Sexual Violence & Human Trafficking - WNC Health Policy Podcast Ep. 3
Rita Sneider-Cotter, Executive Director of OurVOICE
Content Warning: This podcast contains discussion of sexual violence, sex trafficking, physical abuse, and enslavement concerning adults and children, which some listeners may find distressing. Please prioritize self-care in deciding whether or not to engage with this content.
The challenges of finding housing, transportation, living wage work opportunities, the impacts of the opioid epidemic, and limited access to healthcare across the region are familiar to many in the mountains of WNC. However, the negative impact of these social determinants of healths (SDoH) has an even darker aspect that, for many, goes largely unseen and unspoken about: They correlate to our region’s risk level for human trafficking.
The US Department of State describes human trafficking as modern slavery, where traffickers’ use force, fraud, and/or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. Frequently involving sexual violence, each instance of trafficking has severe impacts on the survivor, their community, and future generations’ health. Those who face challenges meeting basic survival or other needs have a higher risk of either actively turning to trafficking (either of themselves or others in their care), or being vulnerable to being drawn into trafficking by others, to meet those needs.
Education on trafficking is a key strategy for improving the health and wellbeing in our region. In this installment of the WNC HPI podcast, producer Andrew Rainey speaks with Rita Sneider-Cotter, the Executive Director of OurVOICE, about sexual violence and human trafficking in WNC, the intersection of SDoH and trafficking, and what’s being done in our region to address this critical issue.
Resources
Buncombe County Human Trafficking Coalition
North Carolina Human Trafficking Commission
Opioid Settlement Fund Overview and Information
Polaris (National Human Trafficking Hotline)
The national human trafficking hotline can be reached 24 hours a day 7 days a week, in English and Spanish, at 888-373-7888.
OurVOICE 24/7 hotline: 828-255-7576
Transcript
WNC HPI Podcast: Sexual Violence and Human Trafficking, with Rita Sneider-Cotter
8/10/2023
AR: Andrew Rainey
RSC: Rita Sneider-Cotter, MSW
INTRODUCTION
RCS: Sexual violence is so disruptive on every level of somebody’s life. It’s horrifically damaging to our whole community. And right now, we know that we have inflation, and we have a housing crisis, and an opioid crisis all at the same time, and so we have a lot of vulnerabilities right now in our community for trafficking.
AR: You're listening to the Western North Carolina Health Policy Initiative podcast. I'm Andrew Rainey. In each installment we’ll speak about different public health strategies for improving health and well-being in Western North Carolina (WNC).
Recorded in the studios of AshevilleFM, in this installment, a conversation with OurVOICE’s Executive Director, Rita Sneider-Cotter, about Human Trafficking, Sexual Violence and health in WNC.
AR: Sexual violence and human trafficking are difficult and complex topics that intersect with many, if not all the health categories on our region’s radar, including: chronic illness, mental health, substance use, workforce shortages, insurance, transportation, legacies of systemic oppression, criminal justice, and housing, among other things.
In this installment, we seek to mark the significance of sexual violence and human trafficking as health issues in WNC and learn some about what’s working well against them, what are regional challenges, and some recommendations for these mountains. To talk about each of these things I have the privilege to speak with the executive director of one Buncombe County-based organization working against sexual violence and human trafficking in our region. I’m here with Rita Sneider-Cotter of OurVOICE. Thanks for joining me, Rita.
RSC: Yes thank you for having me.
AR: Could I have you introduce yourself?
RSC: My name is Rita Sneider-Cotter, I use she/her pronouns, and I'm the executive director of OurVOICE. I've been doing anti-power-based violence work for over a decade now, and with OurVOICE I started as a volunteer advocate in 2021 and got hired on as a program director and became executive director a little over a year ago.
AR: Could you talk a little bit about the work that OurVoice does?
RSC: So OurVOICE has been around since 1974 and we serve survivors of sexual violence in Buncombe County. . . and then for human trafficking, we serve survivors in Buncombe County, Transylvania, and McDowell Counties. We serve ages 13 and up, and those are both primary survivors and secondary survivors. Secondary survivors are folks who love a primary survivor, someone who has been directly impacted. . .because we know that sexual violence does greatly impact our whole community.
We’ve had a 24/7 crisis hotline since 1974 and it was born out of the YW which I think is a really cool part of our history...
AR: The YW, or the YWCA, once the Young Women’s Christian Association of the United States of America Inc. is now just the YWCA and not an acronym. Their mission is to work eliminating racism, empowering women and promoting peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all and list services for domestic and sexual violence survivors as one of their focus areas. With over 200 local associations across the US, there is one on the south slope in Asheville, about 1.5 miles south of OurVoice.
RSC: So OurVOICE, we serve usually between 500 and 600 folks a year. . .this past year, ‘cause we're putting together our annual data for the past fiscal year, we had 875 counseling sessions and 482 crisis calls and we served 2,788 folks in our prevention work. So, we always hope that those numbers get lower but we’re really glad that those folks have reached out and gotten served.
