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$112 Stops One Trafficking Victim with John Molineux · find your cause

• speaker-0: These girls are broken and forced to service as many as thirty clients a day. It costs us a hundred and twelve dollars to intercept one potential victory of human trafficking. speaker-1: Alrighty, so thanks everyone for tuning into this episode of Find Your Cause. Today we have John Molino, who's the founder and CEO of Love Justice International. John, thank you so much for your time this evening for you. speaker-0: Yeah, thank you, Joseph. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. speaker-1: Right. And as I said before we hit record, I think your organization and the work that you do is in an area that the world does not see as much or does not cross paths with as much. So I'm excited to get into it and to learn a lot myself, but also to educate a lot of other people that maybe haven't learned or heard about much trafficking. So but before we do, what is the mission of Love Justice International? speaker-0: The mission of Love Justice International is driving the downfall of slavery by disrupting human trafficking and transit. speaker-1: Awesome. And we're gonna get into the how behind that, but before we do, why you? Why is this an organization that you founded and wanted to found? speaker-0: Yeah. I went to Taylor University, a college in a small college in Indiana, and after graduating from college, went ended up going with four friends to Nepal and while we were there we worked with street children, had our hearts really broken by what we saw. And it was a couple years after that that a friend had been involved in in starting a children's home there. And I went back to Nepal, actually got a one-way ticket thinking I'd be home by Christmas. And I got back to Nepal and I saw the contrast between on the one hand the three kids we had worked with before, some had died, many had gone from bad divorce. It was just like so heartbreaking to see these children. It was like worst thing ever. And on the other hand, seeing the kids in this home flourishing and seemingly so full of joy, being cared for and going to school and playing and singing and it was like the best thing ever. And so this contrast made me feel like this is what I want to do with my life. And so I spent I when the other members of the team went home, I stayed. I spent my first Christmas on my own in in Kathmandu Nepal. And I would end up staying there for the next twenty years. And during that time I would go on to found what would become Love Justice International. And yeah, it's been quite a journey. Started learning when in the beginning we were trying to help street children. We had a helpline to find fresh runaway street children. We had some children's homes. But then I learned about human trafficking. And what I learned w was at that at that time they would say that ten thousand Nepali girls every year were trafficked into the red light districts of India. These are innocent girls who were recruited. recruited by false jobs and false marriages. And when they find out that what they're supposed to do, sex work, they of course try to leave and they're told they're not allowed to leave, they're not allowed to contact anyone they love. When they try to refuse, they are broken in by the most unspeakable forms of abuse. And in this way these girls are broken and forced to service as many as thirty clients a day. And so I I just felt this sense of we have to do something. We have to figure out how to fight. human trafficking and that was the beginning of the journey of our evolution towards becoming an anti human trafficking organ organization. speaker-1: Yeah. One of the the stats also that I think is is t explains the scale of this, 'cause this was an eye opening ⁓ moment for me. And I think you have this on your website. You said fifty million people are living in modern slavery. This is one in every hundred and fifty people yeah, on the planet. So vulnerable people are trafficked into slavery through deception, exactly what you had mentioned. I think One of the initial questions that I feel like humans would have at hearing this is like why is this a thing? Why is this a problem that the world an atrocity that the world is facing? Like what is the reason behind it? speaker-0: Yeah, that's a tough one. I don't know if there's a single reason just the depravity of man, the tendency of those who empower or those who are able to exploit the weak and the vulnerability of certain people. Certainly like poverty is one of the the things that creates the vulnerabilities that leads to human human trafficking. But a lot of human trafficking, not all, is sex trafficking. Typically young girls are trafficked for sex work and a lot of it is also labor trafficking. It c it is For the most part, it's an economic crime. But it's motivated by those who can exploiting those who are not able to protect themselves. speaker-1: Yeah. And I think the next logical question is what are governments doing or what is already being done or not being done that caused the need for for LJI to have to be created and be founded and have your focus as an organization be towards ending this trafficking. Are you seeing involvement from those governments in those countries that you guys have expanded to over the years? speaker-0: Yeah, we are. And slavery is illegal in every country in the world today, even as it's practiced and exists in every country in the world today. And obviously things like corruption and bad governance and a failure of law enforcement can be things that that cause it to not get addressed. But one