Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to Spill the Tea Unfiltered.
Hey, guys.
All right, so we're gonna have a trigger warning. Trigger warning, human trafficking. Anybody who does not feel comfortable hearing or talking about it, please skip this episode. I went to a human trafficking conference, and I think it's something important that we need to talk about.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: And I think we're gonna have. I talked to a lot of them while I was there, a lot of the presenters and stuff. So I think we're gonna end up having a lot of them.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Come on.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: But I wanted to talk about it a little bit. And, yeah, we're gonna. We're gonna go into that. So this was put on by Fortify Alabama. They are a anti human trafficking group.
They've been doing it about, I think, four years now. But this was the third conference that they've had and it was great. So this is on their website, so I'm gonna read this. So for many, human trafficking feels like something that is seen only in fiction or parts of the world removed from ours. But human trafficking is here, and it touches everything in our lives. Its effects can be felt in the clothes that we wear, the food that we eat, even the media we consume. And its tremors vibrate through our neighborhoods and homes. So we're going to talk about that a little bit. So most people think of the movie
[00:01:21] Speaker B: taken
[00:01:23] Speaker A: with Liam Neeson, and that is not what human trafficking is. So when people talk about human trafficking, people just assume we're moving people across countries, which does happen.
However, people don't realize. So forced labor is a type of human trafficking. So when she said that it's are the food that we eat, the clothes that we wear. That's why I don't shop at Temu. That's why I don't shop at Sheen Shein, because both of those are known to have child labor in China. And like I'm talking little kids here, like I'm talking little children are being forced to work hours without eating, without drinking and collapsing and dying making these clothes. So that is a big reason why I do not promote those. And that's not to say that other clothes that come from Amazon aren't from that. You can't be 100 perfect. But when you know for a fact that a certain company uses child labor, maybe don't promote it.
So I don't. I personally don't use either one of those. Construction is a big thing here in our town. And that is another thing that is using forced labor, including massage parlors.
So be careful what massage parlors you're going to and using.
So the way they do it there is a lot of times people will, they'll bring them over and they'll say, hey, we'll give you a good life in the us so this is trafficking to a degree, like coming over from like China, Asian countries. Come over here, we'll give you a good life.
And then.
And a lot of them will come to like New York and then there's like people who run it that disperse them other places and they take their passports so they cannot leave. They are trapped. And they have to work off the fees to get them over here. And it's a ridiculous amount. They put interest on it, so they never get out of it. So then they're having to work and give these massages for basically free.
A lot of them are living in the parlors, which is illegal, of course. There's a lot of times in these parlors there's some sex acts.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: And things that are going on too.
So there. So that with the massage parlors, a lot of it is a labor and sex trafficking together.
So just something to be aware of. If you go to a shady little Chinese massage parlor, there is a chance that there is some forced labor and sex trafficking going on there.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: So. Awful.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: I'm going to read some stats now. A lot of people think because Huntsville, they think we don't have an issue. Yeah, we do. And everywhere does. And for an example, that morning at 8am they posted an ad to buy a 8 year old boy.
It was a fake ad to see how many hits they would get. The conference started at 9 and by 9 o' clock they had like 23 or 25 hits from men offering to buy the boy. And that's in Huntsville, Alabama.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: Where do they post these ads at?
[00:04:14] Speaker A: They're always on, like it's on tour on the dark web. There's websites for it where you can
[00:04:18] Speaker B: purchase how to get the dark web.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: And yeah, there's, there's websites for it. And then like sex ads with girls, a lot of them will say that they're of legal age.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: Yeah. You can like clearly see.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: Yeah, they're not. Mm. So like when Backpage got taken down, another thing came up.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: So there's, there's always something, but for like the little kids, there's like dark web shit that, that people go to. And that was just locally here that that happened.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: That's crazy.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Yeah. And that was just like again to prove a point. Right. To be like when people are like, we don't have A problem here and we're like, oh, but we do.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Um, and like for me and what? I've worked a lot and it was no surprise to me, but a lot of people were like shocked by that, which is unfortunate and very sad. So 14 apps parents should know about Bumble.
