TRUCKERS AGAINST TRAFFICKING
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Mission Statement
TAT stands committed to educate, equip, empower and mobilize members of key industries and agencies to combat human trafficking.
About This Cause
In 2003, the FBI launched its annual Innocence Lost National Initiative, and their investigations have led to the successful conviction of more than 2,750 human trafficking perpetrators who have exploited children through prostitution, as well as the recovery of more than 6,600 children out of sexual slavery. Forced prostitution of children (and women) is referred to as sex trafficking, and it is modern-day slavery. Human trafficking, both sex and labor, has been reported in all 50 states. It is found in both rural and urban settings, and crosses all gender, ethnic and socioeconomic strata. Because sex traffickers continually move their victims to sell them in various venues and don't want "downtime" for their "product," they often market or prostitute them along highways to conveniently access transient customers. As a result, truckers and truck stop/travel plaza employees, as well as other professionals in the transportation industry, often intersect human trafficking in the course of their jobs. They are, therefore, key to recognizing sex trafficking along our nation’s highways, and when they see it, reporting it for law enforcement intervention to either 911 or the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) at 1-888-3737-888. Truckers Against Trafficking (TAT), a 501(c)3 organization founded in 2009, recognized that by educating, equipping, empowering and mobilizing trucking and other key transportation industries, along with law enforcement and transportation-related government agencies, they could raise up a mobile army of transportation professionals to successfully fight human trafficking and close loopholes to traffickers. Since 2009, TAT has made significant headway in accomplishing its mission, due to the positive response of the trucking and bus industries. Thousands of calls from truckers to the NHTRC to report suspected incidents of sex trafficking along their routes have resulted in hundreds of victim recoveries and perpetrator arrests. Bus and transit drivers, equipped with TAT training, have also taken actions which have resulted in victim recovery and perpetrator arrests. To create solid partnerships between the public and private sectors, TAT holds half-day Coalition Builds between leadership and employees of trucking companies, truck stops/travel plazas, transit and energy organizations and the FBI, Homeland Security, state attorney general offices, as well as state and local police. Meetings include training, a survivor’s testimony, a law enforcement panel, connecting industry members and law enforcement with their local resources to combat human trafficking, networking opportunities and the creation of a flash email chain to increase communication between coalition attendees. These meetings, along with other critical law enforcement partnerships and training, are creating solutions-based pathways and mobilizing those intent on finding and recovering victims and arresting the perpetrators who are brutalizing and trafficking hundreds of thousands of our American citizens, including children, each year. TAT's call to action is: Make the Call, Save Lives. And the everyday heroes of the trucking, bus and energy industries are doing just that. Every year, TAT awards its highest honor, the Harriet Tubman Award presented by Progressive Insurance, to someone in the trucking, bus or energy industries who has helped to recover the exploited, improve the lives of victims or prevent human trafficking and/or sexual exploitation from taking place. This year, Joe Aguayo, a WinCo Foods, TAT-Trained driver, won the award for the actions he took which resulted in the recovery of an abandoned, beaten and drugged Indigenous human trafficking victim standing dazed along a remote road Aguayo was traveling. Police told him that if he hadn’t made the call, she probably would have died. Last year, the winners were three transit employees from EMBARK in Oklahoma City (also trained through TAT), whose combined actions resulted in the rescue of a young woman trying to escape a trafficking situation who had boarded the vehicle in distress trying to get away from her traffickers. TAT received a Congressional award in 2015, was named to the United Nation's 100 best anti-human trafficking practices in 2013, and has had its materials featured in the United States Trafficking in Persons report. Endorsed by such organizations as the American Trucking Associations, the Truckload Carriers Association, the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association, the National Association of Small Trucking Companies, the National Association of Truck Stop Operators and many more, TAT now has registered on its website over 1.7 million men and women trained with TAT materials. Protect people in your community and around the nation. Fight human trafficking by giving to TAT through your organization.