How Trauma Fuels The Sex Trade with Klejdis Bilali

Season 6Episode 16October 17, 2024

Learn about the intricate connections between childhood abuse, substance abuse, and the commercial sex industry. We explore the intergenerational pathways leading to involvement in the sex trade, particularly focusing on the specific vulnerabilities faced by mothers.

In this episode of One in Ten, host Teresa Huizar converses with Klejdis Bilali, a doctoral researcher at the University of South Florida’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Lab, about the intricate connections between childhood abuse, substance abuse, and the commercial sex industry. The dialogue explores the intergenerational pathways leading to involvement in the sex trade, particularly focusing on the specific vulnerabilities faced by mothers. The discussion delves into the emotional and psychological impacts of child custody relinquishment among trafficked women, the ethical dilemmas they face, and the socioeconomic stigmas surrounding substance-using mothers. It also addresses the systemic gaps in support systems, advocating for more compassionate, nuanced, and long-term care for affected families. The episode highlights findings from various studies and emphasizes the importance of sustained research and compassionate intervention to holistically support trafficking victims.

Resources:

Time Stamps:

  • 00:00 Introduction to the Episode
  • 01:34 Guest Introduction: Klejdis Bilali
  • 01:38 Klejdis Bilali’s Journey into Research
  • 02:42 Defining Commercial Sex Work
  • 03:59 Links Between Child Abuse and Sex Trafficking
  • 05:38 Vulnerabilities of Mothers in the Sex Trade
  • 07:35 Substance Abuse and Control Tactics
  • 09:41 Challenges in Child Custody for Trafficked Mothers
  • 11:27 Intergenerational Trauma and Victimization
  • 13:25 Study Hypotheses and Findings
  • 18:04 Foster Care and Trafficking
  • 19:30 Attachment Issues in Foster Care
  • 19:50 Challenges in Child Welfare System
  • 21:37 Substance Abuse and Familial Influence
  • 23:01 Ethical Dilemmas in Custody Decisions
  • 26:11 Support Systems and Family Dynamics
  • 31:51 Research Gaps and Future Directions
  • 35:15 Advice for Professionals and Policymakers
  • 38:05 Encouragement for Students and Final Thoughts

Teresa: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, How Trauma Fuels the Sex Trade, I speak with Klejdis Bilali, doctoral researcher at the University of South Florida at their Trafficking in Persons, or TiP Lab.  We’ve long known that there is some connection between the commercial sex industry in adults and child abuse in childhood.

But until this study, little has been known about the pathways between the two, the intergenerational nature of those pathways, and what this means for the children of mothers in the commercial sex trade.  What are the specific vulnerabilities to being drawn into sex trafficking or exploitive sex work in the first place?

What contributes to the difficulty of exiting the sex trade even when one wants to?  And the question we always ask, what about the children?  First of all, who even has custody of them? And what are the ethical questions involved in deciding where custody will lie? And what’s the effect of those choices on both mothers and their children?

These are complicated ethical choices, as you will hear, and ones with implications for more holistic and better work with these families.  I know you’ll be as challenged as I was by this important conversation. Please take a listen.

Klejdis, welcome to One in Ten.

Klejdis: Yeah, thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.

Teresa: So, let’s start at the beginning, and I’d like you to tell me just how you became interested in this topic of commercial sex work and its intersection with child abuse.

Klejdis: Yeah, so I’ve always said that this field kind of found its way to me more than I found it. I think it’s fair that somebody wakes up one morning and says, today I’m going to research Commercial sex, child abuse, or human trafficking. I think for me, I’ve always kind of been interested in, you know, I’m a practitioner as well, so I was always interested in trauma and abuse and violence against children, and I worked as a clinical intern at a non profit that served victims of sex trafficking or sex abuse.

So I think naturally, I just gravitated towards this topic. I think working with Dr. Joan Reid, who’s a leading researcher in trafficking, also really helped. I think she’s really shaped who I am as a researcher and kind of the research that I want to focus on. So yeah, for this paper, I really wanted to explore the intersection between sexual abuse, physical abuse, and sex trafficking, but also really focus within a familial kind of context and intergenerational kind of framework.

Teresa: Let’s just do a little level setting for a moment because if I’m remembering right from your study, when you were using the term commercial sex work, you’re talking about trafficking, but you’re also talking about voluntary prostitution, correct?

