Rob Morris

Published Feb 13, 2012, 5:00 AM

Alec talks with Rob Morris, president and co-founder of Love 146, an organization that fights to prevent child sex slavery and provide aftercare for its victims.

The numbers around the child sex trafficking industry are staggering. Over a million children are sold into this multi-billion dollar industry each year. As Rob explains to Alec, he sees behind the numbers: “This is not about an issue, this is not about a cause. This is somebody’s daughter, this is about somebody’s son. Little boy. Little girl.”

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

I'm Alec Baldwin, and here's the thing. Child sex trafficking has been called the ugliest preventable man made disaster in the world. Over a million children are sold each year as sex slaves into an industry that is said to be worth billions of dollars. Sex trafficking overall is one of the most lucrative crimes on Earth, second only to the global drug trade. The numbers are horrific, but sometimes numbers that size have a way of obscuring the greater horror. Behind each number is a person, a victim whose individual story is ghastly. New York Times op ed columnist Nicholas Kristof recently told the story of schrey Pove, a Cambodian girl who was sold by her mother to a brothel. Her virginity went to the highest bidder she was six years old. For the following three years, she was forced to have sex with up to twenty men a day. Stories like shre Poe aren't limited to Southeast Asia. They happened in Africa, Europe, and right here in the United States. My guest Rob Morris works to protect young people like shrepe Hove around the world. Rob is president and co founder of Love one forty six, an organization that fights to prevent child sex slavery and provide after care for its victims. Rob has been doing humanitarian work most of his life, but ten years ago, when a musician friend of his said his band wanted to take on the issue of child sex trafficking, Rob was oblivious. I had honestly never heard of child trafficking before, and then started looking at it. Um, we have never heard of it at all. I had never heard of it. I was given the impression back in high school that slavery ended with something that we call the Emancipation Proclamation, but the reality as it hasn't. Not long after that initial conversation, Rob and his friend took an exploratory trip to Southeast Asia to see how they could help up with the issue. They were given about an hour of training before they entered a brothel pretending to be John's Men who wanted to purchase young girls for sex. It was the most disturbing experience of my life, because here I am having to learn how to pose as the very thing that everything in me is completely an early repulsed by as a human being, as a father, as a man, and remember them saying, look, if you don't think you can hold it together, if you're going to freak out, and when you see what you're going to see, don't go in because we can't risk an investigation being taken down because of your reaction. We're brought into a room and we're looking through these class windows. They call it a fish bowl at young girls and they were sitting watching children's cartoons on television sets and they had the dignity of a name taken from them. He just had numbers been into their dresses. And on this side of the glass, we were shoulder to shoulder with what I would describe as predators who were purchasing these kids for sex where they predominantly What was that this was a brothel that catered particularly to Westerners. They looked like, anybody, could you tell language wise where it will be America, kins, Europeans. The stats, the latest stats that I've read, and they say that about of sex tourists are American men. I'm hearing the voice of this investigator in my head who said, if you don't think you can hold it together, because everything in me instinctively wants to smash you the glass. And yet as many of these kids out of there, and we couldn't do it because there was an investigation taking place that they had to get together exactly. So it was incredibly disturbing. And the thing that so shook me was the looks in the eyes of the kids. There was nothing left there, man, and they were so emotionally shut down, no life in their eyes. Except for one kid. It must have been new to the brothel, because there was still a fight left in her. She was the only one that was not looking at the children's cartoon, and she was staring at us through the glass. Never forget those So there was a fight I have not given up yet. Her number was one that was just sort of emblazoned there in our brains, and so yeah, so that's who, that's who we fight for. And she represents the new name the organization Love One. We actually named the organization at that time UTUS for Children International, and then after a few years we changed the name, partly because Mother Teresa used to say this and said it so well. She said, if I didn't pick up the one off the streets of Calcutta, I never would have picked up the fort. And so when we look at the stats, the numbers, and we throw these things out there. There's a dehumanizing that takes place. We forget that this is not about an issue, it's not about a cause. It's about somebody's daughter. This is about somebody's son, little boy, little girl. And sometimes we get just sucked into the stats and we're throwing these things around like we're not talking about human beings. And so that's why I even renaming the organization. It's a reminder to us that this is about a girl. This is about a child, This is about all those children that she represents. Is there something about the culture in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world that the government really won't put their shoulder into stopping this? I don't think something. I mean, there are always advocates, and there are always people, and that's who we look for. I mean, what do you think prevents a country like the Thai government from doing a better job at extinguishing