These quarterly meetings are a partnership between Point Loma Nazarene University and the San Diego District Attorney’s Office.
June HT-RADAR Quarterly Meeting recap on Assets and Logic: Proposing an Evidence-based Strategic Partnership Model for Anti-trafficking Response by lead researcher – Dr. Kathleen Preble
Kathleen Preble, Ph.D. – While serving in the U.S. Peace Corps, Kathleen realized her passion for human rights and working with marginalized communities. When she returned stateside, she earned her Masters in Social Work pursuing a career centered on social justice. She was introduced to human trafficking while resettling refugees in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A few years later, Kathleen was hired by a local police department to assist in a special investigation unit devoted to identifying trafficking survivors and holding the traffickers accountable. This experience helped Kathleen see a gap in knowledge concerning evidenced-based practices and human trafficking response. She returned to school to pursue her doctorate in Social Work so that she could help fill this gap. Kathleen is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Missouri—Columbia, researching human trafficking and its impact on survivors and service providers and teaching courses related to interpersonal violence and resiliency. Community-based and survivor-centered research is important to Kathleen because it directly impacts the quality of care survivors of trafficking receive while exiting exploitation. In boosting the survivor voice, we can ensure the services developed for survivors have the intended outcome and empowers survivors to live their intended lives. Though Kathleen is interested in all forms of trafficking found in the United States and how survivors perceive the experience, most recently she has been focusing her efforts on understanding phenomenon in Missouri, including demographics, gaps in services and training, and bolstering coordinated, evidence-based responses. Because Kathleen’s research is community-driven and survivor-led, it is especially helpful in understanding the needs, contexts, and implications various anti-trafficking responses might have in addressing human trafficking.
Since knowledge about human trafficking has increased over the last 20 years, so have our understandings about interventions, survivor empowerment, and attention to intersectional forces that lead to trafficking vulnerability and exiting barriers experienced by survivors. An area lacking in such advancement, however, relates to collaborative community responses (CCRs), which have notably increased evidenced-based, effective responses in other public health and health equity responses. CCRs have been part of US-based anti-trafficking efforts since the passage of the U.S. TVPA, but very little research has examined their effectiveness or how to standardize a unified collaborative effort in multidisciplinary antitrafficking teams around common goals. The proposed model utilizes health equity techniques to map existing community resources that could potentially respond to identified needs. Using logic models, the proposed process allows for interdisciplinary teams to systematically plan a response using the identified assets in their community to achieve a common ultimate goal and improve the response to human trafficking. Research, practice and policy implications are discussed.
Our Interactive Session
Our interactive session consisted of identifying resources for outpatient mental health services in San Diego with the Asset Map template provided by Dr. Preble. Below you will find the resources identified within the 30 minutes dedicated to this activity. *Please contact Dr. Preble at preblek@missouri.edu to adopt and implement this model in your region, she is looking forward to collaborate with locations outside of Missouri.
Additional Resources:
State of Missouri & Metro East Anti-Trafficking Strategic Plan
California Based Resource:
California Against Slavery – Directory of Services
Catch up on our last HT-RADAR Quarterly Meeting Through our Recap on Cultic Theory
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