Klejdis: Yes, and that was pretty deliberate. So, originally in our paper, we actually, I think we just used sex trafficking. And, one of the reviewers pointed out that intake forms that we kind of used to recruit participants, right, because we’re relying on these intake interviews that providers from the organization that we collected data from had done with victims. But the site kind of caters to not only sex trafficking victims, but also women who are involved in the commercial sex industry who perhaps don’t meet the legal definition of sex trafficking, but had endured abuse or violence.

And so, we made the decision to keep it broad and to be inclusive of those experiences because we know that it’s possible to also be abused while also quote unquote willingly engaging in sex.

Teresa: Of course.

Klejdis: And so, we just wanted to be inclusive of women in those situations and contexts as well.

Teresa: So thanks! I think that’s going to be really helpful for people because often when we’re talking about this, we really focus exclusively on the trafficking end. So, I appreciated the broader nature of the work, and I think it’s good level setting for the conversation. I thought your literature review was really helpful in laying out what’s known before you even started your study about the links between child abuse and the commercial sex industry. So, just broadly, what are the links between the two before we start talking about your own findings?

Klejdis: Sure. First, we find that, you know, child sexual abuse is one of the most important correlates in predicting child trafficking. It’s in one of those correlates or risk factors that’s in every trafficking screening tool or assessment. And, I think, That’s kind of been established at this point in the literature, what is unclear is that pathway into trafficking, which I think can vary from person to person, certainly varies from client to client that I work with, and so that’s a little bit unclear. So, based on the research that we do at the TiP Lab and what I’ve read, it’s almost like that one factor that is cumulative, right?

If you are a child that is enduring sexual abuse, physical abuse, that’s learned behavior, right? Those kind of toxic behaviors that are reinforced in those relationships, right? Because oftentimes, children in these contexts don’t have a lot of power in these relationships. And so, they kind of carry those behaviors and the way that they’re conditioned over time into adulthood.

And, the people that they date and people that they come into, the peers that they hang out with, and certainly the traffickers, especially those Romeo pimps that the literature kind of talks about, so there is a relationship there, but I think currently how it happens is a little bit less clear, which we hope to clarify somewhat through our study, but again, making causal inferences that Having an experience with child sexual abuse will absolutely lead to sex trafficking. That’s a little bit hard to confirm currently.

Teresa: So, one of the things that I also noticed that you covered in your literature review really had to do with the specific vulnerabilities faced by mothers who are part of the commercial sex industry. And so can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think we’re used to focusing on the child side of this equation, but not necessarily the vulnerabilities faced by the moms. If you could talk about that, I think that could be helpful.

Klejdis: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve worked with parents who have had histories of trafficking. Their children have also had histories of trafficking. And I think often what is so unfortunate is that Is that parents, especially those involved in the commercial sex industry, tend to face a lot of stigma, they’re outcast, they’re isolated in the way that their needs are not really prioritized, right?

We tend to prioritize the needs of the child and providing safety and support for the child, but we rarely think about mothers who have to make this very constrained decision about giving custody of their child or risk having the child enduring the same lifestyle and risk factors and vulnerabilities that they have. And the consequence of that is, of course, that they have to endure trauma as a result of child custody loss. So, the vulnerabilities that they endure are significant. I mean, I’ve worked with mothers that have faced significant mental health issues from their own past traumas. Many are very disadvantaged. They face a lot of structural barriers, so homelessness, poverty, financial insecurity. They have on and off relationships with unsavory characters and people, and they don’t have a lot of support from their family members. As you can see, all those things accumulate that make it much more difficult for them to make a proper decision, if there even is a proper decision in that case, it’s very hard to tell, okay, well, in this situation, what do we emphasize or prioritize the needs of the child or the needs of the mother?

And how can we make that work? So, it’s two sides of a coin, you know, on one end, you want to make sure that the child is safe, but the other end, you can’t ignore the needs of the mother because she, in a sense, is also a victim of this.

Teresa: We’ll talk more about this in a minute, but I think another element that popped up both in your study and in the literature in general was substance abuse, just the degree to which that is a pervasive factor in many of these cases, and as you’re saying, it’s one of these chicken and egg things in that, which preceded what? Is that like a response to the trauma that these individuals have experienced that they’re self-medicating as a part of that in order to cope with whatever they’ve experienced along the way. Is it a part of coping with being a part of the commercial sex industry in and of itself? What is driving that? But certainly, it also contributes potentially to the loss of custody issues that we’re talking about as well.

