267. Protecting Our Children: Recognizing Signs of Trafficking with Alexandra Ford

00:00:10
This is happiness solved with America's Happiness coach, Sandee Sgarlata.

00:00:20
Hello everyone, and welcome to today's show. This is your host, Sandee Sgarlata, and I am so happy you're here. First of all, I want to thank each and every one of my listeners for all the five star reviews. And I'm so proud to announce that because of you, Happiness Solve podcast is now in the top 0.5% globally and growing. We just had our biggest month ever with over 85,000 downloads.

00:00:45
So I have a question for you to ponder. Are you reaching your full potential or is something holding you back? I am grateful to announce the launch of the Peak Performance Mindset Academy, where you will discover strategies designed to transform your mindset and shatter your performance ceilings. Envision feeling unstoppable and confident in any professional or personal situation. Don't wait to start living your best life.

00:01:13
Text peak to 26786 and begin to embrace the power within you. So when you text peak to 26786, you will receive access to my new book, Peak Performance Secrets. And as a special gift to you, the first 100 people who download peak performance secrets will receive a three month trial membership into the Peak Performance mindset mastermind at the reduced rate of only 1995 per month. So don't wait. Text peak to 26786.

00:01:47
Thank you for listening today. And remember, happiness is a choice, and the choice is yours. Enjoy the show.

00:01:59
Alexandra Stevenson Wow. So this is. Hello. You're kind of one of these guests that when your publicist sent it to me and I read, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's awesome. But it was probably scheduled, I don't know, a couple of months ago or a month ago, I don't know.

00:02:16
And so it isn't until the day of the interview where I actually look at the bio again. And reading your bio, it leaves me almost speechless for the audience. Alexandra is a former trafficking victim turned activist who embarked on her anti trafficking journey at eleven after ten years of personal hardships. You recognize your experience as human trafficking, and it's interesting because you are the second guest I've had that went through that experience, and she too did not realize that that was what was taking place.

00:02:59
First of all, I just want to honor you and your courage because this is not an easy topic to talk about for anyone because it's one of those things that we know is going on. But when you actually talk to people who have experienced it, it's a tough topic. So I just want to acknowledge you for, for having the courage to come out and, and share your story because it's. It's definitely something that we need, that we need education on, because from what I understand about it, a lot of times young girls and boys are drawn into it and they don't even know. What'S happening at the time, 100%.

00:03:45
Can you share your story? Yes, I can. And I'd like to start by kind of reflecting that back to you because. Absolutely. This is a hard topic to talk about as a victim, survivor of it, but for people who haven't been touched by it or to their knowledge, haven't been touched by it, to create space to talk about it and use their platform to talk about it, as you are, as well as your listeners who are taking the time now to pause their day and dive into a bit of human darkness so they can learn and bring some light to that, that is incredible.

00:04:21
And that's why I do what I do. So thank you to you and to your listeners. Thank you. My story is it can be very short or very long, and I do tend to lean more into the longer version because I think the short version is I was trafficked at 20 years old, and I didn't find out I was trafficked until I was about 30. And that's how I kind of got involved in the anti trafficking movement.

00:04:55
Having said that, as you said in my bio, I was an anti trafficking advocate at eleven. So that's where the story gets longer, because I was not dropped on this earth at 20 years old. Right. Like, I didn't just show up one day and go, hey, I think I'm going to exchange sexual acts for things of value. That sounds like a great idea.

00:05:13
Right? Things led me to that point. And I think the reason I start my story so young is I don't check any of the boxes that people so often think, okay, well, those are the high risk or vulnerabilities that people go, oh, okay, well, that explains that. And I hate this word, but I was a quote unquote normal kid from a quote unquote normal family. Like, I was raised in suburbia.

00:05:47
Like, just picture perfect. They filmed anybody who knows the movie the Santa Claus with Tim Allen. Yeah, they filmed part of that around the corner from my house, the part that is the mom's house that's supposed to look know, picture perfect suburbia.

