The trucking industry is one place where caring people on the front lines can make a huge impact to end trafficking. Sandra Morgan, the Director of the Global Center for Women & Justice and Dave Stachowiak, one of the Center's board members, welcome Kendis Paris, National Director of Truckers Against Trafficking. Kendis speaks about the important work her organization is doing to raise awareness about trafficking and why the trucking industry has an important role.
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Transcript
Dave: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast my name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie: And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave: And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues to be a voice and make a difference in ending human trafficking.  And Sandie I am so excited today that we have a guest with us who, I know we’re both going to learn a lot from, and our audience is going to learn a lot from.  Through a lens that I don’t think we’ve looked at much, we’ve talked about some of the things that we are going to talk about in the episode today a little bit but this is just a really neat thing that is going on that can help us all to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking.

Sandie: Well the Global Center for Women and Justice welcome you Kendis Paris to our Ending Human Trafficking podcast and why don’t we start off with how you got involved with fighting trafficking in the trucking industry.  So, tell us a little bit about how you started out doing this?  This doesn’t sound like the average soccer mom kind of job.

Kendis: (Laughs) No, No, really ironically it was my mother Lynn Thompson who came up with the initial idea for Truckers Against Trafficking.  Uh, my neighbor and I had put on a Human Trafficking Awareness Conference in Denver, Colorado; and she attended it and one of the workshop leaders was talking about training gas station employees along our nation’s highways. And she said that combined it with the statistic that the innocence lost, uh the innocence lost things that the FBI do between 2004 and 2009 because this is when she came up with the idea was in 2009. They were finding women and children being forced into prostitution in numerous places. But one of them was among our nation’s highways.  So, she combined that with the gas station idea and said we really should be targeting the trucking industry.  And that is really how TAT was born, and uh at the time our family had a ministry called “Chapter 61 Ministries”, uh was a very small mission which was to fight the exploitation of human beings worldwide, yes very small, very reachable.  Uh, but TAT became its primary initiative and that started in ’09 of March.  And uh became its own fiber one C3 just last September 2011.  And that’s, that’s really how the whole thing got going.

Sandie: So, let’s start with um, I saw the video, the training video that Truckers Against Trafficking produced, and the story in it; the real winner in the story is recognizing what one person can do to change another person’s life.  And I, I just I want to know more about Trucker Willie, can you tell us that story?

Kendis:  Absolutely.  Uh, so Sherri and her cousin Krissy, uh 15, 14-year-old kidnapped off the side of the road.  They were actually forced into prostitution and housed across town in Iowa, excuse me, Ohio.  And about a week into that their pimp recruits a trucker unfortunately, to transport them across state lines where they end up at a truck stop.  And Sherri is actually the one working the lot with an older woman.  And uh, and Krissy her cousin was actually in the car with her pimp.