Health professionals can help stop human trafficking

A seminar at Georgia Northwestern Technical College will show them how they can help the victims.

A Friday seminar is aimed at increasing the awareness health professionals have of human trafficking and how they can be intervening forces in victims’ lives.

The event, titled “Human Trafficking Meets Healthcare: An Opportunity for Intervention,” will run from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Georgia Northwestern Technical College, 1 Maurice Culberson Drive. It will be held in room 101A of Building H and includes lunch along with an opportunity for continuing education credits.

The cost to attend is $10. Registration can be completed at www. infoforwomen.org or by emailing Sharon Baker — the president and founder of the Women’s Information Network, which is putting on the seminar — at baker8483@comcast.net.

Dr. Jordan Greenbaum — a child abuse physician who works with victims at the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Stephanie Blank Center for Safe and Healthy Children along with serving a number of other organizations — will be the keynote speaker.

Due to the nature of human trafficking and the abuse victims suffer, research indicates many of them will at some point reach out for medical attention, Greenbaum said.

“Sometimes it’s what they come in for that triggers concerns,” he said.

The signs are not certain indicators of trafficking but they are red flags, Greenbaum said. These could be a 15-year-old boy coming in for his third test for a sexually transmitted infection, a 24-yearold pregnant woman who has had three abortions over the last three years, or a domineering person accompanying a patient into the room.

In responding to these observations, Greenbaum said health professionals need to identify if the patient is in a high-risk situation, determined through a serious of questions specific to the type of trafficking, such as for sex or labor purposes. However, they must not come off in a way that could potentially re-traumatize a victim and make them unresponsive.

After communicating with a victim, resources like shelter or rehab program phone numbers are shared.

Realizing that human trafficking is far more common than some may expect — estimates as to how prevalent it is are elusive — is a major step of intervention, Greenbaum said. Health professionals do not know what to look for if they are not expecting it, she continued.

Following Greenbaum’s presentation, human trafficking survivor Shannon Holcombe, a 26-year-old originally from Bartow County, will share her story

and how she reached recovery to become a “walking testimony for these women who don’t realize there’s a way out” through her job at Abba House — a residential ministry for women recovering from emotional wounds.

“You wouldn’t be good enough except for sex,” is a notion Holcombe recalled being in- grained in her mind from the time she was 4 years old, when a 16-yearold cousin molested her. It was his words that stuck with her, demeaned Shannon Holcombe

her and weighed heavy on her for close to two decades after.

“I tried just to be a kid,” said Holcombe, who had an absent father and a mother dealing with drug addiction. “Not realizing that the things he had spoken over me would carry through my life.”

Holcombe became addicted to pain medication as a 9-year-old. At 13 she got into a relationship, mainly wrapped around drugs, with a 21-yearold man who would go on to become the father of her son. She recalled feeling broken following his death in a car wreck, when she was 21.

She turned to heavier drugs, feeding an addiction that made her a target

and subject of control for the woman who prostituted her.

“She just kept me wrapped up that way,” Holcombe said.

After cycling in and out of jail, Holcombe was faced with five years in prison. But a life-changing moment occurred on Sept. 14, 2014, she said, women from the Atlanta-based ministry Out of Darkness came to her side in jail, eventually taking her into their program and to one of their safe houses.

Holcombe then entered the 15-month program at Abba House, where she now works as an intake coordinator.

“I started feeling love there,” she said.