Trial Advocacy Podcast: Supporting Survivors of Human Trafficking

In our final episode, Summer and Taylor discuss their backgrounds, including how they became involved with anti-trafficking work. They discuss how this podcast came to be as well as what they learned from it. We appreciate your willingness to learn with us. We hope this podcast is a useful tool for educating the legal field, and we hope it inspires you to continue to share, learn, and collaborate with the anti-trafficking community around you.

We also want to thank you for your grace as we embarked on a new method for sharing information. Trying to find new ways to make knowledge accessible has had messy and magical moments. We recognize there are some impurities that come with recording over video communications and we are thankful for the law school team’s efforts around editing these episodes. We hope you all agree that what we may have lacked in experience with the recording we more than made up for with content and connections to experts in the community. Thank you!

In this episode, Investigator Beth Bascom shares her insight and experience as both an expert and eye witness in human trafficking cases. She discusses how expert witnesses can be a powerful tool to educate a jury on complex legal issues like human trafficking. Plus, we couldn’t resist asking her about her involvement with the High-Risk Victims Unit, which can be an effective solution for human trafficking identification and prevention.

In this episode, we talk to Lorena Bueno, Assistant State Attorney, Felony Division Chief at Office of the State Attorney, about the challenges that trauma presents in legal proceedings, as well as other common challenges working with human trafficking cases. We also discuss how  legal professionals can overcome those challenges to better protect victims and build stronger cases.

In this episode, Summer speaks with Dr. Mimi Graham and Ms. Jill Little about what it takes to be “trauma informed.” We discuss the science behind trauma, the impact of trauma, and why being involved with human trafficking victims may be different from working with individuals who have experienced other types of victimization. We also dive into some promising solutions to working with human trafficking victims in a legal capacity with some valuable advice from this dynamic duo.

In the premiere episode, Summer interviews Professor Terry Coonan, a practicing human rights and immigration attorney with over 25 years of experience. We discuss what human trafficking is, both legally and practically, as well as common misconceptions and current trafficking trends. This episode builds an essential foundation for working with human trafficking survivors and prosecuting human trafficking cases.