Speaking of Psychology - Bonus Episode: Human Trafficking with Kalyani Gopal, PhD, HSPP

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

Human Trafficking occurs when individuals are economically exploited through force, fraud or coercion for labor or commercial sex. Worldwide, it is estimated that almost 25 million people are robbed of their freedom and human dignity through trafficking- trafficking is akin to slavery. It is difficult to determine how many people are trafficked in the US but it occurs here and includes both citizens and foreign nationals. Women, children, the economically vulnerable, persons with disabilities and runaway youth are disproportionately impacted. Understanding what trafficking is and how to respond is critical. Our guest for this episode is psychologist Kalyani Gopal, PhD, a clinical psychologist and Executive Director of SAFE (Sex Trafficking Awareness, Freedom and Empowerment). Join us online August 6-8 for APA 2020 Virtual. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, it's Caitlin Luna, host of Speaking of Psychology. This episode was recorded live during APA 2019, our annual convention that was held in Chicago this year. I was away on maternity leave during that time, so my colleague, Dr. Lynn Buffka, was a guest host. We hope you enjoy the episode. Hello, and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm Dr. Lynn Buffka, and I'm guest hosting this podcast. from APA 2019 here in Chicago. Joining us today is Dr. Kalyani Gopal,

a clinical psychologist and the executive director of the organization Safe, Sexual Trafficking Awareness, Freedom, and Empowerment. Thank you for being here. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Lynn. Thank you for having me here. I was hoping you could start by telling me

a little bit about your background and how you came to be involved in this area of work. Sure. I've been in the field for about 30 years. now and I first got in the field of human trafficking probably when I was 17 or 18 without knowing that I was working as victims of human trafficking. Oh wow. At this time I was in India, I was a bachelor's degree student and I was doing my bachelor's degree

paper on research paper on women in jails, so young women in jails. So I went to this jail which is called the Tihar Jail, it's a New Delhi India and I went to the jail and I was collecting data. and the girls were disappearing. So I was the same age as those girls. I was 18, 17, 18, myself, and so were the girls. They were all locked out. There's like 20 girls, 25 girls in a room,

all locked up in that room. And then they were disappearing in the course of the night. So I used to come back to collect data from the very same girl. Because, you know, in research you're collecting the data from the same group of people. So I go back to collect data, and some of them are not there. And years, and then when I left there, eight months later, they actually had me sign a paper saying that I would not disclose what I'd found in the jail.

So in India, as in any country, for that matter, girls are used by dignitaries who come to the capital city of that country. It could be here, it could be Serbia, it could be anywhere in the world. Washington, D.C., five miles away from the capital building is what they call the track. kitty track, literally five miles from the Capitol building. And in that kitty track, you have young girls being trafficked. So it happens across the world. And at that time, I was so young myself, I was so innocent at that time. I didn't know.

So I guess that's really where I started working with victims of trafficking without knowing myself I was doing that. And then years later, when I came to this country, I was doing my doctorate in Vanderbiltz University. And then a little girl, a seven-year-old girl sat on my lap and she said, my touching me and I didn't know what that was that was that was my segue into the field of human trafficking into field of sexual abuse child sexual abuse I actually came to this country to learn more about intellectual and cognitive

neuropsychic work but I ended up doing child sexual abuse and forensic work because these kids were talking to me so then because these kids were communicating with me and they wouldn't talk to other people my professors and my supervisors said okay you know why don't you talk to these kids and I did, and then those children then started having to testify in court. So then I went with them to testify, and the rest, like this day, is history. And then I started working with foster kids because a lot of kids are sexually abused end up in foster kids.

And then years, about 15, 20 years later, no, 30 years ago, 25, 30 years ago, I had a family of four children in Gary, Indiana, and they were between seven years old, and the youngest was two, two, three years old. they were being asked to perform tricks with each other. So in Gary, one of the houses, it had like black windows. The windows were black paper put on the windows. And inside the stage like this, a little stage, chairs just like that, and people were paying $10 a piece

to come in to watch these kids do tricks, what they call tricks on each other. So the parents were trafficking their own children. And at that time, we didn't call it trafficking. 30 years ago, you know, child sexual abuse, no one said it was human trafficking, right? So what we did was we called a child sexual abuse. I went to court the family for the first time in the history.