of the things that that I I would say is that in many ways human trafficking is like the ultimate crime without a constituency, in the sense that if people are moved from one country to another place, in the place in which they end up being exploited, where the crime exists and can be exploited, they don't have a sort of a political voice. So it's very difficult for them to ever become a law enforcement priority. And actually in the places where they're in transit, where they're passing through, which is often the best place to intercept seed and where our work focuses on, you're literally talking about somebody from over there, going over there. Law enforcement just doesn't have it that necessarily on their radar as a priority because it's not necessarily a crime that affects anything locally. And in source areas, of course, in a source it is a priority. But at least in I can speak for i in Nepal in particular because I lived there for twenty years and victims who come back to the places or from which they were trafficked, they often they often can be rejected by their families and rejected by if people know what happened to them. And so they because of that, they don't want to tell their story. And often what it looks like is And ⁓ often th they will have been enslaved, paid back in debt, and then potentially earned money. And so they may come they go and they're poor and they come back and they have money. It doesn't necessarily look like the terrible injustice that it really is to local people in source areas. So it's a it's a complicated. There's a lot of reasons why ⁓ governments generally are cooperative and and we rely on the cooperation of governments to do the work that we do, but it's just hard it's hard to for it to become a priority of law enforcement in governments. speaker-1: Yeah. In the early days of Love Justice International, when you guys d made the decision to focus on stopping and ending human trafficking, wha what were some of the sparks or some of the moments that maybe happened like the the first person that was arrested do due to you your guys' intervention or the first group of people that were intercepted and brought back to their family? I'd I'd love to hear the evolution of that and where your focus was and how that's evolved since then. speaker-0: It started, I was living in Nepal, but it's not like human trafficking's happening in in the open. You don't see it. I just read about it. I read a book called Sex Slaves and it was about human trafficking, I think I don't know if it was primarily in Nepal to India or f or for a lot of that was a lot of what it was talking about. And I just reading that book, I just was like I remember I was in an airport just trembling with this sense of we have to do something about this. We have to figure out how to stop this. And we started I started learning about different models that are used and to to fight human trafficking. You could div divide those into the pre-trafficking strategies like awareness and job creation are the two that are most commonly used. And they don't necessarily have a tangible impact where you can point to here's a person who would have been trafficked. And the post-trafficking strategies like rescue and aftercare, it can never put back the pieces of what's been broken. It would be far better to prevent it. But this transit monitoring strategy that we learned about aims at the most strategic moment when a person is in the process of being trafficked before they've been exploited. So we s we decide that's what we want to try to do. We're gonna do transit monitoring. It took, I don't know, it was close to a year of trying and figuring out where and getting the right people and setting up a a local subcommittee and hiring staff and f figuring out how to get them trained. And and but I will always remember. There's a little ⁓ internet cafe where I would go to check my email in those days, going into and seeing the email s saying that we've intercepted our first potential victim of trafficking and just feeling this deep sense of that's the most important thing I've ever been a part of. So it's been quite a journey since then. But speaker-1: Yeah. And over the years it sounds like you guys have put together this transit monitoring strategy that is ⁓ was deployed initially in India, but then over the years you've been able to deploy it to different countries and different cities across the world. How much can you share about that transit monitoring strategy and what's the process and is it something that you guys do with your organization or just like hand off to local authorities at a certain point or like what's that process? speaker-0: Yeah. It was invented by several Nepal organizations along the Nepal Indian border and it was called in those days border monitoring. And when we started doing it, we just told our staff to intercept potential victims of trafficking and they figured out how to do it themselves. And they do it by they stand in the key transit area. And that in those days it was a border crossing. Now we've realized it can be a bus station, a train station, we have different transit areas and they look for signs of trafficking. And when they see those signs, they use questioning to try to uncover active human trafficking cases and there's certain red flags that they look for that would be assigned that it's a trafficking situation. And so our we didn't invent it. Our innovation was documenting it. And then we went and tried to figure out how to make it work in other places. We actually had some years where our budget was growing in Nepal and we were in all we were covering the border, but our impact