So these are apps that people that kids are being targeted for trafficking on.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Isn't Bumble just a dating app though?
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Oh, it is, but it requires women to make the first contact and kids have been known to use Bumble to create fake accounts and falsify their age.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Oh,
[00:05:31] Speaker A: kick. Which I've known about for years.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: What is that?
[00:05:34] Speaker A: It allows you to contact and send direct messages to your child. Kids can bypass traditional text messaging features and kicks give users unlimited access to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
[00:05:45] Speaker B: Oh,
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Ola, which I had never heard of, is a self proclaimed addicting video chat app that allows users to meet people all over the world in seconds.
Reviewers say they have been confronted with racial slurs, explicit context and more. FM is known for cyberbullying. The app encourages users to allow anonymous people to ask them questions, hot or not, which I can't believe is still a thing.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: What is that it encourages so like closed off in this world.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: So Hot or not's older, but it encourages users to rate your profile, check people out in the area and chat with strangers. They the goal of the app is to hook up so we'll literally people can rate you on a hot or not scale.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Oh, I'm not.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: First of all, why would you just don't put yourself in that situation. Even Instagram, it allows sharing pictures, but many kids are now creating fake accounts to hide content from parents. Kids also like to text using Instagram because messages are deleted once users leave the conversation burn book. It allows a user to post anonymous rumors about people through audio messages, texts and photos. So these people are using it to like put child porn up.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: Snapchat, we already know all the problems
[00:07:03] Speaker A: that comes with and Snapchat is one of my number one, get rid of it. Do not let your children have it. It's awful.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: I do not have Snapchat anymore.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Nope. And so Snapchat is a popular app that promises users they can take a photo and video and it will disappear. Recent features include Stories, which allows users to view content for up to 24 hours. Snapchats also allow users to use to see your location, which is something I've talked about.
If your kids are on it, you need to make sure that they're ghosted because they can actually see exactly where they are. And what the weather is doing there. Like, if we had Snapchat right now and I was to zoom in on myself, it would have shown that it was raining here, which is terrifying and insane.
Live Me is a live stream streaming video app that uses Geolocation to share video so users can find out a broadcaster's exact location.
Users can earn coins as a way to pay minors for photos.
And then they know where your child is.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: Whisper is an anonymous social network that promotes sharing secrets with strangers. It also reveals a user's location so that people can meet up. So again, it's telling your child, it's telling where your child is.
And one of the stories that we've heard is that a child was using Snapchat and the guy found out where she was and he came for a visit and she was 12 and he was a full grown adult. Is that he's. He's arrested.
But yeah, that was the one where
[00:08:38] Speaker B: he like sexually abused her, right?
[00:08:39] Speaker A: Yeah, but yeah, and he said that she, he loved her and that she agreed to it. But yeah, she's. She may have, but she's 12. She doesn't know what she's agreeing to.
[00:08:49] Speaker B: Yeah. No.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: Calculator percent is one of only several secret apps used to hide photos, videos, files and browser history. So this is also a thing for you to know. If your husband has this on there on his phone, he's hiding shit. Omegle. It's the Omega symbol, but it's called like. Omegle is a free online chat website that promotes chatting anonymously with strangers. Yubo, formerly known as Yellow, an app designed to allow teens to flirt with each other in a Tinder like atmosphere. Because God knows we need more of that.
And then there's Wishbone, the app that allows users to compare kids against each other and rate them on a scale.
So that's some cyberbullying. Yeah.
So same similar to the Hot or not.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: I didn't know about any of these except for Snapchat.
[00:09:34] Speaker A: So as a parent, those are things you should know. There's also symbols that are used by child predators online.
So it's like a triangle within a triangle with like an open bottom. And it's the boy lover. So the logo featuring a blue spiral shaped triangle surrounded by a larger triangle is used by pedophiles who like young boys.
