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Audio Transcript

Mollie Halpern: As the nation recognizes January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month and the crime receives increasing public awareness, the FBI’s caseload grows heavier.

Human trafficking—simply explained as modern day slavery—is the exploitation of a person for sex, domestic servitude, or labor through force, fraud, or coercion.

Calvin Shivers is the chief of the FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children Section, which focuses exclusively on trafficking investigations involving children in the United States and beyond.

Calvin Shivers: Our priority is to identify and recover child victims from sex traffickers. We then focus our efforts on identifying, arresting, and prosecuting those who commit or facilitate this heinous crime.

Halpern: The FBI’s civil rights program handles human trafficking investigations involving adults and foreign children. Unit Chief Stephen Kam says the FBI takes a victim-centered approach to its trafficking cases.

Stephen Kam: It’s a problem that we’ve learned really needs a collaborative approach not only from the investigatory side but in dealing with the needs of the victims when they are rescued—they’ve got some specific needs.

Halpern: In addition to combating the crime through more than 100 Human Trafficking Task Forces across the country…

Shivers: We operate 71 Child Exploitation Task Forces in the United States as well as an international task force comprised of 56 task force officers from 35 countries.

Halpern: The FBI is in its third year of collecting offense and arrest data regarding human trafficking. Reports are available at www.fbi.gov.

If you’re a victim, or know someone who is, call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center Hotline at (888) 373-7888. With FBI, This Week, I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau.

Related information:

-News blog - Human Trafficking Prevention Month: Raising Awareness of a Devastating Crime