Category | News

Center for the Investigation of Human Trafficking finds home at KSU

Published on April 15, 2008 by The Sentinel

    A center designed to map and monitor human trafficking in the state
of Georgia is in its beginning stages here at KSU.  The proposed Center
for the Investigation of Human Trafficking would allow students and
faculty to collaborate on research projects to map and monitor human
trafficking in the state.

    Keisha Hoerner, department chair of KSU’s First-Year
Programs, said students in the first-year program got the idea of the
center after reading David Batstone’s “Not for Sale,” a book that
defines and explains the issue of human trafficking in the U.S.

    “Right now we are in the planning stages,” said
Hoerner. “We are putting together a proposal that will spell out what
the center will look like, the budget, where we will get the funding
from and how we would integrate the center into what KSU is already
doing with other centers we have.”

    The goals of the center are essentially threefold:
(1) to provide accurate and timely information on human trafficking
within the state; (2) to participate in a coalition of law enforcement
agencies, social services organizations, faith-based groups and
researchers working to reduce human trafficking; and (3) to serve as a
resource center for students, faculty, staff and community members
wanting to get engaged in the fight to end human trafficking.

    While they are in the discussion stage, Hoerner and
others here at KSU have already started working to inform and educate
others about mapping. “There’s so much momentum to engage in mapping,
and such an incredible need, that we have decided to start it as a
community project that will utilize the talents and interests of KSU
students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members,” she said.

    Last month they officially kicked off a slavery
mapping program in Kennesaw, according to Mark Hoerner. The Hoerners
serve as Georgia State Directors for the Not for Sale Campaign. “The
slavery mapping program here in Kennesaw focuses on identifying
possible situations in which people are being forced to work against
their will, either in an industrial, agricultural or sexual format,” he
said. “In San Francisco, students concentrated on identifying massage
parlors that were doubling as brothels populated by women (often young
girls) being held against their will.”

    They will do the same here. “Only we expect to
investigate typical businesses as well,” he said. “Atlanta is a highly
attractive city for human trafficking - its number one in the world for
child sex slavery - and we want to put an end to that reputation.”

    “Not for Sale” has really worked well with the Year
of the Atlantic World theme and the Third Annual Student Leadership
Training for Peace conference, though it was not planned that way.

    “We are seeing some really great synchronicity on
campus,” Mr. Hoerner said. “It absolutely stuns people when we tell
them that more than 27 million people are enslaved today and that
roughly half of those are children.” He explained that when people
think of slaves in chains, they think of the countless Africans who
were abused and murdered because they were viewed as a commodity.

    “It’s hard to conceptualize given the way we have
been taught about history. Lincoln spoke and suddenly everyone was free
and equal, right? Yet, right now, I can go to the border in Burma and
buy a teenager for $3. I can literally order a child from Cuba and
have him brought to my doorstep for just $500. That’s a chilling
thought. It’s for that child that I stand up to do what we are doing
here.”