Nonprofit teaches trafficking survivors computer job skills

GlobalPost

When Catie Hart first met the man who would become her trafficker outside of a nightclub in San Francisco, she was impressed by his mature, professorial appearance. Ms. Hart, then 18, had just moved from Colorado, expecting to attend college the next fall, but her encounter with that man — whom she declined to name — would dramatically derail those plans.

“I just moved here all the way from Colorado all by myself, and I didn’t realize at the time, of course, but in his mind he was just like, ‘cha-ching.’” She said her trafficker intended to groom her for sex work from the start, and before she knew it, that’s exactly what she was doing.

Ms. Hart said the line between boyfriend and trafficker was always blurred, intentionally, so that she cannot even pinpoint any specific time when it became a coercive relationship. But she’s sure about one thing: After a certain point, leaving was not an option. She said that in addition to psychological manipulation, her trafficker would use threats of violence to keep her from running away.

“For so long, it was, ‘I will kill you if you ever leave me’ … almost every single day, and he would explain very calmly who he would pay, how much it would cost, how they would follow me for months and months and get to know my schedule so that when it happened, it would look very random and they wouldn’t be able to pin it back on him. And he would say these things so calmly,” she recalled.

Twenty years later, Ms. Hart said that as both a survivor and more recently as someone providing training to social workers working with victims, sex trafficking has in many ways defined her life until now — and she is ready to move on. She has finally found a way to do that through an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit organization called AnnieCannons, which she learned about at a workshop it gave in the area. Its mission is to teach sex trafficking survivors how to develop software and websites.

Jessica Hubley, one of the organization’s founders, wanted to teach survivors something that was actually viable in the job market — and in the Bay Area, where she is based, nothing made more sense than software development. The Stanford University law graduate said she specifically wanted to work with trafficking survivors because “I hate when smart people are denied the opportunity to innovate because of bias or the circumstances of their birth. Human trafficking survivors are the most severe example of this.”

Her focus on the need for economic security was reinforced by interviews with trafficking survivors during a 2013 trip to Myanmar with AnnieCannons cofounder Laura Hackney, who was Stanford University’s senior research associate for the school’s AntiTrafficking Project in the MekongSubregion.

AnnieCannons, named for a female astronomer, would not just train survivors — it would help women monetize those skills by teaching them how to navigate the industry and find work. That meant “[g]iving them a network among each other, connections in government, connections in the social sector, connections in the business world, that they can then leverage to do whatever they want to do,” Ms. Hubley said.

She recalled that the “business side of it that was sort of the eureka [moment]. … We have this huge pool of untapped talent in this very profitable skill, and we have all of this demand for this very profitable skill and the only reason that they’re not going together is because of these biases that people hold that are stupid.”

AnnieCannons effectively acts as both a coding camp and a job agency. It holds its six-month courses at the Alameda County Family Justice Center, where this summer Ms. Hart and four other students have been learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The curriculum is split into two core phases: digital literacy and then front-end web development. A third optional phase that students can choose to attend offers supplementary workshops.

Ms. Hubley believes that financial security is the core issue: As long as sex work remains the best way to make a living, many will continue to do it even when they no longer have to. The stigma and trauma of a survivor’s past, along with the arrest record that many have, can preclude them from finding well-paid work. Before she decided to attend University of California, Berkeley — and eventually become an educator — Ms. Hart continued working in a strip club for two years to make a living.

“Even though I have my degree and stuff, I’m not necessarily someone who should go applying to jobs on Indeed.com because all you need to do is Google me and see I have this past, and HR and big corporations don’t like that stuff,” Ms. Hart said, adding that oftentimes, when it came to jobs, “I still felt that same feeling like when I was doing sex work, where, like, I didn’t feel like I had other options.”

Ms. Hubley wanted her organization to break this cycle by offering women another economically viable alternative, without the judgment sex workers often get from prospective employers. This is why AnnieCannons emphasizes not just the training program but also on networking and job placement, so that its students do not have to navigate the industry on their own.

AnnieCannons, which Ms. Hubley and Ms. Hackney founded in 2013, partners with local organizations and shelters who screen their clients for potential candidates for the program. Ms. Hubley said their students “range from having been born into slavery, like have no memory of not being in their trafficking situation before they got away, all the way up to having a … college or graduate degree prior to having a romantic partner exploit them.”

The pool of candidates referred to AnnieCannons before the start of each semester is screened through an interview-andtesting process. Ms. Hubley said 55 percent to 75 percent of applicants pass. So far, 30 students have finished the core curriculum, not including the five currently studying.

“The most critical service that no one has enough of is housing,” said Ms. Dartis. In addition, many women who have been trafficked choose not to identify as trafficking survivors because of the shame and stigma — and therefore won’t take advantage of organizations specifically for trafficking survivors. Even with power almost completely restored, the island’s