The Cabrini community received insight on human trafficking both domestically and internationally and how officials are fighting the topic.
“Figure out the thing you can do right now and do that,” Kevin Ryan, president of Covenant House and Executive-in-Residence, speaking about ways to fight human trafficking, said. “And then do a bigger thing when you can.”
The Tuesday, Oct. 21, panel included Ryan, Hugh Organ, assistant director of Covenant House Philadelphia; Pearl Kim, Delaware County assistant district attorney; and Sarah Charles, district director for Senator Daylin Leach, who could not attend.
Each member of the panel offered a different angle of human trafficking. While Ryan gave a general example of both national and local perspectives, Organ spoke on working with victims of human trafficking and hotbeds right here in Delaware County.
“This [human trafficking] is not a big city problem, this is an everywhere problem,” Organ said. “You can drive down certain streets in Philadelphia where kids are being sold on street corners every single day of the week. At the airports there are young women getting sold out of hotel rooms, Asian-run salon parlors, all over the city and all over the state of Pennsylvania.”
Once people are spared from the human traffickers throughout the state, it is the job of people like Kim to prosecute the traffickers for their crimes.
Compared to Organ, Kim explained underlying details about trafficking that may have not been known to the audience, such as the problems that they once faced on the prosecuting end, and the ease that it can take a pimp or trafficker to coerce a runaway to partake in particular actions requested of them.
People like Charles, have made Kim’s job easier in recent years by helping pass legislation to make prosecuting traffickers more simple and even make the punishments for traffickers more just to the crimes they have committed.
Ryan admits that the cartels that run the trafficking are smarter and have more power than officials and covenant House at the moment, and that real results proving that “the good guys” are making a difference are a long way away but the time will come.
“I’m very buoyed by the fact that this wasn’t his [Kevin Ryan’s] last time coming to campus and that we will have more interesting people to shed light on a lot of different issues,” Sherry Peters, Nerney Leadership Institute administrative specialist, said. “While, yes, it’s a learning and growing experience for the students—it’s also for the whole campus.”
