Key Points
- The Online Anti-Human Trafficking Certificate concentrates on the Five P Model: partnership, prevention, protection, prosecution, and policy.
- The policy component was added to address unique issues in implementation in order to create a human rights focus.
- Law is not enough, we need to develop policies and procedures that allow legislation to be effectively implemented.
- Policy can also protect the viability of partnerships by creating an understanding of what everyone’s roles and responsibilities are.
- Your last step in actually working on the Five Ps is to have a written policy that addresses each individual P more directly, which then achieves the goal to support and sustain anti-human trafficking efforts.
Resources
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Transcript
Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode number 203: The Fifth P: Policy.
Production Credits [00:00:09] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.
Dave [00:00:29] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.
Sandie [00:00:35] And my name is Sandie Morgan.
Dave [00:00:37] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, the topic today, The Fifth P: Policy. There’s a fifth P?
Sandie [00:00:49] There’s a fifth P.
Dave [00:00:52] Wow.
Sandie [00:00:52] Yeah, I’m excited about it. I’m also excited that we have as our guest, the Assistant Director of the Global Center for Women and Justice.
Dave [00:00:59] We do. I don’t know how many times Derek Marsh has appeared on the show, Sandie, but I’ve lost count- it’s that many times, certainly three or four times since, and in a couple of capacities. We’re so glad to welcome back to the show Derek Marsh today. He is the assistant director of the Global Center for Women and Justice. And he was previously with the Westminster Police Department, and in 2003 he retired as Deputy Chief after more than 26 years of service. In 2004, he co-founded the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, which you hear about often on the show. He served as the co-chair of the task force from 2004 to 2012, at which time he developed and taught courses in human trafficking locally and across the state of California, supervised human trafficking investigations, and assisted in creating anti-human trafficking DVDs for state and federal grants, and wrote and managed multiple grants and provided congressional testimony twice as an expert witness. Today, with our Global Center for Women and Justice, Derek’s work focuses on the Online Anti-Human Trafficking Certificate Program, grant writing, budget, and developing and providing local, national, and global outreach and training programs and opportunities for first responders and frontline workers. Derek also has a M.A. in Human Behavior and an M.B.A. In Police Management and Leadership. Derek, so glad to welcome you back to the show.
Derek [00:02:24] Well, thanks for having me back again. I appreciate it.
Sandie [00:02:26] Well, it’s good cause Derek and I just got back a few days ago from Argentina, where he was implementing all of that training knowledge that he has- training law enforcement, community leaders, along with the rest of our team. So, it’s always great to share his expertise with our Ending Human Trafficking partners.
Derek [00:02:47] It’s always great to have a chance to go global a little bit and apply what we learned here and show that it’s applicable no matter where we go.
Sandie [00:02:55] And one of the things I’ve really appreciated at the Global Center is how you have intentionally designed and really enhanced the Anti-Human Trafficking Certificate. So, since you’ve been the Assistant Director, we’ve added a labor trafficking course, which kudos to you for that. And now we’re actually in the Fall, revising the whole program. Do you want to talk about what that’s going to look like?
Derek [00:03:27] Sure. What we’re trying to do is trying to kind of mesh our courses with other courses that are being offered in the online format, so that we can be actually a concentration for other majors that are currently being offered in the online course format. So, we’re going to have five weeks and we’re going to have all of our courses work on the Five Key Model. So, we’re going to be looking at partnership, prevention, protection, prosecution, now policy as being each week an overall theme for the different topics that we’re going to be talking about and the different courses, and of course labor trafficking being the newest topic but we’re also still doing our commercial sexual exploitation of children, our human trafficking ethics, our human trafficking course, our aftercare course, all those courses contribute to our Anti-Human Trafficking Certificate. We’re looking forward to fine tuning these courses and adding more in the future.
Sandie [00:04:19] Okay. I’m excited about that. For those of you who are listening while you’re driving, when you get home please go to the Webpage and pull up the PDF of the Enhanced Collaborative Model for Human Trafficking Task Forces. This diagram that Derek has developed is color coded so that you can get an idea of the holistic nature. And it starts with a victim-centered trauma-informed approach and the partnership component is wrapped around the prevention, protection, prosecution, and policy. But our ultimate goal is to prioritize people over process. And do you want to explain your thinking in how you designed this model?
