt from human trafficking after disasters ourselves. So I was curious: why aren’t we talking about it? And I think folks who are on the front lines who are working with those populations know that that’s happening. But perhaps outside of that, it really wasn’t so known, until some of the incredible research and whatnot came out following Katrina and subsequent disasters after.

[00:04:17] Sandie Morgan: So give us maybe a story we can kinda hang our hat on around Katrina that shows what the problem is.

[00:04:28] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Absolutely. I think one of the most famous cases after Hurricane Katrina was the Signal International case. It involved hundreds of guest workers from India who were working on oil rigs in the Gulf. They were doing skilled work with welding and pipe fitting and things of that nature, and were brought over on visas to do that work.

[00:05:00] Well, they were defrauded. They were tricked when they came over. They were told that they’d have a pathway to citizenship, that they would be able to bring their families over. They paid exorbitant fees to come over. And then once they arrived, what they found is that they were in terrible conditions.

[00:05:19] They were under guards with guns and with violence. They were in really squalid conditions, limited access to medical care. And when they started organizing to try to say, “How we’re being treated is not right,” immigration enforcement was used against them, and threats of violence. And so what’s incredible about the Signal International case is that it ended up being the largest human trafficking settlement at the time.

[00:05:48] It was, I’m gonna get the figures wrong, but I think it was like 1.7 million at the time. And it really was incredible because it was a labor trafficking case, and because it was in that post-disaster setting, they brought so much attention to this issue that can happen when there’s so little enforcement and there’s so little capacity to protect people in those conditions.

[00:06:14] Sandie Morgan: So what was the link between Hurricane Katrina and that case?

[00:06:19] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Great question. So Katrina destroyed a lot of infrastructure. Something like 80% of the houses in New Orleans were damaged after Katrina, for example. And the same thing happened with oil rigs and with the oil and gas industry in the Gulf. And so these folks were brought in to help repair these oil rigs that were out in the Gulf, and then also on the ground, in the oil and gas industry as well.

[00:06:53] Sandie Morgan: Okay. Okay, so they were trafficked to the disaster.

[00:06:59] Leanne McCallum Desselle: There was legal migration, and then the trafficking happened in the labor conditions, repairing the oil rigs.

[00:07:09] Sandie Morgan: Oh, okay. Okay.

[00:07:11] Leanne McCallum Desselle: It’s complicated because the folks who recruited them were doing so under false pretenses, but they used a legal visa process to get here. So it was a component of their fraud, but they came willingly to do what they thought was the oil rig repairs.

[00:07:36] Sandie Morgan: Okay. Okay, so you started out working on the ground in Louisiana’s anti-trafficking response in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, correct?

[00:07:53] Leanne McCallum Desselle: So I didn’t start working in Louisiana until 2017, but I think the ripple effects of Katrina are such that around here it’s before Katrina and after. And so it’s an impossibility to parse out the work in this space without acknowledging Katrina. I think what’s important to acknowledge too is, when I started doing anti-trafficking work, there were some people that I was working with who were around during Katrina when the language of human trafficking was still very new, right?

[00:08:35] You think the TVPA was 2000, and then Katrina happened in 2005. And so a lot of the folks that I worked with in the 2010s were there when Katrina happened, when they didn’t have the language to describe it as human trafficking. And they were there then in the aftermath of Katrina when initial funding for traditional anti-human trafficking response started in 2007, 2008.

[00:09:05] And that was really the genesis of modern anti-human trafficking, in the wake of Katrina, when there was designated funding from the US Attorney General’s office to responders in Louisiana.

[00:09:20] Sandie Morgan: Okay. Okay, so then you moved from being a social justice worker in that space of anti-trafficking to actually becoming a researcher so that you could study the connection between disasters and trafficking specifically. So how did you find a pathway to do that?

[00:09:49] Leanne McCallum Desselle: That’s a great question. When I was in graduate school, I was really interested in research, and I thought maybe I would be working in the international space doing anti-human trafficking work, maybe doing research, not quite sure. And then I took this swerve to really doing on-the-ground anti-human trafficking program response.