00:06:05
And I grew up with my mom and my dad, and I had an older brother, and I actually have an older half brother as well, but he's quite a bit older, so I wasn't raised with him. I grew up playing outside on the streets with my friends and kicking a ball. Well, I'd say playing hockey, but I didn't play hockey. I got put in, like, goalie gear and got slap shots hit at me by the Neighbor boys. But it was just quintessentially perfect.

00:06:29
And as any adolescent kid does, I was figuring out who I was. And was I athletic? Resounding? No. Was I creative?

00:06:41
A little bit. Could I be a singer? Absolutely not. All these different things and the place where I found my niche and the thing that I was really good at turned out to be advocacy. Now, that's not really on the list of things you expect for a preteen.

00:06:57
But when I had a teacher read our Class A story about a boy who lived in Toronto, I lived just outside Toronto, and the boy was a few years older than me, and he had started a nonprofit organization called Free the Children when he had heard that child labor and child exploitation existed. So when I heard in this one story both that kids can do stuff, like important stuff, and that bad things were happening to kids, I was like, okay, well, that seems like a really easy answer to me. If bad things are happening to people and I have the power to change it, why would I not do that? So two friends and I actually started the first OakvillE chapter, Free the Children. Free the children later became we Charity, which was behind a massive me to we movement across the globe.

00:07:49
This is when it was still very small. So I skipped my first school dance to stuff school and health kits to send overseas to kids who have been freed from child labor. Instead of getting in trouble after school, I was doorknocking to collect signatures for a petition to send to our government to strengthen laws regarding child labor. Wow. So I'm pretty sure, as a mom myself now, though my kids are much younger, I'm pretty sure my parents were probably patting themselves on the back and being like, we just won parenting.

00:08:21
Exactly right. This kid is 1112 years old. And like, all right, we're done. We're done parenting. She'll parent us now, teach us all these things.

00:08:32
And that absolutely might have been the case, and that would have been the life path that I was on if it had not been for my friend's uncle. And at about 1314 years old, he began grooming and sexually assaulting me. And I say began because this went on for several years, and this is where my life path obviously just dramatically changed. However, this isn't a movie, so it wasn't like a montage where I suddenly started wearing all black and black eyeliner and immediately hanging out with the wrong crowd. And there was all these glaring warning signs.

00:09:17
It really wasn't like that. I did start slipping. I moved away from the advocacy work, but preteen to teen, that wasn't really necessarily a big shock, right? Like, kids are finding themselves and they change friends and what they like and don't like. On the surface, I was still getting good grades.

00:09:38
I wasn't really a kid who skipped a lot of school. So I was always kind of like, at least if I show up in class, I'll absorb this by osmosis or something. Like, I may as well just be here. So I got reasonably good grades from the age of about 16 to 19. I had a long term boyfriend.

00:09:59
But in the background, what my parents didn't see is I started doing drugs. I started smoking weed. I started doing mushrooms. And over the years, over those years, I worked my way through ketamine, ecstasy, and finally landing on meth, which ended up being sort of my drug of choice for quite some time. So I graduated high school, and I can't get too much into the detail, but the uncle who was assaulting me, I found out he had assaulted some other people as well.

00:10:32
And when we realized there were some young girls, his daughters, at risk, we went to the police. And so the criminal justice system got involved in my life. Now, up until that point, I had been telling myself this story, that I was a wildly mature teenager and we had been in some sort of clandestine relationship because I had learned my whole life that sexual assault was no means no. It was a stranger in an alleyway. It was someone kicking and screaming and fighting and all of that.

00:11:06
And that wasn't my experience. My experience was confusion and shame and interest and excitement. There's a good looking 30 something year old man who is showing interest in me, and I was not popular among my peers. I was a nerdy kid on the outside and, like, a nerdy kid on the inside. Like, being a child advocate does not endear you to your peers.

00:11:35
So when he showed interest in me, I kind of felt like it elevated me. Like, oh, well, I have this secret. I'm in a special relationship. I knew it was wrong because I didn't tell anyone, and my body knew it was wrong. And that's why I started numbing out and using substances.

00:11:53
But until the justice system got involved, I could keep telling myself this story, right? So when they got involved, and I remember the look on the detective's face as she was drawing the story out of me and the look of sadness.