these practices. I think it's just will and recognizing that this is an issue that we need to deal with. And again I don't want to just single out Thailand. I mean it's it's the same thing when we look at here in the US. I think it's not just a cultural thing. We're talking about poverty, we're talking about marginalized people. Were talk about places of conflict, or even when you see something like a natural disaster in a place. The first people on the scene in Haiti, it wasn't aid workers, they were traffickers. Are the indigenous Haitian people or again I think it's people that are looking for opportunity. How can I make a buck? So men and maybe some women who are in the sex for higher business there in the prostitution business. The earthquake comes there there in Haiti, and they said to ourselves, this is our big chance. We're going to make a killing here. And I mean it's estimated that the trafficking of human beings basically generates between twelve and thirty two billion dollars a year. It's profitable. You have the same situation happening here when it's vulnerability. You've got himps lowering girls from bus stations. They come here, they don't have a place to stay, looking for something to eat, perhaps come from a broken home, and this pimp comes in as the night and shining armor, and it's all good at first. I'll give you a place to stay, give you food, I'll take care of you, I'll be your daddy. And here's a girl that's either had an abusive father or maybe not even a father in her life, and this guy's telling her the things that she's always wanted to hear a father say, you're beautiful, you're special. And in the United States, many of these people are coming out of foster care systems, that people who are runaways from that system of vulnerability. Basically, that's the bottom line is it's about vulnerability. So where are their vulnerable children, Foster care system runaways, throwaway teens, and there are hundreds of thousands of people working every year between the ages I was told of eleven and fourteen years old is the average age that where they start. Yeah, a child usually enters into the trafficking situation or prostitution. The average age anywhere is between thirteen and fifteen years of age in the United States, and the statistics are really dangerous. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of really good solid research. You'll hear numbers from everywhere from a hundred thousand kids at risk for commercial sexual exploitation to three hundred thousand. Because it's the issue is such an in the shadows kind of issued. Many times victims don't come forth, or they're arrested as criminals. Even most states, a fifteen year old is picked up for prostitution, they're arrested as a criminal and thrown into jail. The next day, the pimp fails them out in their back in the situation, so they're not even counted as a victim of traffic. So people who are in the ranks of this vulnerable group of people in the foster care system and so forth, are there people who are working on the fringes of that system, or perhaps even within the system itself, who function as pimps and shills and and they develop talent if you will incide that business. Is that a big problem? Wow, that's that's a that's a huge question, ston. I think um pimps, traffickers, john's, whatever, any of those categories will look for places where they can get easy access level. I mean, we've seen something happen just recently in the news with Penn Stay. So coaches, people in ministry, you know, pastors, priests, you see um A camp counselors, teachers in the news who have gone in that direction. It's an easy situation because they get easy access and they sometimes come with trust built in. Explain to the audience, then how someone, I mean, what are signs maybe the parents, peers, or other people involved in the lives of these children can see. What is the mechanism of which we cross over from mentor in a relationship and becomes a sexual relationship. Is there a language that people are using. Have you even been involved in any research of this or scenity researcher? I think that I think that's a really legitimate question. I mean, I think there are signs to look for if it's your own team ager with such a ying spending inordinate amount of times, I mean, it's inappropriate for a kid to be spending time alone with it. And that's my thinking. With a teacher at their house, that's just a no brain. So that's what you see happening. Oh yeah, that's I mean, that's what we've seen happen. That's what continues to happen. And so these people that are these predatory or potentially predatory people in terms of child sex abuse, it begins with excessive or significant amounts of time alone with the child that they get them alone, and that's when they begin to develop this relationship that then they cross this line and lead them by the hand, if you will, into a sexual relationship. Yeah. And again, what happens in the mind of what could be described as a predator is beyond my comprehension. I don't think anybody wakes up at forty five years of age or fifty years of age and says I'm going to have sex with a child. There is a grooming that takes place over years and years, and that's what we're seeing now. And even when it comes to media and grooming, where media has normalized the objective cation of women and girls and that leads in some realms to exploitation. Kids are watching videos where you have a glorification of pimp culture, where it's totally like okay to watch a music video where you have a guy walking women that are hardly dressed with chains around their necks, or somebody swiping a credit card down in a girl's crack in a video. Do you recognize that our society is far more sexualized when you were growing up or was it twas ever? Thus, oh man, I think things have changed very very quickly. I think you're seeing images portraying women younger and younger. Somebody was telling me about this show that's on TV where they have these kids in these