[00:10:12] Managing these local and statewide programs responding. And after several years of doing that, I’ve always had sort of a researcher’s heart. I love learning. I love research. And so it was something that was kind of calling me back to think bigger, if you will. And what I like to say is, I think that practitioners and survivors hold so much knowledge, and researchers sometimes get it wrong, that the knowledge that they’re generating gets kind of stuck in the ivory tower.

[00:10:48] It never makes it down back to the ground, to the people who, first of all, are contributing to the research, but then they should benefit from it. And so my goal was to go back into research if possible, and really make that research-to-practice connection, and center responders in all that I do to make sure that they are the number one folks who are benefiting from the research that I do.

[00:11:13] Sandie Morgan: Let me stop you for a second because I want to explore that idea of it never gets back to them. So they invest, they do the interviews, they’re in our focus group, and then they don’t get the benefit. What is the benefit that they should be getting?

[00:11:32] Leanne McCallum Desselle: That’s a good question. In my perspective, I think so often researchers are focused on getting that peer-reviewed journal article, to get the science to develop that. The challenge with peer-reviewed journal articles is first, they’re in a language that many people don’t speak. It’s a totally different language.

[00:11:54] And second of all, a lot of times those are behind paywalls, and so people who aren’t tied to academic institutions are not able to access them. And so even if people could access it, they may not even really benefit from it. And so to me, I think sometimes researchers forget to take that step back and make plain language accessible and policy or practice-based and centered resources that are for that audience that’s so different than an academic audience.

[00:12:29] Sandie Morgan: All right. So we’re going to really think about how to make the research accessible and relevant.

[00:12:42] It’s not just a report in a journal. And so your recent paper that attracted my team actually wasn’t about 2005 in Louisiana. It looked at hurricanes in Louisiana between 2017 and 2022. So what drew you to that time period in the region?

[00:13:14] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Before I became a researcher, I was managing statewide anti-human trafficking response, a multidisciplinary response in Louisiana. And so I was doing the work on the ground when Hurricanes Laura and Ida hit, and was part of the community that was attempting to respond effectively to victims and survivors during those disasters.

[00:13:43] And I think there were so many lessons learned during that period that it felt like there was knowledge that these practitioners held that so many others would benefit from, who really haven’t been through that experience before, who haven’t been able to maybe bear witness to it, who aren’t experiencing these massive disasters at such a regular interval.

[00:14:09] And so when I got to RTI, I was so lucky to connect with fellow researchers, Dr. Kelle Barrick and Dr. Rebecca Pfeffer, who are also very interested in this topic and were able to procure internal funding from RTI to pursue this research project. And so using some of those community connections that I had as a former practitioner and a person who’s been in that space, and then blending their research acumen, we were able to do this incredible sort of field-informed project.

[00:14:50] Sandie Morgan: So what conditions do disasters create that traffickers exploit?

[00:14:59] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Natural disasters create a variety of vulnerabilities that traffickers can exploit. Some of the ones that I think are most important to acknowledge is, first of all, housing access. And housing is sort of the center of stability in so many people’s lives because their community is around them, family, friends, their school, their church.

[00:15:28] So when somebody’s housing is impacted and they have to leave that community space, they’re highly vulnerable to being exploited and taken advantage of. And also, people will do sketchy jobs and things that they may not have done in other circumstances in order to be able to house and protect their families.

[00:15:51] So I think that that’s one really important component. Another important component is the fact that disasters disproportionately impact vulnerable people to begin with, and that’s in part because of redlining and the way that folks who are poor tend to live in communities that are particularly vulnerable to flooding or fires, you name it.

[00:16:18] That’s unfortunately a component of

[00:16:22] Sandie Morgan: Let’s define redlining.

[00:16:24] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Redlining is the historical practice that only white people were allowed to live in certain neighborhoods, oftentimes in the best areas that are maybe higher up, less prone to flooding or less prone to negative weather patterns. And so people of color and poor folks had a tendency to live in lower lying areas or areas that were not as desirable, which tend to be more impacted by weather and disasters.

[00:16:59] Sandie Morgan: I still remember going to Louisiana and doing the bus tour, and everything along the bus line that was pointed out was described in terms of before Katrina and after Katrina. So in your paper, you interviewed 46 disaster responders and trafficking responders. What did they tell you about how sex and labor trafficking showed up differently after a storm?