The father got 56 years in jail. They had a life sentence, mother and father. They both got life sentences, basically. And that was my very first case. And from then on, I started getting cases on child sexual abuse from across the country, testifying of wherever, you know, what was going on. A lot of them high profile cases involving people who are like brothers of judges and politicians,

sisters, so forth. So I got involved with all of that. And then about 10, 20 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, maybe, I had a young girl called me from Chicago. And I was at this time working in Indiana. And she called me and she said, Doc, come pick me up. And I was like, I'm not going to come pick me. you up, this is a foster child. I said, I'm not going to come pick you up, you know, go home.

What are you doing at nine o'clock at night outside and get back home? What I didn't know is that she was probably being trafficked. I had no clue. Until today, that weighs on my mind as a child I could not protect. So from then on, I got really interested in the field of human trafficking because I realized these teenagers were disappearing. And what's really troubling is foster parents, some foster parents, not all, but some foster parents literally will ask for teenage children and teenage girls because I really get along well with the girls, you know, I'm really good with girls, I work really well with them, give me the teenagers, the hard to place, they're really hard to place, they're really hard to place, they're hard to place kids, we'll take care of them.

Of course these kids are running away, or we think they're running away, but now I realize they're probably being trafficked. So having done all these years of child sexual abuse, I was now moving into the field of human trafficking. So at this point, I do literally 20% or 30% on my clinical work is on human trafficking work, which are anti-human trafficking work. Can you help listeners understand what human trafficking is? Because you're talking a lot about sex trafficking, but trafficking can involve laborers as well. So can you help people understand sort of the range of what human trafficking encompasses? I'm really glad you asked me that the sex trafficking

is like the sexy thing that people talk about, right? No pun intended. But, but So there's two types of trafficking, fundamentally. There's labor trafficking and there's sex trafficking. Labor trafficking is larger worldwide than sex trafficking. So labor trafficking is a $150 billion industry, right? Human trafficking is about 20% of all trafficking, sex trafficking that is. It's 20% of all trafficking.

Labor trafficking involves organ harvesting. So I was in India training the people, the NGOs, and the Miramar, the Myanmar, Myanmar, Nepal, India border. There's a lot of unrest there. There's a lot of refugees out there. So I was working out there with the NGOs and the magistrates and the IOM, the UN people. And I was training them on how do you identify and work with victims of traffic.

Because we're a psychologist, that's what we do. We train people to interview other people and to interact and to establish that rapport. And so when I was working with them, one of the things that comes up was organizing. harvesting, child brides, huge, huge issue of child brides, organ harvesting. Sex tourism is very big. So especially Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, there's a massive sex tourism. We have brides going from China to Vietnam. We have brides coming from Nepal to India, Russia to India.

So these are child brides that are being trafficked. That's very, very big. Even in this country, we have child brides, and there's laws. Every state doesn't have laws against child brides, just so you know. Some of the states allow child brides. So keep that in mind when you think about human trafficking.

Another big aspect of human trafficking is the mining industry. So for example, in DRC, which is DR Congo, in Africa, they have a region called Kivu, and we were working with some of the folks out there. And what happens is there's tin. They have mining with tin mining. tin mining. And the children and the women are trafficked for tin mining over there. So it's a very

big industry all over the world. We have child soldiers in Kenya. So these kids are about three, four years old when these boys are then taken into human trafficking. They are child soldiers, and they're made to fight for ISIS. They're taken all over the world. So think of the Boko Haram children, the girls who were kidnapped, everyone knows about that. They were also trafficked, sexually trafficked, but they're also labor trafficked. Labor trafficking is huge between Nigeria and Italy. So Italy is a destination point, is a gateway into Europe, and they go from Libya and Nigeria. They go from Nigeria to Libya to Italy. So we are trying to break that chain. It's a supply demand chain. So the U.S. is a destination country for sex trafficking. The Middle East is a destination country for

labor trafficking. Europe is a destination continent for sex and labor trafficking. So there's several different forms of it. Sex tourism, if you ever travel to the middle, to the southeastern countries, sex tourism is very big and their sex extortion is very good, very big there. So tourists go from here, they think, okay, you know what, my wife's not here, my family, my spouse, my girlfriend, whatever is not there. And what they do, pictures are taken and this extortion that takes place using the children. So there's a lot of pedophilia that goes on. Wow.

It's a huge problem. I was researching this issue. I was overwhelmed by how big it is. And it happens not only across borders, but within countries as well. And it was important. I learned something important is that distinct from smuggling. Yes. Human smuggling is trying to get people into a country, not necessarily for labor or sex purposes.

