Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Building the Support Network for Sex Trafficking Survivors with Kat Wehunt

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon talks with fellow Jefferson Award Recipient, Kat Wehunt. Kat is a leading voice in bringing awareness to the human trafficking movement. A survivor, Kat shares facts about human trafficking that may surprise you. Her non-profit, The Formation Project, serves as a community-centered organization for survivors of trafficking, providing them with support, understanding, and empowerment. Please note that this episode contains mature content and is not suitable for young children. Thank you to our guest, Kat Wehunt, Founder of The Formation Project Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Kat Wehunt Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Researcher: Valerie Hoback Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends, welcome. So excited you're with me today. And I am going to give you a little content warning right off the top. This is a very important conversation that we are having. But it is a conversation about human trafficking. I think it's information that adults need to hear and that adults need to take to their own children. But I also think this is not the most appropriate topic for young children to be hearing on this podcast. So I hope you'll stick around and listen and then take it and apply what works for you. We're gonna be chatting with human trafficking survivor and activist Kat Wee Hunt. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm really excited to welcome Kat to the show today. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Kat and I met at the Jefferson Awards. Congratulations again on your win. Likewise. Thank you. Thank you.

congratulations again on your win. Likewise. Thank you. Thank you. I was really taken with your story. I loved hearing your speech at the Jefferson Awards, and I wondered if you could just give everybody who's listening a little overview of your story and the work that you do. Well, my name's Kat Wee Hunt, and I am a survivor of familial sex trafficking. I was trafficked from the ages of 14 to 17 by an older relative, all while living at home with my parents who were both in law enforcement. And I didn't really identify as a victim or survivor of human trafficking until many years later when I started working in the gender-based violence space, I was working in a rape crisis center, sitting through their training to be a victim advocate the first time that I heard someone train on familial sex trafficking or human trafficking. And I immediately was like, wow,

that's what's happened to me. And so I now run a nonprofit and we're survivor led and have lots of other survivor leaders that work on staff with me. And we provide direct services to survivors of human trafficking. What was it like when you had that realization when you were like, this is what happened to me? Because of course you had never forgotten what happened to you. It's impossible to forget that. But when you came to the realization that this is what I experienced, what was that like for you? It was really confusing, isolating. It felt really isolating. But also, there was something really great about putting a name to what I had been through. I was trying to identify with so many other subcategories of victimizations like domestic violence or sexual assault or incest or just other struggles. And it never felt like it fit right. And I felt like there was this big part

of my story that I was kind of hiding because I didn't hear anyone else talk about that they had been through something similar. So although it was scary, it was freeing. And I remember thinking, well, why don't they teach this? Why did I think that this was like the movie Taken? I always thought, well, I wasn't handcuffed or kept in a basement or put in a shipping container and drove across state lines. And my dad did not have a special set of skills to come rescue me from another country. And so when I realized what trafficking actually looks like in America and actually looks like in our communities and neighborhoods, it was freeing to know that it happened to other people, but it was heartbreaking to know

that we weren't identifying it and that we were missing it. Did you tell your parents what happened to you? I did tell my parents. Initially, when I told my parents what happened to me at 19, I didn't have the language to put to what I had experienced. So I was telling them that I had been through sexual assault and sexual violence, but didn't really know that it was considered trafficking. And so it wasn't until a couple years later that I had to come back to my parents and tell them, hey, actually, this is what this is. And it actually was human trafficking. And so it was a little bit of a process for me to tell everybody. But yeah, my whole family knows.

Did you experience what so many people who are victims of human trafficking report that they had difficulty being believed? Yes. My parents believed me, which I'm really thankful for. but I think the word human trafficking, because we have so many misconceptions around it, people aren't really initially wanting to believe you, especially if they think, well, were you not kidnapped or were you not held hostage? So I have some people who still to this day have a hard time understanding what human trafficking really is. Polaris Project, they're one of the biggest data sources for human trafficking in America. And they recently said that there's over 28 different typologies of

human trafficking in America. And we're looking for this 1% or this one type. We're missing 27 other types of human trafficking that are happening in our communities. And people like me who went to school and got my doctor's visits or maybe standing in the grocery line behind you were missing that. And so I still think there's a lot of awareness and education to be done about what really human trafficking is. What do you say to people who ask the question, like, well, what even even is that if human trafficking isn't kidnapping and chaining somebody up? I mean, it can be that that has happened to people. Absolutely.

