By Linda C. Ashar, JD, Faculty, Dr. Wallace E. Boston School of Business and
Steve Wynne, JD, Founder, Blink3, and Faculty, Dr. Wallace E. Boston School of Business
More than 25 million people around the world are estimated to be victims of human trafficking. University Linda Ashar interviews professor Dr. Steve Wynne, an international legal consultant and associate professor, about the non-profit he founded to help combat human trafficking.
Learn about Blink3, a nonprofit initiative created to help victims signal for help using a nonverbal SOS by blinking three times. Blink3 also offers free educational courses to raise awareness and prevent human trafficking. The conversation highlights the importance of public awareness and collective action in addressing this global issue.
Listen to the Episode:
Subscribe to The Everyday Scholar
Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Read the Transcript:
Linda Ashar: Hello everyone, this is Linda Ashar. Welcome to my podcast. Today, I am honored to be speaking with my colleague Steve Wynne. Steve is an international legal consultant and associate professor in the School of Business at American Public University. Steve, welcome and thank you for giving your time to this podcast.
Steve Wynne: Absolutely, Linda, I’m very honored that you would ask me to be part of this podcast. Human trafficking is such a horrific issue and growing so much that we really need to bring this to the forefront.
Linda Ashar: I could not agree more. And you are a person of many talents with a commitment to betterment of the world we live in, and this is an example of the many things that you do. And that’s what we’re talking about today, your mission in the battle against human trafficking.
Steve has spearheaded a project that is a nonprofit organization called Blink3. That is one word with a capital B-L-I-N-K numeral 3. We will be talking about this wonderful program today but first, share with us some background. What is human trafficking and its current picture in the US as well as globally? I think, it’s important we understand what we’re talking about.
Steve Wynne: Exactly. And when I first started researching this, I was shocked at the level of human trafficking on this planet. We think of slavery as being gone in this country, but it’s in every nation around the world, in every big city and small town here. It is estimated that there are more than 25 million human beings across the globe right now who are being denied their fundamental rights to freedom.
Human trafficking is present in every country on the planet, and increasingly on the rise. Every 30 seconds a child somewhere is stolen from their parents or voluntarily walks away. The human traffickers have become so sophisticated and it’s such a profitable crime that it’s now part of organized crime.
With drug trafficking, you can bring the drugs across the border once and only sell it once, but with human beings, you can bring them across the border and sell them thousands of times. So, it is truly becoming the number one global crime on the planet. It’s just so profitable with so little risk that it is really the chosen of not only the pimps locally or the strip clubs locally that basically take away the rights of these women, but literally human slaves taking people from one country, bringing them to another either for labor, hard labor, or working in a nail salon, or something like that. Working in the construction industry, something along those lines. They’re brought in, and they’re sold and they don’t have paperwork, and they are basically held captive, and it’s even worse when we get into the sex crimes.
But one of the things we wanted to do with Blink3 is to teach people about this without scaring them. So, when we move on and look at more of the issues with human trafficking, we look at who’s involved. It is organized crime, local players in the sex industry, street gangs, just the regular gangs out there are getting into it, abusive partners do it, as well as family members.
Linda Ashar: Well, it’s clearly about the money. Aside from the aspect of certain personalities that like to be dominant and predate for the psychological fun of it, we know that those people are out there, but the real driving force of this global, sick practice is money.
Steve Wynne: $150 billion a year.
Linda Ashar: Who is really profiting?
Steve Wynne: It’s the higher ups in the organized crimes. Obviously, someone’s uncle, if they’re selling them is profiting too, but it’s really the higher ups in organized crime. And, in ways, the people who are luring these kids away from their homes and grooming them are also part of the problem because they’re under threat as well.
If they don’t work for the organized crime organization, just like in a gang, they will get beaten, or harmed, or killed as well. So, pretty much everyone involved in this trade, except for the higher ups, is really being coerced, is really part of human trafficking because most of the people who are out there snatching people away and grooming them really don’t want to be part of it either. But again, it is so profitable and when it is that profitable, it really takes over.
Linda Ashar: Let’s try to think of a case and follow it through. Do you have some examples you could share that puts a picture to this?
Steve Wynne: Sadly, I have way too many examples, but one that sticks into my mind was a girl here in the United States was captured by a truly evil human being. Months later, police found on the dark web an advertisement that this man was selling this human being. I guess, he had become too close with her, and he could no longer abuse her in the way he wanted to. He started having feelings for her, so he felt he had to sell her.