Derek [00:05:13] Sure Sandie, and I would like to say I’d love to take full credit for this on my own, and the bottom line is I’ve been working all these years on trying to represent as succinctly as I can the federal model that’s been espoused since I started getting involved in 2004 and really was created back in 2000-2001 book by the United Nations and by our federal government. So, the idea here is that the background for our Enhanced Collaborative Model has always been the victim-centered trauma-informed approach. Our victims come first, we want to make sure we don’t re-traumatize them when we find them. And so are our move from our criminal justice system, where we focus on our criminals and holding them accountable for their actions. I love doing that, but the reality with human trafficking and most of our types of crimes that we’re working on now that are victim-centered. We really should put people in front of the process, people in front of our justice system, in the sense that it should be a restorative justice process. And that’s what I was trying to get that when I was putting this model together and that’s why we put the overall goal here of prioritizing people over process. And then the rest falls after that, and while we still want to put people in jail and hold them accountable, we still want to protect our victims, want to prevent them actually from being victims ideally. Overall, we want to have our policies reinforce these issues and overall make sure these multi-jurisdictional multiagency partnerships can reinforce our efforts. Really, we’re about making sure that our victims are supported, and they are really the focus of our efforts from the beginning all the way through the end.
Sandie [00:06:49] So, let’s take a look at what it means to add Policy as the fifth P. So, let’s dig in to policy, Derek.
Derek [00:06:59] Sure, before we had the three P’s with prevention, protection, and prosecution and policy was kind of implied but never explicitly stated. So, when you’re looking at prevention you were looking at the idea of trying to stop something before it started by keeping people from becoming victims. And that’s important, and there’s the idea that you would have that support and that idea of like identifying an awareness upfront, maybe even some intervention. You’re also looking at protection, you had these victims but you’re also providing resources for those victims and helping them recover themselves, restore themselves, reintegrate themselves back in society; which implies again the idea that you have these resources and there’s financial restitution or there’s financial resources you can get these people back on their feet again, help them you know provide and restore their personal dignity, get them back from their victimization and help them become active members of society again without that fear we want them feeling safe and secure. And obviously with prosecution you have to have laws for prosecution, you have to have policies for prosecution. So, all those things kind of played into understanding there is a policy behind it all, but we’re an explicit. So, I’d heard about this actually going to Africa. I heard this from the Nigerian delegation, and I thought that was a real kind of a genius way of looking at it. You broke out this policy component, because really it has its own unique issues that you want to address specifically that really are separate from the other three Ps, and from the partnership itself as well.
Sandie [00:08:30] So, what are some examples of those differences?
Derek [00:08:35] Well, I think right off the bat with a policy issue, you want to focus on the fact that you want to have a human rights focus. You know, we talk about the victim-centered trauma-informed approach and we talk about prioritizing people over process, but you really want to be explicit you want to say hey we’re about human rights we want to make sure that people have the right to access fundamental necessities and resources. We’re talking about clean water, right to food, right to shelter, right to medical resources. These are things people all should have to reduce their vulnerability to make them as invulnerable to being at risk as they can possibly be. We also want to make sure that if you become a victim that you have the chance to be compensated whether through restitution or through maybe some government funding sources so that they have the chance to recover and have the recovery capabilities and the resources for recovery and programs so they can recover whether they’re psychological or other resources they can go through. Also, you want to have the resources and a sense of being able to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions, and that’s important too. So, that’s going to cost money as far as having attorneys, court systems, and things like that in place investigators and things like that. Also, you need those support victim services and you need those support system services teamed up with law enforcement so those partnerships, and those partnerships do take time and energy. They require resources, financial and otherwise. You want to make sure those are in place to make sure that you can perpetuate those. And finally, prevention activities, ideally the best victim is someone who never even existed to begin with. So, you want to make sure you have awareness campaigns and those prevention activities that you can do an intervention type of activities so you can go out there and make sure NGOs, and faith-based community, people like agencies, and people involved with that can keep folks safe so they don’t even get involved to begin with. And all of that is what we mean when we talk about human rights focus. So, that’s why the idea of victim-centered and trauma-informed, you know you need that human rights focus, that explicit human rights focus to be focused on and I think policy is a great place to put it in.