But that is not what it looks like for most people. Well, unfortunately, the topic is a little complex because human trafficking does look different depending on where you are. So human trafficking in Cambodia or in India can look like kidnapping or can look different than it looks like in America, but specifically domestic trafficking happening in the U.S. And we're the second largest destination for human trafficking country-wise. We're the second largest destination for human trafficking country-wise. And so specifically here, when I'm looking at somebody and trying to decide, is this human trafficking, I'm looking for two things primarily.

And it's a perpetrator, a third party that's involved, and an exchange of value. And so if somebody is exchanging sex for a safe place to stay or a meal that night, that's an exchange of value. And I think that's an important piece to realize is that it's not always money that's the exchange of value, especially when people are engaging in this world to survive. And by means of survival, it can look really different depending on the person. But a lot of people here are trafficked by somebody that they know, whether it's a family member or an intimate partner

or a close family friend. That's most of the time what we're seeing in America. Mm-hmm. And so is that how you differentiate between trafficking and, say, somebody who's engaged in prostitution? Is that third-party perpetrator that is involved? It's not just a transaction between two individuals. So yes and no. It depends on your age. So anybody who's under 18 in America cannot consent to commercial sex. When you add that commercial value in it, we're just talking about something of value being exchanged. So they cannot consent to selling nude pictures for money. They cannot consent to engaging in sex for money, food, a safe place to sleep, or anything like that. So under 18,

if you're engaging in commercial sex automatically, federally, it's human trafficking. Now above 18, that's exactly how you differentiate. And we're looking for force, fraud, or coercion, one of those things to be involved. And I think most of the time we think force. And although we do see that, most of the time I'm seeing coercion and coercion is present in every case that we come across. And that's mental manipulation. And that's like brainwashing and kind of similar to cult-like behavior where you're really breaking a person down and brainwashing them into this whole new lifestyle. A young girl meeting an older guy who is the perfect boyfriend who dates her for

an entire year and meets all of the promises he makes. And then at the end of the year, he says, look, I've paid for your place to stay and I've paid for the lights and I've fed you. And now you need to do X, Y, Z to help pay me back. And then she engages in commercial sex and that's where the coercion is involved. And that's where it begins to be human trafficking. Maybe you've encountered this question, but I know that something that I've heard from having had discussions about this is a curiosity on the part of outsiders looking in saying, if it's not involving force, it's just involving coercion. Why don't people just leave? And of course, the answer to that question is extremely complicated. It's not nearly as simple as they are making it out to be in their minds. And I

wondered if you could address that. I do get that question from time to time. And my first reply usually is, well, I did. And that's why I'm standing here in front of you. But why didn't I leave sooner maybe is the question some people ask me. And it's also a good question when you're looking at people who initially started engaging in sex work consensually is the opportunity to leave and looking at that option and how hard and difficult that is. For me, I was young. And so there were threats of violence to my family, threats of getting my little sister involved. There were threats to release nude images of me and nude explicit material. It's the lifestyle when you're engaging in the commercial sex industry. It's not just commercial sex. It comes with a lot of other things, drugs and alcohol and violence. And a lot of people I serve, unfortunately, their pimps are having them get arrested.

They're getting multiple felonies of prostitution or they have a really bad drug addiction. of prostitution, or they have a really bad drug addiction. I have had pimps who have started girls on a $300 heroin addiction a day. And then the only way for them to maintain that is commercial sex. And so when you're in that deep, it's really hard to even figure out, how do I get out of this? And how do I reintegrate into society? And I think getting out is not always the most difficult part. It's how do I reintegrate into society and be able to enjoy all of the good things this life has to offer? If I have kids and I want to be a PTO mom and they do a background check on me, how embarrassing and hard would that be? Or if I'd like to get a job, but I have a felony, in a lot of states in America, if you have a felony, you can't associate with known felons, yet you can only work at felony-friendly places.

