Victim Advocate. Explain How Your

¶ … victim advocate. Explain how your office would work with (a) a sight-impaired victim and (b) a victim with traumatic brain injury who is confined to a wheelchair. What problems or issues may be encountered by your agency and in the criminal justice system?

When working with victims with any type of special needs, the most important consideration to keep in mind is that the person is a person with a disability, not a disabled person. Therefore, the person should come before the disability. The first thing I would do is consider whether there are physical barriers preventing the victim from accessing the physical resources in the office. Does either of the victims need assistance with transportation or help getting to the office setting? If there are written documents, can I make a Braille copy available for the sight-impaired victim? Does the victim with the traumatic brain injury have a guardian and are there questions of legal competency? Is the office wheelchair accessible? As long as the victims can access the office and the office can provide them with any accommodations, I would work with them as advocates. I would prepare them to face a more difficult time under cross-examination. Obviously, a sight-impaired victim will have a more difficult time with identifying perpetrators. For the victim with a traumatic brain injury, I would have to assess functioning. If there were concerns that having the victim participate in the criminal justice system would increase trauma, or concerns that the victim lacked capacity, I would have to talk to social services and see what resources were available for the victim. Finally, I would find out about the cause of the disabilities, because if they were the result of criminal activity, the victims might be entitled to additional assistance or compensation.

Carefully view the two videos, Modern Slavery and Free the Slaves. Respond to the following:

Describe at least three different forms of human trafficking.

Discuss the incidence of various types of child trafficking in the U.S.

Outline the obstacles to freedom for trafficked individuals in the U.S.

Please post one original response. Each original response should be a minimum of 125 words in length.

I was horrified to discover that slavery still existed in such a huge scale in the modern United States. Obviously, like most people, I had seen isolated news reports discussing people caught holding other people as slaves. However, I was simply unaware that the problem was so huge. To know that today's global slave trade is far larger than the slave trade was at the height of the Atlantic Slave trade if horrifying. Even more horrifying is the fact that many slaveholders are in Western countries where slavery has long been illegal, and these slaves are hidden away and may never be detected. Three forms of human trafficking that I noticed were smuggling-related trafficking, where immigrants seeking to come to the United States are instead diverted into sweat shops and forced to work as laborers, the sex-slave trade, and the domestic labor slave trade. Most troubling to me was child trafficking. Honestly, after watching the videos, I went beyond them to further examine the problem. I found a wide variety in numbers, but consistently saw that between 100,000 and 300,000 children in the U.S. are at risk for sex-trafficking each year, and that many of these children come from the more than 2 million U.S. children living on the streets. Moreover, while the videos distinguished between different types of slavery, other research showed a huge overlap between types of slavery. For example, a U.S. family might bring a young girl from another country to work as a domestic in the U.S. home, with the father using her as a sex slave as well. Finally, I was alarmed to see that the barriers for freedom are so significant. Slaves who are brought into the U.S. illegally face deportation and even criminal charges if they escape their captors. They may have loved ones with them that are in danger if a slave escapes. They may also have vulnerable loved-ones in their countries of origin. Slaves frequently face language barriers, as well. Depending on the country of origin, they may have a deep mistrust of law enforcement, because law enforcement may have participated in or ignored the slave trade in their home countries. There is also the stigma associated with the sex work that many of these slaves are forced to endure. Finally, they may face credibility issues, since many slaveholders are otherwise respected members of the community. All of these barriers discourage escape and reporting of the crime.