Klejdis: It’s a significant risk factor, of course, and a major vulnerability for these women and their kids. What we find, especially among women who have traffickers, not only do traffickers get these women hooked on drugs, really, to maintain control, and it’s part of that grooming and recruitment, but also entrapment tactics that traffickers use. But, I’ve worked with some clients that The way that they maintain control over their victims and these women are through taking drugs away and they go, you know, the victim goes through all these withdrawals, they have no other choice but to do whatever they say in order to get the drugs back.

So, it’s this very complicated relationship between drugs. Again, it is, in my opinion, bidirectional that women become involved in drugs, may find their way to trafficking and vice versa, that traffickers use drugs as a means of maintaining control over women and that further prolongs their involvement with trafficking. I’ve worked with many cases of youth where their parents are active substance users. Often, it’s not viewed as a disease and often it’s very stigmatizing. But, it does change people’s opinions about the mother’s fit to be a mother because she is unable to attend counseling or substance use treatment, or I think people forget that we have to redefine what progress looks like for a lot of these women and a lot of men and women that are both, um, exploited through sex trafficking, but that also face a lot of substance use issues.

Teresa: Well, one of the things that I’ve been talking about tangentially, but I do want to get a little bit into it. You know, this piece around child custody loss, and again, we’ll talk more about your study and the hypothesis and your findings in a minute, but just in general, what are the sort of specific vulnerabilities that these moms have to child custody loss?

Klejdis: One of them, I think it’s the facts that they are dealing with severe substance use issues, right? We here in Florida, we have a number of treatment courts, specialty courts that can help these women through, you know, their case plan and make sure that they’re attending treatment and counseling, what have you. Treatment with those types of issues, especially with trauma, when it’s compounding on the trauma they’ve endured through trafficking, is very complicated. It’s like, where do you start first? Do you start with the substance use issues or the trauma or both? As a clinician, it’s very difficult to tackle.

And so, sometimes I think some of these programs tend to have very high expectations for women. I think there tends to be a stigma, again, with mothers in particular, but they tend to have very high measures of success, right? And sometimes, by nature of them being involved. In exploitation and being involved with substance abuse and having substance abuse issues, it becomes very difficult to stay on the straight and narrow.

We know that progress is not linear. It’s very much so cyclical. So, sometimes we expect perfection when we really should be expecting progress. And again, redefining what progress means for these women. And so, it’s very easy, I think, for people to say she’s unfit to be a mother and he’s unfit to be a parent because, you know, X, Y, Z, he’s dealing with all these issues. But at the same time, I think there’s less compassion. For these individuals dealing with these very complicated, difficult to treat issues.

Teresa: One of the things that you’re pointing out, it’s just the sheer complexity of this and you touched a minute ago on the fact that there’s also an intergenerational piece of this in some cases. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because they think that we certainly know that if someone has been sexually abused as a child, they’re more vulnerable for sexual exploitation throughout their lifespan. But I’m not sure that people really think about the fact that it’s not just a two- generation problem often. And so, can you speak to that a little bit?

Klejdis: Yeah, absolutely. More from a clinical standpoint, I think just working with the, that I worked with, I conducted family reunification sessions with girls involved in sex trafficking and their families. And even before I started working on this paper, I started to realize, oh, there’s actually vulnerabilities. And I think we call them precarities in the paper, but risk factors involving child sexual abuse and all these other different types of exploitation that are impacting not just the kids and their parents, but also their grandparents and also their aunts and their uncles. And it seems to cluster among certain families with certain risk factors.

And I think, that’s why it became so interesting for me and my co-authors to touch on intergenerational trauma and victimization, revictimization in this paper, because we know that there exists a link between child sexual abuse and sex trafficking, but understanding that pathway becomes very difficult. In the case of this study, I think we were a bit limited because it was case file research. So, we didn’t have data on the children of these mothers to say, okay, are they dealing with trauma or abuse? We really just had data on the mothers and their predecessors, right? So, they were reporting what their parents or the family members and the issues that they had endured.