AR: Coming to this conversation, I noticed that I’ve had exposure to more definitions of sexual violence than human trafficking. For example, the definition of sexual violence used by RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network lined up with what came to mind. They define sexual violence as an all-encompassing term referring to crimes like sexual assault, rape, and sexual abuse. However, trafficking as a term seems less familiar in the mainstream outside of say, an action movie or political conspiracy theory here or there. Could you define what human trafficking means?
RSC: Yeah, we know that there's lots of Hollywood movies out there that like to portray trafficking in a really specific way, and those don't give us the most accurate view of what trafficking looks like. Human trafficking is defined as using force, fraud, or coercion to make money or gain something of value from another person’s exploitation.
AR: The website of the US Dept of State mentions that “trafficking in persons,” “human trafficking,” and “modern slavery” are all used interchangeably.
The state department writes that trafficking includes, but does not require, actual movement. If you’re picturing the illegal movement of people over borders, that’s smuggling, and often (but not always) includes the consent of the persons crossing the border. . . . that’s not the case with trafficking. . .
As Rita mentioned, it's the traffickers’ aim to exploit and enslave their victims and the coercive and deceptive practices they use to do so that defines this horrific practice. The State Dept’s website also notes how many challenges in addressing this modern day slavery are made worse by a societal failure to address its legacy of the legalized chattel slavery in the United States based on skin color. This includes but isn’t limited to the invisibility of intergenerational trauma and continued systemic racism that positions survivors of these circumstances to be more targeted, less believed, and with fewer assets to heal.
Now back to the conversation with Rita:
AR: What would you say media depictions get wrong about human trafficking?
RSC: Because we know that, unfortunately, there's many systems of oppression in our society. . . so those systems of oppression look like racism, or ableism, or homophobia or transphobia and that makes our neighbors that are in those marginalized groups a lot more vulnerable and those aren't often portrayed in the Hollywood version of trafficking.
AR: Again, the legacy of legal slavery in the US impacts current practices of enslavement in trafficking.
The US State Dept website points out to a few other misconceptions about survivors, writing that survivors of trafficking do not have to have been born into it. . . Survivors of trafficking may have been exploited at or near their home, they may have been physically transported into it, they may have previously consented to work for the trafficker, and they may even have participated in a crime as a direct result of being trafficked.
In all of those cases, they are still survivors of trafficking. . .
RSC: I think another way of looking at sex trafficking is that it is labor trafficking. The type of labor that's being done is sex work. . . and one thing always when I talk about trafficking I want to make very clear is that our position at OurVOICE is that sex work and trafficking are two distinctly different things. Consenting adults get to decide what happens to their bodies and if someone is engaging in consensual sex work, that's their decision to make. We have no judgment around that. We all are trading labor of our bodies in some way for money, that’s what jobs are. . . the difference between human trafficking and sex work is that the person that's being trafficked is not getting to choose what is happening to them and they don't get to keep the profits, and so that's a really distinct difference.
I think the other aspect to that too is keeping in mind that there is no such thing as a child prostitute. Every time I hear that term I cringe, but that’s not a real thing. Children can not decide to engage in sex work. Their brains are not fully developed. . . they’re legally not able to do that, and so anytime somebody is paying a child to have sex, that’s human trafficking.
AR: So, sex work and sex trafficking are not the same, with a difference being the consent of the people involved and age.
RSC: Yes. We at OurVOICE believe that everyone should have control over their own body. It’s a pretty important part of being an autonomous human. We get to decide what happens to our body. Human trafficking and sexual violence both are times where your autonomy was robbed of you. . . there are similar reactions to that kind of violation, again trauma affects everyone differently, but we do know that both of those often lead to a traumatic response in the body…
AR: Could you give us an overview on what trafficking, this form of modern slavery, looks like in WNC?
RSC: In North Carolina, we talk about human trafficking in kind of two categories. So there's labor trafficking and then there’s sex trafficking. We at OurVOICE work with both categories. . . probably a little bit more sex trafficking is coming in the doors of OurVOICE in Buncombe County but when we’ve served rural communities, we do see a fair amount of labor trafficking in agricultural industry or the greenhouse industry.
AR: Who’s impacted by labor trafficking in our agricultural industry?
RSC: We definitely see Spanish-speaking labor-trafficking survivors. One of the most important partnerships we have when we're working with those folks is Legal Aid of North Carolina, they have an entire migrant farmworker unit which I believe is all bilingual, if not it's like the vast majority, and they are so passionate about that work and so knowledgeable about labor trafficking and are able to really make sure that folks are having their rights upheld because often, with that group of monolingual Spanish speaking trafficking survivors, the power and control that traffickers are using often has to do with immigration, and so making sure that they have a lawyer that can look out for their legal rights is such an important part of that work. And OurVOICE has a commitment to language justice and so we have a bilingual position on every team at OurVOICE to make sure that folks have access to our services in an equitable way.
