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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – As energy around Super Bowl LIX ramps up, local, state, and federal law enforcement will provide safety for visitors. Many others will look for signs of human trafficking.
Events like the Super Bowl, NBA All-Star, and other major sports and entertainment events are often a playground for sex traffickers to hide in plain sight, preying on and manipulating victims that they have an emotional or physical strong hold on.
Louisiana’s I-20 and I-49 corridor is referred to as “victim’s corridor” by experts who say the quick access points to interstates that quickly take you into and out of Louisiana through Shreveport is one they will be watching as sports fans descend upon the Bayou State.
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A national organization is working with healthcare, victim’s services providers, and law enforcement using data, lived experience, and trauma-informed care to provide educational resources and courses for those looking to understand better how human trafficking presents itself daily.
The Set Me Free Project provides human trafficking prevention education and was founded by Stephanie Olson, who also serves as the organization’s CEO.
“We started because I had – personally, I’m a survivor of sexual and domestic violence, and I had personally been working in the area of – working with women in sexual violence, addiction, things like that,” Olson said.
The idea of taking on the dark underworld of human trafficking was not on Olson’s radar until a colleague suggested they help sex trafficked victims. Olson said she and her team started researching to educate themselves on what trafficking looks and does not look like.
While many people are focused on international cartels and gangs that incorporate trafficking into their money schemes, experts will tell you the real danger is usually not presented by strangers. Many people are trafficked by spouses, family members, or love interests or fall into online recruitment; they have already developed relationships, so when they are told to participate in sex acts, forced labor, or criminal acts, they oblige because the trafficker has worked hard to create isolation and feelings of distrust.
“We had this mindset of, you know, the movie Taken; and kidnapping people and shipping overseas and when we realized that wasn’t what it looked like at all, and that we were in a hotspot in our community at the time,” Olson said. “I had kids in middle, you know, in the middle school ages, elementary. And realized, gosh, only one to two percent of individuals are recovered and restored.”
Recovered refers to the victim’s ability to escape their traffickers, and once restored, victims have received services such as health care and mental health resources and regained control of their lives that the trafficker once controlled.
Olson calls the low number of victims who escape trafficking “strikingly low,” and it triggered her to understand that education on how to prevent trafficking in all forms is what was needed most, especially educating young people.
The Set Me Free Project provides an age-appropriate curriculum to offer young people the tools, understanding, and language to help them communicate and recognize potential human trafficking threats when or if they encounter them.
“Our goal is not to be fear-based, but to really empower people to understand what human trafficking is, what it’s not, and how to really prevent it in your community,” Olson said.
Olson said “human trafficking” is not part of the kindergarten through sixth-grade curriculum. At that level students are learning about consent, trustworthy people, navigating social media safely. Rudimentary learning that lays the foundation for the courses designed for the middle and high school curriculum.
“Once we hit middle school to high school, we’re talking about human trafficking, both sex, labor, and forced criminalization,” Olson said. “Healthy relationships and what those look like and what they don’t.”
Safe navigation of social media sites is also taught to older students because, according to Olson and other human trafficking experts, social sites provide a window of opportunity for recruitment into trafficking.
Set Me Free Project also provides courses for parents, caregivers, and educators to help them separate facts from myths and spot signs that someone may be at risk or involved in trafficking.
Corporations, especially hotels, casinos, coffee shops, and even financial institutions, can also contact them for training as traffickers exploit every imaginable industry to achieve their ends.
The value of accurate information and trauma-informed training that communities have gained through programs like Set Me Free and others that provide training is unmeasurable. Survivors, law enforcement, and medical community members work hand-in-hand with Set Me Free to draft the evidence-based curriculum.
“We make sure that not only are we putting our expertise in there on the topic, but we are getting expertise from really – expert sources, and were excited because we have a fantastic grant through the CDC and some incredible researchers,” Olson said.
To learn more about the Set Me Free Project or sign up for online human trafficking prevention courses, visit the website.
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