00:12:15
How old were you at this point. When we went to the police? I was 18, just about to turn 19. Okay. And so this whole story, this lie that I've been living for four or five years, just blew apart.

00:12:32
And it was just suddenly, oh, my God, I've been assaulted. That cognitive dissonance piece, everything slammed together, and the truth was there, whether I liked it or not. And alongside that became this complete loss of autonomy and complete loss of my story as I got lost in the cogs of the criminal justice system. And that's where I kind of went from going, I'm doing drugs, but I have it under control. Like, I'm partying on the weekends sort of thing.

00:13:03
But I was maintaining a full time job and boyfriend and all that. And I dumped the boyfriend. I quit the job. I did get another job because I still had to pay for things, but I didn't go off to college as many of my friends did. I got a job working at a tanning salon, and I started sort of living this double life.

00:13:24
Like, at night I'd be partying and doing meth, and then during the day, I'd be managing this tanning salon. And then he walked into my salon, and he was notorious in our town. He had been in jail for most of the time I had been a teenager. I knew his twin brother, who was my drug dealer, and he had gotten out of jail, and he was a drug dealer. And he walked into my salon and showed interest in me.

00:13:57
And at that point, I was like, well, I'm doing meth. He sells meth. It's a match made in heaven. Like, why not? This is brilliant.

00:14:09
Yeah. And so we got involved, and he is the man who ended up trafficking me.

00:14:20
And it's still really hard for me to refer to him as my trafficker, because like I said earlier, I had no idea I was trafficked for another ten years until ten years after it happened. Wow. So how long were you with him, and how long did this trafficking take place? Four months. Okay.

00:14:45
How did you leave? How did you leave the situation?

00:14:50
I ran.

00:14:55
I got into a car accident, and I have absolutely no proof that he caused it, though there were rumors that he had bragged about it and the car accident. I was pretty banged up, and it meant that. So at this point, we'd been together, and I had agreed to certain things, and then there was a lot of violence in our relationship, so he had forced me into doing others, and at that point, absolutely knew I was trapped. So when I got into the car accident, it actually gave me breathing space because I couldn't dance on stage, I couldn't go out partying. I had broken ribs.

00:15:39
I could barely breathe. I ended up with some pneumonia because of the broken ribs. It just gave me some breathing space. And in that breathing space, I remembered a piece of information he'd given me. And so I had attempted to escape at one point by applying to school in Windsor, Ontario, where I had some friends going to school.

00:16:00
And when I had gone to visit Windsor, he had had someone following me, and he sent me pictures of me walking around Windsor. I didn't know someone was following me, but he had had someone following, you know, indicated, you're not going to get away that easily. So the thing that I remembered was that he had actually been in jail in Ottawa, Ontario, and he had told me that there were people there who wanted him dead so he could never go to Ottawa. Now, lo and behold, back when I had had my plan of attempting to escape, I had applied to several different schools, and one of them had been in Ottawa. So all of a sudden, I was, hmm, I'm moving to is.

00:16:45
This is where I'm going to go. So I did that. As I healed, I had to kind of play the game with him a little bit, and we partied a little, and he would lose his mind. And, I don't know, the trauma bond had started to fray. So I started to be like, I might get out of this.

00:17:11
I might be able to. And I did. I moved to Ottawa. I went to school. I literally just wrapped up that part of my life into a little box and, like, put it on a shelf in the back of my mind, scrawled in Sharpie, like, never open.

00:17:26
Don't ever look at this. This is bad news. Don't look there. And I just continued with my life as though it hadn't happened until about a year and a. A year and a half after I moved to Ottawa.

00:17:39
I was out drinking my white and green beer on St. Patrick's Day, as one does in college, and I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I turned around and it was him. Oh, my gosh. And that taught me that a trauma response is completely uncontrollable because My body responded instantly just by running and then vomiting. Oh, my gosh, the terror.

00:18:11
And I had convinced myself that what had happened wasn't that bad. I hadn't really told anyone most of the details because of the amount of shame I carried.