Absolutely. This is really about getting people into the country to have them being used and really kept to do things that they don't want to be doing in a way that we would consider violation of their human rights. That's very well said because human smuggling involves money at the receiving end. So basically, you pay someone fully aware of what's happening. You talk about informed consent all the time, right? They are consenting to be smuggled across borders. Human trafficking doesn't involve any consent. It involves deception.

So it's fraud, coercion, deception. You're not paying money to be trafficked. Right. The trafficker gets paid to traffic you. It's a whole different dynamic. I can only imagine, and I want to know more about what's the psychological impact of having been trafficked? What happens to the person who is? It is massive.

It is totally, and I tell people, you talk about domestic violence, right? And we talk about human trafficking. And people often think, well, I have a domestic violence shelter. Why can't I keep kids or women who are trafficked in that shelter? You can't. Because a domestic violence victim can walk out. A human trafficking victim should not be allowed to walk out because when they walk out, they go to their trafficker.

Immediately the traffickers waiting outside. And they're terrified, terrified of speaking, Because even though you and I are talking, if you have a victim of human trafficking in front of us, it's just not three of us. Her traffickers in the room with her. He's psychologically right there. So it's a manipulation. It's a dehumanization of an individual with, it's almost like an addictive force. So what they do, they'll give you little bits of love.

Teeny, meaning, you know, you're great, you're beautiful, you're lovely, a little bit of love. And then massive doses of punishment. You know, there's pain through the cigarette butts being put on them. They're made to lay naked on a table. And so as an example to everybody else who spoke or snitched, you know, basically, they beat them up. So if you don't bring X number of dollars home to the trafficker that day, you're on serious punishment.

There's no food, there's no water, there's no drink. There's nothing for you. It's a very seriously dehumanization. So your entire identity is what the trafficker tells you you are. If the trafficker says you're a woman, you're a woman. If traffic says, you know, it's that bad. It's that severe. It's a complete manipulation control of the human mind.

And how does a person ever get out of that? What is it that they can do to try to escape that manipulation? Is there something? There's so much now. As psychologists, we have so much to offer. And the tragedy in this field, and I say it's a tragedy, because there's not enough psychologists who are involved because you always think of it as a social justice issues social work issue what am I doing with community stuff you know that

that kind of mentality we tend to be more clinically in our office in a in a clinic safe like a comfort zone being in your office but really we need to get out there in the community because that's really where human trafficking is happening that's where our patients are our patients are in the community they're living every day in the community they're not living in our office right So we need to be out there. And so the ways to treat victims of human trafficking, what I do, I had to modify existing treatment to work with trauma victims of human trafficking.

Because you're working with an addictive or an addicted human being. You're also working with a human being who doesn't feel she's human anymore. Because the traffickers who gives her her identity. So when you have that third person in the room, you first have to separate that literally, that literally the psychological separation between the trafficker and her like two separate entities that's the first stage and the next stage then is then you try to tell this person who are you then you have to build you're to build that person up not only as a human being but you to build them up and says what do I want

what do I like who am I who was I before I became a victim of trafficking I became of my PIMS girl you know they have have, they identify themselves with a lot of street language, which I won't use, but they have very specific language how they identify themselves. They have a hierarchy. It's like a harem, so each woman has a role in that harem. And then I do a lot of trauma work with rapid resolution therapy. I've modified some of the treatments because I do Eastern as well as Western, because it's not only a psychological issue, it's a spiritual emotion, it's just a multifaceted demeaning of a person. I've never seen a human being so non-human as I've seen

the victims of trafficking. Wow. It is they will sit in my office and I worked with severe sexual abuse so don't get me wrong. I've worked with very very severe sexual abuse cases with you know the fragments of personalities do and so they will sit here they will put their legs up there and they will just hold themselves like this for hours and you cannot speak to them because in their heads, their traffickers looking right at them. And they're not hallucinating. That person's in their head, you know, literally inside the head.

So you're working with an individual who's so severely traumatized, you know, it's just a tragedy. And so when you have to pull them out, the biggest thing, what I use, I use a lot of visual, tactile and very hands-on with them. You know, usually with trauma patients, you say, don't touch them, don't go near. them. With them, they literally need you to hold them. You literally have to hold them. You know, like they're like children. And once they trust you, initially they won't talk, of course, but once they trust you, you can't stop them. It's like a dam just breaks through and they cry and cry and cry and they'll talk and talk and talk. A session with them is about three hours.

