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On Thursday’s show: No 'safe harbor' for sex trafficking victims

A placard of a child sits on a table during a conference Oct. 31, 2011, on human sex trafficking in Atlanta. The Georgia Department of Education estimates that about 5,000 girls in the state are at risk for trafficking each year.
David Goldman
/
AP
A placard of a child sits on a table during a conference Oct. 31, 2011, on human sex trafficking in Atlanta. The Georgia Department of Education estimates that about 5,000 girls in the state are at risk for trafficking each year.

So-called “safe harbor” laws designed to protect targets of sex trafficking in Florida are failing victims, according to a new report by the Delores Barr Weaver Policy Center. Instead of getting help, victims are too often shuttled into the criminal justice system or otherwise detained without needed services. The study’s authors will unveil their findings Thursday on First Coast Connect and discuss what needs to happen to fix the problem.

Guests:

  • Inderjit Vicky Basra, president & CEO of the Delores Barr Weaver Policy Center.
  • Lisa Glass, survivor and contributor to the report See the Girl: Trafficked Behind Closed Doors.
  • Stacy Ellison, vice president of development and communications for the Delores Barr Weaver Policy Center.

Then, some of the hardest working people in America are homeless. We talk to the author of There is No Place for Us: Working and Homelessness in America about housing precarity ahead of his local book reading. The acclaimed author spent years following five families who sadly typify the experience of thousands of homeless people: those who the author says are enduring “an emergency born less of poverty than prosperity. Families are not ‘falling’ into homelessness. They’re being pushed.” Though the families he followed live in Atlanta, it’s a problem replicated in Jacksonville — and virtually every other American city. As the book notes, “Today there isn’t a single state, metropolitan area, or county in the United States where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.”

Guest:

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