00:18:22
Like I said, I just put it in a box and put it away and been like, that's over. That didn't happen.

00:18:29
And so at this point, I finally went to the police. And once again, I got enmeshed in the criminal justice system. I lost my autonomy.

00:18:43
I had been doing so well. I had started in college, gotten a scholarship to university, was getting straight A's in university, and at this point, I started again spiraling, trying to hold on. But as we progressed through the court system and court dates and all of that, I ended up dropping out of school after my second year. But he was charged. He was held on remand.

00:19:08
He was found not guilty on two of the four charges because there simply wasn't evidence, and because a woman who had been a close friend of mine, who had actually helped patch me up after one of his more severe incidents of abuse, got on the stand and said that she'd never seen a bruise. On me, that, oh, my gosh, he. Was a nice guy, and that I had instigated any arguments between us and just horrendous lies.

00:19:38
And when he got out of jail again, it took him ten days to find me. He showed up at my place of work. At that point, I went to the police again, and I started figuring out, do I have to fake my own death? I'm never going to be free of this. I kept thinking for so long, I had thought that was a blip, right?

00:20:02
It was this thing. You made bad choices, but it's over. And now I was like, I'm never going to be free.

00:20:11
That was November of 2010 that he found me again. And through Christmas 2010, I went back to our hometown. I used myself as bait. I didn't want to live in this. Like, is he going to show up again?

00:20:27
Why aren't the police arresting him? I didn't really understand what was going on, so I was just like, well, if he finds me, I hope he kills me quickly. That's all I can hope fOr. Oh, my goodness. And then in January 2011, he was killed in an incident completely unrelated to me.

00:20:44
And it was over. I was free. Wow, I am so sorry that you had to go through that. And where are you today? You just shared this horrific story as you were going through it.

00:21:04
I get where you were coming from. It's so easy to compartmentalize and like, oh, it's not that bad. It's so easy to do that because we don't understand it. Shame doesn't feel good, right? Yeah.

00:21:20
Shame is, like, one of the worst feelings, right? We don't want to feel that way. So how were you able to move forward to where you are? Today and be this advocate and this voice to educate people. Because I think trafficking is really about education because most people, like you said, the other guest that I interviewed ended up homeless at the age of 15 and was, like, living at the YMCA or whatever, you kind of say, okay, those circumstances, she was pulled into that and someone like yourself, right?

00:21:58
And when you're explaining those circumstances, you don't realize it, how people can have that power over you. What it did make me remember, and it wasn't a human trafficking thing. My biological father was very physically abusive to my mother. Like, to the point he would pull guns in her and everything. And he died when I was 18 months old.

00:22:19
And to this day, she always says, he loved you very much. However, I'd still be running to this day if he was not alive. He was alive. So I get that feeling that you're like, okay, right, it's over. So back to my question.

00:22:40
How have you been able to move forward to get to where you are today? And now you have? Thank goodness you got children of your own. I mean, that's just incredible because there's nothing better than being a mom, right? But how have you been able to move forward?

00:22:53
I mean, that's a lot of heavy shit to carry. And you were worried about swearing, and I dropped the first one. I like it. Thank you for laying that out there. It is a lot of heavy shit to carry.

00:23:07
And you know what? On some days, I carry it a hell of a lot better than other days. So, to answer your question, moving forward has looked a lot like moving forward. Skidding sideways, falling backwards, feeling like I fell off a cliff and have to start again. And then sometimes feeling like I've reached the peak of the mountain only to realize that I'm at base camp and not anywhere close to it.

00:23:32
So I threw myself into two things mostly. One is education. I, at my core, am a nerd. Like back to that eleven year old advocate. I love to learn.

00:23:49
I absolutely love it. I'm passionate about learning, and it's a safe place for me because I'm good at it. So I collected degrees, so I got a diploma in community and justice services, an honors diploma. I finished my bachelor's that I had to drop out of while I was dealing with him. So that's in criminology.

