W. Va. — For those who may find themselves in a coercive or trafficking situation, there are many resources available to help and advise, both at the state and local level.
Assistant US Attorney general Andy Cogar is also co-chair of the West Virginia Human Trafficking Taskforce.
“The taskforce, as it’s currently comprised, has existed about two years,” he said. “It actually existed two or three years before that. I helped to found the taskforce, the human trafficking side of our taskforce. It started out as a hate crimes taskforce years ago. It evolved into the civil rights and human trafficking task force, and now it’s exclusively the West Virginia Human Trafficking Taskforce.
Cogar said one of the main goals of the taskforce is collaboration.
“First of all, we are building a collaborative network between law enforcement, service providers, government agencies, nonprofits, survivors, and other areas and professions that intersect with trafficking victims,” he said.
“As part of that collaboration, we are providing a forum through taskforce meetings and subcommittee meetings where we can share information and build mutual understanding about each other’s roles in combating the problem and trying to find creative solutions on how we can more effectively work together to combat the problem.”
Cogar said the taskforce also is building a data source for trafficking in West Virginia.
“We are trying to work together to build a knowledge base, an evidence-based approach, to form a baseline of understanding or data to assess the problem in West Virginia and identify areas where trafficking is more likely to occur than in other areas,” he said. “So, in other words, we are trying to build in some empirical research and data collection, which is led in large part, by Dr. Patrick Kerr, a WVU professor out of Charleston in the psychology department.
“Dr. Kerr’s objective in the short-term is to develop and build out a very explicit network of service providers who are adequately trained and advertised as it were, and available to serve trafficking victims readily.”
Cogar said the taskforce hopes to build its network to make sure everyone involved with trafficking victims uses the same protocol.
“So, when we have trafficking victims that are identified that we can connect them very quickly and efficiently to the appropriate place for them to go given the nature of the trauma and their age and all that,” he said.
Cogar said the other important part of the taskforce is raising awareness, especially for law enforcement.
“On the law enforcement side, one of my main objectives as part of the taskforce and one of the taskforce’s objectives generally for law enforcement and to a large extent other groups as well, is to raise awareness of the problem,” he said.
One local organization helping survivors in Morgantown is the Rape and Domestic Violence Information Center (RDVIC). Executive director Nnenna Minimah said the organization provides a safe place for survivors to tell their stories.
“We provide peer-to-peer support counseling for empathetic, supportive people who have been trained to deal with very sensitive issues,” she said. “They hear them out about their situation and try to link to other resources and needs they have.
“All our services are free and confidential. I like to say we are kind of like, I like to call us a go-for. I will go forth and get some information. If I can’t do it myself, I’ll go out and try to connect them with other resources and guidance.”
Minimah said the program offers legal advocacy to help with understanding the legal system, filing emergency protective orders and referrals to legal aid.
“We also help with referrals to legal aid if they are needing an attorney, if they are a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, dating violence, human trafficking, and we provide an advocate,” she said. “That’s what we call our staff, an advocate, to go to court for support and to answer any questions they have in general.
“But, we do not give legal advice. We aren’t attorneys. We provide medical advocacy, which means we might meet people at the hospital who have been hurt by violence if we get a call from the hospital or someone who said they needed an advocate for someone who needed some support. We provide support while they are in the emergency department or even in they are in another part of the hospital.”
Minimah said advocates help patients understand their rights and help them navigate the medical system, including answering questions about specific procedures, like the sex crime kit for victims of sexual assault.
“We also have an emergency temporary shelter,” she said. “We provide support groups for survivors of domestic violence, sexual violence, and we do community education where we do prevention programming in schools. That’s all the way from preK to seniors in high school. We also do prevention programming and education for college students, the community. We go out to medical professions and tell them, try to make them aware about identifying survivors and how they can connect them to us.”
Minimah said the shelter uses Kerr’s human trafficking identification system to identify potential survivors.
“We’ve also received training,” she said. “We provide training on recognizing survivors of human trafficking using the trafficking victim identification tool.
“This is a one of the few tools out there, I think one of the only ones, that are research-based and able to identify victims of trafficking with a fairly high accuracy. I would use that with working with these individuals if people are thinking they are survivors of trafficking. It asks some questions to help them better understand if they are in that situation.”
Minimah said many times clients who come to the shelter don’t know they are survivors of human trafficking.
“They don’t have that label, and their traffickers don’t tell them that. So, I would use that tool because we use the short version, and it’s been shown to be 88.8 percent accurate in identifying victims of human trafficking and 84.9 percent accurate correct identification of people who are not victims of trafficking.
She said the tool asks questions such as “Have you ever worked without getting payment you thought you would have gotten? Have you ever felt you could not leave the place you work or live? Did anyone you live with or work for trick or force you into doing anything you didn’t want to do.”
Teresa Haring, president of Liberia Inc., said her program is about empowering West Virginia women and girls to live in personal freedom in all areas of their lives. She said one of the program’s goals is to help trafficking victims through the outreach of soap.
“We have done some SOAP outreaches,” she said. “There is a woman in Ohio named Teresa Flores, and she does this SOAP, which stands for Save Our Adolescences from Prostitution. They’ve done them at a lot of sports outreaches around the U.S., like the Super Bowl, Daytona 500. We get together and put the human trafficking hotline on a label and put it on a little hotel soap, and then we go to hotels, and we give them soaps where they can put them in the room or on the housekeeping carts. Then we give training materials to the desk staff and the housekeeping staff where they each get the warning signs.
Liberia has done outreaches in Mon and Marion counties, putting the information in all area hotels, Haring said.
Haring said Libera also has small cards to hand out that help survivors of trafficking and violence find help.
“We’ve put over 15,000 of these cards around the state of West Virginia,” she said. “In every county. This card has the domestic violence hotline, human trafficking hotline, sexual assault hotline. … We put these in places like gas stations, hair salons, nail salons, grocery stores, Walmart, convenience stores, the DHHR to get people connected to the hotline.”
Sam Wilmoth, a Title IX education specialist at WVU, said the university’s Title IX program wants to help survivors through a variety of resources.
“We have a broad array of resources designed to help people who are survivors of any kind of violence or exploitation,” he said. “Among those certainly would be free counseling services at the Carruth Center. It could be community-based advocacy at RDVIC, and we set that up for people in the community all the time, occasionally even people who aren’t students, and they call us and we make that referral for them.
“We also have a peer advocate program. These are students who are trained on issues of Title IX- related events, things like sexual violence or domestic violence. They’re helpful for spreading awareness of the resources that might be available or about the kinds of violence that are common on college campuses.”
Wilmoth said peer advocates may help survivors affected by Title IX related issues with a variety of things.
“It could be things that seem small, but to a survivor of violence that they might be huge,” he said. “It might be things like someone who is uncomfortable walking back from their evening class because they recently discontinued an abusive relationship or because they’ve been stalked in the past, and maybe a peer advocate just being with them to make it to the PRT on the way home is a big help.
“We try really hard to have as many resources as we can at our disposal, including relationships with local law enforcement, many of whom are increasing their own awareness of human trafficking events.”
