In this episode, I sit down with Amanda Altman, CEO of Kristi House in Miami-Dade County, to talk about the alarming rise in child abuse and human trafficking – and what we can do to stop it.
Amanda pulls back the curtain on the harsh realities of child sexual abuse, human trafficking, and the $150 billion industry targeting vulnerable children. She shares staggering statistics – like how 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys will be sexually assaulted before they turn 18 – and explains why prevention education, community involvement, and parental awareness are more critical than ever, especially with the rise of online exploitation.
How many people has Kristi House helped over the years:
“Over 30,000 at this point. … It’s so wonderful on the one hand. On the other hand, I hate it that we have to exist because I hate thinking about any child going through this, but I am so grateful that they have such a child friendly place where they can come and get all of the services that they need to heal and recover.”
Why human trafficking is so prevalent:
“When you talk about human trafficking, (you ask) what’s the goal of the trafficker? Instead of selling drugs, they’re selling people. And the advantage to selling a person is you can sell them over and over and over again. When you sell a brick of cocaine, you’ve sold it. It’s gone. You’ve got to find another one. A person – you can sell them over and over.”
Does Amanda think the criminal penalties are strong enough:
“I do not. The laws have taken quite a while to catch up. So, for a while, we were really fortunate here in Miami-Dade County, we have a state attorney who recognized this problem long before many other states did. She found creative ways to prosecute these people, even when the human trafficking laws hadn’t quite caught up.
So, they’re starting to catch up now, but these cases are really hard to prove and you really still need a victim to testify. You can imagine that that’s really hard sometimes to convince a survivor to want to face their trafficker.”
Online trafficking has gotten much worse:
“What we’re seeing a lot of now is online solicitation and online trafficking and online sextortion and things like that. And, so I feel badly saying this to parents because parents have so much on their plates already, but you have got to pay attention to what your kids are doing online.
If your child has a phone, you need to put in every parental protection that you possibly can. You need to be monitoring your child’s text messages. You need to be monitoring their emails.”
What can we do to better protect our children:
“I still say the number one thing you have to have is education. It’s the only way to break the cycle of these things ever. Victim services are of course, incredibly important after somebody’s been victimized, but we want to prevent somebody from being victimized in the first place. The only way to do that is prevention and education.
Every single school in the country should require prevention education, and I don’t care if you’re in the wealthiest school district in the country or the poorest school in the country, you need to have this education, and it needs to start young. We do programs for kindergarten through 12th grade.”
What Amanda’s most grateful for:
“There are so many things that I’m grateful for. I am, I’m incredibly grateful for the team that we have at Kristi House, I think we have built just an amazing team. We have about 85 employees. They’re not all therapists, they’re not all advocates. Some of them; it might be the administrative person who’s running the office or answering the phone when it rings.
But each one of them plays a really critical role. I hope they know that. I hope that they feel that because really without any one of them, the wheels would not keep on turning.”