wasn't necessarily growing. And so we realized we needed to figure out how to make it work beyond Nepal. And we had Two failed pilots in Bangladesh. We had a failed pilot in Thailand and a third attempt in Bangladesh. We finally cracked the code and figure out, got our first intercepts outside Nepal, figured out how to make transit monitoring work there. And then a woman in South Africa called, got a hold of us and said, I heard about your model. I want to see if can work in South Africa. And we ended up doing transit monitoring in OR Tambo Airport, which is the largest airport in Africa, and had our first intercepts in Africa. And that became a beginning of our expansion throughout Africa. And so now part Of that evolution, and it was an evolution of our role. In the beginning, I was personally doing relational ministry through broken Nepali and gestures and English, and realized that's not there's Nepalis who are better than me at that. And in fact, Nepalis are better than me at everything in Nepal almost. And so I moved to managing the team. Eventually we would articulate what is our core competency, what our role should be relative to the right nationals, and that is searching out the people, places, and tools to maximize mission impact. And so we became focused on documenting and figuring out how to create these tools like a transit monitoring standard like Searchlight or Human Trafficking Database and then training on and adapting those and giving them to local partners. And once we reoriented around that. core competency and figured out got really good at finding the right people and that's when in the right places that's when we figured out how to scale around the world. So now we're in 17 countries. We have 57 stations. We have 150 plus monitors we have 300 plus subcommittee volunteer subcommittee members and we've just crossed 115,000 intercepts. It costs us $112 to intercept one potential victim of human trafficking. speaker-1: So somebody donating $112 is what translates into one intercept, you're saying? Yeah. Wow. How are you able to extrapolate that? Because that's a really interesting data point. speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ Yeah. We basically ta it it gets it's a little bit complex because we th there's a joint cost accounting thing going on where we have arrests and intercepts. But essentially we are dividing our costs by the number of intercepts that we have. At the bottom it's very simple. Because we have some other programs, our overhead has to be proportionally allocated between those and that creates a little bit of complexity. But it's a fairly straightforward calculation. speaker-1: Yeah. And then I also see you guys posting a lot about dream schools coming up throughout the world. What is a dream school? speaker-0: We have one dream school and it's a school that we run. So we s we have several children's homes that in Nepal and those were the our first project was to have these homes for orphaned and abandoned children to help them become flourish and become difference makers in their nation. And w we got to a point of seeing that if they if we want them to become difference makers, we need to do something about their education. And so we started a school called the Dream School in Poker and Nepal, which is just an excellent school that aims just to equip them to become difference makers through excellent education. And yeah, that that is ⁓ it's amazing to see the legacy of kids that that were once orphans and abandoned and really lost and broken and seeing them loved over many years and just now we have we have a lot of kids who are out of the program, kids who are in college, kids who came through the school Who are now teaching at the school. It's been really amazing to see these orphaned and abandoned children become difference makers in their nation. speaker-1: Yeah. Well. I have a three and a four year old daughter and I if I were in your shoes, I don't know how I would be able to have any positivity in my life day in and day out being involved and in seeing the things that you probably have seen and see on a daily basis. How have you been able to have thought past all the negatives that you're exposed to and focus on the impact and how has that maybe evolved over the the two decades you've been doing this? speaker-0: One thing I'd say is we don't actually see it on a daily basis. Like I'm at our headquarters, program headquarters, we don't they're not transit monitoring here. But secondly, even our monitors, our teams on the ground, they're not seeing human like what happens to victims. They're intercepting before it happens. So they're seeing a positive story, ⁓ a story of some ⁓ a story of redemption, a story of something prevented. Of course we do in in in the process of our hear about and come across accounts of what it's like. But if anything, what we feel What we actually try to be intentional about is facing up to it. And so this will kill you to hear this, that we have a ⁓ process that we use when we train our monitors because we feel like a broken heart, our hearts should be broken about human trafficking. And a broken heart is ultimately the anointing that we need for this work. And so one of the things that we do at the very end of our monitor training is we ask people to close their eyes and picture someone who is precious to them. And you can imagine who you would prick picture if you went through that. And then we walk through an account of human trafficking. I and you can hear me getting emotional even now. I'm just talking about it. I we I we can't go it we don't go through this process without weeping. It's called the greatest