beauty pageants, and you don't dress a five year old kid provocatively. That's just insanity, you know. One very I don't want to say dated or tried and true. One traditional, if you will, component of this is the issue of sex education in schools, or sex education in some way in our society, where we really come get a little more honest with ourselves about the power of sexuality and the forces it is in our lives and how much we need to face that and everywhere increasingly younger group of people sexism and that you don't want to demonize. You don't want people to grow up thinking that sex is a bad thing or sex is an unhealthy thing, because you're gonna have a whole other set of problems when you do that. What's your opinion, if any, about the need for recalibrating and be dedicating ourselves to a serious sex education program in schools. I think, coming from our work, we would love to see the issue of sexual exploitation be taught as a regular part of the curriculum of sex education. It's usually not and so getting that as part of the taught curricul What is exploitation? What does it look like the schools that we've been going into. It's amazing the lights that are turning on. Kids will be up afterwards saying this is happening to my friend by somebody who she thinks is her boyfriend. I think it needs to be part of a sex education curriculum. How do you protect your self from being exploited so that you're not in a place do you see? That's fascinating to me that you say that, because in the past, I mean sex education to me, as I recall in a biology class in the ninth grade, we had a sex education component. It was folded into that class. It was almost like the duck and cover response to atomic bombing, you know, like they might as well have just had, you know, Eisenhower come in or Ellen or Roosevelt and teach us sex education. It was so dated. But what you're saying is even more interesting, which is to come into a room and start to teach kids, and even in seventh and eighth grade perhaps and say to them, here are some of the dangers of sex and sexual exploitation. Because as I've said to my own daughter. I have a sixteen year old daughter, and my conversations with her about sex are guys will say anything to you, some of them to get you to do what they want you to do. And the real issue is that some of them are very good at it. Some of them will really sell you on the idea that doing what they want you to do is what you want to do. And I wonder if a more sophisticated, more evolved version of that is what we need in sex education classes, which is to teach everybody here's where sex can get you in trouble. Yeah, and I think challenging guys as well. Challenging boys. You know, the definition of rock and roll from the School of Rock is sticking it to the man. And basically, let me tell you what the man is doing. The man, the culture that we're living in, a hyper sexualized culture, is grooming you to be this forty five year old man some day. So if you want to stick in a man, rebel against that, be your better self. I was in a school and in teaching in a high school classroom on the issue of trafficking and exploitation, and there was a guy in the back of the class. It was just sort of like smirking the whole time. And he's like, man, this sounds like a good business to go into, and you know, and and your business. No, no, hey, I can make some money here. He's like, this is lucrative, you know, because I was talking about some of the stats and and the kind of money that's generated through you know, the sale of human beings. And he's thinking, man, this sounds like a lucrative business. And he's making jokes and everything, and then I start to unpack about you know, let me talk to you about what a pimp really is instead of this glorified pick ture that you see on your videos. And this is what a pimp looks like. And we talk about some of the kids that we worked, right, we have a girl in our safe home, Alec, that is deaf and mute. The idea that somebody would first take advantage of a child who is living in abject poverty and a child who couldn't even cry out for herself, could not even say anything about it, is insanity. This is what a pimp has. This is what a trafficker is, This is what they prey on. Somebody said, you know these people are like animals, and I love I think it was dos Jevsky who said, don't ever compare human beings to animals, because it's an insult to animals, because animals would never come up with the artistic cruelty that human beings come up with. That's the reality. This is Alec Baldwin. You're listening to. Here's the thing coming up more from my conversation with Rob Morris, one of the co founders of Love on. This is Alec Baldwin. I'm talking with Rob Morris, one of the co founders of Love one forty six, an organization that works to prevent child sex slavery around the world. Rob's organization focuses on prevention, providing after care for victims, and also worked to pass legislation like the recent Safe Harbor laws. At the bottom line of Safe Harbor laws designed to create a situation where it redefines anyone under the age of eighteen in some cases sixteen, from being considered a criminal to being considered a victim. And so it's to protect so um instead of being the fifteen year old being picked up for prostitution and being arrested throwing at the jail and bailed out by the PAMP. This person now is to be perceived and looked at as a victim of human trafficing. According to federal law. Anyone or the under the age of eighteen years of age. According to the federal law, UM cannot consent to being commercially sold for sacks. That's you can't do it, and so anyone under the age of eighteen. A safe harbor law is supposed to be designs to say this person is a victim and not a criminal. And that's what the safe heart was it work. Um, well, absolutely, we helped UM push to get one past in Connecticut. There's only I believe four or five states that actually have one. So yeah, and it also increases the penalties for