Lee la entrevista en español aquí

Safe Horizon’s Anti-Trafficking Program is a member of GAATW in New York City, USA. Charlotte Clar and Borislav Gerasimov from the GAATW Secretariat conducted this interview with Anita Teekah, Senior Director of the Anti-Trafficking Program, in September 2022 to learn more about Safe Horizon’s history, context, and current work. 

Charlotte Clar: Thank you for meeting with us today. Can you tell us when Safe Horizon was founded and why?

Anita Teekah: Safe Horizon was founded about 45 years ago. The Anti-Trafficking Program (ATP) was founded in 2001, after the Trafficking Victims Protection Act was adopted in the United States.

Safe Horizon was originally known as the Victims Services Agency and intended to meet the needs of all types of crime victims in the New York City area. Over time they changed the name to Safe Horizon. Since then, they’ve founded different programmes that interact with different people. The agency works with child protection services (NYC ACS), we work in the family courts, in the criminal courts, we operate child advocacy centres, we provide immigration relief, and we work with domestic violence victims, homicide survivors, and child abuse victims. Safe Horizon’s programmes provide assistance to survivors of any type of crime or victimisation.

Safe Horizon works with over 250,000 people a year. They’re the nation's biggest victim services agency, even though they only work within the five boroughs of New York City. A lot of our clients are foreign nationals and many are children, unfortunately. There’s no type of person that Safe Horizon doesn’t work with.

The Anti-Trafficking Program (ATP) works with people within and outside of NYC, in other parts of New York State, parts of New Jersey, and occasionally Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

Borislav Gerasimov: Can you give us some examples of the services you provide, the people you work with, and the way you operate?

AT: ATP works with people of all ages, nationalities, and immigration statuses, but you have to be a victim of trafficking to qualify for our services. You may have been a victim in your youth and be an adult now, but we will work with you as long as you have a history of any form of human trafficking. Most of our clients are victims of labour trafficking, women, and foreign nationals. Our clients come from over 80 countries and speak a plethora of languages but we're trying to do more outreach to domestic victims of labour trafficking. The top three countries of origin for our clients are the Philippines, Mexico, and the US. In any given year, between 20 to 30% of our clients are men. We have also been seeing an increase in individuals who self-identified as LGBTQ+. We have some clients who have a physical disability or cognitive deficit or some psychological condition and we’re doing more outreach to these groups.

BG: When it comes to victims of trafficking, who does the identification, who decides that someone is a victim of trafficking, which then allows them to use your services?

AT: Sometimes clients will come to us from other service agencies and so they've already been identified; others come in and self-disclose. But even if a client only needs or wants legal services, we still have them go through a social worker for an intake. They don't have to receive social work services if they don't want to. But if somebody is undocumented and they need legal services, they usually have case management-related needs as well. Our social workers will do a pretty thorough intake to determine if the person is a victim of trafficking, according to the federal definition. New York State law is a little more regimented, so individuals who might be considered a victim of trafficking under federal law will not necessarily be considered a victim under state law. In order to make sure that our services are as inclusive and widely available as possible, we use the federal definition.

As long as somebody has experienced force, fraud, or coercion to induce them to perform some type of labour against their will or any kind of commercial sexual acts, they would be eligible for services. We do have individuals that might be considered victims of severe labour exploitation/borderline trafficking and because there aren't service organisations that cater to labour exploitation, other than worker rights centres, that can be tricky. We still connect these clients to counselling and financial assistance and legal assistance. But if somebody also needs legal assistance, then they have an intake with one of our immigration attorneys and undergo a more particular kind of assessment, because now we have to determine, from a legal perspective, does this person meet the definition of a victim of human trafficking, such that they're eligible for a T or U Visa. The TVPA sets out very specific criteria to be eligible to apply for a T or U Visa. The first one is that you're a victim of trafficking, and then there's three additional criteria for a T visa. So it can be a multi-step process for our clients, depending on whether they also need legal assistance or not.

CC: You mentioned that Safe Horizon helps over 250,000 clients who speak many languages. What are some of the main challenges in serving this large and diverse group?

AT: I'll keep my answers specific to ATP. I want to make sure that our workers look like the clients we're serving. Safe Horizon has become more equitable in terms of what our job descriptions look like. If you don't have a Master's in social work but you have many years of experience, we will consider that in lieu of having a degree. Because with the way discrimination and systems of oppression work in the United States, and really everywhere, people who are more privileged and have more money are going to have the degrees and credentials that we want in staff but they don’t look like the communities we serve. So right now, our staff is really diverse and reflects the communities we serve.

One of the challenges is that because we serve so many male victims, oftentimes, they don't want to work with women social workers, but most social workers in US are women. And so we've had male clients say they don't feel comfortable with disclosing incidents of sexual abuse or physical assault during trafficking to our women social workers. It's a challenge but we try to recruit qualified men on our social worker team to make sure that we have coverage, at least among two genders, for as many clients as possible.