[00:17:41] Leanne McCallum Desselle: The responders that we talked to had a variety of perspectives and really interesting insight into the ways that storms can lead to trafficking and increase exploitation. Some of the populations that were most vulnerable that we were told about by these responders were foreign nationals, so people who are non-US citizens who might be, particularly in work settings, looking to do quick jobs, day laborers taking short-term contracts, those sorts of folks doing the repairs and what we call disaster resilience or disaster recovery work.

[00:18:27] It’s a very vulnerable population. Another very vulnerable population that we heard about was children, which I’m not sure that we expected in the United States. The international literature talks a lot about children in the sense that there’s fraudulent adoptions and child snatching, things like that.

[00:18:51] In this context, it was actually interestingly about familial exploitation and exploitation of isolated children. So very different from maybe what the international literature says, but nonetheless, we heard children were very vulnerable. They may be experiencing exploitation from new people being in their homes, not having safe people to do outcries to, like teachers, sports coaches, things of that nature, and that isolation was a big part of it.

[00:19:26] And the escalation of stress within homes, like substance use, domestic violence, that just increases the temperature that can lead to additional abuse. And then the last sort of population that we talked about a lot that’s not talked about enough is people who are already being exploited.

[00:19:48] Sandie Morgan: Hmm.

[00:19:49] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Being exploited in sex trafficking, for example, that the trafficker might switch gears and change their business tactics to target a new audience to make the most money. ‘Cause at the end of the day, human trafficking really is a financial crime, right? There’s that commercial component, which is what makes it different than domestic violence and sexual violence.

[00:20:10] And so we heard a lot about that, about some of the changes that traffickers would use to make the most money and exploit the situation.

[00:20:18] Sandie Morgan: So then you also identified that the responders really weren’t prepared. They didn’t have the skill set to identify. They didn’t have the skill set to know who to call. What gets in the way in the first response season, maybe three to five days?

[00:20:49] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Yes. In the initial aftermath of the disaster, so much is focused on life, limb, and property, and I think it’s very hard to imagine if you haven’t been in that situation just how severe this is. So when we’re talking about that, we’re saying cell phone towers are down, right? So you may not know if your coworkers are alive or dead.

[00:21:15] You’re trying to

[00:21:16] Sandie Morgan: So having the hotline isn’t even gonna help you?

[00:21:20] Leanne McCallum Desselle: No.

[00:21:21] Sandie Morgan: ‘Cause that’s what we give out all the time.

[00:21:23] Leanne McCallum Desselle: I know, and I’ll say after Hurricane Ida, the child abuse hotline for the state of Louisiana was down for, oh gosh, it was at least three weeks, and

[00:21:34] that’s where all cases of child trafficking are supposed to be reported. So basically, for at least three weeks, unless you happen to know exactly who to call at the Department of Children and Family Services, there was no way to report child trafficking with the mechanism that you were supposed to.

[00:21:53] And that’s the kind of thing that is impossible to describe to someone who’s not been there. Just identifying where your staff are. For example, with Hurricane Ida, I actually left Louisiana. At the time, I was managing a statewide child trafficking response group. I went on my honeymoon in Lake Tahoe.

[00:22:19] Or not my honeymoon, my bachelorette trip, and I was stuck out of town for 10 days, and I could hardly get ahold of my husband and my extended family at the time because cellphone towers weren’t working. And then you add on top of it some of the communities that were hit the hardest, being able to drive there is difficult.

[00:22:40] Cell towers are down, power’s down. So just being able to identify your partners in those first few days is a challenge unto itself, and you’re really focused on that life, limb, and property. And so in-depth investigations or checking in with your clients if you’re a service provider, trying to call and make sure that the families are okay, it’s an impossibility.

[00:23:03] Sandie Morgan: So then how do you give some basic skills to someone who’s on a response team? If they see something that is not right and looks like it’s got elements of fraud and exploitation, how do you equip them to have a human trafficking response?