those purchasing sacks, pimps and traffickers. Talk about the the I mean for most people who are who look into this issue. Obviously, the Internet has made a huge change in the way the sexual trafficking and the whole cornucopia of a sexually illegal activity is conducted. Talk if you will about how your organization and similar organizations consider that. Yeah. I actually spoke with UM member of the NYPD here and he deals with the trafficking issue here in New York, and he just he described the Internet as the new streets that the day of where you see prostitution happening on street corners and all of that is coming to an end, and it's happening now on the Internet. That's a big deal because then it be comes a situation where it's much more anonymous, much more difficult to see and to track. You did some of this investigative we're here in the US. The Korean SPA story you were involved. That was an accident. I was getting a tattoo and the place that I was getting the ink that downstairs was a sauna and acu pressure place with an Asian name to it, and the blinds were always closed. There was a one way glass mirror. Yeah, knowing what I know, I'm just like, this looks really shady to me. Asked the people in the tattoo place, Hey, what's going on downstairs? They're like, oh, we don't ask any questions. Didn't take rocket science. You know, you looked it up in the phone book and it's got hours of operation at three o'clock in the morning. When it gets up at two o'clock in the mor I think I'm gonna go get some accu pressure is sort of no brainer stuff. One of my co workers went on a site. There are there are websites where John's can rate their experiences with women that they've been with in a prostitution situation. And so they typed the name of this particular spa and and split up. Oh exactly, it's like a Yelp for these kinds of services, and this place lit up all over the place. So we reported. We had an advocate within the police department in in Connecticut who understood the trafficking issue. It took a long time, but they eventually ended up doing a raid and sure enough, there were all kinds of funky things going in there, and specifically Korean women. None of them spoke English. The women were arrested, then the John's were let go. They used the Johns for evidence, um, and the women were the ones that were arrested. And this is why even the safe harbor law is such a key thing for children, so that hey, you know what, this is not a criminal, this is a victim, and that changes the perception and how we deal with them. About six months later, the place opened up again under a new name, and basically it's doing the same thing again because of the priority this is not you know, there's people getting killed. We got to deal with that. Talk with you would about the Penn State scandal. You know, in my mind when this happened, if Sandusky is proven guilty of a crime, which obviously it's simply there's a lot of it's the point in that direction, what's the best thing to do with people like that? Like, wouldn't you love to get a guy like that in a conference room and grill him for about a month about everything he did and why so we can learn more about it. I wonder if just taking these people and having the our indignation at the four and just shuddering them away somewhere and punishing them and making sure ever the world knows how we deal with these people. You get them out there and we try to kind of we try to have some kind of forensic examination of him and what he did so we can learn from that. What do you think about that kind of thing? Well, I think I think there's some power to deterrence in Hey, you know what, you can face life in prison. I know Massachusetts just passed along where a trafficker now can get life in prison. I think there is a good thing with that is there's the deterrence factor, like, oh, you know what, when I think about profit versus risk, the risk just went up quite a bit. I'm gonna go sell drugs now instead of selling human beings. A lot less risk involved. I won't get, you know, twenty years to life. The good thing is, I think it can act as a deterrence. As far as stronger laws, that's a great question. As far as, like somebody asked me the other day, have you ever met anybody that's been rehabilitated somebody that has actually been a trafficker. I have not. I would love to find that person and find out. But I'm not talking about rehabilitating Sandusky or using Sandusky's testimony to rehabilitate any other traffickers. It's in order to help other people recognize what to look for. I'd love to get Sandusky into a study as a part of his sentence where we can learn about this were then, because I'm assuming when this thing happened with Sandusky, the first thing I thought to myself is, oh God, the next thing we're gonna hear is how prevalent this was that we didn't know it that coaches are are sexually abusing, if not outright raping or pimping players on their own teams. What do you think of that idea? It would be certainly interesting to know what goes on inside a person's head like that and what that looks like and how it ends up, how he sees the world and how he how does the predator to think so we can help the prey avoid some of these pitfalls? Yeah, I mean, prevention is the bottom line, right, what I think we can do. And these are the complexities for me. What will this brings me back to is this notion of and we get honest about sexuality, we get honest about ourselves. People will say to me in my business, do violent films disturb you? And I'll say, to a degree, they do, But I said not really, because violence, I think is something that people don't feel they have a right to. If you go in and see a film, you know, if you go watch Charles Bronson and Death Wish Kill all the bad guys and you feel motivated and authorized to go out and commit some act of violence, you have some other pathology going into the film. Sexuality is different because sexist. Some people feel entitled to have, they feel they should be