ATP staff and clients at Holiday Fiesta Potluck, Dec 2018

Another piece is language. We have staff that speak English, Spanish, Thai, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, and one speaks a little bit of Nepalese, but that doesn’t cover all languages. So we use an interpretation service and, depending on the quality of interpreters, it can be difficult to have a relationship with clients. We were working with a Cambodian Monk and the Khmer interpreters that we were using were not the best, and so that impacts the relationship with clients.

Another piece was COVID. It just blew everything out of the water - clients were getting sick, losing their jobs, made to work more often, couldn't leave home to come to our office in Brooklyn, and we weren't allowed in our office for the first six months of the pandemic due to the COVID hotspots throughout NYC.  

Other challenges beyond COVID include childcare. A lot of our clients have children and so we need to navigate childcare issues if a client needs to come to the office for a counselling session or to pick up financial assistance. We also have to pay for transportation for the clients to come to us. But for a lot of foreign clients, it's also about teaching them how to use the subway and how to get around New York. And the traffickers can be based in the same borough that we are. So making sure that people are safe when they're getting on the subway and travelling to us and they feel secure in doing that.

Another challenge is that we never have enough funding to provide the full scope of financial assistance that our clients need. Especially during COVID, we got a lot of requests for rent. For a lot of clients, if they lost their jobs, they were months behind on rent. So they were coming to us with requests for 5-6-7 thousand dollars for rent. That's a huge amount of money for a programme like ours. Luckily, we did have two private funders that stepped up in 2020 and gave us additional, unrestricted, funding, specifically for client assistance. We used that money to pay mostly for rent arrears, as well as food cards and personal care item cards for people to buy clothes and diapers, and things like that. But that ended in early 2021 and people are still having problems paying rent.

Another challenge has been staff turnover because in this work you get burnt out under normal circumstances and then with COVID a lot of my staff had a lot of personal life issues. People had children, deaths in their family, or became sick. So when the staff are impacted they need to take time away, which means we don't have staff to work with the clients. And we simultaneously had increased numbers of referrals. So it was a perfect storm of being chronically understaffed, under-resourced and handling large numbers of clients. And the staff that are remaining have to pick up even more clients than before. Under normal circumstances, you have staff turnover, but that's accelerated in the pandemic. I have two social worker vacancies right now, we're down 50% on the social worker team, but a lot of clients need counselling. Everywhere in New York City there’s a waitlist for therapy.

BG: Can you give some examples of the challenges victims of trafficking experience in the US? And because you mentioned working with LGBTQI+ people, any specific challenges that they face?

AT: Housing is a major challenge. Another is employment - a lot of clients are looking for sustained employment with living wage salaries. A third is immigration relief. Under the prior administration, the adjudication times for visa applications became so delayed that people were out of status for even longer periods of time. And the longer you're out of status, the longer you have to wait before you’re eligible to access public benefits. This puts more strain on service providers for that financial assistance in the interim, while people are undocumented.

For LGBTIQ+ people, challenges include finding appropriate housing, especially for transgender clients. There was one housing entity that specialises in and works with transgender people, but it was a really traumatic experience for the client due to unfortunate dynamics.

Another is counselling, specifically for LGBTIQ+ people, that meets their needs in terms of whatever issues they might be grappling with. Also, social support systems - they don't have a tonne of social support systems especially if they've been runaway or homeless youth or are they were unaccompanied minors. Our prior supervising social worker was a gay man. When he left to start a private practice, that was very difficult for a lot of our clients. We haven't been able to meet that need yet.

ATP staff and client Susy Andole at presentation for CUNY School of Professional Studies, Dec 2019

CC: How do you learn from the people and communities you serve? Or put otherwise, how do you incorporate their voices and views into your work?

AT: We have a client satisfaction survey and we’d send it to clients and go over their feedback. It was anonymous, but we'd go over all their feedback and say, oh, okay, these are the things that the clients are benefiting from, these are the things they need, and we would do our best to meet those needs if we weren't meeting them before. Or it was my conversations with male clients who were saying to me, “I don't want to talk to a female worker, I want to work with a man”. And this is why we strive to hire male social workers in order to meet that need.

We also have a survivor leadership group called Voices of Hope. Originally it was open to clients who wanted to be advocates. And then we thought, you know what, let's open it up to any client who’s been recommended by their lawyer or social worker to join or any client who expresses a desire to be in community with other survivors. We have monthly meetings and our Voices of Hope survivor liaison, Renee, is extremely tuned in to all members. And in our monthly meetings we get a sense of what needs they have that haven’t been met yet.