injustice. You close your eyes. And I I have a four and a six-year-old son. And last time I went through it here at the office, I pictured my son, my four-year-old son, and of course I was weeping. It's it was just heavy. And we have now in our office we have a tool called Impact Stream where a bell, it's like a church bell sounds and something pops up with every time there's an intercept. It happens in real time. And it happens fifty to a hundred times a day around here that that bell goes off. And there is a joy in it. There is a but that day that we picture both well when we went through that process, yeah, there there was a lump in my throat. I pr I probably broke into tears or a sob every time that that thing went off. But it there's a sense of we have to force ourselves to face up to it. And doing so, but then also being a part of the hope, the redemption, the restoration, the prevention. it gives you a an incredible sense of purpose and worth and it makes everything in some ways I feel like everything else feels boring to me besides being able to make a life changing impact into my life. speaker-1: Yeah. People that are listening, what could they do now? I know you get there's pretty in depth training to become it sounds a monitor. Wha what are some things that people could that maybe travel a lot? I personally travel a lot internationally for my day job. What are some things that people that are traveling or even locally could look out for and then d what could they do if they notice something? Yeah. speaker-0: It's it's I would be a I would be hesitant because not knowing this in a given context, not knowing the security situation, it intervening in a human trafficking situation can be very dangerous. And so it takes quite a lot of like preparation on a but for us to figure out how to make it work in a given local context. But it essentially report to the authorities is the answer. In the US there's a there's a human trafficking hotline and in the US the law enforcement but it I've we've had situations where we see someone on an airplane, we ask a few questions, try to understand what's happening, try to but I've yeah, I've never honestly personally intercepted someone. It's our teams on the ground to do it. I actually have a friend who had a situation where he ended up calling the police and it sounded like it was a an actual human trafficking situation, but that's actually unrelated to our work. ⁓ speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Future plans. As you guys keep evolving this, I looked on your website and it shows a timeline of all the the new countries and cities they've expanded the transit monitoring strategy to. How are those areas chosen? Is there like a a heat map of where this is more common globally or or yeah, how what's kind of the future rollout plan and why? speaker-0: Remember I told you our core competency was searching out the people, places, and tools to maximize machine. In fact, so searching out those right people in those right places is what we and endeavor to have be our specialty. And so I'll tell you first about the people, and that is we're seeking once we identify a place that we want to work, we're seeking a champion who will be a volunteer who will lead the establishment of trend and monitoring. And they're not paid, and that's key because it eliminates the corruption that tends to dominate in in on the edges of the world's greatest injustices. And we will go through a long process over months where we have a Zoom call, we share a little bit about We are what we do, they share who they are, we get to know them, we give them some assignments, and eventually they start exploring whether transit monitoring can work and how. And so that's on the people's side. In terms of choosing the places, we there's several tiers that we would use for this. One is we'll do we do report, we'll do a country report. And so we have actually reports for even though we work in around 20 countries, we probably have reports on close to a hundred because we've been trying to understand and study where and prepare to scale transit monitoring. The second thing is we use data science. And pr and we use predictive modeling to predict basically impact on the dollar. And so we have a ranked list of places that where we have our predictive models suggest will have the best impact on the dollar. And then based on those things, we'll start working on a pilot plan with the champion. And so in terms of what future plans, our mission is to drive the downfall of slavery by disrupting human trafficking and transit. That doesn't necessarily mean we're gonna end slavery. But fifty million and it's like we're in places where a law enforcement response is strong, it's hard to make an impact. We have the in the US we have the FBI. Who are how are we gonna be more effective than the FBI and trying to fight things? It seems very hard. But in a place where it's just happening in the open and no one is even questioning it, nobody's even asking, you just get up, you set up and you start poking around, asking questions about it, like it has a disruptive preventative effect that that peep traffickers start per the perceptions change about of risk for traffickers. And so we there there's there's a diminished there's a curve where if there's hardly any disruption happening, that first disruption can can can get you a l all the way up here. And then once you have the FBI, you're up here. So this is the places that we want to work. The places where it's most rampant, where it can be disrupted. And so honestly we we're we're we are actively planning to scale into those places. Honestly I had