Sandie [00:10:44] Well and one of the things that I understand from my experience in nonprofit leadership, and really in any kind of management role I’ve ever had, is I get a new law that’s sent out to all the managers maybe at a hospital or some organization. And now I have to figure out how to implement it. So, legislation is one step but then the next step is developing policy and procedures at the delivery level. And I think adding the policy reminds us that you’re not done just because you have law. And so how do we begin to create those policies at the level where it’s going to make the most difference at the implementation level.
Derek [00:11:37] Exactly. I think it’s something that we all do, no matter what new laws we’ve run into. We saw it with domestic violence, when we had laws here in the United States and California; I remember when I first started working in police work in 1987 when some of its first domestic violence laws came out and being a rookie out in the field and seeing actual domestic violent crimes occur, some of the senior officers I was working with didn’t recognize those crimes and them handling the calls and saying this wasn’t a crime and me insisting it was, and me losing the battle in the field and them saying this wasn’t going to happen and sometimes it was years before we were really consistently holding people accountable to those laws. We had an experience investigating, we had experience prosecuting, we had case law supporting what was going on, and we had experience actually incarcerating people that we actually had those domestic violence laws actually work and that legislation was actually consistent. We’d actually review that legislation that had been refined and through experience in the field. So, any law, whether it’s human trafficking law even gang laws, have had the same type of delay before they were actually implemented most effectively. So, you know as we break down policy into legislation, and governments, and capacity building that legislation just because like you say just because you have a law doesn’t means it’s going to be implemented or could be effectively operationalized for years to come and you just have to consistently pursue it and have people and governance agencies push the issue and make it a priority at the different agencies that are capable of enforcing and prosecuting and adjudicating it, until it’s actually done and done well and consistently and fairly and equitably so it can be a good law and a sustainable law in perpetuity. And then as we find issues or problems with it, it can be refined through the legislative process and that iterative process keeps moving forward.
Sandie [00:13:40] Well and there’s a lot of great examples right here in California. I think of the Supply Chain Transparency Act, which was designed to reduce labor trafficking, slave labor in the products that arrive here on our shores and are on the shelves in our stores. And when that law was first passed, nobody did anything with it and then they had to start writing policies about what it looked like. And I remember calling a company and asking how they were implementing that law. And they simply said We have a zero-tolerance policy. But they didn’t actually have a procedure or a policy that said how to check the supply chain on maybe the cotton and the labor in the T-shirts they were selling. And I think that’s what we have to understand is policy is how we actually implement and interpret the legislation that trickles down to our community. Does that make sense?
Derek [00:14:50] Absolutely. In fact, you can have laws ad nauseum really. And the bottom line is that agencies and people have to regulate themselves in the end. So, you can have lots of laws on the book. I mean, we keep hearing about laws that are there are thousands of laws that people aren’t even aware of and they don’t follow. And I’m not talking about the big ones like murder, and robbery, kidnapping, and horrific laws like that but administrative laws and things that people aren’t familiar with. And if people aren’t aware of them, then they’re not following through on them, then they’re no better than the paper they’re written on. So, you have to have people that are actually following through on them. You have to have the procedures by these companies that they impact, and making sure that they’re being followed through with at every level that that law is supposed to impact or the bottom line is- the law really has no strength no impact to actually stop what is intended to stop or hold people accountable or agencies or organizations accountable that are supposed to be held accountable.
Sandie [00:15:53] Well and so when I look at policy and I go back to the other four P’s, I can begin to imagine that partnerships are going to be more durable if you have written policies in place about how to manage those collaborative efforts because it will protect the viability of those partnerships.