AR: Although there’s limitations in this dataset, including the comfort of the workforce in speaking with researchers and the increase in potentially impacted population size, a 3-year study published in 2019 made a conservative estimate that about 28% of NC’s migrant worker force had experienced labor abuse or trafficking in NC’s agricultural industry. . with undocumented workers experiencing labor trafficking at a higher frequency . . .
AR: So immigration issues and language barriers are exploited by labor traffickers in our agricultural industry. What patterns do you see with sexual violence and trafficking for our region?
RSC: There's a lot of domestic servitude happening and those are really tricky to identify and for those folks to access freedom or access their rights because it's happening so tightly behind closed doors.
One of the other really insidious forms of trafficking that we have in WNC is familial trafficking, and so what that is is parents or family members, caregivers. . . are giving access to the children that they're caring for, generally in sexual ways, often to get money. . . sometimes this is for pure survival, so sometimes this is for rent money, sometimes it's for drugs. And so, it's folks who are in really desperate situations, but we know that it's horrifically damaging to that entire family system.
AR: I’m thinking about how big tourism is to the mountains and curious if that industry also impacts trafficking. . .
RSC: Yeah so I think in Buncombe County especially but I mean all of WNC is so beautiful and does attract tourism. . . that is something that comes up, mostly because tourists are coming in and they have excess money, right? If they're able to travel here, they probably have enough money to purchase some things. So whenever there's excess money there can be vulnerabilities for trafficking, but we also know that every community has trafficking, it just depends on what the community looks like for the flavor.
We in WNC have a lot of rural areas and it does allow for folks to hide a little bit better in some ways, or to stay under the radar, and when we're talking about familial trafficking a lot of times these things are so intergeneration, and it becomes family norms, and on some level, community norms, where its just not talked about.
I know on a local level one of the things that we're watching and still learning so much about is called patient brokering and my best synopsis because I'm certainly not the expert on this but this is a form of exploitation where halfway homes or rehabs are taking advantage of folks who are in their healing process from addiction and they're introducing drugs or they're using some kind of other insurance fraud to really take advantage of someone who's in a vulnerable state in their healing. You know, it’s a particularly insidious issue when someone who is in a position of authority betrays that trust. . and so I think that for folks that are in the helping service industry, most of us really want to show up with integrity and make sure that folks are protected and it’s up to us to make sure the infrastructure is built so that there’s protection from folks who are coming in without those intentions. And so, I know Buncombe County has been looking at how to have better oversight and regulations for some of these care houses. . . so we're following along and hoping that we can provide any trafficking specific or sexual violence specific input.
AR: So, we’ve heard some about what human trafficking, this form of modern slavery is: the exploitation of people, removing their ability to consent. We heard that in WNC, OurVOICE sees a lot of domestic servitude, familial exploitation, patient brokering, and agricultural industry exploitation. You mentioned that these violations are horrifically damaging to people and their communities. Could you link this more explicitly to health outcomes?
RSC: The impacts of trafficking are immense, it’s such a chronic trauma and so it has long lasting impacts, and often takes, you know, a lifetime to heal from. . . and takes a lot of really specialized support which often therapists are not equipped to handle such chronic trauma. The other thing that I think comes up as a community impact from trafficking is how drugs intersect with trafficking. . . so we know that folks who are using substances are at greater risk of trafficking because when they are high, they are more vulnerable, they're not able to protect themselves in the same way, but we also knew that trauma causes folks to need to numb to survive, and so there’s a really vicious cycle of traffickers finding folks that already have those addictions but then also introducing more substances to keep that power and control over folks. . . and that just has such a negative impact over our community.
AR: While not always identified or spoken about in public or healthcare spaces, sexual violence and the modern-day slavery that frequently intersects with sexual violence are issues which are both linked to serious immediate and long-term health consequences.
The CDC lists immediate health issues from sexual violence including physical traumas, sexually transmitted infections, and pregnancy, as well as psychological traumas and resulting challenges, like depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.
Particularly with repeated violence, as typically occurs in instances of trafficking, it can also lead to chronic illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder along with reproductive, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, and sexual health problems.
The psychological impact of these traumas also connects survivors of sexual violence to negative health behaviors, with studies indicating higher rates of smoking, alcohol abuse, drug use, and risky sexual activity. Additionally, it can impact survivors’ relationship to work, maintaining personal relationships, and the ability to feel safe.
In addition to the survivors, the violence inflicted on them is also felt by family, friends, and other community members in the survivor’s life. There is also evidence that childhood survivors are more likely than others to find themselves exposed to future intimate partner violence.
