Over 27.5 million children and adults worldwide are lured, coerced, or forced into sex or labor exploitation, according to the U.S. Department of State. Many go unidentified. “Human trafficking is a huge public health problem, and health care professionals can make a huge difference,” said Dr. Hudson Santos Jr., dean, professor, and Dolores J. Chambreau RN Endowed Chair at the University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies. “Recognizing signs of human trafficking is one of the first steps for us to be effective in combatting it. If we cannot identify human trafficking, we cannot stop it.”
During National Human Trafficking Prevention Month, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office (SAO) convened its Annual SAO Forum on Human Trafficking at the University of Miami for the first time, thanks to an invite from Dean Santos. The half-day gathering on January 21, themed “Healthcare Heroes: Making a Difference for Survivors,” received additional support from the Maria G. Lamas Featured Speaker Series for Human Trafficking Education and Prevention Endowment.
Dean Santos, a nurse scientist known for investigating the impacts of social determinants on maternal and child health, thanked Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle for being the “driving force” of the event, which included expert panels chaired by former University president Dr. Donna E. Shalala, in whose namesake Shalala Student Center the event took place, and by nursing innovator JoNell Potter, M.S.N. ’87, Ph.D. ’03, a distinguished two-time alumna of the school.
State Attorney Fernandez Rundle, who established the SAO Human Trafficking Task Force in 2012, thanked Dean Santos for his “vision and determination in inviting all of us here,” underscoring the importance of coalition-building with an ever-evolving network of partnerships from the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Camillus House, and the Women’s Fund Miami-Dade, among many others. “All of those partnerships we’ve been building throughout this decade really make a difference,” she said. “Today we’re forming a partnership with our medical professionals, our nurses.”
Over 400 people attended, including Miami Interim Provost Dr. Willy Prado, Miami-Dade County Public Schools Board Chair Mari Tere Rojas and other school board officials, police chiefs from a number of departments, health leaders, community advocates, nurses, educators, law enforcement officers, first responders, volunteers, and countless other key stakeholders.
“When I look out on this room, I see what you see: collaboration, partnerships, friends, people who are all on a mission together,” said State Attorney Fernandez Rundle. She offered a comprehensive overview of several multidisciplinary, collaborative efforts to eradicate human trafficking, which represents a $152 billion criminal enterprise worldwide. “Trafficking is about profit,” she said. “Anybody who can make money by selling our kids becomes a predator.”
Her office’s dedicated Human Trafficking Unit and Task Force, she explained, grew out of a 2011 report that Florida had the nation’s third-most calls to the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline (888-373-7888), operated by Polaris Project. Moreover, Miami was Florida’s trafficking epicenter, yet her office had just three human trafficking cases at the time. “That began our journey,” she said. “We’ve learned a lot.” They have since filed over 906 human trafficking criminal cases, freeing 1,257 victims connected with those cases. In 2024 alone, they made 104 human trafficking-related arrests, provided comprehensive services to over 105 trafficking survivors, and fielded 539 calls to the local trafficking hotline (305-FIX-STOP) created by her office.
Fernandez Rundle introduced Dr. Potter, chair of the forum’s community panel, as an “extraordinary hero” who, along with her Miller School of Medicine colleague Dr. Panagiota “Pat” Caralis, established the Miller School T.H.R.I.V.E. Clinic (Trafficking Healthcare Resources and Interdisciplinary Victim Services and Education) in 2015. Dr. Potter and the panelists highlighted important trafficking-related health services and initiatives in Miami-Dade County. Luis Diaz, assistant superintendent at Miami-Dade County Public Schools, reported on mandatory human trafficking awareness training received by hundreds of school resource officers. Amanda Altman, executive director of Kristi House, shared that in its 30 years the nationally accredited children’s advocacy center has helped over 30,000 abused and trafficked children. Project GOLD, Kristi House’s program for sex trafficked children and young adults, will for the first time be able to help male trafficking victims through a federal grant partnership with T.H.R.I.V.E., she added.