And so there's lots of barriers to exiting the commercial sex industry. It's really, really hard. That's a great point, that often a condition of being granted parole or a probation condition is you cannot associate with anybody who has a felony or that can be viewed as a violation of your probationary conditions. But then if you are only able to be employed at locations, like let's say a janitorial service or you're working as a cook in a restaurant or whatever it is, you're associating with other known felons. And then that puts somebody in a really tough spot of like, do I violate my probation and risk going back to

jail? Do I have no job and not eat? What are my options here? And you raise a fantastic point that we have created the conditions in the United States that make it very difficult to find a legitimate option to reintegrate into society. Yeah, absolutely. Credit is also a big issue for the people that we serve. Oftentimes, traffickers and people who are exploiting victims are smart, and they're really trying to work the system in their way. The reason that my trafficker got started in this was he was originally trafficking drugs. And he realized, well, if I get arrested with illegal substances in my car, I'm going to jail. But if I get arrested with my relative in my car, she's going to lie for me. And I can sell drugs only one time,

but I can sell a person over and over and over. And so we're talking about economics 101 here when it's a low risk, high reward criminal enterprise. And so they're smart and they're doing things like making the women get credit in their name, putting hotel rooms in their name, not paying things off, opening businesses to launder money through under their name. And so if we do leave or when we do leave, we have a lot of baggage and mess to work through to reintegrate. That's a great point too, that it's not as simple as people make it out to be in their minds. simple as people make it out to be in their minds. Leave and do what is often the question that people have to answer. And the do what, that is not actually easily solved. It's even difficult to rent an apartment if you're a convicted felon. Yes. We find that our women

who come through our program are having to go to around 20 different service providers in their first month out of exploitive situations. So that's a lot to navigate. It's hard for a regular person to figure out how to pay a parking ticket. Is it magistrate's court? Is it this court? Who is this? So they need a lot of help and resources to make it happen. That's part of what your organization does is work with people who are exiting a situation, a trafficking situation. And I want to hear more about the work you do. But I have one question first, which is, how do the perpetrators get started being a perpetrator? Is it primarily they were selling drugs? Is the motive usually financial? What is happening in that person's mind? That's a great question. So I actually have some friends and colleagues who were ex-traffickers or ex-pimps and have gotten out of

that lifestyle. And from hearing some of their experiences, they're unfortunately raised in the same marginalized populations that a lot of the victims are. And they're collecting vulnerabilities that make it hard for them to get out of the systemic situations that they're in. And so a lot of times this is a financial kind of goal. And I think money really does drive this issue. piece that sometimes we forget to talk about is people wouldn't be selling sex at alarming rates if people weren't purchasing sex at alarming rates in our country. And so the third party here is the buyers that are involved and the demand for sex in our country is outrageous. And typically the buyers that we see, this is just statistically what we're looking at, is they're 99% male. They're most often white middle-aged men married with a college degree and children at home. And the ads that are placed every day when I go speak or train

at other organizations, sometimes I'll pull up a website where commercial sex is being sold in our area and it'll be 10 a.m. and there'll be hundreds of ads on there. And I think really that is what's driving this issue. And that is the only thing that will end this issue is the demand. If people stopped purchasing, people would stop selling it. How do we get people to stop purchasing it? I mean, it's easier said than done, right? Like telling people to stop doing something. Well, you should stop it. That doesn't work. What are the factors that make people want to purchase it to begin with? Especially when you're talking about like, these are well-educated adult men with spouses and children who have

opportunities and they have the money to purchase it? What is driving that behavior? That's a great question. And I think I have a little bit of a controversial view on it. And I don't want to group all buyers kind of into one category. However, what I primarily am seeing is one of two things. And it's men who aren't able to have open, honest conversations about sex. Or I've had buyers say to me, my wife and I are really going through a hard time and I continually keep getting denied to be intimate with her. And I can't handle the shame of being rejected one more time. And I can see that being true for men who are potentially purchasing older women who maybe they have the idea that this is freeing and independent and that women should be able

to do what they want and make the money for it, but not realizing a lot of these women are going home and giving all of their money to their trafficker over or what they're experiencing. So I think part of it may be some lack of education around prostitution and the commercial sex industry, and that it's just inherently violent towards women. And the other part of it is people, I think, with problematic sexual behaviors that don't have a space to talk about that either. I have the same kind of feeling with pedophilia as somebody who experienced sexual abuse as far back as I can remember. I don't think it's okay at all. And I think they need to be held accountable when 1000%. However, if you are starting to have problematic sexual thoughts or urges that are coming up, where is it safe to talk about that? Where is it safe to get help for that before you