The CDC’s website mentions that “over half of women and almost 1 in 3 men experience sexual violence. . . during their lifetimes” and while it impacts everyone, it is more likely to impact children, women & girls, as well as recipients of systemic violence due to identity, such as indigenous, Black, and/or immigrant communities, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer peoples.
There is further research linked online, but the bottom line is that sexual violence and the modern slavery of human trafficking have a severe impact on the health of our community and will continue to impact community members, their families, and communities at large generations into the future. Although it is not typically present in community health discussions, this data demonstrates that both sexual violence and human trafficking must be present on the agenda for health work in WNC.
BREAK
Hi everyone, Andrew here on the WNC HPI Podcast, the show that looks at public health strategies to improve health in WNC. We’ve been talking with OurVOICE’s Executive Director, Rita Sneider-Cotter, about sexual violence and human trafficking.
The national hotline for sexual violence survivors and survivors of human trafficking is (828) 252-0562.
Be sure to check our website at www.wnchealthpolicy.org for the transcript or to listen again. We’ll return to my conversation with Rita in just a moment. . . .
STRENGTHS
AR: Understanding a little better what modern slavery looks like in WNC, and in the case of sex workers, what it doesn’t look like. . . . what actions are working well to end sexual violence and trafficking both in terms of prevention and in supporting survivors?
RSC: We have a lot of work to do to talk about what healthy relationships look like, what consent looks like, and also making sure that folks in our community know what the trafficking in our community looks like. So, one of the ways that we're trying to do that is we have the Buncombe County Human Trafficking Coalition, and we invite anyone in the community to come and join this coalition, so if you're interested please come get in touch with us. It is a virtual coalition, although I'd love to see it go in person at some point, and we bring in trainers from across the state to talk about trafficking because we really want to make sure that folks are not looking for the ‘Taken’ version of trafficking. . .
AR: Taken being the 2008 film starring Liam Neeson, who plays a highly trained military operative seeking to rescue his daughter from kidnappers.
RSC: . . . that Hollywood version of trafficking, because then they’re going to miss the trafficking that is actually happening right in front of them. So I think the coalition has been really great because I’ve personally gone to talk to a lot of organizations and a lot of times when I’ve invited them to join the coalition I get: “wait I’m not a part of this,” like, “I don’t see trafficking survivors. . . ” and the reality is we probably all see trafficking survivors and we don’t know it and that’s the problem, that’s the crux of the problem in my opinion. So having more folks come to the table so that we all as a community have a shared language and vision about what trafficking is I think is so important. So that's something I'm really excited about. .
An offshoot of that coalition is the rapid response team. And so those are folks that are boots on the ground really working with trafficking survivors in the first 72 hours. So, we have our local law enforcement partners with the Asheville Police Department and Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office, we also have forensic nurses with Mission that are on that, and we have DSS, so Department of Social Services, that might be working with kiddos who have been trafficked and a couple other organizations that work with trafficking survivors that we can talk about like ‘how do we handle the crisis situations well, and how do we keep talking about proactively, instead of reactively, how we keep getting better” . . . so we're working on building out a written protocol so that we have some clarity around that. . and that’s exciting work.
I also think that the Buncombe County Family Justice Center, which is where most of OurVOICE is housed, it’s where our direct services team is housed, is such a beautiful collaboration and offers low barrier access to services. We’re located downtown, we’re open 8:00 to 5:00 and there's quite a few on-site partners that are there so that survivors don't have to go to a lot of different buildings.
AR: Could you describe what the family justice center is and how that model is beneficial to support sexual violence and trafficking survivors?
RSC: Yea, so the family justice centers are a national model. They’re an old model but they work really beautifully because they are working on centering the survivor. . . and so trying to bring things to the survivor instead of making the survivor go to different places. The ‘one-stop shop’ model is often how it's referred to. . . in ours, we’re very lucky to have county support, we're in a county building, and we work really closely with HelpMate. OurVOICE and HelpMate are sort of the two lead agencies with the direct services aspect of things...
AR: Helpmate’s mission centers victims and survivors of intimate partner domestic violence. While there’s a lot of overlap with OurVOICE, OurVOICE, as we already heard, focuses specifically on sexual violence and human trafficking. To learn more about intimate partner domestic violence in WNC, you can visit Helpmate’s website @ www.helpmate online.org.
RSC: We also have Mountain Child Advocacy Center, Mission Forensic Team, and that is a strength for our region, we have a really wonderful forensic nursing team. . . so folks can get an exam there without having to go to the ER, so that’s a strength for our community. . . Department of Social Services is often a close partner. . . and Pisgah Legal Services and so we're all able to come into the den and meet with survivors and make sure that they feel supported.
Law enforcement’s right across the hall from us, and so while we know that the majority of sexual violence survivors will not report to law enforcement for a variety of reasons that are understandable. . . when there's been historic, systemic racism for our BIPOC survivors to trust if they come forward that they’ll be believed. . . we know that a lot of survivors will not access the criminal justice system, and so what does healing look like if you don't access that system? . . . For those folks that do want to report, we’re able to really work closely with law enforcement to make sure that it’s the least traumatic way of going through the criminal justice system as possible because it takes a lot of courage to make that decision and we want to make sure that that’s supported.