00:24:15
And then I did a postgrad in victimology. And then I recently finished my master's in psychology. Oh, wow. And so that, for me, has been a constant through my life that when things get difficult, I go back to school, which doesn't always make sense to a lot of people, but for me, it's a safe place. Well, it's a healthy thing to do.

00:24:42
It's a healthy stress, right? It is a lot of stress. Absolutely. Yeah. But the brain will always choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar potential heaven.

00:25:01
So high stress is a familiar hell for me. So if everything is calm, that is very unfamiliar, and it makes me uncomfortable, and I tend to working on it in therapy, but I tend to then stir things up because if everything's too calm, I'm, like, waiting for the other shoe to drop versus if I keep myself in a fairly high stress environment that feels comfortable. Now, high stress because I have an assignment due is a hell of a lot better than high stress because someone is stalking me. So I've kept myself in that sort of high stress environment, I guess. Well, and it's also that type of high stress can be healthy.

00:25:41
Yeah, absolutely. And it's a motivator to keep going and keep busy. And it's healing for some of us. For me, it is. Hey, whatever works, right?

00:25:54
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the other thing I did was I traveled. I picked up, and I moved to New Zealand for a while. And then I did Australia.

00:26:04
I backpacked Europe. And I just kept finding ways that I could feel safe in new situations instead of avoiding what would make me feel unsafe. I'm just like, I'm more the just let's do this. Know, figure out how to swim once we're already in the middle of the ocean sort of thing. So I did that.

00:26:26
And then I moved to Wyoming with my then husband. And while in Wyoming, because of visa, I'm Canadian. So because of visa situations, I couldn't work. But I'm not one, as we just discussed, to sit and twiddle my thumbs. So I heard of a woman who was doing some anti human trafficking work in Wyoming, and I was like, okay, I don't know anything about human trafficking, but I've now worked within the social services field.

00:26:59
I've worked with offenders and with victims, with men, with women, with children, with adults. I've worked in prevention and rehabilitation right within the offender system. So I think I could probably learn about trafficking and lend a hand. Not to mention I have my own story of what I thought. Then I called it domestic violence and a series of my own bad decisions.

00:27:25
So I met up with this woman, Terry Markham. I emailed her, and I was like, hey, this is who I am and what I'm doing. I don't know anything about human trafficking, but here's the deal? You can't actually pay me because I can't work. I'd like to volunteer my services.

00:27:40
And she tells me now, she's like, I thought you were punking me. Like, who the hell emails someone and says, hey, I have several degrees and a lot of work experience. Please don't pay me. Can I help? Right?

00:27:53
So we met up, and as we got talking, I shared a bit about my story, and we go back and forth on this. Now, thinking back, did she say I was trafficked? She's like, I would never tell someone they were trafficked. Like, it's up for someone to decide sort of their own label. And I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure you told me.

00:28:14
But regardless, she explained to me what human trafficking was in the most basic of terms, and was like, it sounds to me this is what happened to you. And I remember laughing and being like, no, trafficking is that thing that happens to those people over there. It's not a thing that happens to a kid from Oakville, Ontario, who is a nerd and all of that. But as I came to understand it, it fit. And two things hit me.

00:28:45
One, for the first time in ten years, the shame of having made horrible decisions, as I had labeled it, lifted. It had somewhere to go. Suddenly, it wasn't all my fault. I wasn't just, excuse my language, please excuse my language here, but I had thought of myself as just a dumb whore, like someone who had made horrible choices. And that's what I'd been called so many times that that's where my story sat and that's why I couldn't touch it.

00:29:19
I didn't want to think about it, right? And suddenly now the idea of coercion is being explained to me. And that just because you consented, if consent and coercion exist in the same space, the coercion voids the consent. So you didn't truly consent, you didn't know what you were consenting to, you didn't authentically consent. And the other thing that hit me was at that point, I didn't have my master's yet, but I had the other degrees and diplomas.

00:29:49
I'd done a lot of work for ten years in the social services field. I'd been through a criminal investigation and court process against him. And not once had the word human trafficking ever come up. Not once. Wow.