In this group, a lot of people were talking to Renee about interrupted education. Federal funding is not enough; it's barely enough to provide financial assistance to clients, never mind help them with educational enrolment. And so we put together a proposal, pitched it to a funder, and we’re currently in our second year of funding for our ATP Education Initiative. We can cover educational opportunities for not only our clients, but also family members in the home country. Many times, if our clients could have found a job that paid them enough to support themselves and their families in the home countries, they wouldn't have migrated abroad for work. And so we've been able to pay college tuitions for some of our clients, children, and grandchildren in their home countries. The hope is that if they have a strong academic foundation and become more competitive in the job market domestically, they won’t need to migrate for work if they don't want to.

We’ve also paid for courses and certifications for our clients who are in the US. One of our clients, who was trafficked into doing manual labour, wanted to be a paralegal. We enrolled him in a paralegal course and he got an A! He sent us his transcript, which he didn’t have to do, and now he's looking for employment as a paralegal. We also cover the costs of a computer, notebooks, school supplies, uniform… We know that we can cover tuition, but if you can't afford the uniform or other required supplies, it isn’t sufficient for our clients.

BG: What are some other successes that you feel proud of?

AT: The Survivors of Trafficking Attaining Relief Together (START) Act, which is criminal record relief, is a big win through our advocacy. The US doesn't have any federal law that allows victims of trafficking who've been forced to commit crimes and who've been convicted of those crimes, to clear (vacate) their criminal records. Each individual state can choose to have such laws. Up until November 2021 in New York State you could only clear a prostitution-related conviction. Some of our clients have convictions related to theft or identity fraud or something that’s not related to prostitution. If you have this criminal conviction on your record, it affects your chances for immigration relief or getting a job, because you're not going to pass a background check, custody of your children, because that can be held against you, and so on.

Together with other organisations, including GAATW members, we formed this coalition to pass the START Act. This was a five-year effort. Every year something happened to derail the effort. In November 2021, the New York state governor finally signed it into law. The law allows for victims of human trafficking to move to clear any type of conviction that was related to their trafficking. It doesn't exclude any types of crimes, including violent crimes. Say you have a client who, during their trafficking, was forced to murder somebody else. That client can make a motion in court to clear that conviction and argue that it was related to their trafficking. The motion is not automatically granted. But the fact that they can make the motion, and then it's up to the judge to make a determination, is huge. It's the strongest criminal record relief law in the US and only a few other states have the same legal protection for survivors seeking to clear their criminal records.

We also do a lot of direct federal government advocacy for more funding from the Department of Justice and other federal agencies. The Education Initiative was a big one because that is something that without our private funder, we couldn't have done anything like that and address root causes of trafficking.

Individual client stories are also really powerful. When you hear about clients who have been through horrific situations and now they’re married, graduated school, have a job, or have somewhere safe and affordable to live, it doesn't matter what type of success it is, it’s great. We have one client who had been in 24 foster homes and shelters by the time she was 22 years old. She was working with one of our social workers who got her an apartment. She applied for a job at a shoe store. She has employment and she's more stable now. And that is huge for her because now she has an apartment for herself and her three young kids and they're safe.

BG: Are also pushing for a similar law like the START Act at the federal level?

AT: Yes, but it’s going to exclude violent crimes, because of our political climate and the increasingly partisan nature of our political system when it comes to trafficking reform.

BG: Are there any successful cases where victims have had their criminal records cleared?

AT: We have a client right now who was forced to commit a murder. We connected him with pro bono counsel and they’re currently working with him on his behalf to file a motion to clear that. Other clients have had robbery convictions, identity theft or identity fraud convictions vacated, so that’s been great. Two clients have murder convictions on their record, which will be difficult. A lot of things are pending right now because the law only passed 10 months ago and a lot of motions are being filed. The one-year anniversary is November 16th, so we are planning a big anniversary event with legislators. But we also want to start collecting data on how many motions have been filed and how many have been granted, and for what kind of convictions, so we can see how effective this has been.

ATP staff and Safe Horizon CEO Ariel Zwang at the Brooklyn Human Trafficking Task Force event, Jan 2020

CC: That’s great! We don’t have any more questions. Is there anything you’d like to add that we didn’t ask you?

AT: The only other thing I would mention is that we’ve always been careful because we have so many clients of colour, that we try to be really equitable in the way we roll out services. We try to infuse more diversity, equity, and inclusion in our coalitions because a lot of coalitions can be white-led. My legal staff doesn’t currently have BIPOC representation. I want to recruit more attorneys of colour who look like our community members but it’s hard to retain people because of the salaries, the burnout, and the trauma they’re constantly exposed to. Those are things that every service provider is going to experience and I don’t know how we’re going to mitigate that because it’s not going to change. If we can pay people more, if we can provide more support for folks, they’ll be better equipped to do this job because it’s a really hard job. I personally don’t do direct service, but I still wind up talking to so many of our clients, and the things some of them disclose… I can’t imagine if that was my job, to hear that day in and day out, and to sit with it… A lot of our staff are relatively young, maybe around 30, and they have to figure out how to draw boundaries to deal with this work, and it takes a toll on people. So that is something for us to figure out how to manage better.