AR: About that intention of making interactions with the criminal justice system ‘the least traumatic’ possible for survivors. Could you speak to what that means?
RSC: So the Criminal Justice System, as, what I’m talking about is reporting to law enforcement, going through an investigation. . . The vast majority of sexual violence cases, which sex trafficking would be under the umbrella of sexual violence, are also going to involve a forensic exam. . So they often would get an exam within 120 hours, law enforcement does their investigation, and then the DA's office would decide whether to bring that case or not. . . so there's a lot of gatekeepers in the system, there's a lot of folks that get to decide if there's enough evidence or not. . and that can be really hard for a survivor that hasn't had power over their own lives to then be in another system where they don’t have power over what happens next. At OurVOICE, we are able to walk with folks through that whole process. . . so from providing advocacy and being with folks during the exam, during the law enforcement interview, all the way through the court case, we're here to walk alongside folks. The criminal justice system has made a lot of improvements but it's still an incredibly hard system to access. We know that the majority of cases will not lead to a conviction. These are really hard cases to investigate and prove, they happen behind closed doors. . . there’s a lot of reasons. . but at the end of the day, we know that a majority of folks will find healing outside that system.
So, one of the most important things about trauma-informed care or a trauma-focused lens is knowing that trauma manifests in many different ways, and often what survivors need is choice, and they need consistency. They need to be able to rely on the folks that are showing up. I mean, going back to the law enforcement example I think one of the most important aspects of that relationship is that I can say “I can tell you what officer is going to come in and take this report and I can tell you that I've worked with him before, and he's going to come in and he's going to be kind when he comes in here, and I know this because I’ve worked with him before”. . . and that's a really powerful thing instead of calling the police and not knowing who’s going to show up. Building those genuine relationships as we work with folks is so important so that we can really know that we can rely on each other.
I think the other thing with trauma informed care is just making space for folks to go through their process, because everyone experiences it differently, and so you might have some folks that come in very stoic because they just know that they have to compartmentalize and they just need to say all of the words and get the plan together. . . and then you might have folks that come in and say “I'm not going to be able to get anything done today, I just need to cry and I need someone to hear my story,” and both are really important processes and we have to be able to pivot depending on what the survivor needs.
AR: Are there any current policies you’d like to point to that are supporting survivors well at this moment too?
RSC: The US government just added sexual violence as a qualifier for housing. . . and so I'm really excited as someone who's been in this movement for a long time. . to see what that will do to really help sexual violence survivors get the stability that they need. There's been a focus on domestic violence in this realm for a long time for very understandable reasons, but we’re finally seeing that sexual violence is so disruptive on every level of somebody's life and often sexual violence survivors do need housing and so I'm excited to see how the landscape changes as a result of those changes that have already been made.
Challenges in WNC
AR: In the face of the really horrific reality of sexual violence and modern slavery, it sounds like we as a region have a number of pieces in place that are working on preventing and responding to it. I heard an educational effort to understand what trafficking is with the Buncombe County Human Trafficking Coalition, a rapid response team, planning on proactive rather than reactive responses, both collaboration and centralization of organizations at the Family Justice Center, a growing framework to center survivors needs with trauma-informed care, and even some policies that may open more housing resources to survivors. I wonder if we could now dig into a little more about the challenges you’re seeing in your work right now, and particularly how they relate to WNC.
RSC: Yeah. Right now we know that we have inflation and we have a housing crisis and an opioid crisis all the same time, and so we have a lot of vulnerabilities right now in our community for trafficking. We know that when folks aren’t getting their needs met, their basic needs especially, but really all of their needs, they're more vulnerable to trafficking… and so this can look like our houseless neighbors being more vulnerable because they're not getting their basic needs met, but it can also look like our youth being really lonely or misunderstood, especially our queer and trans youth, and traffickers know that and so they're really good at finding the vulnerabilities and finding the needs that aren’t being met, and finding ways to meet those needs enough to hook folks.
You know, the opioid epidemic has hit Appalachia hard. . . and so, those things really can create a perfect storm especially when there's not access to housing. . Our partners that are serving the houseless population are really doing a lot of work, and the need is way greater than what they're able to offer. I know that as we go into the cooler months that's really when I see my team start to have a lot of compassion fatigue because there are times that we just have tried every way to get folks into a shelter and we don’t have enough options and so that's something that really comes up. A lot of our neighboring counties don't have any homeless shelters and so that puts survivors at an even greater risk to have to make some really hard decisions about whether they’re going to go back to their trafficker or whether they're going to stay in an unsafe situation because it might mean life or death.
