Protect Your Children from Traffickers

The world’s efforts to combat human trafficking might be a violation of Einstein’s law: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.”

“In the case of our anti-trafficking efforts,” states safety expert Brian Searcy, Col. (RET) USAF, “we have been doing the same thing over and over again. Unfortunately, we’ve been getting the same results, including that the Internet keeps on luring young people into the world of commercial sex.”

He wants to inject a new approach involving two necessary components.

• He’d like for more parents and guardians to learn situational awareness with respect to their children’s vulnerability to being trafficked.

• He’d like people to convert awareness into habits, behaviors, and a way of looking at the world that they can act on.

What Is Situational Awareness

“Situational awareness,” he explains, “is a mindset. It involves identifying a problem, assessing it, predicting the necessary countermeasures, deciding what to do, and then acting.”

He would particularly like to see parents and guardians use this kind of analysis to keep the young people in their care safe from Internet predators. He knows that the internet is a major area of vulnerability.

“When it comes to trafficking,” he points out, “80% to 90% of recruitment occurs through the Internet. With the pandemic, it’s probably closer to 90%.”

Facebook, he contends, turns out to be the greatest danger. According to the Federal Human Trafficking Report, “In 2020, 59% of online victim recruitment in active sex trafficking cases occurred on Facebook.”

Four Steps to Improved Situational Awareness

Parents and guardians need to be aware of children’s vulnerability to online recruitment. Here are four steps he recommends for these adults.

1. Know what’s going on around you. “Know what your kids are doing when they’re on the internet. Don’t assume that they are mature enough to protect themselves. Typically, children have no awareness of how vulnerable they may be.”

2. Cultivate the ability to put yourself in the shoes of the young people in your care. “You’re not just listening so that you can speak when your child has stopped speaking. You need to understand where you child is coming from. You can’t deal effectively with a threat unless you know how to actively listen to your child’s concerns and point of view.”

3. Use your own critical thinking skills, and do not take situations at face value. “Dig deeper. Get to the actual problem and not just the symptom you see, which is their behavior.”

4. Pay attention to your instincts, those nagging little voices that say something isn’t right. “Trust your gut. If you have a feeling that something isn’t right, don’t ignore that feeling.”

In his view, awareness is a start, but it isn’t enough. It needs to lead to action. Searcy favors taking courses on situational awareness, the kind where you spend maybe five minutes a day, over a period of weeks, studying danger factors and what to do about them.

“Study after study proves that this micro learning is how you learn and change your habits and behaviors,” he points out.

To find courses, search on “trafficking situational awareness training.” There’s an abundance of choices.

Searcy lives the advice he provides to others. When he, his family, and a couple of family friends were planning to meet at a restaurant for dinner several years ago, he called to say he’d be five minutes late. The group was starting to take their seats, when his young daughter realized that one of their guests was about to sit in the chair that faced the restaurant’s entrance.

His daughter told the guest, “Wait! Stop! You can’t sit there. It’s where my dad needs to sit.”

The guest was taken aback. “Why on earth not?” he asked.

“Dad needs to be able to see the door and know where the exits are. He will have a plan ready in case anything goes wrong.”

Probably most people don’t need to be as vigilant as Searcy. Still, he does believe that if we are going to make a dent in the problem of child trafficking, parents need to educate themselves about the threats. And be ready to prevent those threats from becoming reality.