act on it? And will you be completely ostracized from the community? Not to say that it's okay, but to say that I need help and I need resources to deal with this so I don't act on this. And I don't think people want to deal with that side of thing. We just want to lock them away on a separate island and exile them from humanity. But unfortunately, there's a lot of problematic sexual behavior going on and probably it's more common than people realize. probably it's more common than people realize. And so I'm not sure if it's a gender thing that women maybe are more willing to engage in shameful or hard conversations, but I think there's not a place for people to go and to deal with that before they perpetrate. There might be this sense of, I should get help for this. I should speak to a therapist.

Some people might have the forethought and wherewithal to have those thoughts in advance. Not everybody does. But if you do, and you find a therapist, there's this, I would imagine, a fear that that therapist is going to become an immediately mandated reporter, and that you are going to have the cops called on you, or you are going to face legal or other types of consequences, even if you haven't acted on it yet, but just for merely having the ideation. And so then it makes people, perhaps, I'm hypothesizing, not even want to seek out treatment or assistance for that problem. Absolutely. And just the culture in America teaches that women are commodities. Even with

OnlyFans, it's like, we're okay with being exploited as long as we're profiting off of it. And I think the other piece to it is the prevention education that happens in school around sexual abuse or sexual violence, healthy relationships, often teaches young women how not to be raped or how not to be violated instead of teaching young men about safe relationships or how not to violate women or what healthy boundaries looks like. And so unfortunately, we put a lot of pressure on the victim to handle and solve this problem without bringing in the other parties. That is a very good point that women really since the dawn of time have had to constantly

deal with this mental calculus of how do I keep myself safe? How do I not get raped when I'm walking down the street at night? How do I keep myself safe from the unwanted advances of X person or whatever? And there's no emphasis on training men how not to become a rapist, right? Like how do you not sexually assault people? And it's clear now that we have reached some kind of crisis point where what we're doing isn't working. And maybe it is time that we actually begin explicitly teaching our boys and adolescents and adult men how not to become a rapist. Yeah, absolutely. I have this grand idea that a woman should be able to be passed out, drunk, naked on the side of the road and still not be assaulted. We should be able to be in this world and be safe.

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I want to hear more about what led you to starting the nonprofit that you currently run, the Formation Project. What was the impetus for thinking to yourself, I need to take what I have experienced and I need to help other people? Well, I never ever once thought that I would start a nonprofit. Administration is not my skill set. So I started working in the human trafficking space in another organization in the upstate of South Carolina. And we were working on international child sex trafficking efforts based in Kaukanada, India, in Andhra Pradesh. And so that trafficking looked a lot different than what it looks like here. I really wanted to get my foot in the door and learn about what the

anti-trafficking movement was and how I could help. I've always been a person that feels like there's no way to compensate for some of the things that I've went through, but I have to figure out how to make them a gift to other people or I will just live miserably. That it doesn't make it better, but it is a why. It is my why. And so I left that organization and started working for the first time with domestic human trafficking in Greenville, South Carolina as a case manager, kind of boots on the ground. People, law enforcement would call it 3 a.m. if they had potential victims. And so I was exciting. I was ready to save the world. And slowly I began to realize that I was the only survivor in

the state that I knew at that time out as a survivor and working in this space. And so that was challenging for a number of reasons because I didn't have anyone to look at to say, this is what this should look like. And also there were already precedents and best practices that were kind of set as to how we were going to care for survivors in our state. And I didn't always necessarily agree with all of them. And I specifically started serving this one young lady. Her name was Heaven. And she was a feisty young lady who had been through so much for her entire life. And I worked with her for a period of four years where she left her trafficker. She

detoxed herself from a really horrific heroin addiction. She got custody of all three of her children back. She began operating a crane as a supervisor and she's calling me like, Kat, I'm drug testing people now. Isn't that funny? And she graduated the program and we ended up becoming friends. And this organization would have her come share her story as just success and celebration as to everything that she went through. But I was her case manager. And I can tell you that she did all of that on her own. I think she needed the relationship. She needed someone to tell her she could, but she got herself on food stamps. She got her own job. She ended up figuring out how to do this. And so I had moved on to a consulting role and working with our state on a coordinated response for