And again, what we found was that the backgrounds of these women were marked by domestic abuse, violence, substance abuse, in some cases financial instability, poverty, and again, the women were dealing with the same issues. I think it’s very hard for me to look at that and say, Oh, this is such an isolated issue that just impacts these women only, right? It doesn’t really exist in a vacuum like that. Certainly, there are traits that are passed on and we speculate that it, you know, it serves as a potential for risk for their own children, but of course more research is needed to affirm that.

Teresa: So now let’s turn to your study for just a moment and tell us a little bit about what were your hypotheses going into the study and what you found?

Klejdis: Yeah, absolutely. Where my co authors, Sarah Gardy, Casey Crook, and Dr. Reid, they actually had a data set collected from a community partner here in Tampa Bay who had worked with trafficking victims and women involved in the commercial sex trade. And, I think our study was published just this past May, but we actually started working on it back in 2021, 2022, where I was still a clinical psych student and doing clinical work.

So, I was doing the family therapy stuff. With trafficking victims and they were thinking and looking over this data with child custody and, uh, among trafficked women. And so, I remember having a meeting where Dr. Reid kind of proposed that she wanted to do a paper on this, but she didn’t quite know how to frame the paper, which is where I came in. I said, I’ve noticed this thing, this process kind of happening in my sessions with my clients. I wonder if it would be interesting to frame this an intergenerational kind of perspective.  Really going into this, we want to look at several things. First, we wanted to make the connection between child abuse, not just sexual abuse, but physical abuse as well, and trafficking.

We also wanted to see contextually, qualitatively, what the backgrounds of these women were like, what their family lives were like, explore substance use issues, because that is a variable that the organization had already collected, which we thought would be interesting to investigate.  And also, child custody outcomes, right? So, what does all this information mean for the children of these women? What happens to these kids after these women have endured all this trauma and abuse and exploitation? So that’s how we piece everything together and it fortunately worked out. I hadn’t seen anything else in the literature and I thought maybe we were mending a gap there and starting a bigger conversation about intergenerational victimization.

Teresa: We’ll walk through a little bit of the findings here in a minute, but one of the things that struck me is not so much that some of your findings were so shocking. I think if you’ve worked in the field a while, you can think of your own caseload as exemplifying some of them, but the degree to which they were true. If you’re a practitioner, you’re working with your own client pool, you may think there’s something specific about it, right? But then, when you see data, one of the very interesting things as you go. Well, look, we may not be to the point that we can say that something is causing it, but when you have a correlational pattern above 90%, you can certainly say there’s, there’s something there.

So for example, one of your findings from the study had to do with the percentage of kids who had been trafficked as children, what their experience of child sexual abuse was and child abuse overall. And I mean, it was just a very high correlation between those two things. And I think it’s one of those things that really makes us think about how we need to interrupt this cycle.

We talk about the cycle of abuse all the time, but it seemed to me that was so, it just illustrated it so clearly that there is a clear pathway here, and that, sadly, many of these children who have been sexually abused as children, that exploitation is never really going to stop. For them, it’s going to be not just a pathway, it’s going to be a jetway that just traverses the entirety of their adult existence, which is tragic.

Klejdis: Mm hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think one of the analyses that we did in the quantitative portion was Trying to see how the onset, the age of onset for trafficking, so women who had been trafficked for the first time as youth versus women who had been trafficked for the first time as adults or who had been involved in the sex industry as adults. And, we found that there was a greater portion of individuals that reported child physical and sexual abuse for an earlier onset relative to individuals that had become involved as adults. Not to say that there’s a (inaudible) were exploited as adults didn’t have histories of child physical and sexual abuse.

They did, but it’s certainly much different than those that had a much earlier initiation into trafficking. And we also found that those that had an earlier initiation into trafficking as youth also reported were more likely to report that they had family members that were also involved in the commercial sex industry, which again, goes to show that this thing isn’t really isolated just to these women alone. You kind of have to look at things within that microcosm of the family unit, so that was probably the biggest contribution that I think this paper really makes is that evidently we can’t say this caused this, but we can say that something’s clearly going on if there’s very clear differences among this population of people, so I’m glad that resonated with you because I also found that was one of the most interesting findings.