Thankfully, the police were able to get in, arrest him and save her from this situation but, of course, she will never be the same. She was basically taken out of a torture room. And her mother was very, very happy to have her back, but so dismayed when she found out that her daughter was for sale for $500 on the dark web, that that was the only value they put on this human life.
Now again, when someone’s working for them, it can be $500 or $1,000 every time they do a transaction, every time they sell the person. The devaluation of human life as if this is not even a human, is what made me have to get into this when I saw it, I had to do something to try to help.
Linda Ashar: So, this man was selling her services in his room, or was he using her for himself initially?
Steve Wynne: Both. They will keep them and then they will sell them to make some money, but also keep them as their own…
Linda Ashar: Slave.
Steve Wynne: Yes, slave, exactly right.
Linda Ashar: So, is the psychological aspect of that to train them to be a slave and then, be able to sell them compliant?
Steve Wynne: Yes. In reality, we don’t even know the full range of the statistics. We believe right now that only 1% are able to escape. If only 1% are really telling us what’s going on, and 99% are still imprisoned we don’t have the full picture. But some of the reasons that they stay is insecurity or embarrassment, or fear of retaliation, or intimidation. These people will say, “If you don’t come and do this for me, then I will expose these pictures that you gave to me. Or I will kill your family.” It’s all about coercion and keeping them silent and keeping them complacent so that they do whatever is asked of them. And quite often, they’re turned into addicts as well.
Linda Ashar: Right. I’m sure that our listeners are wondering why isn’t law enforcement more effective considering what we’ve just heard about the size and numbers involved versus the percentage that we know about? I think you said something like 1%. And the inability of people who are in the trade conduits to be able to do anything for themselves.
Steve Wynne: Law enforcement just doesn’t have enough resources. It’s basically that simple a problem. It’s like the drug trade. We’ve been fighting the war on drugs for how many years now? It’s just so profitable that people are willing to put themselves on the line to make that money and to take others in. I’m not sure that we will ever truly solve it because if there is a market for human beings, then there will be a supply of human beings. Someone will come up and fill that supply.
What we want to do is help law enforcement because quite often they have a very difficult task because a girlfriend may not say, “I’m in an abusive relationship and I’m being sold,” because if she does, she may get beaten even worse when she goes home. It’s that fear of retaliation against them, or their own family, that keeps them silent. So quite often law enforcement just doesn’t have the information they need, and this is another reason we came up with Blink3 to help law enforcement as well.
Linda Ashar: You’re beginning to touch on how you became involved Steven, I’d like to hear more about that. And I certainly can hear the passion in your voice. How did you get involved and in Blink3, what’s the background of that before we get into Blink3 itself?
Steve Wynne: I said was looking to help with human trafficking and I found an organization called Anti-Trafficking International, fantastic organization, which is trying to spread prevention and awareness education so that at least we understand this issue. I’ve been working with them for a few years and I came up with a program that I thought was helpful to them and they didn’t have the budget to run with it, so I decided to run with it on my own.
But some of the reasons that I was doing it is because, as I said, they don’t even have to snatch a child off the playground anymore. They actually use very highly advanced techniques to lure their victims away from the safety of their home. They use techniques like love bombing. One in six children in the US right now has been approached by a human trafficker online already. This is how common it is.
They will try to get or groom tens of thousands of people just looking for a few who are insecure. And they will use these techniques like love bombing, where they overwhelm the victim with affection, adoration, gifts, and love. Or they’ll do something like gaslighting where they make victims question their sense of reality or sanity. “Negging” is another technique where they cause the potential victim to feel bad, or worthless about themselves. They also use guilt tripping where they make the victims feel like they should do more to help the trafficker, especially in a romantic, or other type of relationship where “I can’t pay my rent, but if you sleep with this guy, I’ll get enough money to pay my rent.” They also use emotional blackmail where they can use threats of suicide or sending illicit photos to family or friends. And then, there’s the outright threats where “if you don’t do what I ask you to do, I will kill you and your family.” It is that bad.
Linda Ashar: You’ve described some of these things that we know is for sex trafficking. What are some of the other areas? There’s labor. How does that work?
Steve Wynne: It really is a situation where people are brought to another country. They’ll do either through, “Hey, we have a great job for you in the United Arab Emirates. You can be a model and make so much money.” And as soon as they get on the plane and they fly there, they are now a human slave and will never see their family again. Exactly what happens with that person really depends on their worth and their value. Sometimes they’ll become domestic house workers, or slaves where they basically get paid nothing, live in a small quarters, have enough to eat, but are human slaves in that way. Others will bring it into manufacturing areas, or like in this country, nail salons, or even kitchen workers may be people who are trafficked. And it’s very difficult to find out if they’re trafficked because some of them don’t speak the language, some of them don’t know that they’re being trafficked, some of them are actually happy to be in the country and working, so they don’t even understand they have that they are being held against their will in a way.