You can go shorter than three hours because there's so much they've held in. But if you say, I'm sorry, you know, my time's up, you know, you need to go, my patients waiting outside. You've lost them, they're not coming back. Right, and they would need time to sort of get out, but then to be safe enough to then leave your office, I would imagine. Absolutely, absolutely. You can't do traditional EMDR, you can't do traditional rapid resolution, you can't do traditional, visual therapy, you can't do the traditional narrative.

So I've had to modify everything I've learned in order to be able to reach out to them. So I modified it. For example, rapid resolution therapy, which is like a visual hypnosis kind of therapy. I call it the chakra, rapid resolution chakra therapy. So I put them into deep relaxation. And I literally do work that I've never done before in my life, but I have to do it because that's what works.

So ultimately, when we're looking at our patients and we're saying we need to do evidence-based work, I say, yeah, sure, let's do evidence-based work. I'm all for it. But what do I do with this patient who is not going to respond to it? You know, I can't just say, hey, by the way, this is my technique. I'm going to use it because I know it's backed by serious scientific research.

Can't. You have to heal your patients, right? That's what we are sworn to do. So I modify a lot of those techniques. And now my patients, within about four sessions, I'm able to get them to speak. I'm able to get them to write. Because sometimes they will refuse to write. They're frightened to write.

I'm able to separate them from the trafficker with that huge guilt. It's like this massive shift. and guilt because once they get better, once they realize the victims, and they, by the way, they never think of themselves as victims. They think of themselves as just being the girlfriend. So if he go there and say, I'm so sorry, you're victimized by human trafficking and this guy is your pimp, she doesn't know, he's not my pen. I'm doing this because I want to do it.

And if he's my pimp, it's because I chose him to be my pen. So how do individuals find their way to you if they're not seeing themselves as being trafficked? Usually I'll get them from the FBI. I get them from the Homeland Security Department. I get them from the Sheriff's Department. So the deputies in the Sheriff's Department will send them to me. Other survivors will send them to me.

They're not NGOs. They send them, yeah. So I get them from a variety of different. So how can the average person recognize whether or not someone's being trafficked when the person themselves doesn't necessarily recognize it? Absolutely. So, you know, in the statistics we have in Indiana, for example, is like 159 cases were reported last year.

In my clinic alone, I had six cases in two months that identified. So think about if someone is not trained, just like I wasn't years ago, I had to train myself. If someone's not trained, as a psychologist, we'll miss all the signs. So this is what you're looking for. You're going to be looking for people with extra phones.

Someone whose hygiene is questionable. someone who's got problems of running away from home several times. So within 48 hours of a kid being picked up by running away, one in five to six children is picked up by a trafficker. That is the high statistic we have. We have 458,000 missing children in the country, right?

But Nick Mech, which is a national missing, exploited children, they have identified about 459,000 children, I think, as it last year. But when they did the Super Bowl, and during the Super Bowl, they rescued children. They were able to identify only 10% from the missing children's database. Wow. 90% they didn't even know what missing.

Wow. That's huge. That's huge. It's huge. So people who are being trafficked don't necessarily recognize it. It's very hard for us to recognize that people are being trafficked. Yes. What does someone who has been trafficked, if they get out of the situation,

What is it that they can do or what seems to help them to rebuild their lives? So what really helps them is jobs. So one of the biggest things I've got from survivors, the biggest complaints we have from survivors, because I host a conference every year on human trafficking, is because the very first conference we had in 2014, we had eight survivors there, and all eight of them had said, please give us jobs. Don't just tell us you're going to get us out of this life.

They call it the life. is it don't get us out of the life. Give us jobs. Because if you have jobs, we won't go back. But if I can't pay my rent, I can't put food on the table, you know, I can't buy a small toy for my grandchild, I can't do all of that.

How do you want me to survive? At least my PIM, sorry, you know, that's what they call them, at least my PIM gives me the money that I can, you know, survive. I can send money home if I have to. So the way to identify these victims in a clinic setting ask them three questions just three if you can ask these three questions you can actually identify victims one who's in charge

of your money who's in charge of your money if you're an adult right who's in charge of your money if you're in a domestic violence condition for a situation maybe your spouse is in charge of your money or the guy who's your boyfriend so then you want to ask more questions has he made you sleep with other men simple questions right there's one question Lisa next question least the third. So just the classic interviewing technique that we're really well trained to do. And then the second question you always want to ask is, have you been made to do something you didn't want to do? Have you had to do something you didn't want to do? It could be, yeah, I didn't want to go to the mall, so I had to go to the mall.

