Filipina co-founder of the new initiative hopes to reduce the number of trafficking victims, especially those of Filipino descent
IN a digital world where scamming has essentially become institutionalized, the risk of falling prey to con artists, thieves, and swindlers has become unfortunately easier as the internet evolves.
But the insidiousness of the deep underbelly of the internet largely centers around human trafficking, which has only increased in scope with the advent of the internet and social media.
Human trafficking — the illegal trade and exploitation of individuals to benefit from their work, service, and bodies — is also referred to as modern slavery, a highly sophisticated web of criminals that seek to profit from the torment, trauma, and torture of unsuspecting victims.
But as the global human trafficking network has grown, so have the efforts by anti-human trafficking advocates.
In conjunction with other anti-human trafficking advocates, community organizations, and coders, Annalisa Enrile, Ph.D. — a Filipina American professor of social work at the University of Southern California with almost 30 years of experience working on anti-human trafficking efforts — has developed and tested a new software that aims to thwart traffickers before they traffick.
The software, named Project Gridlock, currently zeroes in on sex trafficking — the coercion and transportation of individuals for the purpose of sex exploitation — by targeting advertisements on escort websites and other virtual avenues where pimps seek to recruit unsuspecting victims.
According to Enrile, the software’s algorithm goes through escort ads, picks up the phone numbers, and spams the pimps using language and messaging that makes it sound like a potential buyer trying to make a connection. And because the team utilizes a bunch of different phone numbers to communicate with these traffickers, they won’t know which calls are legitimate or ones coming from Project Gridlock.
Enrile said that Project Gridlock worked with the Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force, law enforcement representatives, child welfare experts, trafficking survivors, and other experts on the subject matter to identify the websites and online avenues most frequented by traffickers, pimps, sellers and buyers.
Project Gridlock was launched in Los Angeles over Super Bowl weekend, and Enrile told the Asian Journal that from that Friday, Feb. 11 to Sunday, Feb. 13 the software was able to target 5,000 pimps and traffickers.
“We believe it causes disruption, and at the very least it pushes people out and at the very most, it requires perpetrators to address how they’re exploiting in a different way,” Enrile told the Asian Journal in a Zoom interview on Friday, Feb. 18.
“If this is where we are seeing the most growth, especially around large events like the Super Bowl and you see this explosion of ‘new-to-town’ ads, can you rough this system enough so that you can push these traffickers, who have these quotas to meet, out in the open?” Enrile posed.
Enrile explained that it was difficult to get the project kickstarted because of the lack of visible achievements that come with prevention efforts, i.e. there’s not much to see before a trafficker trafficks. When a trafficker who has already trafficked is arrested by law enforcement, for example, they can measure the severity of that person’s crimes.
“It’s not really a win for them. And that’s a problem, like with any prevention program, it’s like, how do you measure something that doesn’t exist because you’ve stopped it?” Enrile said, adding that a large chunk of anti-trafficking efforts that are victim-centric focus on recovery after the fact.
“Let’s give [victims rehabilitation] services, but nobody ever wants to say, ‘Let’s teach buyers not to buy. Let’s teach perpetrators not to sell,’” she noted.
But Enrile noted that much of the support for the program came from support from anti-trafficking advocacy community. Two weeks before the Super Bowl, Enrile’s Filipina American friend — Charisma De Los Reyes, who also happens to be commercial sexual exploitation of children program coordinator for Child Welfare Services in San Diego County — helped raise funds to pilot the project.
Within five days of fundraising, the group garnered $10,000 to start the project, which Enrile said is constantly being refined to better serve the community in the name of protecting would-be victims and inhibiting traffickers.
“I think that you have to be willing to take a chance on these out-of-the-box ideas,” Enrile said.
And for Enrile, it is worth it to take on these large, disruptive changes to a massive global exploitation ring that operates in plain sight.
“Sex trafficking is a small percentage of the numbers when we talk about human trafficking, but it is responsible for almost the majority of the profit that is derived from human trafficking as a whole.
Human trafficking, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), is a $150 billion industry, and sex trafficking specifically accounts for a whopping $99 billion.
Generally, traffickers tend to target migrants, disabled people, and other vulnerable individuals. But victims tend to be disproportionately women, specifically, women of color and children. According to the ILO, 71% of trafficking victims are women and girls, and 1 in 4 victims are children.
As a Filipina American expert on the issue, for Enrile, there is inextricable emotional proximity to the fact that Filipinos are among the most-targeted groups by traffickers. Enrile explained that the fact that labor is the Philippines’ largest export coupled with the fact that migration from the country is notably high, the risk of trafficking increases.
“We tend to take jobs that are also very invisible, jobs that are service-oriented and dirty, dangerous, and demeaning that makes us more vulnerable to trafficking,” Enrile explained.
According to the United States State Department’s report on trafficking from the Philippines, “A significant number of Filipino migrant workers become victims of sex trafficking or labor trafficking in numerous industries, including industrial fishing, shipping, construction, manufacturing, education, home health care, and agriculture, as well as in domestic work, janitorial service, and other hospitality-related jobs.”
Of the estimated 10 million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in 170 different countries, 3% are working without contracts, making them more susceptible to trafficking.
Additionally, traffickers work with facilitators around the world through “social networking sites and other digital platforms, recruit unsuspecting Filipinos through illegal recruitment practices such as deception, hidden fees, and production of fraudulent passports, overseas employment certificates, and contracts to exploit migrant workers in sex and labor trafficking,” the State Department wrote.
The history of exploitation of Filipinos is deeply rooted in United States militarism when it comes to sexual exploitation. Enrile said the painful stereotype of Filipinas among American soldiers as “little, brown, f*cking machines” also influenced her work to stop sex trafficking, with Project Gridlock in particular, which sought out Filipina- and Asian-centric ads.
As of press time, Project Gridlock is in the process of possibly collaborating with law enforcement agencies and institutions that may benefit from the software to aid in stopping trafficking at the source. Enrile said that the team is constantly looking to refine the software and better target these traffickers to stop exploitation before it actually happens.
“It’s like a tennis game,” Enrile explained. “The traffickers get ahead, we get ahead, the traffickers get ahead and we get ahead. We’re constantly pivoting around each other to address these incremental shifts, but lately, I’ve been wanting to see what are the huge, disruptive shifts we can do to stop this problem.”
