Lynn Bufka: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm Lynn Bufka, and I'm guest hosting this podcast from APA 2019 here in Chicago. Joining us today is 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.
Kalyani Gopal: Thank You Lynne. Thank you for having me here.
Lynn Bufka: 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.
Kalyani Gopal: 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 with victims of human trafficking.
Lynn Bufka: Oh, wow.
Kalyani Gopal: 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 Tihar jail. It's in 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 up, there's 20 girls, 25 girls in a room all locked up in that room, and then they were disappearing the course of the night. So I used to come back to collect data from the very same girls, cause 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- to the capital city of that country. It could be here, it could be Serbia, it could be anywhere in the world. Washington DC, five miles away from the Capitol building, is what they call the track, the “kiddie track.” Literally five miles from the Capitol building, right? And in that kiddie track you have young girls being trafficked. So it happens across the world. At that time I was so young myself, I'm 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 Vanderbilt University, and then a little girl, a seven-year-old girl sat on my lap and she said “my dad's touching me.” And I didn't know what that was. That that was my segue into the field of human traffic- into field of sexual abuse, child sexual abuse. I actually came to this country to learn more about intellectual and cognitive neuropsych work, but I ended up doing child sexual abuse and forensic work, cause 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 supervisor 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 they say, is history.
Lynn Bufka: Okay.
Kalyani Gopal: And then I started working with foster kids because a lot of the kids sexually abused end up in foster care. And then years, about 15-20 years later go- 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 to three years old, and 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, there was 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. Thirty years ago, you know, it's child sexual abuse, no one said it was human trafficking right? So what we did was we called it child sexual abuse we- I went to court, the family, for the first time in the history there, 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.
Lynn Bufka: Wow.
Kalyani Gopal: And from then on, I started getting cases on child sexual abuse from across the country, testifying wherever, you know, that was going on. A lot of them high-profile cases involving people who were like brothers of judges and politicians’ sisters and so forth. So I got involved with all of that. And then about 10-20 years ago, or 15-20 years ago maybe, I had a young girl call 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 you up.” This is a foster child, I said, “I'm not gonna come pick you up, you know, go home. What are you doing at 9 o'clock at night outside? You get back home.” What I didn't know is that she was probably being trafficked. I had no clue. And to 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. 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, they’re hard to place, they're really hard to place, the 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 this, these years of child sexual abuse, I was now moving into the field of human trafficking. So at this point, I do literally 20% to 30% of my clinical work is on human trafficking work, well, anti-human trafficking work.
Lynn Bufka: Can you help listeners understand what human trafficking is? Because you, you're talking a lot about sex trafficking, but trafficking can involve labor as well, so can you help people understand sort of the range of what human trafficking encompasses?
Kalyani Gopal: I'm really glad you asked me that, because sex trafficking is like the sexy thing that people talk about right? No pun intended. 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 one hundred fifty billion-dollar industry, right? Human trafficking is about 20% of all trafficking, sex trafficking that is, is 20% of all trafficking. Labor trafficking involves organ harvesting. So I was in India training the people, the NGOs, and the Miramar- the 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 there, and I was training them on how do you identify and work with victims of trafficking? We're psychologists, 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 organ 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, there’s tin, they mine, they're mining with tin. 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, 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, 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 the 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, my spouse, my girlfriend, whatever is not there, and what they do, pictures are taken and there’s extortion that takes place using the children. So there's a lot of pedophilia that goes on.
Lynn Bufka: It's a- 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, it’s distinct from smuggling.
Kalyani Gopal: Yes.
Lynn Bufka: Human smuggling is trying to get people who - into a country not necessarily for labor or sex purposes 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.
Kalyani Gopal: That's very well said because human smuggling involves money at the reception 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.
Lynn Bufka: Okay.
Kalyani Gopal: You're not paying money to be trafficked.
Lynn Bufka: Right.
Kalyani Gopal: The trafficker gets paid to traffic you.
Lynn Bufka: Right.
Kalyani Gopal: It's a whole different dynamic.
Lynn Bufka: I can only imagine, and I want to know more about what's the psychological impact of having been trafficked? What-what happens to the person?
Kalyani Gopal: It is massive it is t- it is, 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 trafficker is waiting outside, and they’re terrified, terrified of speaking because even though you and I are talking, if we have a victim of human trafficking in front of us, it's just not three of us. Her trafficker’s in the room with her. He’s psychologically right there. So he- 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-weeny love, 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 literally 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 in serious punishment: there's no food, there's no water, there's no drink, there's nothing for you.