Derek [00:16:16] I agree. I also think that alongside that with those collaborations comes an understanding of what everyone’s roles and responsibilities are. So, you have those rules you have those MOUs, a memorandum of understanding, as far as what everyone’s responsible for doing in those collaborations and those partnerships and then you have to hold people accountable to those. So, if they’re not holding themselves to those standards then there should be a mechanism for the group as a whole to constructively hold each other accountable to say hey your role is to do this in this particular partnership how do we get you to make this happens so this could be a more productive, constructive partnership where we are affecting these anti-trafficking efforts we’re doing and make it a more positive anti-trafficking effort across the board.
Sandie [00:17:11] And the policy column on this model really has a human rights focus, like you mentioned before. So, when I take policy and I apply it to prevention from a human right focus and you mentioned earlier community education in campaigns in prevention. So, that means then I need to have a policy about how I use media, how I use the pictures of someone who has the right to say, “no you can’t use my picture”. Or a human right focus that is going to build a legitimate understanding of human trafficking. Accurate I think is maybe a better word. And I think about all of the media that I see with graphics of chains, chains, chains, and how many victims when you were in law enforcement, Derek, did you release from chains?
Derek [00:18:13] I believe I can count them all on one hand, without any fingers. So, that would be a big zippo. I mean that’s not to say it never happened anywhere, because I know for a fact it has, however, so rare and over time it’s become increasingly more rare, at least here in the United States, that traffickers are much more dependent on psychological coercion and other aspects on that level that it’s so rare we see chains being used. And just like you said, we need to be really responsible and ethical in how we represent trafficking because people’s expectations are so skewed by the media and by movies and other media products. And on the one hand, it gives and takes right. On one hand, it raises awareness, and that’s not such a bad thing. On the other hand, you have a certain expectation by watching these that these people are being kidnapped and horrific things are done to them, and in some cases and in some parts of the world that’s absolutely true, but in many cases the terrific things are done are psychological, not physical. In a sense so much as the torture and the man that clings people to desks and to bedposts and things like that. And the other idea is that the last thing you want to do especially with people who have been in situations is to further exploit them to make a point in advertising campaigns or exploit their stories without their permission or to use them in the sense of promoting agencies or even support organizations or victims service organizations to show that they’re actually doing a quote-on-quote “good” or “focused effort” in anti-trafficking when these people aren’t survivors, haven’t become survivors, are on the road to survivorship. They really don’t have an informed consent ready to go and really need the time to understand where they are at and how they want to be identified and thinking of them first before what that potential media exposure might do for that particular agency, whether it’s just for the idea of recognition or maybe for donorship or other issues like that.
Sandie [00:20:22] Well and what this model helps me visualize for any organization is that your last step in actually working in prevention, protection, or prosecution is to have a written policy that achieves the goal to support and sustain human trafficking efforts. And I work at Vanguard University and we have a lot of outside organizations that would like to offer jobs and internship opportunities to our students. And there’s a process for doing that. And so often organizations will apply and if they’re human trafficking it gets shunted over to me and I immediately ask, well can you send me your policies on media, on victim and survivor support, and those kinds of things. And there are so many that have no policy, so they make it up as they go along. And that’s why I think our ethics courses are really going to be an important piece adding policy to that.
Derek [00:21:35] Well I think you make an excellent point that you know why put this together from a policy perspective I have a tendency to think more globally and from like 10-20 thousand foot perspective and think from a government perspective and really like you’re saying here that it can just be from an organizational policy perspective or from a group policy perspective. Everybody who’s involved in partnerships or could potentially be involved in partnerships needs to precinct out what their roles and responsibilities are, what their mission is, what their vision is, how they’re going to enact it ethically and responsibly and with a victim-centered trauma-informed approach that doesn’t take advantage of other people or other victims strictly for the sense of perpetuating an organization’s survival or an organization’s movement forward. They should be able to come up with a model, business model if you will, that doesn’t only survive because they have victims that they’re using to supplement their media campaigns or their reason for existing. Instead they have a reason for existing that yeah they may be serving victims and that’s a great thing to do and I don’t want to minimize that, but they’re not using those victims to advertise their wins, their successes, their survivorship focus- instead they’re using the methods and their practices and they’re promising practices that they’re developing and using day to day as their advertisement in and of themselves without having the people that they’re working with and creating survivors as the objects of their media and their success.