Teresa: You know, one of the findings in your study is also a part of the existing literature, but I think one can’t say enough about it, which has to do with  the way in which so many of these women were foster kids first. Talk a little bit about that because I think that for those of us who work in child abuse, we do know that there is some connection between the two for some kids. But I think, again, data in black and white just makes that stand out all the more and what we need to do about that.

Klejdis: Yeah, absolutely. If I remember correctly, there wasn’t a huge difference in terms of the onset of trafficking, in terms of the women’s reports of who was involved in foster care groups, homes, versus those who were initiated into trafficking as adults, but I think it was up to 30 something percent of our each of those sub samples that were involved in group home. So to me, that is a significant amount. That is over a quarter. It’s pretty significant. It’s something that the literature has found time and time after again, it’s included in again, nearly every single human trafficking screening tool and assessment.

And unfortunately, I think it shows again familial disruption. I think parents and these caregivers are some of the most important attachment figures that a child has. And once that’s disrupted, I think it causes a lot of issue for these kids. Some of the kids that I used to work with, they were wonderful and bright and incredible kids, but they had a lot of attachment issues because by nature of being involved in the foster care system and in child welfare, I think that in and of itself served as a trauma. Many of these kids did not feel loved. Many of these kids felt abandoned. Many were angry at their parents, at the system for allowing all of this to happen according to them. So, it’s complicated. Again, it’s one of those risk factors where it’s very hard to tease out what aspect of involvement with the child welfare system is traumagenic, what part of that is contributing to continuous exploitation and trafficking risk. That’s a little bit hard to tease out.

Teresa: Oh, and the degree to which, you know, based on other data points in your study, that the child may have come into the foster care system because of child sexual abuse in the family. In which case, is it the foster care that is the problem, although it certainly does cause grief and loss?  Or is it the fact that it just simply compounded or amplified the trauma that kids had already experienced and they were already essentially on a pathway, potentially, to be trafficked or a part of the adult sex industry because they had been sexually abused previous to that. And as we know, many, many children within the system do not get any sort of care. The fact that they were moved to foster care does not mean they’re necessarily going to get services, unfortunately.

Klejdis: Yeah, and that’s a huge issue here in Florida and I guess that was my experience as well as a clinician working in the child welfare system is I remember one of my clinical supervisors telling me that there are some organizations here in Florida where the child might be court mandated for family reunification for family therapy and treatment. Some of these organizations had a policy about devoting a single therapy session prior to reunification.

Teresa: Can you imagine?

Klejdis: They’re like, what kind of processing are you doing in a half hour session? There’s just no way. Fortunately, the program I worked with had a family program, a manualized treatment for that process, but even that, I was just surprised. I’m like, we were making progress, certainly, but that took time. That took months. I cannot imagine a single session devoted to teasing everything out in just a half hour session. It’s just impossible.

Teresa: It’s like a drop in the ocean, right? All the many, many complex issues that we’re talking about. We talked a minute ago about addiction, and that also was a part of your findings. I mean, across the board, high levels of substance abuse, right?

Klejdis: Mm hmm. Absolutely, and also familial substance abuse again, which points out that this is, at least to some extent, learned behavior that I suspect that they’re probably being introduced to coping through substance use through family members, that introduction happens very, very early on. I believe it was upwards to,  I don’t know,

Teresa: It was 80-

Klejdis: Yeah, it was 80 something percent of our sample, which is significant. That is such a disproportionate representation of women and who use substances. But it’s, again, I recall that we cited one particular study in our paper that mentioned that it was a great qualitative study, but they were looking at women who had endured child custody loss, and who had, in order to cope with that loss and the trauma and the grief, they turned and pushed them more towards the commercial sex industry and as a result of the mental health issues, depression, anxiety, it pushed them more to self-medicate with substances and for some women having And their child proved to be effective and in motivating them to facilitate exit out of sex work and sex trafficking. But again, it’s like that ethical thing of how appropriate is it to keep a child in those circumstances for the betterment of getting mom out of sex trafficking or commercial sex industry. So, you get these very complicated ethical situations that I think we’re just beginning to really understand, at least empirically.

Teresa: You know, what’s interesting to me is that the moms themselves seem to have some understanding of these ethical dilemmas as well. I tell you, the most surprising part of the study to me, honestly, was the percentage of moms who voluntarily, and often without system involvement at all, gave up the custody of their children. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I was like, It’s a really selfless thing. It’s a really selfless thing to do. And I think we don’t give these moms credit enough for how selfless they often are.