Linda Ashar: Yeah, well, I think it’s important that we understand just how broad this servitude is.
Steve Wynne: Exactly. And it can happen with sex workers too. Women will feel empowered that they can make more money when they’re doing exotic dancing, or other type of sex work, but if most of the money is going to someone else, they don’t understand they’re truly a human slave, they’re in human trafficking. So even getting the victim to understand it can be difficult at times.
Linda Ashar: I have read that the targets are a broad range of humanity. We know and have a visceral understanding that children and women, particularly young women, are targets. But it isn’t just that demographic, is it?
Steve Wynne: No, it’s anyone who’s disenfranchised, or feels out of place, and that’s how they groom them online. They just go in and listen to their chats, and see are they upset with their family? Do they not get along at school? Anyone who’s disenfranchised, or feeling alone can be easily brought in. Obviously, this is younger people, normally, but people with disabilities, people with a history of abuse, people with mental illness, all of this plays into it. It can be any range of ages as well. Yes, young women are predominantly the ones, especially for sex work, but it can be any age.
Linda Ashar: Steve, we have been talking about the human trafficking issues in a broad concept and what it’s about, the depth of the problem and the inadequacy of solutions, but you have come up with a solution that we can all engage in and help in some way called Blink3. Let’s talk about that. What is Blink3?
Steve Wynne: At my last position volunteering, I was asked to come up with a global campaign that would spark the whole world and not cost a penny, and I thought that was an impossible task until I came up with Blink3. We were sitting in a meeting one night and a lady was speaking about how she was sure when she was in Italy, she saw an issue of human trafficking. There was a young lady with four large men around her and she just said, “I don’t know if it was human trafficking. I don’t know what to do. If she had given me some type of signal, maybe I could have helped her.”
Again, it’s a difficult topic because it feels like we’re helpless. It feels like we cannot do anything to solve this issue. And when you talk to people about it, people close their ears. It’s just too horrific an idea to think that someone is torturing another human being for their own pleasure. So, it’s a difficult topic to talk about, and it’s a difficult topic for law enforcement, and it’s a very difficult topic to solve. The best way we can solve this is through awareness and prevention. Just understanding the idea and then how to keep ourselves or others, from being brought into human trafficking. And this is where Blink3 came up.
I have been studying the martial arts my whole life and I don’t drink, and when I go to concerts and stuff like that, or go to bars, I always tell my friends that if someone’s bothering you blink twice, and I will come up and gently make them go away. If they’re really bothering, you blink three times and I will drop them where they stand as a joke, just kind of like, I’m here to protect you. And my thought was that we could use Blink3 for the victims of human trafficking to signal a silent SOS to law enforcement, or TSA agents, or a random stranger, a family member, just to let them know that we are in trouble. It could even work for medical emergencies where we cannot speak, or if we have language issues, we can simply blink three times, and the person will know that we need help. Our captor, hopefully, will not see this, so we can ask for help without getting retaliated against.
Although Blink3 is the worldwide phenomenon we hope to give to everyone, we hope it’s a tool for everyone, not only for people who are in trouble to get out, but people who are in this hopeless situation, if they know at some point they might be able to blink three at someone and get out, it may give them enough hope to live another day. The real emphasis is we need to have training and awareness, preventative awareness, as well as just awareness that it is a problem. Most of us don’t know it’s such a huge problem and we don’t want to hear that. So not only have we created Blink3, which we are going to launch soon, hopefully, end of summer with a few celebrity endorsers to get the word spread. But we’ve also designed the Blink3 Academy, which has four completely free classes where if you go through them, they only take a few minutes, when you go through them, you learn about the processes, and you get a certificate of achievement at the end to show that you have gone through this training.
In the first one, it’s called Blink3 Basic Training, and we just tell you about the silent SOS, how you can use this signal for help when you need it. The next one is Become a Blink3 Sharefluencer where you can share this information and influence others and maybe help save a life. Just using your social media and other outlets to let people know about Blink3. Then we have Become a Blink3 Guardian, which goes through a more intensive training of how to help others while keeping ourselves safe. If we see something, say something, yet we keep ourselves safe so that we can help others. And then we have a far more extensive class called Prevention of Human Trafficking, which provides a great deal of information about awareness and prevention education.
