USD Magazine Spring 2020

Across campus , the university community is combatting human trafficking on multiple fronts

by Karen Gross

s an associate professor at the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, Ami Carpenter specializes in conflict prevention and resolution. Like most San Diegans, her knowledge of human trafficking and its grip on San Diego was relatively super- ficial back in 2010, when she was invited to use her negotiating skills to help a disparate group of community stakeholders figure out how to face the growing challenge. “I got brought into this small group of people who represented different sectors, who understood they needed to work together but didn’t really know how,” Carpenter says. “I came in as a con- flict resolution analyst to help the conversation move forward. That’s what I did for two years.” By the end of those two years, the group — which included law enforcement, social service providers, victim rights advocates and others — managed to form a countywide umbrella advisory coun- cil. And Carpenter, along with Professor Jamie Gates of Point Loma Nazarene University, became co-chairs of its subcommittee on research and data. “I asked District Attorney Summer Stephan, ‘What can Jamie and I do? We’re academics. We study numbers,’” Carpenter illustrations by Neil Shigley A

remembers. “And she said, ‘We need numbers. We know there’s a problem, but we don’t know the scope of the problem.’” What she and Gates uncovered during their seminal three-year study revealed much bigger numbers and a much more daunting problem than almost anyone expected. Their findings also shattered some widespread misconceptions: that perpetrators are more often black, that the issue is mainly tied to organized gang activity and that it most often involves smuggling people across the border. The study found that human trafficking and sexual exploitation of children existed in every part of the San Diego region and estimated the scale of the region’s underground sex economy at $810 million a year. Its perpetrators and victims included people from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, with a relatively even split between white, black and Hispanic facilitators. One hundred percent of the 20 schools they surveyed had evidence of sex trafficking connected to students, in both wealthy and impoverished neighborhoods. “The first thing that happened was, we got a lot of press cover- age,” Carpenter says. “And we did that intentionally because we wanted to raise awareness.”

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USD MAGAZINE