Lynn Bufka: Wow.
Kalyani Gopal: 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, you know, it's that bad. It’s that severe. It's a, it's a complete manipulation and control of the human mind.
Lynn Bufka: And how does a person ever get out of that? What- what is it that they can do to try to, to escape that manipulation? Is there something?
Kalyani Gopal: 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 issue, 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 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 treatments 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 trafficker’s who gives her an identity. So when you have that third person in the room you first have to separate, 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 build them up and say “what do I want? What do I like? Who am I? Who was I before I became a victim of trafficking? I became my pimp’s girl?” You know, they have their- they identify themselves very 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, it's just a multi-faceted demeaning of a person. I've never seen a human being so non-human as I've seen in victims of trafficking. It is- they will sit in my office, and I work with severe sexual abuse, so don't get me wrong, I've worked with very, very severe sexual abuse cases, which you know they fragment their personalities too. 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 trafficker is looking right at them. And they're not hallucinating. That person's in their head, you know, literally inside their head. So you're working with an individual who's so severely traumatized you know it it's it's 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, I’m 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’t go shorter than three hours because there's so much they've held in. But if you say “I'm sorry, you know, my times up, you know and you need to go, my patient’s waiting outside,” you've lost them. They're not coming back.
Lynn Bufka: Right, and they, they would need time to, sort of, get out but then to be safe enough to then leave your office I would imagine.
Kalyani Gopal: Absolutely, absolutely. You can't do traditional EMYou can't do traditional rapid resolution. You can't do traditional-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 the rapid-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 had to do it because that's what works. So ultimately when in 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 gonna respond to it” you know? I can't just say “hey by the way this is my technique. I'm gonna use it because I know it's backed by serious scientific research.” 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 would refuse to write it, they’re frightened to write.
Lynn Bufka: Right.
Kalyani Gopal: I'm able to separate them from the trafficker with that huge guilt. It's like this massive shame and guilt because once they get better, once they realize they’re victims, and they, by the way, they never think of themselves as victims. They think of themselves as just being the girlfriend. So if we 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 pimp. 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 pimp.
Lynn Bufka: So how do individuals find their way to you if they're not seeing themselves as being trafficked?
Kalyani Gopal: Usually I'll get them from the FBI. I get them from the Homeland Security Department. I get them from the sheriffs in the Sheriff's Department.
Lynn Bufka: Okay.
Kalyani Gopal: So the deputies in the Sheriff's Department will send them to me. Other survivors will send them to me, then not- NGOs can send them, yeah. So I get them from a variety of different.
Lynn Bufka: So how can the average person recognize whether or not someone's being trafficked when that person themselves doesn't necessarily recognize it?
Kalyani Gopal: Absolutely. So you know in the statistics we have in Indiana, for example, is like a hundred five… hundred and fifty nine cases were reported last year. In my clinic alone I had six cases in two months that I identified. So think about if I, 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 who’s hygiene is questionable, someone who has 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 a high statistic we have, you know.
Lynn Bufka: Yeah.
Kalyani Gopal: We have four hundred fifty-eight thousand missing children in the country, right? But NCMEC, which is the National Missing Exploited Children, they have identified about four and fifty-nine thousand children I think in the last year. But when they did the Superbowl and during the Superbowl they rescued children, they were able to identify only ten percent from the missing children's database.
Lynn Bufka: Wow.
Kalyani Gopal: Ninety percent they didn't even know were missing.
Lynn Bufka: Wow. That's huge.
Kalyani Gopal: That's huge.
Lynn Bufka: It’s huge. So, so people who are being trafficked don't necessarily recognize it, it's very hard for us to recognize that people are being trafficked.
Kalyani Gopal: Yes.
Lynn Bufka: 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?
Kalyani Gopal: 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 a 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.” They say “don't get us out of the life. Give us jobs. Because if we 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 pimp”- sorry you know, you used the word, that's what they call them- “at least my pimp 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 is in charge of your money? In a domestic violence condition or 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? Cause one question leads to a next question leads to a 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. sorry but 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 in 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 the mother's boyfriend, because the mother, knows that you're, she- that you had sex with the boyfriend or the husband because in exchange, she was able to pay rent. That is human trafficking. That literally is human trafficking. But we don't call it that. The mother trafficked the child-
Lynn Bufka: Right.
