Lauren Trantham: The Truth about Human Trafficking

Dancing in the Discomfort Zone with Anne Bonney

National Human Trafficking Hotline: Call for confidential help and info 24/7 888-373-7888

Human trafficking is a multi-BILLION dollar criminal industry (Estimated at $5.7 billion in the US alone…and the US has some of the highest demand in the world.)

Human trafficking denies freedom to almost 25 million people around the world. (and those numbers are notoriously under reported)

A 2017 study of cases reported to the Polaris-operated National Human Trafficking Hotline (https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en/human-trafficking) involved over 10,000 individual victims and nearly 5000 potential traffickers. This is a HUGE problem.

Lauren Trantham (https://www.ridemyroad.org/) is working for survivors, photographing them, and telling their stories in an ethical and empowering way to raise money (over $400,000 at the point of publishing) for survivor programs. She’s also the Director of Communications for an amazing non-profit called The Epik Project (https://www.epikproject.org/) that is comprised of mostly men trying to eliminate human trafficking. In this terrifyingly informative episode we talk about

How trafficking doesn’t happen the way you think. (Only 5% are forcefully kidnapped. The rest are a lot more insidiously trapped)

Some other social issues crossover with human trafficking: porn use, loneliness, and increases in suicide

What Epik Project (https://www.epikproject.org/), a non-profit of men fighting human trafficking is doing, and how their Demand-Disruption program is not only interrupting sales in the moment, but addressing the larger issue of male loneliness that is inextricably tied to the human-trafficking problem, and how in the 10 years they’ve been doing this, they’ve interrupted over 500,000 potential human-trafficked sales.
In this episode, we talk about

• Some signs to watch out for.
• Her 10,000 mile motorcycle journey across the US to photograph survivors, her source of hope in this dark battle.
• How the Epick Project has adjusted their approach to their focus on reducing demand

Here are some links that Lauren mentioned in the interview.

Elevate Academy founded by trafficking survivor Rebecca Bender. Donate today to help a survivor: https://elevate-academy.org/

The Network works specifically with illicit Massage parlors: https://www.thenetworkteam.org/

The Polaris Project is a main data collection hub for human trafficking: https://polarisproject.org/

Exodus Cry Podcast : https://exoduscry.com/podcast/

National Human Trafficking Hotline: Call for confidential help and info 24/7 888-373-7888 https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en/human-trafficking

The Brain on Porn research. https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/relevant-research-and-articles-about-the-studies/

Want more from Lauren?

https://www.ridemyroad.org/

https://www.instagram.com/ridemyroad/

Lauren Tratham is an author, and speaker, business owner with nearly eight years of experience as a leader in the Anti-Human Trafficking Movement. She is the founder and Executive Director of Ride My Road, which has raised over $400k for survivor programs. As a photographe