00:30:01
The idea had never entered any of my textbooks, had never entered any of the detectives language. It had never entered my head. And I thought, as someone who's worked for ten years in the criminology victimology offender field, as someone who went through court against their offender, all of this, and I had no idea I was trafficked. How the hell is anyone else supposed to recognize trafficking for themselves or for a loved one? Exactly.

00:30:34
That is ridiculous. How does no one know? Exactly. So we co founded uPrising, the nonprofit in Wyoming, and I launched myself into anti human trafficking work, which is where. I'm at you, because you mentioned that she explained to you human trafficking at its very basic level.

00:30:55
Can you please explain that to the audience so that people are aware? And then I'll have another question after that. Absolutely. Human trafficking. So let's talk about commercial sex.

00:31:10
Commercial sex is when you engage in a sexual act, it's not always intercourse. Any sort of sexual act can be stripping can be. Oral sex can be whatever in Exchange for something of value, right? So usually money, but it might be a place to stay for the night, it might be a ride to somewhere. It might be drugs, it might be, I don't know, your Freedom.

00:31:36
It could be anything. Something of value. That's commercial sex. When a third party profits, you've got human trafficking. Now, there are some coda sales to that.

00:31:49
If someone under the age of 18 engages in commercial sex, they cannot consent to commercial sex. They're under 18. Right. So it falls under the umbrella of trafficking. If someone is over the age of 18, you have to prove that there's force, fraud, or coercion.

00:32:05
Right. And this is where the gray area and a lot of the debates happen. But legally, if you are not Being forced in any Way, there's No Defrauding, no one's telling you that. We're just Doing this for a little while until I make it big, or YOu'Re going to be a model, or they promised you were going to be a nanny, and then now you're having to work to get your driver's license back or something, whatever. So anything fraudulent or coercive.

00:32:37
So the lies and the manipulation that can exist. So if you're over the age of 18 and you prove force, fraud, or coercion, then human trafficking. So in my story, I originally agreed to engage in commercial sex acts with my boyfriend because I thought we were business partners. I thought we were working together, keeping our money. And then when he literally, one day we're at a strip club and my feet suddenly are no longer on the floor, and I'm being deposited up on stage with the last words in my ear being, don't get down until you've made me some money.

00:33:15
That is trafficking. But to me, I didn't know that. Well, I didn't know anything about trafficking, but I was on stage at a strip club. There are people around. I could have screamed for help.

00:33:27
The thought never occurred to me. And I think that's where we get so confused about the idea of trafficking and how it's enmeshed with consent and what consent is. Because people think consent is the absence of someone screaming, no. Right. And it's not.

00:33:50
Consent is an enthusiastic yes. Right. That is not manipulated, that is not coerced, and that is not forced. Wow. So having explained all of that, Alexandra, what advice can you give to a parent, to a teacher, to a know a neighbor who sees a young boy or girl or knows somebody?

00:34:24
What are some of the advice that you can give that would help them to identify, if that's even possible, that there was human trafficking going on? Because I think that's the hardest thing is like being aware of what's going on. Absolutely, it is. And it's hard because I get asked this question all the time. And I can give you a list of, like, do they check these boxes?

00:34:51
However, half those boxes are just cranky teenager things too, right? Are they Sullen and reserved? Do they hide their phone from you? Are they on their phone all the time? And parents listening to this, parents of teenagers are going, are you telling me my child is being trafficked?

00:35:08
Like. No. Exactly. But there are some things you can look out for. Do they have expensive, or maybe not even expensive, but new things that you can't explain.

00:35:21
Suddenly they have their eyelash extensions, and you're like, well, we're not a family that has a lot of spare income and you don't have a job. So where are you getting $100 a month eyelash extensions? Or their nails are done constantly. All of a sudden they have new trinkets or tattoos. Sometimes, like anything, sudden shift is always worth asking more questions.

00:35:51
It's not a scarlet HT saying they're being human trafficked, but it's worth asking more questions.