Anything else that caused you shame or made you feel bad about yourself, about your body. So you can ask questions that lead to more deeper questions. And it's like the funnel approach and interview that we do. We ask broad questions and then we narrow it down. And the third question you can always ask, especially of a child abuse, child sexual abuse victim, did you ever feel bad about sleeping with this person? Usually it's a mother's boyfriend. Because the mother knows that you had sex with the boyfriend

or the husband, because in exchange, she was able to pay rent. That is human traffic. That literally is human trafficking, but we don't call it that. The mother trafficked the child in order to pay rent for the other kids and herself. So clearly with trafficking, and certainly you're talking a lot about sex trafficking, the inability to provide basic things. Absolutely. It's the financial motivator in many ways.

I mean, obviously, one person is benefiting financially, and one person's barely surviving. Absolutely. But that's part of what's happening. Absolutely. The first question you asked, said you should ask is, who's controlling the money? I suspect that's also really relevant for people who are being labor trafficked as well. Absolutely. And are there things to look out for for people who are being labor traffic that might

be different from sex trafficking? So labor trafficking has a very different dynamic than sex trafficking. We don't see many in the clinical setting for labor trafficking, right? Because labor trafficking tends to be domestic servitude. So in domestic servitude, for example, they'll have small children who are in the clinical who are sent by their parents to work in your house in exchange for all the income that she makes going back to the family.

So in certain situations, for example, with labor trafficking, usually with organ harvesting, for me that's like really big, because that's one of the biggest forms of labor trafficking. What happens with organ harvesting is in order to go from one country, for example, to come to from Mexico to the US, US, right? Think about labor trafficking when you think about that. I know we focus on sex

trafficking a lot, but that's with the minors. But with the older people, the older adults, labor trafficking would be where they take an organ in exchange for safe passage of your family. So for example, a kidney, if I don't know any of you have families with kidney failure, but with a kidney that's donated, there is a cost to it. So if you give me your kidney, I will allow your wife and child, one child, to come across the border. You have to give me something else

in order for your other child to come across the border. And that child becomes the unaccompanied minors. So between January and June, we had 56,000 children unaccompanied. in the border. In May alone we had 11,500 children who were unaccompanied. So this is a massive, massive human trafficking racket. The proportions I can't even explain to you how seriously they impact families within this country as well. Because think about these kids are going to school with your kids. These kids are intermingling

with your kids. They're then being hired by traffickers to then say, hey, go to the school and get these other kids to upload pictures of themselves. So labor and sex trafficking then gets intertwined. So it's a very fine line between the two, and often they go together. Labor and sex trafficking, very frequently go hand in hand. So these are things we start to tell people to think about, because nowadays with the Internet and the digital age, the biggest problem we are having now is our middle schoolers are being asked to

upload pictures of themselves with nothing much on. And then they're saying, if you're my friend, you'll send me a picture. Before it was, if you're my friend, you'll wear the same color clothes I wear. You know, now it is, if you're my friend, you'll upload a picture of yourself doing X, Y, Z. So these kids do that just because they don't want

to lose the friendship. And because everybody else is doing it. So of course they're going to do it. And then after some time they say, I don't want to do it again. Oops, too late. I have your picture. I'm going to show it to your mother. or your father, or the whole school's going to know what you did.

And from then on, they're trapped. Right, so there's a way that now media, technology, is really contributing to individuals in this country, getting brought into maybe not actually performing sexual acts, but providing pornography because they're being manipulated. I hadn't realized that was happening as well. It's horrifying to think about that. It's horrifying, horrifying.

What else do you think people should know about trafficking and how psychology can help people in that space? So I think the biggest, what I really like for everyone to know about human trafficking is that it's here. It's happening here. It's happening among us. It happens in meetings. I host a conference, like I said, on human trafficking. I had somebody come in 2014, my 2014, my first conference, and the guy had an NGO. that are volunteers. You know how you have nonprofit organizations and they're like, let's, you need to volunteer. Why don't you volunteer in this organization? Or they'll say, you know,

we are a modeling agency. You know, you have a pretty daughter or you're pretty yourself or good looking yourself. They'll say, hey, would you like to model? And then they'll take your picture and they say they're going to model you. That picture, your face goes on somebody else's body. Or they'll make you say do certain poses and they'll put that and they can digitally change you so that you are actually performing an act. And then they'll send that picture back to you, the video back to you, and say, if you don't do what I tell you or you don't service so into person, I'm going to send this to whoever you're married to.