trafficking. It was no longer working for that organization. And we would keep in touch from time to time, but I was working on coordinating a response here in Charleston with the task force because there was no service providers providing services for adult survivors here. And I get a call that she had overdosed and passed away. And it was devastating. And I remember thinking, I can't do this work anymore. This is it. I've given it my best try. But at the end of the day, if we couldn't serve her, then what are we doing? And I realized that with really good intention, people were trying to provide services to survivors, but it was really complex. And we have really complex trauma and complex needs. And we were throwing services at people like a job, check. Reliable transportation,

check. Drug and alcohol free, check. But there were no measures of success. I didn't know what good looked like. It was like if you had a job at Waffle House barely making your bills and not able to pay nearly half of the things that you need to pay for, but that's still good. And I realized survivors were resilient, and we can figure out how to get ourselves on food stamps if we want to. But we needed a community. And at that time, kind of the idea

was to keep all survivors separate for confidentiality purposes. And so that we didn't get each other in trouble during recovery, honestly, and we didn't know each other and there was no survivor community. And so I decided to, because of heaven, to build a survivor community because at the end of the day, she didn't feel like she had anyone to call and say, hey, I'm thinking about using. Please don't take my job away from me or my kids away from me or all the things I've worked so hard for, but I'm having nightmares and I can't sleep still. She was left with a lot of the vulnerabilities and a lot of the trauma that got her into

some of the situations in the first place. And she didn't have a community to rely on. And so literally that is why I started the formation project. We provide a lot of really great services, but I hope that our legacy is the community that we build. And I hope that, God forbid, we had to close our doors tomorrow, that the survivors would still meet every Tuesday night for peer support group and bring a meal or bring a Modge Podge and do life with each other. Because relationship often gets us into this and relationship keeps us out of this too. I love that. Tell me more about how your organization has grown. How many people are you serving?

What does it look like on a day-to-day in the formation project? We are rapidly growing. So we got established in 2019 was when we got our 501c3. And at that time, it was right before COVID. So starting an organization in a national pandemic was interesting, but the need was there. And so we started to focus on where we could make the most impact. And that really looked like crisis intervention. So helping people get out of exploitive situations and then emergency shelter.

We had no emergency shelters in our state for survivors of human trafficking. And typically other shelters wouldn't for survivors of human trafficking. And typically other shelters wouldn't take survivors of human trafficking. And so we kind of started there in the pandemic. And since then, it was me and one other person. And now we have a staff of seven in a drop-in center where survivors can come and engage in services and get case management. And we have peer support groups and martial art classes and boundary classes and healthy relationship classes. And we have case managers that work one-on-one with all of our survivors walking through trauma recovery.

Everybody that comes to us comes from a different place. So some people are really just walking right out of their exploitive situations with nothing, like no clothes, no birth certificate or ID. And then some people are coming to us saying, hey, wow, I realized what I had been through was human trafficking. And that was five years ago, but I really want community and I would love some therapy. Our newest kind of project is we're opening a transitional home for survivors to be able to stay for six to nine months for them to work on trauma recovery before they dive right back into independent living. And it's exciting. It's going to be a democratically run home. So there'll be a president and a treasurer and a comptroller, and they'll really have a lot of voice in the way that that home is operated.

And I'm really have a lot of voice in the way that that home is operated. And I'm really excited. Half of my staff are survivors, which I'm just blessed to be able to have a place where survivors can come and feel heard and understood. And we're all in the same playing field working this together. There's no hierarchy. We're figuring this out together. And it's beautiful and messy and funny and hard sometimes, but extremely rewarding. I love that. What are some common misconceptions that Americans have about human trafficking? Because as you mentioned, what human trafficking looks like in Cambodia, India, other places in the world is different than what it looks like in the United States. What do you find are the biggest misconceptions people have about human

trafficking in the United States? I'm glad you asked that question. One of the biggest ones is that it involves transportation. And I really do not love the name human trafficking because it kind of insinuates movement in the name. And so I can understand why that is a misconception. People often get trafficking and smuggling confused and they're different. So people being smuggled into our country illegally is different than traffic. They could be smuggled and then trafficked. You don't have to be moved to be a survivor of human trafficking. I've seen moms pimp their daughters out for rent money to the landlord, and they'd never leave their home ever. Most victims of human trafficking are foreign-born victims, and that's not true. We have a mix, but we have a lot of survivors that are born and raised and trafficked in their own communities. It must always involve physical force or restraint. That's often one that I hear a lot. Human trafficking does not happen in my neighborhood

