2022 Anti-Trafficking Conference
Last year, Catholic Charities aided 7 survivors of sex trafficking by fulfilling basic needs and finding housing, to trauma counseling.
To raise awareness of trafficking in Indiana on the heels of World Day Against Trafficking of Persons on July 30, we would like to invite you to the 2022 Anti-Trafficking Conference.
Thursday, August 25
10:00am-4:00pm
Ivy Tech Community College
3800 N Anthony Blvd, Fort Wayne, IN 46805
** Virtual Option Available **
The purpose of the conference is to build the collective capacity of our local communities to support persons who have experienced, or are experiencing, human trafficking.
The conference will include lectures of the following:
Building Human Trafficking Cases with Intimidated and Missing Victims
The victimization of survivors of sex and labor trafficking may persist long after the trafficking stops. Following the arrest of a trafficker or a victim's exit from exploitation, traffickers continue to assert force, fraud, and coercion against survivors. These intimidation tactics enable offenders to escape criminal accountability: law enforcement and prosecutors are unable to locate victims and witnesses necessary to build a case, or victims are too fearful or traumatized to participate in the criminal justice process.
This presentation will provide prosecutors and allied professionals with strategies for minimizing opportunities for intimidation and maximizing offender accountability when victims are intimidated or missing. Specifically, the presenter will discuss protective orders, courthouse safety measures, and strategies for bringing the voice into the courtroom through the doctrine of forfeiture by wrongdoing and other rules of evidence.
Forced Criminality Case Study – The Perfect Plan:
How Victor Rax Sexually Abused and Trafficked Boys in Salt Lake City
While awareness of human trafficking is on the rise, there are still blind spots that prevent law enforcement from recognizing all forms of exploitation. Men, boys, and victims of labor trafficking through forced criminality are often overlooked because they do not fit the typical depiction of a human trafficking victim. However, in the case of Victor Rax, Utah’s Attorney General’s Office was able to identify dozens of boys and young men from immigrant communities who were forced to sell drugs after being sexually, spiritually, and physically abused.
The presenters will use the Rax case as a backdrop to discuss the realities of labor trafficking through forced criminality, including how traffickers use grooming tactics common in both child sexual abuse cases and in gang culture to recruit and coerce victims to commit crimes. Strategies to better identify and respond to cases of forced criminality will be discussed through a detailed examination of the Rax investigation which led to his eventual arrest for sexual abuse and labor trafficking.