The small triangle represents the small boys, while the bigger one represents an adult man.
Then there's the little boy lover. It's a variation of the boy lover logo. It's used by Pedophiles who like very young boys.
It also features a spiral shaped triangle but its corners are not straight. And this is deliberate meant to resemble the scribbling of a young child.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: It literally looks like a little child scribbled it. Yep.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Then there's the girl lover. This logo features a small heart surrounded by a larger hot signifies the the pedophile is sexually attracted to young girls. The two hearts signify the relationship between an adult male and a minor.
The child lover. This logo features a butterfly made of hearts is used for pedophiles who do not have gender preference. These are sexually attracted to both young boys and girls.
And then there's the clomel. It's the child love online media activism logo. So there's a group of pedophiles who use this symbol on social media. It tells other pedophiles that they are interested in children.
The FBI bulletin describes how pedophiles are using logos like this one to promote their cause.
So this is happening every day and it's happening here in the U.S.
so just FYI, for your information, so we're going to talk about the scope of the problem. So this was taken from Fortify and they had all of it has references like they cited their sources. So they all have sources.
49.6 million in modern day slavery.
So that's what trafficking is between forced labor and human labor. You are in a slave labor of some kind, whether it's sex or labor. 27.6 million forced labor and 6.3 million or sex trafficking. So forced labor is a big problem. People don't talk about it. But the fields in Florida, like you know, I've seen a lot of cases on that where like the orange fields, everything. So a lot of the fields that are being plowed and worked, cotton fields here in Alabama, they probably have some issues. A lot of construction companies, different stuff like that. It, it's when your passport is being taken and you're not being paid like what you should be getting paid and someone has control over your money and over whether or not you can leave, then you are being trafficked. Trafficking generates 150 to 245 billion annual profits.
It's the second largest criminal industry and the fastest growing because it's repeatable. Exploitation makes it lucrative because if you're selling drugs then once the drugs are gone, they're gone. You can keep selling humans.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: So
[00:12:49] Speaker A: it makes it, it's the second largest and it's probably going to become the first. So 150 billion globally and 99 billion from sex trafficking. 32 billion of that is in the US alone.
The USA is the largest sex buyer. So when people sit there and think that it's an overseas problem. No, the US Is a problem. Rich people buying children and people selling children, or even adults in the U.S. they are the problem.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: In the U.S. only 1% of child trafficking victims are recovered or identified.
1%.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: That is insane and so sad.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: Approximately 300,000 are sex trafficked children are in the U.S. so more than a quarter million each year. Approximately 400,000 children are reported missing in the U.S. that's about 1100 per day. If you want to get involved with anything, you can reach out to fortify.
That's a local Alabama thing. But if you want something on the national scale, skill, you can reach out to Nick Mick. The national center for Missing and Exploited Children. They're the ones who.
John Walsh, who founded Nick Nick, his son Adam went missing in the 80s, I believe, and he's the one that created America's Most Wanted. And then he, like, he's the one that did all the shows. He's done the hunt, he's done everything else. So Nick Mick is the number one national center for missing and exploited Children. Like it's, it's nationally ran.
So let's talk about who a trafficker is. It can be male or female, young or old, and it could be stranger or family. You have your pimps and your traffickers, your organizers.
There's things called a bottom girl, and that's a victim who's turned into an enforcer. So a lot of times when a girl gets taken by a pimp and says, like, you're going to work this off for me, he uses his bottom girl, who's faithful to him, to enforce it.
Yeah, Familial traffickers. So it's family members selling children and that is very common.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Like the JonBenet Ramsey case.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Which 100 is what happened. He sold her to Epstein.
Motivations, Financial gain, control and power. In 90 of sex trafficking cases. Cases. The sex trafficking recruiter is not a stranger, but known to the victim or even their family.