AR: We have a healthcare workforce shortage in WNC in many areas, including nursing and primary care providers, do you see it in your field as well?
RSC: As far as the providers, I think that our medical shortages definitely play out where we know that our medical system is just so. . . it’s so taxed right now, and if we have folks that are exhausted themselves and experiencing compassion fatigue it's really hard to then take on a survivor that maybe has some higher-level needs. So that’s something that we sometimes run into.
We need to continue to find opportunities to train therapists and other care providers on what complex trauma looks like and what those needs are. I think that the areas that we see the most room for growth is individual therapy. We're so lucky that we have All Souls Counseling in town, they are an amazing nonprofit that utilizes the sliding scale model, but they are still only seeing folks on a short-term basis and what we're talking about complex trauma like trafficking, that's going to take longer. . . sometimes even sexual violence, depending on the severity and the length and the complexity of the trauma. . . they might need longer than that, and there's not a good option for folks to have long term therapy if they don’t have a solid insurance or a solid financial situation.
AR: In previous installments of the HPI podcast, speaking about maternal health and food insecurity, other guests have mentioned how the ruralness of our region has created access issues, particularly with limited transportation. I heard you mention how the family justice center seeks to make access easier by having multiple services in one place. Are there other kinds of transportation issues as well?
RSC: In transportation, I mean, Buncombe County would love to see public transportation grow and become more reliable and just more well-resourced, but so many of our neighboring counties have almost no public transportation. . . McDowell is one of the counties that we serve and, you know, that can be a huge struggle for survivors there to be able to get around to get all the things done. I think our rural communities, when somebody doesn't have access to resources, it really feels amplified.
AR: So, there’s a lot of interwoven issues here that intersect with trafficking. . . like education and sufficient trauma-informed providers. Then there are the social issues like housing, substance use, and access through language and transportation. . . how does funding look for all of this work?
RSC: There is no real funding stream for human trafficking work, and that's a problem. We are incredibly lucky at OurVOICE that we have some VOCA to do work. VOCA is victims of crime act. . . but there's no state stream for human trafficking like there is for sexual violence or domestic violence, and I hope that in 10 years from now it'll be that we have a very consistent stream of money. . . but without it, it's really hard to see the same level of services across our whole state for survivors of human trafficking as we do for sexual violence and domestic violence.
AR: Thinking about funding and resources, I know that having solid data is often something that is often needed to get steady funding, and that gathering data can also be a difficult task, particularly when there isn’t a lot of funding upfront. Do you all gather data directly at OurVOICE or do you find that data is a challenge in combating trafficking in our region?
RSC: The trafficking movements in its infancy- we have a whole lot more reliable data about sexual violence than we do about human trafficking. . . and it's one of the hardest parts of my job because people really want to have a lot clearer data and a lot clearer answers and we just don't have it. . . so we can only base our information on what we're seeing through our doors and then what other large organizations like Polaris or other big national organizations are able to pull with their resources. . locally I would say yes, a lot of our cases are either sex or labor. . labor specifically in the agricultural. . .we know that trafficking is happening in families with children, but in my experience working with survivors, we often will not see those cases until those adults have the autonomy to be able to come and get help themselves. . . and it's often many years later. .
AR: I can imagine that the data coming in, say from who calls the hotline, gives you some sense of who’s impacted in our region, but it also makes me wonder how many more folks are impacted that aren’t calling and how we can make estimations about that. . .
RSC: Absolutely. Yeah. You know, that’s a data point that I’ve always been curious about but I’ve never seen studied and I think that’s a hard one because if folks aren’t self-identifying then it's hard to know what that actual number is but RAINN statistics have been pretty consistent.
What I’ve anecdotally experienced as someone in this movement that’s been interesting since #MeToo came out is I think that there’s a lot of women or femme folks in the older generation that as #MeToo inspired this conversation about what is sexual violence, there were a lot of women that had awakenings of “oh I have experienced sexual violence but it was so normalized. . “ and so we’re having different conversations and I’m really curious how those numbers are going to shift with that new awareness.
BREAK
On today’s installment of the Health Policy Initiative Podcast, we’ve been talking with OurVOICE’s Executive Director, Rita Sneider-Cotter, about sexual violence and human trafficking in WNC, including what the landscape looks like and specific challenges in our region.
The national hotline for sexual violence survivors and human trafficking, which here, will take you to OurVOICE is: (828) 252-0562.
Be sure to check our website at www.wnchealthpolicy.org for the transcript or to listen again. We’ll return to my conversation with Rita in just a moment. . . .
REGIONAL STRATEGIES
AR: So, thinking over our regional challenges, are there any strategies that come to mind for you that could support work against trafficking and sexual violence in our region?
