Unfortunately, it's very common for the victim to take a lot of the blame in human trafficking cases. Sandra Morgan, the Director of the Global Center for Women & Justice and Dave Stachowiak, one of the Center's board members, interview Amelia Franck Meyer, CEO of Anu Family Services, to learn about her efforts to combat trafficking in Minnesota and Wisconsin through her passionate advocacy for children and families.
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Transcript
Dave: You’re listening to the Human Trafficking Podcast; this is episode number 28 airing on May 10th, 2012. Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, my name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie: And I am Sandie Morgan, director for the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University.

Dave: And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice and make a difference in ending human trafficking, and Sandie we are back today with another interview to help us to maybe gain even more knowledge so that we can study the issues, be a voice and ultimately be able to end human trafficking and contribute to that making a difference that we always talk about so I am so glad to be back with you and back with our guest today.

Sandie: Well I will tell you a little about our guest, first of all she was our research presenter at our March Ensure Justice Conference on standing together to end exploitation of girls and she received really high marks from everybody that attended the workshop, and in fact if you are interested in buying a copy of her workshop, you can do that at GCWJ.vangaurd.edu but let me introduce to you Amelia Frank Meyer, she has been the CEO of Anno Family Services since 2001, that’s a child welfare agency located in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and for those of you who listened to our last podcast, we were talking about not calling these kids terms that put them into juvenile delinquency but finding the opportunities and making opportunities by giving them designations that place them squarely in a child welfare context. That’s exactly what Amelia does. She is an advanced, practiced social worker, a licensed independent social worker; she has a master’s degree in social work from University of Minnesota and a master’s degree in sociology from Illinois and a graduate certificate from the University of Minnesota. Dave is always excited, Amelia, to meet fellow friends from Illinois and he was excited when he found out that Illinois was the first state to pass the law that makes it impossible to prosecute any child under the age of 18 for prostitution no matter what. So we are very happy to have you here, welcome.

Amelia: Glad to be here.

Sandie: Well, when you did our workshop for us at the Ensure Justice Conference, the title of your workshop was called “Stop Blaming the Victim.” And we talked about the kinds of baggage that comes with terms like ‘teen prostitute’ and ‘child prostitute’ and what that does so that people say things that are really unreasonable, a clinician says ‘well, the first time she was forced, but after that it was her choice.’ Or ‘well, you know, she is dressed like that, what does she expect?’ so we have lots of evidence that people do blame the victim and we have people who are trying to be part of the solution that even blame the victim because she doesn’t follow through on what we advised her to do. So what we want to hear from you today is, we want to know why we shouldn’t blame the victim, what is her experience, what can we do to better understand the victim?

Amelia: Well, I’m just struck with this group of girls how much it reminds me of Stockholm Syndrome and the work that has been don...