Sister Anne Victory reflects on what she has learned through her work with the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking, in the Cleveland area. Hear the full In Good Faith episode IGF041 at aNunsLife.org.
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Sister Anne Victory has led efforts against human trafficking for over a decade. She helped to establish the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking in 2007. One result of the Collaborative’s work is that over 60 agencies in NE Ohio–law enforcement, health care, social services, and others—are now connected to weave a safety net for the men, women, and children who are victims of human trafficking. Sister Anne is Director of Education at the Collaborative and her background includes extensive experience as a nurse clinician, educator, and administrator.
Sister Maxine
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I'm Sister Maxine, and my guest is Sister Anne Victory with the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking. For yourself, as you began to work on education in regard to human trafficking, what was the biggest thing you had to learn in order to be effective in your role? Things that you had to maybe learn about the subject as well as things you might have had to learn about yourself in order to work in what is an enormously challenging area?
Sister Anne Victory
I believe it was a few things. I pretty much knew methods for teaching adults in particular, because my graduate work was for patient education. So that came relatively easy in terms of teaching adults. The other thing was allowing myself to really take in this issue, and respond in some positive way about the outrage. So that passion had to come forward. And I'm finding that when you're passionate about something like this, and I tend to be pretty quiet and shy, I can speak about this a long time to any group with a sense of urgency and, and passion and compassion. So that became a part of the awareness. The other was that, certainly, different groups need different styles and approaches. And when it's talking with children, I will call on my friends who are elementary educators from the start, they know how to do that well. I'm less likely to be as effective, but I'm learning from them, the things that will work for teaching kids that I wouldn't have known, because I didn't do that. I didn't ever have that opportunity to teach children. So there are things to learn along the way. There's also whatever a group needs, figure out that organization's mission, what they tend to do, what their business is like, and respond to those things that are going to be of interest to them related to the issue of human trafficking.
Sister Maxine
May I ask who are some of the most recent kinds of groups that you have talked with about this?
Sister Anne Victory
I recently spoke to a group which is a joint between the FBI and the private sector, who want to deal with security issues, cybersecurity in particular. So they're interested in what's happening online, and how do we monitor that effectively, and those kinds of things. So that's one of the groups. Just last month I talked to a group, which is an international group dealing with business ethics for companies that are across the globe. They are concerned about keeping their companies out of the business of falling into human trafficking, or if they get into a contract situation with another company, find out what that company really does, what their supply chain is, and keep the trafficking out of it. So we each bring a piece of the pie to the table and help inform one another about how do we best address this? Because it's so complex, and touches so many pieces of people's lives.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