or my city, I think is probably the biggest one that I hear. Human trafficking does not discriminate based on your socioeconomic background. Unfortunately, marginalized communities are targeted more, but we have had really wealthy and really privileged people that have experienced human trafficking as well. I think sometimes in the United States, people think that human trafficking involves a stranger kidnapping somebody and then moving them to a different location for a variety of purposes. But the primary mechanism behind trafficking is that the trafficker is known to the victim. I don't know how many of us were taught stranger danger or look out for the white van,

but less than 1% of trafficking victims are kidnapped. And I personally have never met anyone that was kidnapped and I've served hundreds of women that were trafficked. And Epstein, all of his victims went home to their parents every night and went to school and to the doctors and that's far more tricky than kidnapping someone out in the open is the best way to hide and disguise this crime unfortunately but i wasn't taught what to do if a relative was being

inappropriate with me but i was taught what to do if a stranger asked me to help him look for his dog, you know? And so I think giving parents information of how to have conversations around these topics is so important as well so that we're not missing the 99% of people. We also talked previously about how misconceptions and misinformation about human trafficking actually makes the problem worse. When people are out there spreading misinformation about, you know, the pizza gate, or there's children in a tunnel underneath the Capitol building, or whatever it is. There's a variety of different types of misinformation out there in the world. That actually is worse for victims. You are doing the opposite of helping them by bursting into a pizza restaurant with a weapon than you are actually helping people in your own community.

So I would love to hear from you. How does misinformation impact human trafficking? It is so hard with the amount of information out there and how rapidly it can spread. Wayfair, I don't know if you remember hearing about the Wayfair incident, where they were saying that it's crazy because people will call me and ask me about these situations. And I will do my due diligence and I will call my partners or the people that I know

in the FBI and just make sure this is not really going on. And no, unfortunately, folks, Pizzagate and Wayfair are not trafficking children. And it's really dangerous to share this information. And I know that the intent is probably good, but it is one, keeping victims that are out there being exploited, standing in the grocery line behind you, silent and invisible. And it's distracting from what's really happening in the communities and it's really dangerous to victims themselves that's why a lot of us do not self-identify as victims of human trafficking and it's one of the most underreported crimes because we are consuming the same information that you guys are consuming out there. And so we think if we aren't kidnapped,

we aren't a victim and we're therefore not going to report. Also, just the way that we talk about human trafficking and the images and the language that we use, all of that, unfortunately, misuse can be dangerous to survivors out there. If I see a human trafficking organization that has a little girl with duct tape over her mouth handcuffed with a big red X or whatever, that over-sensationalized media makes me internalize that I'm not a victim because I don't look like that. And so making sure that the way that we talk about it is accurate information, making sure that we're not just sharing a Facebook story that maybe somebody had wrote without doing a little bit of research, making sure that it's accurate information. And sharing information about this subject is

important. It's really important. And we're just sharing the wrong information. And so I would encourage you to find your local organizations that are either survivor led or survivor informed, meaning they have survivors working with them and share their information about what it actually looks like in your community and what can be done to help. But those big, crazy stories out there are really doing a lot of harm to the movement. Yeah, if you're spending all your time looking for little girls who are handcuffed with a duct tape over their mouth, and if that's your sole mental image of what it looks like to be trafficked, then you're going to be turning a completely blind eye to the people who actually

need your help. Like you said, the person behind you in the grocery store line, the people that you might actually have a chance of impacting. You won't be able to see it if you're spending all of your time focused on the wrong thing. Absolutely. This is such an informative and impactful and important conversation. I really appreciate the work you're doing. I appreciate you being willing to share your story. And thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. As I mentioned in the episode, I met Kat at the Jefferson Awards. She was a recipient, and I was really moved by the speech that she gave. And the work that she does is so

important. If you'd like to find out more about a survivor-led human trafficking organization, you can go to theformationproject.org. Thanks for being here today. Thank you for listening to Hearer's Work. It's interesting. This show is written and researched by Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and is hosted by me, Sharon McBann. We'll see you again soon.