Sandie [00:23:17] Then looking at this from the 5 P in the whole picture, then policy actually has a role under each one of the Ps that we’re looking at here. But it brings more of the human rights focus to how we apply that in our ultimate goal.
Derek [00:23:41] Yeah I would say that actually it makes the what was initially implied or implicit with each of these previous four Ps it actually makes it explicit and it makes us have to address them more explicitly and more directly so that we don’t have the option of kind of saying well we’ll deal with that later or something when it’s on an M.O.U. we can put in a drawer somewhere and forget about it. Or we’ll deal with it when it comes up because unfortunately in the heat of a moment, we have a tendency not to always think as clearly as we can. That instead of the better strategy always is the thinking ahead and plan ahead and sure things change on the fly, and we have to be adaptable and I appreciate that. I’ve done it many times myself, we have ourselves here at the Global Center, you know. And I’m not saying that doesn’t happen every day of the week, nonetheless, the plan is you know failure period. And so at least we have a framework to work from initially and we recognize there are certain issues we just don’t violate. And whether it’s the victim’s sanctity which we will not violate, or whether it’s the sanctity of confidentiality, or what data we can share or data we can’t share, or which partners we can admit to having it which two partners are confidential. All of these issues are important when it comes to having a healthy partnerships and healthy efforts that are going to be successful working to counter human trafficking both locally, nationally, and internationally.
Sandie [00:25:16] Well I really like how you summarized this going from implicit to explicit and that’s when we write policies, we make things explicit. People know where we stand, and we are able to evaluate how well we’ve done what we said we would do because we have it in writing what we said we would do.
Derek [00:25:39] One of the biggest things I’ve always been frustrated with as people to tell everyone how successful they are and what they do, and it’s always judged on something they decided after the fact. And with all the grant writing we’ve done and worked within our lives, I think one of the great things about grant writing is that you have to decide upfront what your levels and your definition of success is. And so, as you’re moving through the project you keep working towards that definition of success and you’re not tempted later to redefine it as you go. You might find other levels of success as you go through, but it’s not something that you just come up with suddenly at the end of a project you know walking into the project with those levels of success are, you’ve actually partnered with other people who agree to those definitions of success and you know by that sharing and that transparency that you’re less likely to exploit others, or exploit your victims, or exploit the issues by defining upfront what those success definitions are and be beneficial to everyone along the way.
Sandie [00:26:43] Well I’m excited about seeing policy as our fifth P, I love that it’s going to be implemented in our anti-human trafficking certificate and as we do that we’ll come back and address this again on a future episode. Any closing remarks, Mr. Marsh?
Derek [00:27:02] Well, no not really. Just thanks for having me on again. It’s fun, thanks for including me and talking about the Fifth P, I think it’s an exciting movement forward.
Sandie [00:27:11] Alright.
Dave [00:27:12] And thank you both for your perspective on the Anti-Human Trafficking Certificate Program. Two of our faculty members here today, Derek and Sandie, of course, working together along with all our faculty. If you are looking and searching for a framework that’s going to help you to really dive in on the issues in detail, The Anti-Human Trafficking Certificate Program is a fabulous place to start and a good starting point for you is to go over to the endinghumantrafficking.org Website you’ll see a link there with a lot more details. It’s also a great place to go to begin the journey because one of the other resources that are there for free is Sandie’s book, The Five Things You Must Know, a quick start guide to ending human trafficking. Especially if you’re just listening for the first or second or third time and you haven’t yet downloaded that book, it’s an important guide that will teach you the five critical things that Sandie’s identified that you should know before you join the fight against trafficking. You can get access to that just by going to endinghumantrafficking.org and all of the details are there on both the certificate, the book, and so much more. And Sandie and I, of course, will be back again in two weeks for our next conversation.
Sandie [00:28:27] Thanks, Dave.
Dave [00:28:28] Take care.
