I’m just a mom. In truth, I haven’t consistently been on time for anything since 2006. With four children, my days (and my nights) are filled with endless responsibilities of caring for small humans. I bring snacks to ball games, sing lullabies, kiss boo-boos. I drive a minivan. You get it.
But recently I have found myself in the eye of a whirlwind anti-trafficking movement that is coming out of Apex and moving across the state and beyond. I ricochet between the worlds of motherhood and abolitionism. In the last two years I have found myself dancing with rescued temple prostitutes in India, sipping lemonade on the Governor’s mansion porch while I pled for our North Carolina children, discussing new legislation to combat child pornography in the conference room of the Attorney General in the Department of Justice, and walking the marble halls of the Eisenhower building after a meeting with an assistant to the President for an executive order. How many times have I paused and asked myself, how exactly did I get here?
I
first learned that there were children around the world younger than my daughter being thrown into brothels to be raped by adult pedophiles more than twice their age, after I read the book, Half the Sky, ten years ago. Today, more than 40 million people are enslaved worldwide. At least a quarter of those victims are children. There are places in the world where the cries of raped children are lost in darkness. They are unprotected by broken justice systems, abandoned because of cultural normalization, and trapped because of drugs, violence and extreme poverty.
And I asked myself a decade ago, what would I do if one of those girls was my daughter? No, that’s the wrong question. What wouldn’t I do? Still, it seemed too daunting and too “over there” and not here.
But it isn’t. In 2016, the Apex Police Department shut down an illegal massage business that was a front for a brothel that involved victims from multiple countries and businesses from multiple states. Human trafficking happens everywhere, in every town. Each year, thousands of advertisements are placed online for the Cary/Apex/Raleigh area to sell sex; most of these advertisements use trafficked victims. Thirty-seven percent of trafficking victims are trafficked by a family member. And then, of course, there are the labor trafficked victims that can be found in restaurants, construction jobs, and nail salons. We aren’t immune.
Another mother and I asked a question to Mayor Olive over a cup of coffee: What would it look like for a town to completely eliminate human trafficking? He did what mayors do—he issued a proclamation against trafficking. But Mayor Olive did what really good mayors do and insisted that the proclamation be more than just words on paper, and that we do a week of awareness for the town. Three mothers and I helped put together the first Freedom Week on Human Trafficking and brought in speakers and events to educate citizens on how to recognize and respond to trafficking. That research forced me to investigate the response of our town and identify gaps, needs and strengths in our community. Since then, with the help of Mayor Olive and other Apex leaders I formed the non-profit Shield North Carolina, and began hosting a podcast with the mayor (the Red X Podcast) that is now broadcast across North America. Shield North Carolina exists to create a prototype that answers the question my original question: what it takes to eliminate trafficking at the community level. Our model is already being replicated to our neighboring municipalities and is being used by the State Bureau of Investigations as a pilot for the rest of North Carolina.
Since that first proclamation, Mayor Olive attended a workshop hosted by the Houston Mayor’s Office on community response. On May 7th of this year, he introduced a resolution that all town contracts include a clause that insists all who wish to do business with Apex not engage in labor trafficking. Apex drew a line in the sand: if you use forced labor, we won’t do business with you. We are the first in the state to do so and are eager to challenge our neighbors to also put a stake in the ground.
Mayor Olive and I collaborated with NC Representative Bill Brawley to put together one of the most comprehensive anti-trafficking bills to date; it passed last session. We have trained numerous groups in the community on how to identify trafficking and provide ongoing social media awareness. We have mentored Garner and now Orange County on creating a municipal response, and are currently partnering with the State Bureau of Investigations and Apex PD for a demand reduction initiative. Recently we partnered with Apex PD and Mayor Olive to create a coalition of faith leaders and service providers to meet monthly for education on human trafficking related issues and empower them with ways to combat trafficking. We have done outreach to the trucking companies in Apex and advocated at the state level for all new CDL licensures to receive training. We are bringing together key stakeholders in Apex to create a restoration home for victims to address the state-wide need for shelter, address the specific challenges faced by trafficking survivors. We’ve brought training in from NY to respond to the Asian illegal massage businesses in the Triangle, and the practices learned are now being implemented as a more culturally sensitive and effective response for undercover operations. Another Shield mother is working with the Administration of the Courts to train judges, and another Shield member was recently appointed by the Governor to serve on the North Carolina Human Trafficking Commission. He was just voted to chair the Public Health Committee for the state, and is identifying ways state health systems can collect data on victims, and create internal protocol for appropriate response. And Shield NC, in collaboration with a colleague from Tennessee, is introducing federal legislation that amends copyright law so that victims of child pornography can receive greater restitution and get injunctions for web masters to take down the images from their sites. We are literally cleaning up the web.
Walt Disney once said, “I hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing—that it all started with a mouse.” We have made it from Apex to the White House in just 18 months and we’re just getting started. I hope we never lose sight of the fact that it all started with a proclamation in Apex.
As the Peak, we have the vantage point to see beyond and I challenge us all to see a state and nation that does not tolerate humans to be sold. It is truly the municipality, where the purview is to be non-partisan and community-focused, that must lead the nation. The work we are doing in Apex can be expected to have a ripple effect across the nation.
We are drawing a line in the sand and proclaiming that as a town we do not tolerate trafficking here. We insist that at the Peak of Good Living, all are free.
I have a choice. We all have a choice. I could sip my coffee with friends at Common Grounds, worship with my family on Sundays or stroll with my kids down Salem street, and not think about the ugliness that exists in every town in my state. I could close my eyes and pretend that this little, beautiful world that I love so much is the world. I could get drowsy at the soothing of my own lullabies and leave the monsters to someone else.
But I’ll never be able to say I did not know they were there.
It’s a rebellion. A revolution. A battle of Darkness against Light. When a community stands together and says, “Not Here!” that boldness spreads. And then the next community declares the same, and then the next, and the next with a wild boldness that is befitting any society that values its children. Before we know it, thousands will have linked Shields, and North Carolina, “The First in Freedom,” will be just that.
Resources
www.RedXPodcast.com
(Nicole and Mayor Lance Olive’s podcast)
www.shieldnc.org
