Non-profit brings support to Gallup, McKinley County
By Molly Ann Howell
Managing Editor
According to the Human Trafficking Hotline website, over 9,000 cases of human trafficking were reported in 2023. Forty of those cases were in New Mexico.
In 2021, The Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose founders are passionate about ending sex trafficking, partnered with the City of Gallup to launch the Broken Arrow Project.
The project’s mission is to provide a sanctuary for survivors to heal and thrive, breaking the generational cycle of abuse and sexual exploitation. This sustainable healing initiative focuses on Native and Indigenous communities affected by human trafficking.
While there are programs in Gallup to help people deal with domestic and substance abuse issues, the closest human trafficking support center is the New Mexico Dream Center in Albuquerque, which has plenty of cases they’re already dealing with due to the major city’s large population.
So, Project Foundation saw a need for local resources, and now they’re working to fulfill it.
They hosted a human trafficking workshop at the Octavia Fellin Public Library March 13. The workshop was open to the public, and allowed people to learn about human trafficking, what it is, and how to best support victims of the crime.
A STORY FROM WITHIN THE HOME
The workshop began with a presentation from Dr. Greg Williams, a survivor of human trafficking.
Williams’ first memory is one of abuse. He was four years old on Christmas Day 1967 when his dad hit him for the first time. The abuse continued for 13 more years, not stopping until he was almost done with high school.
“When you’re 4, 5, or 6 years old, you don’t realize anything different,” he said. “I only knew abuse. I thought every dad did this to their kids. I remember wanting to ask one of my best friends ‘Hey, what does your dad do to you?’”
For the next seven years, Williams’ dad remained the sole abuser of his son. He would abuse him physically, mentally, and sexually.
“You never knew what version of him you were gonna get when he walked into a room or came home from work,” Williams said. “He was an alcoholic. He would take the belt to me. Back in those days everyone used the belt on their children, but not to the point of drawing blood.”
From ages 11 to 14, Williams said he was “trafficked” by his own father.
Williams said he would have to endure 10 to 12 “episodes” of abuse within a five-hour period.
He had a Superman cup from Hardees sitting on his bedside dresser. On the way out of his room people who paid his father for a chance to abuse him would drop quarters, dimes, and nickels into the cup and thank him for his services.
“At the end of the night my dad and I would sit around the dining room table, and he’d count his stacks of cash, and I would count my nickels, dimes, quarters, and sometimes dollars,” Williams said. “And that’s how we spent every Monday night.”
Williams said it took him over 30 years to realize that he was a victim of human trafficking.
It took him 35 years to say he was abused out loud. It took him another three years to realize he had been trafficked.
“Until a couple years ago I didn’t even realize that I was being trafficked,” he said. “I just thought my dad was adding to the abuse that he had done to me alone and then selling me to his friends.”
In 2019, he published a book detailing his abusive childhood. Shattered By the Darkness: Putting the Pieces Back Together. He schedules about 200 speaking events a year.
Williams serves as the Chairman of the Sterling Committee United Against Human Trafficking. He says people are drawn to his story of abuse because “not many men are out there telling their stories.”
He explained that men tend to keep their painful pasts locked away.
“It took me a long time to break through that shell. I thought people would question my story and my manhood,” Williams said.
But he soon realized that he wasn’t alone.
Williams works at the Baylor University College of Medicine. When he disclosed to his colleagues what happened to him as a child, eight other doctors came forward and said they had also been abused as children.
In all, Williams said he wants people to be aware of misconceptions when it comes down to human trafficking.
One of the biggest ones is that human trafficking happens when someone walks down a dark alleyway and is grabbed, handcuffed, and locked away in a crate.
Williams said the reality is much less sensational.
“It happened in my own bedroom every night,” he said. “It wasn’t like being handcuffed to the bed or blindfolded and hauled off in a van.”
In 2017, the International Organization of Migration estimated that 41% of child trafficking situations are facilitated by family members or caregivers.
LAW ENFORCEMENT’S RESPONSE
The March 13 workshop also covered the law enforcement approach to human trafficking victims.
Doug Gilmer, Ph.D., has 35 plus years of experience in law enforcement. He’s the current president of Resolved Strategies, a global justice solutions group. He publicly speaks out about matters related to exploitative crime, such as human trafficking and child exploitation.
During his portion of the presentation, Gilmer spoke about the differences between sex trafficking and labor trafficking.
Labor trafficking involves transporting victims by coercion, threat, or fraud to perform a variety of jobs and tasks. It’s less visible and severely under-reported when compared to sex trafficking.
Motivated by greed and profit, labor trafficking capitalizes on occupations where vulnerable workers, such as immigrants, work under threat and inhumane conditions.
