Learn about how the physiology of children plays a major role in human trafficking. Dr. Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak discuss how the unique characteristics of children make them prime targets for traffickers. How the brain develops in children, decision making abilities, and effects of trauma all impact children and increase their vulnerability to being trafficked.
Key Points

Human beings are hardwired to form relationships with caregivers at a young age. When adequate caregivers are unavailable to children, they are at risk of forming attachments to human traffickers.
A brain develops from back to front, yet the executive decision-making ability is housed in the prefrontal lobe. Because a brain is not fully developed until around 18-25 years old, children are incapable of truly measuring the consequences or risks involved with their decisions.
Children who are at risk not only lack good judgment, emotional balance, impulse control, and consideration of consequences from an undeveloped brain, but also are very emotional in their response, allowing for them to be more easily pimped.
Typical awareness strategies do not work as effectively for adolescents, we need to create defensive strategies to create a better community response through empowering parents, community members, and children.

Resources

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
Netsmartz.org
National Human Trafficking Hotline
GCWJ Resources
Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force









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Transcript
Dave [00:00:00] You're listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 4, recorded in May 2011. Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:29] And my name is Sandra Morgan.

Dave [00:00:31] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking, which amazingly ended at the exact same time the music did. Somehow the timing all worked out, Sandie.

Sandie [00:00:44] Great. Hey, let's talk about human trafficking.

Dave [00:00:48] Alright, sounds good. So, with that, we are going to talk some more today, Sandie2, about kids and how kids are unfortunately very involved in the human trafficking issue. And last time we talked about just scratching the surface on how kids are involved in some of the issues surrounding how we think about kids who are involved with trafficking, some of the statistics, and some of the language that we use. And I know today you'd like us to jump in a little bit more to some of the, and I'm going to try and say this word right, physiology behind how this happens.

Sandie [00:01:28] OK. Yeah. Last week we had a chance to talk about the fact that we don't have to prove force, fraud, or coercion when it's a minor under the age of 18. And we defined the victimization of a child being sold for commercial sex acts as commercial sexual exploitation of children. We aren't talking about kids who voluntarily become "prostitutes". We want to move away from that kind of terminology. But helping us understand how a child thinks and their brain development is a critical part of seeing them as victims, not as perpetrators, because they may come across as very willing participants in the illicit sale of commercial sex. And so, some people would think that they need to be prosecuted as perpetrators, and not rescued as victims. So, understanding how they think is part of the process. So, let's talk about that. I think one of the things to begin with is to understand that human beings are hard-wired to form relationships with caregivers. So, what did we talk about the risk factors with kids last week?

Dave [00:02:52] Well,