The first three classes are quick and easy, and we really don’t get into the horrific aspect of human trafficking because we want to be able to teach kids without scaring them away what to do to protect yourself. Yes, they don’t have to know the horrific details of human trafficking to know they need to be safe. And then, with the Blink3 Academy Prevention of Human Trafficking, anyone who really wants to dive in deeper can learn about this. We have all sorts of resources for parents to go to as well, as well as helpful checklist to what to check with your kids’ emails and other social media accounts.
Linda Ashar: Well, I am no celebrity, but I certainly endorse it. I’ve been through the website. And I know you’re still working on all this, Steve, but the website’s amazing.
Steve Wynne: Thank you. It was a labor of love, and I learned how to become a web designer in the past year. You kind of have to do some of this stuff on your own when you don’t have a lot of money.
Linda Ashar: I think it’s important, and I think you mentioned it, but I think it’s important to make clear that there’s no paywall, there’s no flogging for money here. People can just use these resources for education purposes, for understanding, for becoming aware, for learning how to share awareness.
Steve Wynne: Save a life and others. Exactly. That was the most important part, that we make everything free. We may eventually, add on some corporate training, where people in the airline industry, or something along those lines, and the service industry can come and get certified, and then their corporation pays a little fee, but for the general public, we will always keep this free because it is the only way we can really combat it.
Linda Ashar: And it’s set up as a nonprofit, let’s emphasize that so people understand that as well. So there’s a word that you’ve coined there that I like, and so just explain it a little bit, “Sharefluencer”.
Steve Wynne: Yeah. We were kind of coming up with ideas of “Be a Blink3 hero” or a “Blink3 superhero,” and then my girlfriend decided “Blink3 Guardian.” I’m like, that is the perfect term because we want people to help guard others, and make sure they’re safe themselves.
And then I thought, “Well, what’s a word for sharing things,” and influencer, we all know that, it’s all over the web. Sharing, we all know that, it’s all over the web. Then I was like, “Why don’t we put those two together and create a brand new word, Sharefluencer, so that you can use your influence to share this information and help save a life?” I did trademark it, so hopefully we’ll get some return on dollars from that.
Linda Ashar: Well, there’s your legal hat.
Steve Wynne: Well, and honestly, the educational hat too, because I was literally able to create an online university with four free classes and certificates that print out for free with the student’s name on it to really make them feel like they’ve accomplished something and they’ve gained something.
Linda Ashar: Well, the main way that our listeners… And I hope our listeners will in turn talk to other people about this. The main way people can move forward with this is of course to go to the website and avail themselves of the information there and spread that word. Besides going to the website, how else can we increase awareness about this in your mind because you live this?
Steve Wynne: Exactly, and going to the website’s a great start because it gives you all the information and it allows you to send other people to the website so they can gain it as well. You don’t necessarily have to go out and teach people prevention of human trafficking 101, which is what some groups are trying to do. They’re asking their volunteers to go out and teach this in the community, which is all well and good, but then the message kind of gets garbled and changed with each new person presenting.
Here, we have not only a resource for you to learn, but a resource that you can just give a web link to and everyone else can learn. It’s about sharing it further than that, making sure that everyone understands this, and then using those tactics to help save lives. If you just retweet something, it could literally save a life because someone may see Blink3 and be able to use it, and we need to get law enforcement, and TSA agents and everyone up to speed with Blink3. Once it becomes a universal nonverbal SOS, then everyone can use it, even in a medical emergency, it doesn’t even have to be abuse or human trafficking.
Linda Ashar: Well, I hear you and I agree in terms of the educational materials, but I do think we need to understand the deep and widespread horror of it.
Steve Wynne: Exactly. That’s why the website, we have videos of all of this so people don’t even have to read because people don’t really like to read anymore. But if you go to the website, you can learn about Blink3, what we’re trying to do, you can learn about human trafficking. We pull out all the horrific information, but give you enough that you’re like, “Wow, this is really a problem. I need to do something about this.” We try to do it in a way that we don’t offend people or push them away. We want them to continue to learn. But yes, when you get to the last course, Prevention of Human Trafficking, it’s a horrific subject and we do have to spread this, but we don’t want to scare the kids away, and those are the ones we need to protect so their parents can go to that.
Linda Ashar: That’s why we’re talking about it today. I appreciate you coming to the podcast. People, please go to the website. There are other sources out there about human trafficking. There’s humantraffickinghotline.org. There are other places. Steve’s linked with them all. This is a wonderful program and it’s one that we should all care about.
Steve Wynne: Thank you everyone. And Blink3, universal, nonverbal SOS.
Linda Ashar: To all our listeners out there, please come back for more topics and more podcasts. It’s always a pleasure reaching out to our listeners. Have a good day.