The industries involved in labor trafficking include agriculture; horticulture; fishing; construction; textiles; food service; domestic work;
and health and beauty.
Gilmer argued that there’s more of a societal focus on sex trafficking than labor trafficking.
“We tend to focus on sex trafficking more because one it’s more sensational, and two, it’s got the word sex in it,” he said. “So it tends to get all of the attention. But they’re two very horrible crimes, and it takes on many different appearances depending on how it’s facilitated.”
He also said that the media conflates human trafficking and human smuggling.
Human smuggling involves the provision of a service — typically, transportation or fraudulent documents — to an individual who voluntarily seeks to gain illegal entry into a foreign country.
“They’re two totally different crimes. One is a crime against a person, the other is a crime against a border,” Gilmer said. “One involves transportation, the other involves exploitation.”
As a part of his training of law enforcement entities, Gilmer asks officers to lead with compassion.
While it might sound touchy-feely, especially from a law enforcement perspective, approaching the victim of trafficking with a caring attitude, “doesn’t make you weak, and it doesn’t make you appear soft,” he said.
To emphasize, Gilmer teaches officers to be “trauma-informed and victim-centered.”
“It actually makes you better. It’s going to help produce better cases down the road when you can show some empathy and you’re able to put yourself, and your needs and your desires for your case aside and focus on what’s best for the victim … and give them choices,” he said.
“You’ll build trust with that victim a lot faster than if you try and control the narrative yourself.”
Meanwhile, since The Project Foundation launched Project Broken Arrow, they’ve been working with the Gallup Police Dept. and the McKinley County Sheriff’s Office to create a human trafficking task force.
In an interview with the Sun, McKinley County Sheriff James Maiorano III said the task force is in the beginning stages.
The Sheriff’s department isn’t currently working on any human trafficking cases. They only have three active missing persons cases, and Maiorano doesn’t believe any of them are tied to human trafficking.
Despite this, he said the training aspect of the March 13 workshop was beneficial for his staff.
“The educational part of the workshop was really good for our staff to learn what we’re looking at for evidence, what we are looking for in reporting, and to learn what human trafficking looks like,” Maiorano said.
HOW TO TREAT A VICTIM WITH RESPECT
Circling back to Willams, he took time to explain to folks at the workshop how people can help victims of human trafficking.
His main advice? Listening.
He advised that anyone trying to support a human trafficking victim should avoid such phrases as “I know what you’re going through” or “You’ll get through this.”
When it comes to situations like his, he said that more adults need to pay attention to the children around them.
Victims of abuse often have trouble making eye contact and have bad posture. They experience sadness, have trouble sleeping, and express dissatisfaction with relationships.
Additionally, victims lack trust and resort to perfectionism and/or people-pleasing to cope with the abuse.
THE LASTING EFFECTS OF ABUSE
Williams said he’s still dealing with the aftermath of his father’s abuse even as a 60-year-old man.
The traumatic abuse he suffered is known as an Adverse Childhood Experience. Examples of ACEs include physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; witnessing domestic violence; both physical and emotional neglect; parental substance abuse and/or mental illness; household instability; and incarnation of a household member.
ACEs have significant impacts on a person’s health and well-being throughout their lifetime. Research has shown that ACEs are linked to increased risk of heart disease, cancer, obesity, depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, violence, and early death.
Williams knows this all too well. In 2010, doctors discovered his heart was failing and he was in urgent need of major surgery. But he was otherwise perfectly healthy.
“When I had the open-heart surgery the doctor was saying ‘Greg, we have no medical reason your heart went bad,’” Williams explained.
But Williams knew there was an underlying cause.
“When that abuse is being pushed down and you’re trying to bury it, like I did for 35 years, it turns into a cancer-type disease,” he said. “I thought I had all my personal demons in the basement locked away dead, and they weren’t dead, they were down there lifting weights. A couple years ago they stomped up those basement stairs and kicked down the door.”
That kicking down of the door resulted in Williams being diagnosed with Lou Gehring’s disease. He now uses a feeding tube since the disease totally shut down the function of his throat, and doctors don’t expect him to make it to the end of the year.
Despite all this, Williams still wants to help those who are in similar situations to what he grew up in. When he gives presentations across the country, he gives out his phone number to anyone who wants it. He earned his trauma-informed counselor certificate in 2021, and now he talks to people from all over the country.
He said his patients are able to tell him their stories because they’ve never met him and there’s no risk of him telling their circle of friends and family what they have experienced.
When asked why he shares his story, Williams’ answer is simple: “I want to put skin on [the issue of human trafficking], and skin on this looks like me.”
If you or someone you know is experiencing human trafficking, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888.