00:36:01
Teachers, if you have a kid falling asleep in class all the time, ask more questions. I'm not saying a kid falling asleep in class means they're being trafficked, but I have heard and discussed with colleagues so many cases where kids were being trafficked, but they were still going to school and living at home. Parents and teachers had no idea. They'd go home, have their normal routine. Everyone goes to bed, they'd sneak out, they'd work several hours in the evening, come back before dawn, catch an hour of sleep, go to school, they'd be falling asleep in class and they'd get yelled at.

00:36:37
You're up too late on your phone or whatever it is. And it turns out they're not just up too late on their phone. They were having to work the evenings. So worth asking more questions, things like that, for sure. Well, and I think that as a parent, if my son came home with flashy items that I knew I wasn't paying for, my first question thought would be, are you selling drugs?

00:37:05
Right. That's the first thing that you would think of is you're dealing drugs. The whole trafficking thing would never even be in my realm of awareness.

00:37:19
Those questions are important. Yeah. And it's interesting you bring up dealing drugs, because we're seeing dealing drugs is like the first thing, right. That a lot of parents are going to go to. Right, right.

00:37:29
Because it's common. It's been talked about. We went through dare programming, we talk about drugs in school. We all have a general understanding of both, even if our understanding is only the one that's been fed to us through the media of what drugs are, what drug dealers look like, and whatever, we have an idea, it's in our brain as a possibility. Human trafficking is most often not in the brain as a possibility, as you just said.

00:37:54
However, we're seeing such an increase in trafficking that I actually don't know if it is going to or has overtaken drugs as making more money. Because several reasons. One, when you sell drugs, A, you have to carry them on you, which is risky. You get caught with them, you get charged with trafficking. B, when you sell drugs, you sell your baggie of whatever.

00:38:23
It's gone now, you need more to sell. You can make money, it's certainly lucrative. But when you are selling a person, you sell them and they come back and you sell them and they come back and you sell them and they come back. You can make endless amounts of money doing that. And the trauma bonds that traffickers go to great lengths to develop with their victims mean that even if they come in contact with law enforcement or a parent or protective caregiver or something, more often than not, the victim is not going to screech and point their finger and say, this person's making me do things I don't want to do.

00:39:08
They're going to say, how dare you get mad at my boyfriend. He cares for me the way you don't. We are in love. He takes care of me. This is a partnership.

00:39:19
Ding, ding, ding. I thought it was a partnership. So when they take the time to create that trauma bond and groom their victims and all of that, then it's not only more lucrative, it can be safer. And that's why we need to have so much more education around this, because it can be so dangerous. Yeah.

00:39:42
My goodness, this has been such an incredible conversation. Alexandra, is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience that you haven't talked about so far? So many things. But sure, we could talk for hours. But I try to keep these because most people don't have that attention span.

00:40:00
Absolutely. I will share this once I tell people what I do or we get into talking about human trafficking. First of all, we know statistically the victims are mostly girls and women. We do know boys are victimized as well. But I always want to draw the conversation to not necessarily just looking at how boys need to be involved in the conversation as potential victims, but how we need to recognize the fact that if we're looking at a trafficking triangle, for example, so you have the victim, you have the trafficker, and you have the buyer.

00:40:41
Two thirds of that triangle are stereotypically male traffickers and buyers. Now, this is not. And I hate men. Men are evil diatribe at all. It is when we want to prevent something like trafficking.

00:40:59
One of the most important conversations to have with your children, starting very young and have it develop as they grow up, is about consent. Talked about that earlier. Now, when we talk about consent, it is not just teaching our girls how to say no and blow into a rape whistle, how to walk without their earbuds in and not walk down dark alleyways and all of that. That's not teaching consent. Teaching consent is about teaching both how to give and revoke it and how to accept it, and how to see when it is not being freely given and how to not then try and push for it.

00:41:41
Right. The narrative we so often do the disservice of teaching our young boys is if you get a no, try harder. Right? How often do we see that in rom coms? Like girl says, no boy keeps trying until finally she's worn down and what he's doing is romantic, even though what he's actually done is harassed her for 90 minutes or 90 minutes of a movie.

00:42:04
Right, exactly.