Klejdis: Yes, absolutely. And, we did not assess their particular perceptions of how they felt making that decision. But, we can speculate that it was, one, occurring under really constrained conditions, and two, probably very difficult. I think we cite a study in our paper to support that finding. Again, another great study, but that found that even when women voluntarily relinquish rights to their child or custody, they still endure psychological and emotional ramifications as a result of that decision. Some regret it. Some felt like it was the right decision, but again, there’s consequences related to that. So, it becomes on one end, yes, the child is perhaps placed in a better position, but on the other hand, you have a mother who’s grieving, dealing with trauma, and now, you know, trying to wrangle with the fact that perhaps she’s a bad mother because she gave up custody of her children, which is of course the stigma, the stereotype that’s attached to that.

So it’s, again, very complicated, but it’s a very hard decision that I don’t think very many people understand. Most women in our study voluntarily gave up custody and they likely did it because they wanted the best for their kid and they kind of were very cognizant of the fact that their lifestyle was very dangerous for their child.

Teresa: You know, what was interesting to me is I think when you think about movies, TV that are out there, There’s certainly plenty of them that, that sort of show the opposite, actually, of what the findings are, right? There’s some child who’s living in these terrible conditions with a mother who is a part of the commercial sex industry or something of that nature, and often multiple children. And certainly, that exists. No one’s saying that it doesn’t. However, in your study. If the women themselves were being trafficked, so they didn’t fall into the group of women who were probably still exploited but were prostitutes, more than 90 percent of them didn’t have custody of their children.

Klejdis: Yeah.

Teresa: …About four out of the ones who were. We say voluntarily really with a lot of air quotes around it because these women are exploited in lots of ways. But for the ones who were voluntarily filled with air quotes, participating in the commercial sex industry, still it was something like 75 percent didn’t have custody of their children, right?

Klejdis: Yep, absolutely. And, I don’t know that I should say this on the bright side, but on the brighter side, it, Most, at least women in our study, gave up custody to a family member. So, I think that provides a little bit of hope that okay, perhaps that relationship can be mended over time and the mother to some extent has access to the child and can maintain some type of relationship. Certainly, that’s the case with some of the clients that I work with where they weren’t technically raised by mom, but they maintain some relationship over time. And I think that’s really the point in our paper where we start to argue that if we see that these risk factors and vulnerabilities are happening with the family, and if we see that family members are the, the child is staying within the family, or perhaps there’s opportunity there for family oriented counseling and family services or parenting initiatives, parent child interaction therapies, which at least in Florida, we certainly do not have enough of.

And, not to say that these things don’t exist, we certainly have enough empirical evidence to show that they do work, but I very rarely see them applied to this population of people. So, an unfortunate part of it is we can recognize the problem recognize the risk factors and where we need to intervene and yet we don’t, so sometimes I think that’s the difficulty with the research is like we can make as many recommendations as we want in these papers but does it always lead to actionable change? I don’t know and often, unfortunately, doesn’t.

Teresa: I think that one of the complexities of this is that our system itself, our intervention system, isn’t really set up to address what you’re describing. Not just the fact that you might need multi-generational family clinical services, but if you think about what brings you into a system in which your care will be paid for by something, often it requires CPS intervention. And so, in your data, only about 30 percent of the cases in which the child was not in the mother’s custody with CPS involved at all. So, this meant the mom was not, in many cases, going to have access to paid substance abuse treatment, right? Because it wasn’t court ordered by anybody to try to reunify kids. Who was going to pay for the mental health treatment that the mom might need, or the child might need, or that the entire family might need? So, we’ve got this weird system in the U.S. in which, you have to need something in relation to mistreating your children in order to get any paid help, essentially.

Klejdis: Yep, absolutely, and unfortunately, I think from, again, speaking totally from some of the programs I’ve researched here in Florida, some of the quality of care is not the best. I mentioned previously that, again, I’ve heard that only one reunification session was required. There are some programs that don’t offer any, and I’m just, I don’t understand how we can even begin to address this problem if we’re not willing to customize care, individualize care, and make care accessible, equitable, and accessible to, especially this group of women.

I think that’s really what’s contributing to this intergenerational cycle because, again, I think these women need comprehensive wraparound services that they’re just not getting. So again, that’s another kind of gap when it comes to amending research and practices. I don’t know where we would even begin to do that.