Kalyani Gopal: In order to pay rent-
Lynn Bufka: Right.
Kalyani Gopal: For the other kids and herself.
Lynn Bufka: Right. So clearly with, with trafficking, and certainly you're talking a lot about sex trafficking, the inability to provide basic things, it's the financial motivator in many ways.
Kalyani Gopal: It’s all financial.
Lynn Bufka: I mean that's obviously the person, that one person is benefiting financially and one person is barely surviving. That’s sort of what's happening. I was- 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.
Kalyani Gopal: Absolutely.
Lynn Bufka: And are there things to look out for for people who are being labor trafficked that might be different from sex trafficking?
Kalyani Gopal: 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 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, certain situations for example in 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 U.S., 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 have any or if you have families with kidney failure, but the kidney that’s donated, there is a cost to it. So if you give me your kidney, I will allow your, 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 are unaccompanied. So this is a massive, massive human trafficking racket. The proportions I can't even explain to you how, how seriously in, 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 within 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 sort of 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 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 your picture.” Before, it was “if you're my friend you’ll wear the same color clothes I wear.” You know, nowadays if you're my friend you'll upload a picture of yourself doing XYZ. 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 gonna do it. And then after some time, they say I don't want to do it again. Oops, too late. I have your picture and I’m gonna show it to your mother or your father or the whole school’s gonna know what you did. And from then on, they're trapped.
Lynn Bufka: Right, so there's a way that now media technology is really contributing to individuals in this country getting brought in to, maybe not actually performing sexual acts, but providing pornography.
Kalyani Gopal: Right.
Lynn Bufka: Because they're being manipulated. That's a- I hadn't realized that was happening as well. It's horrifying to think about. What else do you think people should know about trafficking and how psychology could have- can help people in that space?
Kalyani Gopal: So I think the biggest, what I'd 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 20- 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 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 say, “hey would you like to model?” And then they'll take your picture and they'll say they're going to model you. That picture, your face, goes on somebody else's body. Or they'll make you 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 serve as soon as a 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 signs.
Lynn Bufka: So it seems that one of the challenges these days is that it's really, we have much less control over how our image is projected.
Kalyani Gopal: Correct.
Lynn Bufka: And that that can be used in manipulative ways that-
Kalyani Gopal: Absolutely.
Lynn Bufka: -were not present twenty years ago. So I would imagine that in the field of trafficking, particularly around sex trafficking-
Kalyani Gopal: And labor trafficking.
Lynn Bufka: the technology that is being employed, law enforcement agencies have all sorts of new challenges in order to keep up with that.
Kalyani Gopal: 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 are refugees who come to the country because they're escaping political conflict. They're, 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 more conflict and politics and then there is a need for economic- they're both economically challenging aspects. So when they come to this country or to any other country that is doing better or is considered safer, quote unquote, safer than their country, then what happens is they become at risk for labor trafficking. So oftentimes this is a job, it's a promise of a job, they'll say you know what, you, you come there or you'll have a job waiting for you, you just have to turn in your papers. So the biggest aspect of a labor trafficking and sex trafficking is they'll take your papers from you.
Lynn Bufka: Right.
Kalyani Gopal: We’ll keep your papers because we need to turn this over to the authorities and we can speak and 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.
Lynn Bufka: 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?
Kalyani Gopal: Really raising awareness. So what I do a lot of, lot of my work when I go talk in 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 that'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. This is 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 treatments where we are actually going to be having a hundred children and they're really they're trying to raise twice a million dollars, just so you know. So we’re trying 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, we are rehabilitating the vets, we are rehabilitating the children and we have youth and the mothers with children.
Lynn Bufka: Mm-hmm.
Kalyani Gopal: So it's a very comprehensive program.
Lynn Bufka: Sounds like a really important vision for what you could do to benefit people who have been trafficked.
Kalyani Gopal: I’m hoping.
Lynn Bufka: That's really impressive.
Kalyani Gopal: Thank you.
Lynn Bufka: Well I'm so happy that you were able to join us today. Thank you for spending your time with us.
Kalyani Gopal: Thank you.
Lynn Bufka: 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 speakingofpsychology@apa.org. You can find this podcast on Stitcher, iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. You can also visit our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org and listen to other episodes there as well. Again, I’m Lynn Bufka with the American Psychological Association.
Kalyani Gopal, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and the executive director of the organization SAFE: Sexual Trafficking Awareness Freedom and Empowerment. 
