A local philanthropic group working to eradicate forced labor, sexual and otherwise, is making a dent by spreading the word.
Three years ago, when the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking first gave money to a cluster of like-minded nonprofits in Orange County, all parties agreed that one reason human trafficking was growing was because it is a largely hidden and poorly understood crime.
This week, as the Collaborative announced a second round of donations – including a total of $275,000 given to 15 different groups – awareness seems to be less of an issue.
Over the past three years, the term “human trafficking” has become frequently searched online, with queries typically rising and falling in tandem with news about issues such as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and law enforcement raids that identify trafficking victims.
Trafficking, today, also has become an increasingly common plot point in movies and TV shows, including a few that – shockingly – don’t get everything about the problem wrong.
Trafficking is even addressed regularly by local teachers and others, in a new category of classes aimed at teaching school-age children in Orange County how to avoid being wooed by would-be traffickers.
Much of that shift has come since the Collaborative, co-founded by philanthropists Susan Samueli and Carey Clawson, began a campaign to raise awareness about all forms of trafficking, including sex work and other types of forced labor.
Clawson noted that the latest round of funding by the Collaborative drew requests from more anti-trafficking nonprofits than applied three years earlier. That, in itself, suggests more awareness and local action to change the trajectory in what has been a fast-growing problem.
“It just speaks to getting our mission accomplished, little by little,” Clawson said.
“It’s a very large mission,” she added.
“If you were to ask, ‘What is your best outcome right now?’ I would say, before (we started), Orange County was hobbling along with people with great intentions. Now we can direct those resources and collaborate with all the different (nonprofits) and law enforcement. …
“To me, that’s a really big success.”
Awareness, however, has yet to translate into a significant reduction in human trafficking.
And while data on forced sex work and other types of labor typically reflects only a sliver of the actual scope of the problem, the numbers that have been gathered show that trafficking increasingly involves children.
A report issued last year by the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force found that more than half of local sex trafficking victims identified by local police and social service groups were younger than 18. Experts linked that trend to everything from a spike in Internet use during the pandemic and the rise of AI and phishing scams to a higher profit margin for traffickers when younger victims are involved.
But like other data points about human trafficking, that trend, which mirrors national estimates from the FBI and other sources, is based mostly on self-reporting. The Task Force report pulled information gathered when local trafficking victims talked with county social service workers, law enforcement and nonprofits that work with trafficking victims, including Waymakers in Irvine and the local Salvation Army.
Experts say the actual world of forced labor – involving sex work and industries as diverse as restaurants and meat packing and construction – is far bigger than official reports currently track.
But there are several efforts, on several fronts, to fix that.
For example, nurses and other intake personnel at California hospitals now are required, by law, to at least try to identify adult victims of domestic abuse and human trafficking and report their status to social services agencies.
That law, SB 963, signed in late 2024, months after the Collaborative formally began raising awareness about human trafficking, also is creating a database that will identify who is likely to be victimized – something researchers say will lead to better data about human trafficking.
And some of the new anti-trafficking money being given by the Collaborative is going to people working to improve trafficking data collection.
A two-person team at UC Irvine – Angela Robinson, who helps run UC Irvine’s FREE Institute, and Iza Camarillo, who directs research at the UCI Labor Center – will use a $20,000 grant from the Collaborative to finance a series of focus groups involving people who may or may not be victims of labor trafficking.
Though not as well-publicized as sex trafficking, forced labor – typically involving economically disadvantaged migrants who often try to avoid contact with law enforcement and others who might help them escape from servitude – is believed to be at least as big a problem, locally and around the country, as sex trafficking.
In 2023 and ’24, raids at poultry plants in Southern California and at meat packing plants in the Midwest found hundreds of underage workers who were tricked or forced into low- or no-wage jobs by criminal organizations that provided labor for often better-known companies. Early last year, two huge meat packing companies, Perdue Farms and JBS, agreed to pay $8 million to settle claims that they had illegally used child labor provided by third-party staffing agencies.
The thrust of the research at UCI won’t be so obvious.
“A lot of times, people don’t initially identify themselves as being victimized, or as trafficking victims,” Robinson said.
“That’s part of what we’ll be asking about.”