So the vast majority is somebody that
[00:15:18] Speaker B: they know, which isn't crazy. I couldn't imagine, like, oh, yeah, just have my kid. Here you go.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:23] Speaker B: 20,000. Thanks.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Yep. People do that. They trade for drugs, they trade for other children. So one of the stories we were told was that there's these boy groups where they will trade little boys with each other.
[00:15:34] Speaker B: They're done sexually abusing them, so they just trade them off.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Yeah. So like one, one story of one boy, he was sexually abused by his mom and his stepdad and then he was traded to his neighbors and then his neighbors traded their son to them.
And so there was all that. And then there was another story of a boy whose father was part of the Boy Scouts and so he abused several of the boys there. So obviously we've talked a little bit about technology.
90% of teens use social media and 75% have profiles like their own profiles.
Apps commonly used by traffickers. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Gaming like Roadblocks, Discord, Spotify, which is something I learned and more. There's a list called the Dirty Dozen that you can look up so it's in sexual exploitation.org dirty dozen list. Spotify has a messaging section.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: I didn't even know.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: I didn't either. And they've started using that. So recruitment phrases. If you need to look out for thing people talking to your children, if somebody says, don't tell anyone, I can get you more. You're mature for your age. These are common recruitment tactics.
21% of kindergarten through through second grade children have access to cell phones and that's too high. Do not give your children that access. 44% of tweens admit that they've watched something online parents wouldn't approve of. 22% of teenage girls said they posted nudes or semi nudes or videos of themselves online.
70% of children 7 to 18 have accidentally encountered online pornography, often through a web search while doing homework. 90% of children ages 8 to 16 have seen online pornography. 20% of teenage Internet users have been the target of unwanted sexual solicitation. 31% of kids ages 12 to 18 have lied about their age in order to gain access to a website because there's no way to check it.
69% of teens regularly receive online communications from strangers and don't tell a parent.
One in five teens have engaged in sexting, sending and receiving and forwarding sexually suggestive nudes or nearly nudes through text or email.
One in ten admit to sending these messages to people they don't know. And another thing your children need to know is that they can also be charged because them taking photos of themselves as underage and sending it is distributing child pornography. Sugar babies is a growing thing and it's being used for trafficking and coercion as well. In the top 10 sugar baby universities in the US last year, the University of Alabama was number eight. And I just saw yesterday where a coach was arrested for human trafficking.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: At Alabama.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: Oh, shit.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Yep. So just know that.
Pay attention to sugar babies and all those things. There's a lot going on. A lot of people assume it's just women.
Young boys are a growing group that is being trafficked and a lot of times those who are it are end up commit doing it later.
So we're gonna have somebody come on who's talking about what he's doing to try to make a difference in those young boys lives and get them out of that life at a young age. But he did a study of some male participants and 77.5% were abused at age 8 or younger.
So this is something that's going on.
Definitely something that needs to be talked about. It's a hard topic. It's very dark. It's very heavy.
So if you stayed for this long, thank you for sticking around. It's something that I'm passionate about.
I work with the trafficking Hope team with my church.
We're gonna start doing some more. We've already reached out and started working with domestic violence shelters, but we're going to start working some with some of these trafficking groups as well. Because I think this is something we need to get out there, especially for parents who have no idea what's actually out there. And again, it's scary. And you can't wrap your children in bubbles.
However, you can be aware of the signs and like, prevent them from using certain social media and different stuff that. That could absolutely influence them or hurt, potentially hurt them.
So thanks for listening to us and.
And I know it's a dark topic. So go do something that will make you happy today. Go get that delicious Starbucks or whatever coffee. You love that.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Can we get Starbucks after this?
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: All right. Hungry? I just want food.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Um, so we will see you guys next week. Bye, guys. Bye. This episode is proudly brought to you by the law firm Ryan and Rouse. If you or a loved one have been injured or need legal help for changing family circumstances, contact the personal injury and family law attorneys at Ryan and rouse today at 256-801-1000 or visit them online at www.alabamalaw.com. when your future is on the line, don't go at it alone.