a meeting today about Where we I think we drew up a list of around fourteen countries that we want to try to plan to be in next year. And I don't know if we'll be able to do that. Part of it is we need to raise the money for it and we need to figure out there's a lot that has to happen for that to happen. But we have really we've gone from we have twenty years of s in the beginning spinning our wheels about how to scale to figuring it out to cracking the code and now we're at this point where we've been preparing to scale for a decade. And we have all of these country reports and predictive models and systems where we are we are ready to re to move into those places to drive the downfall of slavery. speaker-1: Yeah. For local law enforcement for the locations that you've already expanded to, is that a piece of the puzzle that's a little complex in navigating through and is like figuring out how that communication channel is open and what do they need, what do they not need? How is that then? It seems like it'd probably be unique in every country, but speaker-0: Yeah. It is unique in every country. And the pattern is we can't work without the cooperation of local law enforcement. And so and we need at least local permissions and local and in addition to the hundred and fifteen thousand potential victims that we've intercepted, we've our workers led to about two thousand arrests. And so we do work closely with local law enforcement. We we have in some places some police training programs. We have a police liaison program, and that's really the key is just working with the police, communicating with them, and having someone that specializes in communicating with the police. speaker-1: Yeah. Probably a question that would come up too is over a hundred thousand, hundred and fifteen thousand interceptions, just over two thousand are coming on three thousand arrests. Why isn't the arrests equal to the interceptions? speaker-0: There's a few reasons for it. One is it's a crime that has not happened. You know what I mean? So like we prevent it from happening. And so what the fact that we're able to get arrests shows something about it. But two is so oftentimes the trafficker will not be present. And so traffickers will sometimes they'll travel with the potential victim and then meet up across the border. But then if the if she gets intercepted, she doesn't know where he is and we don't know how to find he or she the trafficker. Sometimes the potential victim doesn't tell us anything about the trafficker, or even is we just deem that she's at high risk of trafficking based on the location she's going or where he or she. It's not only women that we intercept and not only women girls. But so yeah, there there is a lot of reasons why it can be difficult to get an arrest every time. We're certainly that's something we're really focusing hard on. on we've seen a pretty significant increase in in arrests. This year our goal was to hit 400 arrests and we are just it's looking like we're just gonna hit depend on happens the next two months for this fiscal year, but it looks like we're on track to hit that. speaker-1: Is there you guys are very data intensive. Are you able to provide local law enforcement with that data to help in the actual arresting or does that have to come only from that local law enforcement? speaker-0: No, we certainly providing data to law enforcement in order to facilitate arrests is a key part of what we do. And we have one of the world's large most comprehensive human trafficking databases. And we are definitely actively seeking ways to get that information in the right ways into the hands of law enforcement so that they can bring about the arrests of traffickers. speaker-1: What's in that database? Is it just like people or locations or speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, people locations. Yeah, we have information about trafficking networks and traffickers and there are locations as well in there. And it's just the detailed information about the incidents. There's information about the intercept. What was what were the red flags that were used to identify? What is what was in the group? Was the trafficker present? Were they arrested? And then if and then detailed information about traffickers and trafficking networks. speaker-1: Yep. Has it been hard navigating any data sovereignty or data sharing as the people are trafficked from different countries even? Is that a challenge with sharing that data with to local law enforcement or exposing it or has there ha has it been easy to overcome that because of the nature of the data and the goal that you guys have? speaker-0: I would say it's been the the latter. It's been fair, it hasn't been a an issue and w we wonder data data law is really complex and yeah, s trying to figure out how to navigate that with in an evolving landscape we anticipate will bring additional complexity in the future. But what we wanna do is we wanna get the right data into the hands of the right law enforcement who are in the the right place where they can that they're in a position to act on it. speaker-1: Yeah. This is amazing what you guys are doing. People that are listening and want to get involved, what can they do? Where can they go? And yeah. And how can they get involved? speaker-0: You can check out our website which which is at love justice dot ng o and you can find more information about our work. We do have a podcast. You can just search for the Love Justice podcast. And there we have several volunteer opportunities and job positions if anyone is interested in getting more deeply involved. Of course, we need if we were gonna drive the