RSC: At the stage that the trafficking movement is in. . . where I see our focus is education. So educating our whole community and especially folks that have power and influence about what trafficking is what the needs of trafficking survivors are. . . and also creating infrastructure so that survivors can be at the table in a meaningful way. . . I think that this comes back to like where this movement is still in its infancy, because something I would really love to see is stronger survivor voices as we craft a lot of these policies because what I don't want to see is us say “oh shoot we missed that step and now we need to go back and rework things.” Cause its challenging to rework policies. . . So that’s something I would like to see.
AR: Thinking of healthcare agencies like hospitals or clinics, as well as businesses or other organizations that have a regular flow of people through them, do you have any recommendations on how they may be better equipped to identify folks who may be in danger and/or support survivors long-term?
RSC: Absolutely. So I would say, first and foremost, please reach out to us because we would love to train anyone and everyone who wants to learn more about trafficking. We have an entire prevention department who can tailor fit a prevention training to talk about how it fits into your specific business or work. So please reach out. You can also join the coalition and learn more about trafficking. I think that the key is to learning like what trafficking in WNC is really looking like, and so a lot of the warning signs are: does this person have autonomy? Are they able to make their own decisions? Is someone making decisions for them? Do they have appropriate access to housing, food, clothing. . . ? Do they have a support system? Like, those are the things that we are looking at. And of course, setting up your system to make sure that there is language access, to make sure that you’re removing whatever barriers that you have control over so that they don’t have to rely on someone else.
And also, when we have survivors who are in their process of healing and maybe in that acute stage of healing. . . finding jobs that are reasonable for them to do, that are going to have some base level of understanding or accommodations for how trauma may impact folks. . . because that might look like hyper vigilance or a sensitivity to sounds or lights or a variety of other things. . . and so how do we continue to build up education in our community with employers about how to set up workplaces that are accessible to survivors. Because the reality is, folks who have survived sexual violence and human trafficking, I mean, they're incredibly resilient, right? That's just by definition of what they’ve survived, and that they’re still here. .
And so how do we keep building up those structures that we want to see? And so that's something that in our human trafficking program has definitely been trying to work on, how do we do that advocacy with employers? And how do we not just support folks in that acute crisis stage too because healing takes time, right? it's not just okay well now you've gotten your exam, or you've got through these things but like how do we actually support folks throughout this entire process so that something that's really top of mind at OurVOICE.
AR: In addition to trafficking education, are there educational directions you’d like to see for the general public too regarding sexual violence?
RSC: We are really committed to continuing to build a culture of consent in our community so that we are talking about consent being enthusiastic and clear and reversible. We don’t talk about that enough. I have two little boys who regularly are having conversations about consent. That’s the language that we use in our house, “I didn't consent to being touched like that. I didn’t like the way that that felt,” and those are the conversations we have to start having because when we don't, somebody's voice is being silenced and somebody is not speaking their truth and so how do we as a community build up that courage?
AR: Could you speak to how efforts to improve the social drivers of health ties into human trafficking prevention or general support for survivors?
RSC: Absolutely. Anti-trafficking work often looks like meeting folks’ needs and making our communities safer by housing access, by food access, and things like that.
Human trafficking is such a hot button issue right now, I regularly have people come and talk to me about the TikTok hand signal and just a variety of other things they've seen online. . . and it's great that people are talking about it but really the folks that we need to be worried about are our queer and trans teens that got kicked out of their homes and don’t have a place to sleep tonight cause traffickers are going to be paying attention to them. . . .and we need to be pay attention to our houseless neighbors that desperately need a bite to eat or to get out of the rain cause those are the folks in our community that are vulnerable and so just how do we have a more nuanced conversation about the folks we need to care about in our community. I think housing is probably the one that is the biggest need that we really struggle to get folks into safe shelter. We don’t have a low barrier shelter in Buncombe County and that’s a big problems.
AR: And if it's not in Buncombe County. . .
RSC: It’s definitely not anywhere else, yeah. We also know that survivors are not best served in a shelter and sometimes it’s also like the only option. And so, in an ideal world, the housing first model is so beautiful and so important and so, I mean the core housing first value is that folks should be able to have permanent housing. . . that they don't have to leave after a short period of time and it's hard to be able to provide that quickly. But I hope that we're able to because when folks are able to get into housing and take a deep breath, really beautiful healing can happen.
RESOURCES
AR: So we’ve covered a huge amount of information in this interview. I’d like to remind listeners that you can check out the transcript online at the HPI website: www.wnchealthpolicy.org to revisit anything you heard today. To close up, Rita, are their resources you’d like to share with listeners?
RSC: Absolutely. Yeah. We do have a really wonderful organization in WNC called the Hundred Movement. They have trauma-focused therapists that specifically work with sex trafficking survivors, and they're really well-equipped, so we're really lucky to have that. And they do long-term trauma-focused counseling at no charge, and so, when I first got to meet the executive director over there, Amanda Gopal, we’re really lucky to have her as a resource because she also trains nationally on human trafficking and is really skilled at providing therapy to trafficking survivors. .. so a great resource for folks.