00:42:09
We need to be teaching everybody who is going to grow and develop and engage in sexual intimacy both how to enthusiastically say yes, how to feel when their body is not enthusiastically saying yes. And that might mean, does it mean stop? Or does it mean slow down and reassess? And from the other side, how to gauge not just a word coming from someone's mouth, but someone's body language and how incredibly important it is for that gauge of do we slow down or do we stop to be coming from both sides? Because if it is always on, stereotypically, the woman, the girl, to have to be in the driver's seat of go slow down, stop, slow down, go slow down, all of that.

00:43:03
And the boy is being taught just like, pedal the metal, let's go. It is exhausting to always have to be gauging your feelings, their feelings. Am I comfortable? What are people going to Say about me? All of that.

00:43:17
So if we teach all parties involved, that's right. To be gauging that and to be going, we're making out, and it's a lot of fun, but every time I move my hands, she stiffens. Or it's always me leaning in to kiss these sort of things. You know what? Or even I'm doing this because my buddies keep telling me to, but I don't know that this is really what I want to be doing.

00:43:46
I really just like making out. I don't want to take it further, but that's what I'm told I'm supposed to try. All of these conversations, they need to be happening. So both sides are engaging with breaks and not just gas pedals when it comes to sexual intimacy. Yeah.

00:44:03
Oh, my gosh. Well, I know for me, as a parent, as a mom of a. I have one child, and he's now in college. That was one of my worst fears, and I taught him from a very early age, you're not sending pictures of yourself naked ever. And when he went to college, actually, when his high school girlfriend, he turned 1810 days before she did, I was like, don't you too engage in any sort of.

00:44:31
Because I knew that they were having sex. I was like, no, not until she turns 18. And they're like, laughing. I'm like, hey, statutory rape is a real thing. And even if she says yes, if her parents get upset at you, they can press charges.

00:44:49
So that was always my conversation. And this is just lack of education because he's 23 years old now, so it's been a number of years, and I just had no education about that whole consent conversation. And so thank you for bringing that up, because I think that our boys, young men, have to be educated from an early age.

00:45:13
I was appalled when I had learned a colleague's son was sexually touched but damaged at the age of one from a babysitter.

00:45:28
That was, like, my thing with my son. I was like, oh my gosh, I have to protect him. It was just so horrifying. So that's such an important conversation. So thank you for sharing that.

00:45:42
This has been amazing. I love the work you're doing. What's next for you? I don't know. For some reason I'm seeing like PhD in the future.

00:45:50
Yes. So when I did my master's, I did it on a PhD fast track. So should I start my PhD in the next? I forget how many years I have. I start in an advanced perfect standing.

00:46:02
So maybe what's next? I have written a book. Yay. I am putting finishing touches on it right now. And then we'll be hitting, trying to get agents and publishers and all that.

00:46:17
Fantastic. So that is sort of my next big thing. And I actually just recently found out that I have been chosen to do a TEDx talk, that I start my coaching process for that actually this Saturday, October 21. I don't know when this will air. And so I will be on the TEDx stage in January 2024.

00:46:41
Those are my next two big things. Where's your TED talk? It'll be at TEDx, Surrey. So that's in BC, near Vancouver. Nice.

00:46:50
Congratulations. And when your book does come out, when you're leading up to the book launch, please have your publicist or you can reach out to me and let's schedule another conversation so that we can promote your book and let the audience know that that book is available. Absolutely. That would be wonderful. Thank you so much.

00:47:11
Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much. And thank you everybody who's listened today, and I hope that you got value from this and we'll have information on how to, I believe your charity. Did your publicist send me the name of your charity that we can put into the show notes? Yeah, I would quickly say any parents out there who are now suddenly like, oh, my God, you've just given me something new I have to freak out about.

00:47:35
Don't freak out. In the show notes, we'll put Uprising's website and they have resources for parents and for children over the age of twelve to how to talk about trafficking, how to talk about consent, like all of that stuff. So you can go amazing further. And then, yeah, you can follow me mostly on Instagram at the laughing survivor. I love it.

00:47:56
Thank you again. Thank you. Your time. Thank you, everyone.

00:48:11
I certainly hope that you enjoyed today's interview. Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy and happiness. Take care.