downfall of slavery, we need the donors giving and to support our work. And we also have a a monthly giving community called Intercept Partners that's committed to driving the downfall of slavery by fighting by disrupting human trafficking and transit. speaker-1: Yeah. I think really awesome about your organization is how much you guys have focused on making the impact ⁓ understandable and measurable. So to be able to say $112 based on extrapolating your guys' impact is is how you could prevent one person from being trafficked and that you've been able to track that you've had over a hundred and fifteen thousand interceptions and and have those internal goals for four hundred and fifty arrests this year. I I think having that data, people People that hear about it, want to get engaged, know exactly how to and know exactly how much their impact's gonna have. So I think that's a huge advantage and it that you've put the time and being able to tell that story is a huge asset. speaker-0: And it's been it's been an evolution of what we are and how we define what we do, that core competency. We said when we in the early stages, maybe it was before we even had the words around those core that core competency, we were realizing we kind of need to become a tech company. We need so we have a software development team, we have a data science team, we have an impact engineering team who are building those impact producing tools, and then we have installation and compliance team who's training on those core products, adapting them, and then monitoring, measuring whether compliance. about whether they're being followed correctly. And and then in addition, we have a tier of oversight called stewardship, which are culturally sensitive, close to that culture, coaching, mentoring, approving budgets. And so all we've realize it's it's a little bit of a there's a little bit of complexity to how we function. And then we also one key part of this for us has been continual improvement. making sure that we have processes for auditing each of our core processes, which are those tools that it that I told you about, and making them better all the time, getting expert reviews, getting end user feedback, having stakeholders weigh in and try to improve them every year. And so that evolution is definitely what has driven really we saw 2021, I think we had I think we were something like a thousand dollars per intercept. And we saw a mostly unbroken string of months as all the changes that that we had made to around that core competency started coming into place. saw more and more efficiency of impact in our operations. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. And I think seeing yourselves as a a tech company is gonna be so important and such an asset to local law enforcement because sometimes like local govern just government bodies in general sometimes don't move as fast. technologically as they'd want and these traffickers aren't slowing down and and they're not slowing down their adoption of what's the newest technology they could take advantage of to to minimize their risk of being found and maximize their potential of trafficking people. I think that's gonna be a huge ass that you guys are providing local law enforcement and government agencies is being that that technologists. speaker-0: Yeah. And ultimately human trafficking is like multinational crime where the evidence for a crime that happened in one country exists in another country and then the person is in another so it does require it's a really complicated, essentially tech you need a very brainy and technical solution to help ⁓ bring about ⁓ justice ⁓ for potential victims of trafficking. speaker-1: John, I really appreciate your time. Is there anything that we missed or anything that you want to touch on or finish with before we wrap up? speaker-0: Joseph, one of our kind spiegos, one of our soapboxes is that charity should be about maximizing impact. The nature of charity is love and action. Love would care about impact because if it was us or our loved ones and that we would only want impact and to have more of it. And I charity should aim for life-changing impact and strive to maximize the life-changing impact on the dollar. And so yeah, I just that those are some things that I would just encourage your listeners to take into consideration whatever and you're giving and the use of your life, really think about what is it, how can you take what you've been entrusted with and use it to make the greatest impact that you can. speaker-1: Yeah. And in this case a hundred and twelve bucks. donation can save one person from being trafficked. Amazing. John, we will make sure to share all the links and social media outlets and website information for people that are listening to get engaged. But thank you for all the amazing work you've been doing over the past twenty years. Thank you for telling your story and thank you for the impact that you've been able to drive with your leadership and with the teams that you've put together and all the countries that you guys are have your transit monitoring strategy deployed to. And we hope that you eventually bring that fifty million people down to zero. That's like the goal, right? That's the end goal. And we're cheering for for you and for people that are listening that want to donate or donate their time, talent, treasure, testimony, give back however they feel compelled to, can. Thank you, John, for your time and really appreciate it. And good night. I know it's very late for you in South Africa right now. speaker-0: Yeah, thank you, Justin. Appreciate the opportunity and the conversation. ⁓ speaker-1: Thank you.