And imagine you're married, you have children, you have a family, and you just say, okay, I want to make some extra money, I want to do some modeling. I work in a retail store. That's where they go, the malls. the malls, the schools, things that we think, the playgrounds, we think these are safe places, and they're generally safe if you're just alert to the science. So it seems that one of the challenges these days is that it's really, we have much less control over how our images projected, and that that can be used in manipulative ways that were not present

20 years ago. So I would imagine that in the field of trafficking, particularly around sex trafficking, and labor trafficking. The technology that is being employed, law enforcement agencies have all sorts of new challenges in order to keep up with that. And in labor trafficking, usually the biggest problem we have is people come from other countries to safer countries, what they think is safer countries, for a better opportunity. You come for a better life for your children, unless you're a refugee. So there's two types of refugees, right?

one of the refugees who come to the country because they're escaping political conflict. They're political refugees. The other kind of refugees are those who are escaping poverty, and they want to come for a better life. So there's war conflict and politics, and then there is a need for economics. They're both economically challenging aspects. So when they come to this country or to any other country, that is doing better, or considered safer,

quote-unquote, safer than their country, then what happens is they become at risk for labor trafficking. So oftentimes it's a job, it's a promise of a job. They'll say, you know what? You come there, you'll have a job waiting for you. You just have to turn in your papers. So the biggest aspect of the labor trafficking and sex trafficking is they'll take your papers from you.

Right. We'll keep your papers because we need to turn this over to the authorities. and we can convince them, you know, we can convince them that you're a good candidate for this job. So I need all your papers. Of course you're going to give your papers because you want to get that job. Or you want to be allowed in a new country. Once you arrive in the new country, you'll never get your papers back. So you have no papers, you have no identification.

You're basically, even though you may have come in legally at some level, you still have nothing. So that is a challenge between legal and illegal immigration. too for us because they have lost their papers because those papers get confiscated and that's a big problem with them what kinds of challenges or where would you hope that psychologists and people who are interested in psychology how could they use this information in the in their local communities really is raising awareness so what I do a lot of my work when I go talking churches you know I talk about psychological trauma I talk about identification I talk

about child development. I talk about adolescent, so I have a whole curriculum I've developed. It's called the I Act Program. So we've now got accredited. As the first program, there's been accredited globally. And I've developed this program because we have 10 modules covering all the way from infancy, labor sex trafficking, all the, because people don't talk much about labor trafficking. So thank you so much for bringing it up again and again because it's so important. And labor trafficking, just remember, is larger, larger and more worldwide than what we experience in the U.S. as sex trafficking and labor trafficking. So keep that in mind.

So that's one thing I really want to convey. But as psychologists, we can actually teach about child development. We can teach about the human brain. We can teach about the neuropsychological substrates of trauma. We can teach about how to treat trauma. There's so much rehab. So I'm building a village for human trafficking victims. And we're building it in Indiana.

And we have a whole restorative treatment, trauma-informed, trauma-based, evidence-based, and non-evidence-based treatment, where we are actually going to be having 100 children. And we're trying to raise $26 million, just so you know. So we try to raise all that money so we could build the very first human trafficking safe village that is actually built by psychologists, run by psychologists, and mental health professionals, and the vets are going to be providing us the security. So we are rehabilitating the vets, we are rehabilitating the children, and rehabilitating the youth and the mothers with children. So it's a very comprehensive program.

Sounds like a really important vision for what you could do to benefit people who have them. That's really impressive. Thank you. Well, I'm so happy that you were able to join us today. Thank you for spending your time with us. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast. This is APA's Speaking of Psychology Podcast.

If you have enjoyed the podcast or have any comments or ideas you want to share, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. You can find this podcast. on Stitcher, iTunes, or wherever you find your podcast, you can also visit our website at www. www. speakingof psychology.org and listen to other episodes there as well. Again, I'm Dr. Lynn Bufka with the American Psychological Association. Thank you, everybody from here.