[00:23:29] Leanne McCallum Desselle: The first thing I like to share with people is that traffickers take advantage of needs. And so in that time with disaster responders or folks who are helping, the best thing we can do is meet the needs of people who are presenting to us. If they need water, shelter, support, they need help accessing documents,

[00:23:56] we should treat what they’re presenting with because if we don’t, someone else will. Somebody else will say, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll get you a job. Don’t worry. You just have to come with me right now.” And so that is the easiest way to help, is to treat those needs. The second thing is that unfortunately, preparation is key.

[00:24:19] And so if we don’t have a plan before the storm and something that we’ve tried out, it’s gonna be really hard to do it in wartime, right? When nothing’s working, if we hadn’t even tried it when things were working really well. And so having a protocol in place, having a plan in place, “Here’s what we’re going to do if in the shelter setting we identify someone who we think could be experiencing violence.

[00:24:48] Here’s who we’re gonna call. Here’s what we’re going to refer them to.” It’s so important because without that plan, it’s impossible to hold other folks accountable in systems, and everyone’s getting pulled in so many directions. It’s really hard to focus on human trafficking because there’s, like I said, life, limb, and property.

[00:25:14] Thinking about child abuse and human trafficking and domestic violence tends to come second, third, or fourth in the line of priorities.

[00:25:22] Sandie Morgan: So in that situation, having a plan about how to connect, I know in your paper you talked about some pretty creative partnerships to work around challenges. Can you walk us through some of those collaborations, what they look like?

[00:25:45] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Absolutely. This is one of my favorite things about the study, is getting to highlight how creative the providers were in the aftermath of disaster to be able to continue to work. So one of my favorites is that there was a children’s advocacy center in the hardest hit area after Hurricane Ida.

[00:26:07] Their building was impacted, but children still needed forensic interviews, right? Children are still disclosing violence. They still need care and access to care. And so what they did is they called their local law enforcement in the next parish over. We call counties parishes in Louisiana, for those who

[00:26:28] Sandie Morgan: I learned that

[00:26:30] on that bus ride

[00:26:31] Leanne McCallum Desselle: I know, that’s wild, huh? And they called up another law enforcement agency that did have power, did have everything they needed, and was able to, within 24 hours, set up a mobile forensic interview command center in the next parish over to be able to serve those children. And it’s because of that relationship that they had that they were able to switch over so quickly and be able to keep engaging with children.

[00:27:01] Another incredible example after Hurricane Laura: one of our children’s advocacy center partners also is a mental health provider for the community for all ages. Their building was one of the very few buildings that was spared, so even though they didn’t have power, they were able to allow some of their colleagues, like law enforcement, other service providers, child welfare, to come in and set up generator-based cooling, and brought them in and were able to provide mental health services to those first responders to help them to be able to keep moving forward and providing.

[00:27:48] And similarly, in Lake Charles, our Department of Corrections, some of those folks who were managing anti-human trafficking response for children in this city, their offices were completely destroyed, and so they started working remotely too, for the first time in their professional history, working out of a partner’s building to be able to continue to do the work.

[00:28:13] And so much of it was about those relationships and partnerships and what I like to call a duct tape and twine approach, where it’s just you use what you’ve got, and you make the best of it, and I think Louisianans are so good at that.

[00:28:27] Sandie Morgan: So when you were in the final drafts of your paper and you were looking at the changes that the responders and the researchers should make, what is one change for trafficking responders, for disaster responders, and for researchers that would improve our future efforts?

[00:28:56] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Gosh, it’s hard to boil things down to one, isn’t it? But I think for the sake of being condensed, for responders, I think one of the most important policy related changes that could be made would be related to disaster resilience work and doing disaster recovery. So many of the verified cases of human trafficking after natural disasters are in that disaster recovery and reconstruction space.

[00:29:33] My colleagues, Dr. Barrick and Dr. Pfeffer, actually just did an incredible study looking similarly at disaster recovery in Houston, and found that the exploitation rate in that study was about 80% of

[00:29:51] people who

[00:29:51] had been in that space. So policy that protects workers who are doing disaster resiliency is paramount, I think.

[00:30:00] And that’s something that we should all be thinking about, is protecting those workers and not rolling back worker protections during those really critical times in post-disaster settings.

