Human Trafficking Research Lab @Millikin

  At our Human Trafficking Prevention Month panel on January 30th, I was presented with the opportunity to interview with a local news station WCIA in Champaign Urbana. I answered a handful of questions ranging from what the goal of the panel discussion was and why it was important. Ultimately everything I said got cut down to a 5-second clip, but honestly, I was pleasantly surprised they used anything I said because I was very nervous and rambling a lot. They also got my name spelled right, so it was nice to see they listened when I told them the proper spelling of my name. It was pretty cool though, I had never been on camera before, and I don’t mind talking. More than anything, I knew my colleagues really didn’t want to do the interview so I was happy to do it. All in all, it was a really cool experience and the panel went pretty well. We had survivors of trafficking sharing their stories and while that was pretty hard to hear, I think it really resonated with the people in attend

Another group from my PO 323 Human Trafficking class made flyers and notecards to provide information on different types of human trafficking in the community and display the hotline. One of the flyers is a general human trafficking flyer and then the others focused on child trafficking and sex trafficking more specifically. We will have copies of these flyers to hand out at our panel discussion on the 30th and they will be posted around Millikin University too in order to raise awareness.              

The winter break offered a couple of rewarding and engaging experiences in the local community through work in the lab. First, I was lucky to join Dr. Dean on an interview at WAND News. The segment was focusing on human trafficking awareness day and the lab’s victim’s voices panel that was held in January. The interview also covered some of the basic research that the lab does and some lesser-known facts regarding human trafficking. As a local, it was an extremely rewarding experience to be able to share some research and information regarding human trafficking with my local community on the news station that I have watched throughout my life. I was also able to deliver the proclamation dedicating January as Human Trafficking Awareness Month in Decatur at the Decatur City Council meeting. This was an extremely rewarding experience, as I got the proclamation signed and approved by the mayor of Decatur, and I was an active part in bringing human trafficking awareness to my hometown. It i

One benefit of teaching at a university for eight years is that students graduate and get interesting jobs in the community. One of my recent Millikin graduates produces the 4 pm local news show on WAND in town and asked me and my one of my students to come in and talk for Human Trafficking Prevention Month. We were invited to go live from the studio at WAND and it was my first time doing live news in the studio but it was such a great opportunity to talk about the lab, our research, and our upcoming panel discussion at Millikin. You can watch our segment here on WAND  and below is a behind the scenes look at me and my students past and present! So proud of everything that they achieve and do in our community.

January 11th is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day and #WearBlueDay. Through this initiative, the public is invited to raise awareness of human trafficking by taking photos of themselves, friends, family, and colleagues wearing blue clothing and sharing them on social media along with the #WearBlueDay hashtag. So I wore blue and spent the afternoon in Springfield at the Statewide Terrorism Intelligence Center for our Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force January meeting. We heard survivor advocate Khalila Riga speak and learned about how to better serve survivors with our anti-trafficking work. I also worked the room with our flyers encouraging people to come to our panel discussion on January 30th and got lots of compliments on my awareness raising tote bag!

For our seventh annual Human Trafficking Prevention Month panel discussion this year we went with a theme of “Survivor Voices.” The survivor-focused panel discussion will feature survivors of sex and labor trafficking from around Central Illinois. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities of a survivor-led movement and how the anti-trafficking movement can work to include survivor voices in the future. The panel will be on Tuesday, January 30, 2024, at 6:00 p.m. in the Bob and Debi Johnston Banquet Rooms on the third floor of the University Commons on Millikin’s campus. The panel will round out events held around the United States for Human Trafficking Prevention Month 2024.  For the safety of the survivors on this panel, registration is required for this event. Please register here: https://bit.ly/millikinpanel . This event is sponsored by the Division of Student Affairs and the Political Science Department at Millikin University. For additional information, please see the Fa

I was up nice and early this morning to be on the Byers & Co show on WSOY radio with student Diana Terneus one of the students from my Human Trafficking class. We talked about the awareness campaign the class created for our final class project as part of Human Trafficking Prevention Month! You can listen to our segment here:

The next group from my PO 323 Human Trafficking class project created three different Public Service Announcements (PSA) as part of our awareness campaign created by students for Human Trafficking Prevention Month this January. They worked with Professor Meister who runs  WJMU The Quad  Millikin University's college radio station who helped them record, edit, and add background music to the PSAs which range from thirty second to one minute. The students wrote and narrate the PSA citing statistics and list the local Center for Prevention of Abuse hotline. The first PSA is a general announcement about trafficking and you listen to hear it here . The second PSA is about labor trafficking and you can listen to it here . The third PSA is about sex trafficking and features a case from here in Central Illinois which you can listen to here .

For the month of January on the blog, I will run through the different group projects from the awareness campaign created by students in my PO 323 Human Trafficking class for Human Trafficking Prevention Month. One group designed stickers for coffee sleeves and sent emails asking local coffee shops asking if they would be willing to put the stickers on their sleeves during January. Thankfully, locally owned and operated  Coffee Run 121 wrote back and said that they would be willing to put them on their coffee sleeves at their two Decatur locations. Trying to figure out how to print them professionally and cheaply was another challenge but thankfully our duplicating department at Millikin worked with me so that I bought the stickers and they charged me just for the printing of over 300 stickers. All in all this saved me around $150 from a professional sticker printer and I think the results turned out great. Stop by the Coffee Run 121 locations at Harristown 4314 W Main Street or Decat

January is National Human Trafficking Prevention Month so last semester students in my PO 323 Human Trafficking class created an awareness campaign with fliers, public service announcements for the radio, a social media campaign, website resources, and coffee sleeves that will be posted throughout  the month to educate our community about human trafficking. Every year since 2010, the  President of the United States has dedicated the month to raise awareness about human trafficking and to educate the public about how to identify and prevent this crime. So my students took their knowledge about human trafficking patterns, statistics, stereotypes, and laws and put them to use designing a campaign. We will be posting about each part of the campaign on social media and this blog.....stay tuned!