Dr. Katrina Ciraldo, T.H.R.I.V.E.’s medical director and a Miller School assistant professor, said the clinic received 197 patient referrals in the past year, with each case requiring a wide range of complex health interventions, including prenatal care. “Sex trafficking, the opioid crisis, and the HIV epidemic are intersecting public health emergencies,” she said. “Traffickers often exploit addiction as a mechanism to control women and men.” Dr. Stephen Symes, associate professor of clinical medicine at the Miller School, is the medical director for the Center for Haitian Studies, a clinic for uninsured and refugee populations founded in 1988. “We want to make sure health providers start to learn about these issues [of trafficking] and start to learn about them in a practical and feasible and culturally aware way,” he said. The final panelist was program planner analyst Meghan Scott, of BRIGHT, an online resource referral network available through the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Risk to Resilience Lab at the University of South Florida.
Dr. Shalala opened the second panel by sharing how she first became aware of trafficking. It was the 1980s and a student came to her, seeking help for her sister, whom she believed to be at risk. “We were able to stop what was going to be a major trauma in our community, but the services weren’t there,” she said. She has worked to raise awareness ever since. “There’s an African proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ The message here is, ‘It takes a village to save a child.’ What Kathy [Fernandez Rundle] and all of you have been able to do is to make that village and the services more seamless, because that’s the key. You can have a lot of services in a community, you can have a lot of participants and a lot of partners, but if everybody’s not talking to each other, if everybody’s not working together, we cannot save the children in our community.”
Shalala introduced panelists Dean Santos; Patricia Sánchez Abril, School of Law interim dean and professor of business law at the Miami Herbert Business School; Dr. Karin Wilkins, dean of the School of Communication; Dr. Laura Kohn-Wood, dean of the School of Education and Human Development; and Dr. Latha Chandran, executive dean for education and policy, Bernard J. Fogel Founding Chair of the Department of Medical Education, and director of the Academy of Medical Education Scholars at the Miller School of Medicine. Each described how their respective schools are educating students and the community about trafficking. They also expressed interest in coordinating efforts, such as cross-listing related courses.
“This is the exact reason for this panel,” said Dean Santos. “This is what nurses do, bring people together and address social inequities. Bringing the schools together, we should think about how we can address human trafficking from different lenses with the same goal in mind.”
He praised Dr. Potter’s impact with T.H.R.I.V.E. as “the perfect example of nursing-led care that has evolved into an interprofessional clinic serving people at the most vulnerable place in their lives.” He also recognized two School of Nursing and Health Studies faculty, Dr. Deborah Salani and Dr. Betty Valdes, for creating an award-winning, simulation-based human trafficking awareness program at the school’s S.H.A.R.E. Simulation Hospital Advancing Research & Education®. Currently all master’s and psych-mental health nursing students take the course before graduation. Since 2019 nearly 1,000 health care providers, including advanced practice nurses, undergraduate students, and international practitioners have completed the curriculum, which addresses best practices for identifying, understanding, and responding to human trafficking cases in the clinical setting.
The forum closed with an exciting joint announcement. “Dr. Santos has a brilliant idea, said Fernandez Rundle. “He is [proposing to] establish a specific nursing education certificate in human trafficking.” Dean Santos elaborated. “The idea is to bring this full circle," he said. “Nurses [in Florida] go into practice without a requirement for human trafficking training until two years later, when they have to renew their license. Our goal is to close that gap. We believe every health care provider or every person looking forward to being an allied health professional should have basic knowledge of human trafficking identification because it takes a whole village to identify, report, and catch the case, then treat the people who have been victimized.”
He also announced plans to work with University alumnae Heidi Schaeffer, M.D. ’98, and Marie O. Etienne, D.N.P. ’10, both of whom were at the forum, to develop potential legislation requiring pre-licensure nurses to complete human trafficking training before they can sit for their licensing exams. Dr. Etienne is president of the Florida Nurses Association. Dr. Schaeffer, a Visiting Scholar who established the school’s Dr. Heidi Schaeffer Academic Lab for Education & Training Against Human Trafficking, has helped pass local, state, and national human trafficking legislation.
Human trafficking education enables nurses to do what they do best—“support those families in getting back on their feet so they can have fulfilling lives,” concluded Dean Santos. “The good news is we already have the clinical expertise and curriculum at the school. Now the work is to figure out how we transform this resource to extrapolate it across the state and hopefully across the nation. That’s our call for action moving forward.”
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Related Stories
https://news.miami.edu/sonhs/stories/2024/01/we-can-all-do-something.html
https://news.miami.edu/sonhs/stories/2023/06/identifying-human-trafficking.html
https://news.miami.edu/sonhs/stories/2023/01/lecture-recognizing-human-trafficking.html
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