[00:30:11] Sandie Morgan: Hmm.

[00:30:13] Leanne McCallum Desselle: For scholars, I think there’s so little research looking at the disaster and human trafficking intersection in the United States.

[00:30:22] And because our systems are so different than the international system, which is quite uniform, uses the cluster system, like I said, they deploy it in different countries, in different settings. Here, our disaster response is very local, jurisdictionally different in every community. And so we need significantly more research to understand what does trafficking look like?

[00:30:49] What are the most effective approaches to respond to human trafficking? And what can we do to improve our response? And I think that I’m really hopeful, because this topic has gotten so much more interest over the last five, 10 years, that that will happen.

[00:31:09] Sandie Morgan: So we started this conversation talking about how sometimes research does a great job of evaluation, analysis, but then it doesn’t get back to the very people that need it. So what are you sending back that is accessible and will make a difference in the next, because we know there will be another hurricane?

[00:31:38] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Absolutely. The first thing we did before we wrote our academic journal articles, because if you’ve written an academic journal article, you know it can take over a year from writing to publication, is we first made a list of recommendations to the Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board based on our findings.

[00:32:03] So that report went straight to that body who’s able to provide recommendations to the Louisiana Legislature. And this year, that body is recommending some changes to procurement practices for labor to prevent the use of forced labor, which is incredible. So that was one. The second thing is that we made a plain language summary of the findings.

[00:32:33] We have both the recommendations for prevention and recommendations for response, and that’s a front and back one-pager that’s available, that I’d be happy to link to you.

[00:32:48] Sandie Morgan: We will put the link in the show notes. That sounds great.

[00:32:53] Leanne McCallum Desselle: And then the last thing we have is, we have a landing page at RTI just dedicated to this research project, and we’re really happy to report that we’ve had some interesting traction with new connections with podcasts, with outside media, that doesn’t always happen with research.

[00:33:15] And so we’ve got links to those as well, where you can learn more from those different media types, if folks tend to prefer podcasts over a report or something, ’cause I think that’s a really important part of doing outreach effectively, is we can’t put everything in writing, right? We’ve gotta meet people where they’re at.

[00:33:33] If listening to podcasts or doing a YouTube video session is what’s easiest for people to connect with, that’s what researchers should be doing.

[00:33:44] Sandie Morgan: And that’s why we invited you here, because there are lots of people who will never get to the webpage, but they’ll listen in on this podcast or watch us on YouTube. And our theme for the Ending Human Trafficking podcast is study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference. And research is what it means to study the issue, and your report about policy change, that kind of advocacy impacts the future as well as the present, and it makes a difference for so many vulnerable people and for the responders.

[00:34:32] It’s very discouraging when you give so much and then run into roadblocks. So this has been a great conversation, Leanne. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. Is there any last encouragement you want to give to researchers in hurricane spaces?

[00:35:00] Leanne McCallum Desselle: I think my suggestion to anyone who’s interested in researching this topic is to make sure you have a, I like to call it, a cultural guide or a connector in that community if you’re not yourself connected to it, because there are so many unique little attributes in each community. And I think that many…

[00:35:25] So in Louisiana, for example, people are quite wary of researchers because they’ve been asked and asked and asked, and given and given and given to research, but not really seen the fruits of that effort. So they’re hesitant to engage. And so if you can have that cultural guide, that connector who can build that trust, I think it can really improve people’s engagement in the project, but then also just give you that authenticity, and give you that true, full voice of what people have experienced.

[00:35:58] Sandie Morgan: Excellent. I love that. Thank you so much, and we will put a link to the one-pager that’s easy to digest, and we also encourage that listeners will share this podcast with other students and researchers who really want to investigate how to become a voice and make a difference in ending human trafficking.

[00:36:28] Thank you, Leanne.

[00:36:29] Leanne McCallum Desselle: Thank you so much.

[00:36:32] Jamie: Thanks to Leanne McCallum Desselle for sharing her research on how hurricanes create openings for trafficking, and for the reminder that preparation has to happen before the storm hits, not during it. Listeners, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you check out our website at endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources.

[00:36:53] If you’d love to help us grow this podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. And as always, thank you for listening.