By Truckers Against Trafficking

Recently, a 60-year-old Montreal psychoeducator in Canadian high schools was sentenced to 18 years in prison for bringing home an eight-year-old girl from the Ivory Coast – to serve as a sex slave – and subjecting her to three years of horrific sexual abuse. He was charged with sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and possession and distribution of child pornography.

If only someone had questioned what a 60-year-old white man was doing with a very minor girl from Africa – if only someone had known what red flags to look for or the steps to take to report something suspicious – this child might have been recovered much earlier and saved from a living hell.

While the mission of Truckers Against Trafficking (TAT) is to educate, equip, empower and mobilize the trucking, bus and energy industries to fight human trafficking as part of their daily jobs, we recognize that any individual can make a difference and affect change for social good. Any bystander can be a changemaker. We hope the free training we provide will help engage each person who uses it to be more alert for human trafficking and suspicious situations.

A Sapp Bros. travel plaza employee made a difference when she recognized a woman in the store looked afraid and uneasy. Pretending to help her fill out a rewards card, she learned a man, who was there with the woman, was sexually exploiting her. Chapman called the police, and the woman was rescued and man was arrested.

A truck driver’s compassion and care, following the advice of the TAT sticker on his truck, resulted in safety and services for a 19-year-old woman who had escaped from a would-be trafficker.

By implementing training from TAT’s Busing on the Lookout (BOTL) program, two Lakefront Lines employees ensured the recovery of a female passenger, who was being held for forced prostitution by another passenger on the bus. Liz Williamson, a TAT training specialist and survivor advocate, remembers the bus driver who treated her with dignity and respect and gave her a sandwich when, unbeknownst to him, she was being trafficked by her own family.

At a bus station in Texas, employees helped a young man call the National Human Trafficking Hotline after he told them he’d been abandoned by the head of a traveling construction crew who had confiscated his identification documents, stole his belongings, and denied him pay.

A truck driver, resting at a travel plaza, thought an RV parked by the other trucks looked suspicious. His call to law enforcement ended 18 days of kidnapping, torture and trafficking for a 20-year-old Iowa woman and sent her traffickers to jail for more than a combined 80-year sentence. 

Training turns an unaware bystander into an alert responder who can make the difference in someone’s life: whether it’s an eight-year-old or a 22-year-old person in a neighborhood, store, or school, who’s on the job or on a bus heading to a casino. 

Check out the breadth and depth of TAT’s free training materials, which includes include videos, toolkits, posters, wallet cards and stickers (www.truckersagainsttrafficking.org/get-our-materials).

After attending a TAT Coalition Build in Toronto at the end of 2019, Bison Transport began training their more than 1,100 employees with TAT materials the following year and adding it into their employee orientation. The company joined the TAT Canada Committee (TCC) in 2021, adopted an anti-trafficking-in-persons policy, and distributed a survey to their drivers to learn more about what they’re actually seeing on Canada’s highways when it comes to human trafficking. Bison Transport is also a proud TAT Gold Level sponsor.

Stephanie Fensom, Bison Safety and Compliance manager, who first learned of TAT at the American Trucking Associations Conference in 2016 and ordered wallet cards for Bison, said, “Bison Transport is a proud supporter of Truckers Against Trafficking. We have engaged our professional drivers in training and education to help them identify someone at risk. At Bison, we put safety and people first in everything we do; extending that to support TAT in their efforts fits our core values. I am proud of our team of professional drivers for helping be part of the solution, just as we would hope others would do if it was our family member needing help.”

To learn more and become a changemaker, visit www.truckersagainsttrafficking.org.