Teresa: Well, the other thing that I was interested in reading, you were talking about, like, where these kids wind up, right, and who’s custody. Grandparents, and as you say, there’s some risk factors with that because we’ve already talked about the intergenerational nature of a lot of the vulnerabilities here, but the percentage that were with dads, and often mom was saying dad’s a good parent, actually, which I also found was really interesting and hopeful, honestly, but it also made me wonder, and what supports are available for dad, like if he’s going to have custody, then there are probably all kinds of things that he needs to appropriately support these kids, if these kids need counseling, if they need this, if they need that. And are these kids getting any of that? Because I doubt, if they’re, again, if they’re outside the CPS system…

Klejdis: Mm hmm.

Teresa: …How would dad access any of that?

Klejdis: Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, I’ve worked with some youth who primarily been cared after from mother. Dad was their primary caregiver, andmMy client, she was a young teenage girl, and it’s just so hard, right, because on one end, the dad was divorced, and we were trying to get the child that came from a blended family, so she was going to be spending time with mom and dad, and it became this very complicated thing of trying to get everybody on the same page. Each parent had different goals in mind for the child, what the child was going to do after reunification. At some point with this particular program, we wanted to create like a rule of regulation kind of process, ensuring that the child knew the boundaries and the parents knew the boundaries, recognizing triggers, that kind of thing.

And, it became very difficult for some reason, not because of anything the child was doing wrong, but really in just getting the parents to cooperate with one another and getting them on the same page about the child’s treatment. And so, not only is there issues with accessing treatment, but just.  Seeing that this process takes a very long time, family-oriented therapy, parent-child interaction therapy takes a very long time, and so what are the funds to support that, right? Do we have experienced, certified clinicians that are willing to do that? I don’t know, at least in Florida, I don’t know of any program that has that extensive of a program.

Teresa: And also, you know, the federal government has put millions into trafficking services, but a lot of it has been band aid, right? And not to say they’re not needed, you know, any service is probably needed, but if what you’re primarily focused on is sort of the shelter equation and other things like that, then where’s the money? Like, I have to tell you, I’m trying to think in all the solicitations I’ve seen, have I seen anything for the sort of intensive long-term services you’re describing that are needed?

One could slip by me, but I don’t have any recollection of seeing anything that specifically calls for that. I think somebody might could propose that in the application. But as often these funding cycles are one year, three years or five years, we might have a family who needs help longer than that. So, I think it’s just a unique place we find ourselves in where we have a specific subset that needs a level of service that none of our systems are really oriented toward.

Klejdis: Yeah, absolutely. I found pretty much the same here in Florida. I think a lot of these solutions are band aid solutions, they might work temporarily. Like, even the reunification sessions we were doing, the TiP Lab was in the process of evaluating that. And I realized half way through us formulating that study that we’re assessing, you know, we were assessing like trauma processing and the connection and bond that the child felt to the parent throughout the course of the program. But, one element of our study that was missing was, will it sustain a reunification over time? Right? As soon as the child is reunified, how do we know it works over time? And so, I think not only is there a gap in, in, in practice and in clinical work and programming, but I think in research as well, I don’t think we’re really researching these issues across time. I think we’re just looking at it at one snapshot in time, which I’ll admit that’s really our study as well. But, one of my goals as an emerging researcher is to look at things over the lifespan and see how these things are playing out across generations, but also across the lifespan of these kids and these families.

Teresa: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re spot on to be thinking about what the ongoing research gaps are. One that strikes my mind is, you’ve got all these kids who are living with dads. I’d be very interested in what their outcomes are compared with outcomes with grandparents, especially grandparents that have some of the same vulnerabilities as mom, et cetera.

And so it’s the good and bad part of research, right? The exciting part is there’s always another research question you’re interested in. The frustrating part is there are kids who are living through that right now and we don’t have the information we need potentially to help them as much as we’d like. So, tell me, what’s next for you, research wise?