having. It's like there's a lot of men out there, because we tend to think of this more of a man on woman crime. Who they're predisposed to do this kind of thing if they're not careful. Do you agree with them? Yeah, Well, again it comes back to things that have shaped They're thinking you have shaped their psyche. I don't. I don't because I'm not a psychologist. I don't understand all of that. But when we talk about what we deal with, specifically with children, it doesn't have anything to do with sex. It's it's violence against children. It's interesting say that, that's a very good point you make that what is perceived as as a sex crime with this child sex slaverything, it's not sex at all. It's a violent act. It's violence. You're a father and you have two of your own You and your wife have two of your own biological children, and you've adopted four children and how many boys? How many girls? I have two boys and four girls? You have four daughters or any of them biological? My oldest daughter, your oldest daughter is your biology. How old is shame? She's twenty four. So your oldest child is twenty four and your youngest child is how old? Six? So some of your children you have brought into your family and adopted during the course of your years doing this work, where any of them as a result of doing this word none, not even from regions that this that from regions? Yeah, from some of yours. So one of your daughters is from where For example, my daughter who is going to be sixteen this week is from China. And then my youngest trafficking situation like their same kind of situation. I mean, it's it's bad, and my my youngest daughter is from Vietnam. One thing I do wonder is how much does the role of a very very strong and very very effective history of feminism change things in certain countries. Is feminism prevented this from becoming worse in parts in the world that it might have been. Absolutely? I mean, where there is vulnerability, there will be predators in many countries of the world and in many communities by design, Yeah, marginalized women and girls and many times children. But I guess my point is that your daughter is twenty four years old. So when this organization, your work with them started ten years ago your daughter was fourteen, So you've raised your family from a certain point in many of them for their entire lives in side that timeline, And I'm wondering what do you talk to your children about it at all? Or what do you and your wife talk about with him? But how do you handle the subject of sex as a father with your children? Yeah, I think it depends on the age obviously being age appropriate. Even like my youngest kids don't know what daddy does. I mean, other than daddy helps children who are in big trouble, they understand slavery. Like my fifteen year old knows what the situation is. We've had great talks about it. She's actually started to love one forty six stass force in her high school. I think it's important, But at the right age. Are you ever thinking of having any more children or adopting more children? Probably you are. Yeah, it's it's a good possibility. Yeah, we've just talked about it recently, actually adopting one. Why we just feel like, as long as we can provide a home for somebody that doesn't have one, if we could provide a family for someone that doesn't have one, and let's do that. What does your wife think about this work you're doing. My wife's a rock star, right, yeah, I mean, and especially because I travel so much and everything often time, she's become the left six kids. Yeah, yeah, she's doing the hard work. So um. But I remember with the first phone call that I made that night when I came back from the brothel the first time, and I called her up and she could tell right away on the phone and she's like, are you okay? What is this done to you personally? What has it done to you? Because I will tell you that I've had things happen to me in my life and they've made me lose my faith in people. I've had to battle with that. I'm not an optimist. I'm hopeful, and I think those are two different things. I've seen literally the worst of humanity, yeah, and so it it would be really easy to become super jaded, super cynical. But at the same time, I've also seen absolutely amazing things, great people. I remember I met the director of a human rights agency and Kimbodi, and she looked at me, you know what your problem is as Americans? And I looked at it sort of I started wins, thinking, Okay, I can think of some things, but I know you're gonna fill me in. And she goes, you don't think, you react, and I'm like, what do you mean? And she says, a lot of times you see some human rights abuse or whatever and everything, and instead of taking the time to think through solutions that are going to be effective and sustainable, you just react to it. And because you haven't put thought into it, sometimes your reaction causes more harm than good. And I kind of took that as a mandate as an organization to say, you know what we need to be thought that it has informed. And the difficulty though with that is I live with this daily tension. We live with this daily tension of the emergency factor of children being sold and time what it takes to and the time that it takes to create thoughtful solutions that are gonna work. Rob Morris is the president and co founder of Love One. There are many other people fighting to abolish child sex trafficking. Rachel Lloyd runs GEMS Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a New York based organization that helps girls and young women leave the commercial sex industry in this country. Like it's not this foreign, strange Amlien population, it's women and girls who have experienced credible amount of trauma and hardship in their lives, who have the same hopes and fears and dreams as everybody else. You can hear Rachel's story, learn more about Rob Morris's organization, love one, and other resources at our website Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 421 clip(s)