STAKEHOLDER TESTIMONY

I was honored to attend the First Lady’s NCPHST event on April 3, 2022. Human Sex Trafficking is very real, and I support the efforts of First Lady Edwards, the Governor, and all of our stakeholders in raising awareness to prevent and stop trafficking. I appreciate the leadership of NCPHST and the resources they have leveraged to rescue victims and prosecute those responsible for these horrendous crimes.

It was an honor to attend the NCPHST event. Seeing so many leaders come together to learn more about sex trafficking was so impactful to me as a survivor. Allowing survivors to share their lived experience was my favorite part and I hope to see this continue at future NCPHST events.

I genuinely enjoyed attending the 2022 NCPHST with other key stake holders in the community. I greatly appreciated the inclusivity of Survivor voices. This event brought awareness and prevention to the community on a very large scale; educating key persons how to identify potential victims of trafficking and the next steps to report. This is definitely an event that should be repeated annually!

We’re so grateful to the First Lady and her team for hosting the NCPHST Human Trafficking Awareness event here in New Orleans during the NCAA Tournament. As a participant, the survivor stories that were shared will forever impact me and inspire me to continue to fight against human trafficking in my community. The event provided information necessary to ensure our hospitality workers can help end human trafficking in Louisiana.

The biggest impact of the NCPHST event for me personally was how it put a face to human trafficking. When you hear human trafficking, you think of young girls being kidnapped in foreign countries or labor trafficking. The panelist who were brave enough to share their stories completely changed my perspective. So many of them reminded me of the patients in our community that come to us for help and I immediately started thinking through potential scenarios where we likely missed signs because we had no idea what we were looking for. It also shed light to how complex these situations are and why it is so difficult for victims to get out. After the event, I felt even more compelled to not only complete our project, but to make sure we get it right for the victims.

Being a part of the NCPHST’s human trafficking awareness event was awe inspiring and enlightening. To witness First Lady Edwards, Governor Edwards and several other sitting Governors and their wives stand in solidarity against human trafficking was a huge milestone for this country. Additionally, the knowledge learned from U.S. Attorney Ronald Gathe and survivor leaders who spoke on the panel will continually be used to inform programs and policies. I’m forever thankful to First Lady Edwards for her relentless leadership against this heinous crime.

I’m very grateful as an emergency physician to have had the time and opportunity to learn and listen to the survivors’ whole story told in their own words, and I hope I can carry that forward into my practice when encountering patients who may be suffering from similar circumstances. The input of survivors of human trafficking must be key to our strategy to fight this terrible crime. They are the experts and we must listen to them and learn from their experiences.

Realizing that large sporting events foster an environment for traffickers to exploit their victims, the NCPHST event provided valuable resources and training. LSP was pleased to join the NCPHST in the fight by assisting victims of human trafficking and dismantling a multi-state human trafficking ring. LSP remains committed to aggressively working to identify victims and providing resources through our non-governmental partners.