Klejdis: Yeah, so, as I mentioned, I’m a third year Ph.D. now, and I Right now, I’m kind of in the point in the program where I’m thinking about my dissertation, and you bet it’s going to be something about intergenerational timeline victimization. So, Dr. Reid and I, she’s on my committee, we’re already thinking of ideas that would be really interesting for me to do. But again, I love being an advocate for these kids and these victims that have been exploited in this way. And I would love to, I think, continue with community-oriented research because I think I don’t know, I read through research papers and it seems a little bit sterile to me. You can have a great measure, a great study of great, great methods and then, you know, it’s sometimes devoid of the raw experiences of the victims and survivors.

And so I would love to implement, like a mixed methods kind of design with my dissertation and I imagine it’s going to be very difficult, especially if I’m doing something longitudinal, but we’ll see. Recently, I’ve also been very interested in trauma bonding, not only within the context of trafficking, but also in terms of exploitative relationships within the family and familial trafficking and how those learned behaviors, right, like the trauma bonding behaviors that the child learns during childhood are carried forward into adulthood. So yeah, I’m kind of interested in that, a little bit of attachment theory, again, how the relationships the child shares with caregivers impacts other relationships beyond that relationship. Yeah, I have my hands in, I don’t know, different topics and different theories that I would want to do.

Teresa: You have a whole long career to explore, so it’s good. I’m just wondering, your listeners here, they’re all child abuse professionals. If you said, based on my research, based on all the studies I’ve read and preparing to do my research, all of that, I just had a couple of things that I just feel, you know, I’d want listeners to take away from this and take action on what would that be?

Klejdis: Yeah, absolutely. I think first and foremost is don’t give up on your clients. I know that’s, it’s easier said than done, but I think sometimes as professionals in this field, it’s very easy to get lost in our work.  I’ve seen one too many clinicians become very burnt out and their compassion for the clients really wanes over time because it’s too much or sometimes you work with some very difficult clients who are quote-unquote resistant to treatment or incorrigible, what have you, but I think sometimes for some victims of interpersonal violence and certainly human trafficking, that inability to give up on individual, you’re that single source of support for them for many of these victims.

And so I think again, I keep going back to progress over perfection, but you have to understand that, you know, when you’re assessing the journeys, the healing journeys of trafficking victims, I often compare it to addiction and substance use treatment and healing in that journey is not linear. It’s inevitably cyclical. You should expect complicated issues. You should expect relapse. You should expect these difficult kind of things to pop up over the course of treatment. So, as providers, I would hope that you learn your boundaries and you learn to take care of yourself because we’re really not able to care for anybody else unless we, mentally, were okay ourselves and emotionally we’re okay ourselves. So, don’t give up on your clients, redefine progress and take care of yourselves.

Teresa: Healthy advice and what about for policymakers, if you had the ear of policymakers for a moment, what would you say you would love to see?

Klejdis: I would love for them to listen to the researchers. I think we aim to do this in the TiP lab. We want to be multidisciplinary, and we want to make sure we have a lot of community partners, so we feel that they feel represented in our research and in the policy that we recommend. But, I would hope that policy makers focus on the advice of experts who are either in the field or who are actually analyzing data in and researching this thing and really, honestly, just putting money in evidence-based practice. I hate to say it, but I think I’ve just seen one too many programs implemented just because as a band aid solution, like we said earlier, and unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working. Some programs are great. Some are not. So, I would hope that policymakers just are willing to collaborate with researchers and practitioners and willing to advocate for the work that we do.

Teresa: Is there anything else that I should have asked you and didn’t, or anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about today?

Klejdis: I suppose, I think, because I am a student, if there’s any students listening to this, I just encourage you to go out there and take every opportunity you can to figure out your passion, especially if you have an interest in this field, send that email to a professor that you love their research, you love their lecture, their class, or volunteer at a local shelter or go for that internship where you interview or do intake interviews with trafficking victims. You just never know where it’s going to go. And I know that for me personally, it has led to opportunities like this. So just bite the bullet and just go for it because I know that we’re waiting for eager and passionate providers and researchers in this field.

Teresa: I could not have said it better myself, Klejdis. Your work was wonderful. So hopefully, some of the students listening will take your advice on that.

Klejdis: Yeah.

Teresa: I just so appreciate you coming on and sharing your research. And when you get that dissertation published, if it’s on a similar subject, feel free to come back. We’d love to have you.

Klejdis: That’s amazing. Thank you so much again for having me.

Teresa: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. And for more information on this episode, or any of our others, please visit our podcast website at oneintenpodcast.org.