Definitely the Buncombe County Human Trafficking Coalition. . we also at OurVOICE, run the Buncombe County Anti-Violence Task Force that meets regularly to talk about violence in our community and how we can build that culture of consent and you can sign up on our website to get updates and stay in touch. And those are free. . . usually there’s food. . so that’s always a good incentive.
The Human Trafficking Commission has some really good resources on their website: the North Carolina Human Trafficking Commission. . . they are tasked with overseeing all things human trafficking in North Carolina, but again, because of the infancy of the movement, I think that they're still kind of figuring out what that looks like. .
I think related to opioids specifically, our county commissioner, Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, has really been working hard on the opioid settlement planning, because communities are getting money from that lawsuit, and so there's some really exciting opportunities to be involved in like how we're going to help heal our community with some of that money. And so I recommend that folks check that out.
I think that we all need to come together and talk about our housing crisis and there's a Homeless Coalition that meets regularly, that's a coalition of different partner organizations including the city of Asheville and Buncombe County. . .
Our website has some good information. . .
AR: https://www.ourvoicenc.org
RSC: …and Polaris is a good one for human trafficking - they run the National Human Trafficking Hotline.
AR: The national human trafficking hotline is 24 hours a day 7 days a week in English and Spanish and is 888-373-7888.
RSC: And that will, if you are calling in Buncombe County, will direct to OurVOICE’s hotline. You’ll be directed to an advocate with OurVOICE, and our 24/7 hotline is 828-255-7576.
AR: So folks could call either of those numbers and reach OurVOICE?
RSC: Yes
AR: And what’s the breadth of that? Would that only be for Buncombe County or could listeners who may be seeking resources somewhere else in WNC reach out?
RSC: They could absolutely give us a call. After 5 and on the weekends, there’s an advocate that will answer. If you’re calling from somewhere that we don’t serve we’ll connect you with a resource there.
AR: And one more time, the OurVOICE hotline, which is what you’ll get directed to here in WNC, is 828-252-0562.
WRAP UP
RSC: I think what’s working well is that there’s a lot of folks that want this work to keep getting better and keep growing, and there’s a lot of momentum and coalition space for those of us that are doing the work and see the problem to coming tougher and keep sharing ideas and resources and building infrastructure together. I think that’s a really big strength.
And I think a lot of the challenges really come down to our society is facing some really big, hard issues around housing, and around the opioid epidemic, and just folks being in a lot of pain and not having their basic needs met. We often talk about the most important anti-trafficking work we can do is to make sure our neighbors have what they need so they aren’t relying on someone that’s going to exploit them. . .
We envision a future in which our community is really clear on what sexual violence and human trafficking is so that we can create a community that is based in consent and bodily autonomy where everyone can have their needs met and feel safe. And that has to be done by having really hard conversations where we create shared language and shared ideas. . . and so we would love to welcome anyone to come and work with us in coalition through the Buncombe County Anti-Human Trafficking Coalition or our Anti-Violence Taskforce.
AR: On today’s installment of the Health Policy Initiative Podcast, we’ve been talking with OurVOICE’s Executive Director, Rita Sneider-Cotter, about sexual violence and human trafficking in WNC. The national hotline for sexual violence survivors and survivors of human trafficking, which in WNC, will take you to OurVOICE is: (828) 252-0562.
Rita thanks for your time today and helping to educate me and our listeners about this topic.
RSC: Thanks for having me.
OUTRO
AR: You've been listening to the WNC Health Policy Initiative Podcast through the NC Center for Health and Wellness at UNCA. To listen again or learn more about public health issues in WNC, check out the website @ wnchealthpolicy.org. To find some of the resources mentioned in this show, head to the blog section at the top of the website where you’ll find additional show notes.
If there’s a WNC health issue that you’d like to hear more about, speak about, or comments about anything you’ve heard on an HPI podcast, feel free to send us an email at info@wnchealthpolicy.org.
A big thanks to the AshevilleFM Studios where this installment was recorded.
Another big thanks to Asheville-based Appalachian ballad singer Saro Lynch-Thomason for humming the old shape note styled ballads Lady Margaret and Evening Shade during the show breaks. You can learn more about her work and regional music traditions at sarosings.com.
Other music included in the podcast includes old ballad, Little Margaret, performed on banjo by Cath and Phil Tyler. Found on the FreeMusicArchive, it is licensed under an Attribution- Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Additional music includes the track Expectations by Lee Rosevere, The Cost of All Things, Massalia, Zither Sprak, Some Nights End, Hickory Shed, Talens Bal, Collagen and Bone, A Catalog of Seasons, and Night Watch by the Blue Dot Sessions. These tracks are found on the FreeMusicArchive under license attribution international CC BY 4.0.
Be sure to check the website for more HPI podcast episodes and other resources @ wnchealthpolicy.org. Thanks for listening.
