By Robin Shear, Sr. Editor, UM School of Nursing and Health Studies

National Nurses Month is a time to recognize and thank the nearly 4.2 million U.S. nurses who devote themselves day after day to their profession and their patients. It is also an opportunity to address the ways in which nurses can make an even bigger impact and stronger statement in determining the future of their profession.

One place nurses can make a tremendous impact is in the public health crisis of human trafficking. Every year millions of men, women, and children are enslaved, exploited, and abused worldwide, including in the United States and our own South Florida.

However, these victims are not easy to recognize because they are being controlled, hidden, coached, and terrorized into remaining invisible.

The University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies is committed to providing evidence-based education that will help health professionals prevent and mitigate human trafficking.

During National Human Trafficking Prevention Month in January, Drs. Deborah Salani and Beatriz Valdes, both associate professors of clinical at the School of Nursing and Health Studies (SONHS), presented the first installment of the SONHS Spring Lecture Series, “Do You See What I See? Recognizing Human Trafficking” in the school’s S.H.A.R.E.™ Auditorium.

During a video shown during the lecture, one trafficking survivor said she had been sexually exploited since age 14. “I told [God], that’s it. I can’t survive this anymore,” she said. “I was going to commit suicide…Most of the girls in there don’t think they could get out.”

Dr. Salani explained that while there are risk factors making certain people more vulnerable to being trafficked, human trafficking victims may be any age, race, gender, and nationality. “Any person forced to work or perform service under threat of penalty or harm is a victim of trafficking,” she said.

“Do You See What I See? Recognizing Human Trafficking,” is also the name of the powerful hybrid of simulation and classroom instruction from Drs. Salani and Valdes that over 600 nursing students at SONHS have completed since Spring 2021.

Teaching health care providers to identify and responsibly assist human trafficking victims in culturally appropriate ways that don’t retraumatize or endanger them is part of a concerted mission under way at SONHS to make evidence-based tools and resources available to as many area health care professionals as possible.

Human trafficking awareness is a pillar of the school’s goals for Ever Brighter: The Campaign for Our Next Century. Standardized patients enact emergency department patient scenarios addressing the sex, labor, and domestic servitude aspects of human trafficking.

“It’s not something you can read about. You have to practice it,” said SONHS Dean Cindy L. Munro. “Recognizing human trafficking should be a skill set just like the one we have when we see someone collapse. When that happens, we know how to perform CPR. We roll right into action.”

“Our vision includes establishing the Academic Center for Human Trafficking Education and Prevention at SONHS,” Dean Munro continued. “The center will provide a permanent incubator from which faculty and students can continue developing, disseminating, and scaling up evidence-based curricula and research to national and international levels.”

Critical support to date has come from The Harcourt M. and Virginia W. Sylvester Foundation, Maria G. Lamas, Heidi Schaeffer, M.D. ’98, and the UM Citizens Board, among others. Generous funding from the Sylvester Foundation will enable SONHS to significantly expand its efforts over the next two years to educate frontline health care professionals, collaborate with major hospital systems such as UHealth and Jackson Health System, engage a consultant, form an advisory board, and establish reproduceable resources for the local, national, and international community.

Lamas’s gift helped create The Maria G. Lamas Featured Speaker Series for Human Trafficking Education and Prevention Endowment with nurse practitioner Jessica Peck, a nationally recognized anti-human trafficking advocate and clinical professor from Baylor University, as its inaugural presenter. “Human trafficking is one of the most egregious human rights violations there is,” said Dr. Peck during her address. “This is happening in your back yard, in my back yard, all the time, all around us.”

Teaching health providers to better recognize human trafficking’s victims is an important step toward combating it in our communities.

If you need help or suspect a case of human trafficking, call or share the Stop Human Trafficking hotline at 1-888-373-7888.