Rotary speaker encourages action against trafficking
January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month and January 11 is Human Trafficking Awareness Day
NORTH PLATTE -- Amelia Stansell is a Rotary Club District Governor, mother, wife and advocates against human trafficking.
She was the guest speaker at the recent Rotary Club District meeting in North Platte January 4.
Stansell, a strategic business consultant and Rotary District Governor in Warrenton, Va., opened her talk on trafficking by highlighting the varieties of trafficking.
“There’s labor trafficking, sex trafficking, child marriage, child soldiering, even organ harvesting and trafficking, which is something I didn’t think actually existed until I went to the Houston convention and started really getting to know some folks that that’s what their passion is in Rotary, ending forced organ trafficking. Every time I think I understand trafficking the next thing hits,” she said.
She used the illustration of the drug trade needing a place to manufacture the product, then transported it to a community and sell it, only to do it again the next day. Human trafficking is more lucrative because the “product” can potentially be sold multiple times.
“Bodies can be used and sold, many times over, over and over, often undetected and they’re not going to be prosecuted as heavily they do for drug trafficking, and because our law enforcement hasn’t been able to catch up all the human trafficking side of sex trafficking, labor trafficking, all of that, they also are going to get away with it,” she said.
She said trafficking most likely will not be investigated to the level it should. She said trafficking is the second largest trade, just behind the drug trade, because traffickers see it to meet a need, or desire.
Her focus is on child sex trafficking. The reality of the situation woke her when she was in a church service.
“I go to a small Lutheran church. We go to the Saturday night service, so it's really small. And that front of the children’s sermon, when I started working on this, we had about four or five kids that would go up there. Numbers stick out to me and I count constantly. It’s this weird, neurotic thing I do. I was sitting there one night, and I was counting heads going ‘there are five heads up there. One in five kids is going to be approached by a trafficker online by the time they’re 18. Two of those heads sleep under my roof. And I care about those other three heads, too. Somebody should do something about that.' And I made the mistake of looking in the mirror and realizing that that somebody was looking back at me,” she said.
She encourages people to immediately call 911 and the National Trafficking Hotline (888-373-7888) when witnessing trafficking, and not put yourself in danger.
For more information about trafficking in Nebraska, see https://ago.nebraska.gov/identifying-trafficking-0