Queens Village Toledo’s Protecting Our Children: Awareness Session

By Fletcher Word
The Truth Editor

Queens Village Toledo held a session on Monday, December 8, to help attendees learn about the risks of human trafficking, sexual violence and unhealthy teen relationships.

Celia Williamson, PhD, and Fonda Royster, MA, conducted a workshop for about two dozen observers at the Mott Branch Library on the causes and pitfalls of unhealthy behavior and relationships, and the signs to look for.

Royster is head of operations at RESA Solutions, LLC, an agency focused on helping organizations build trauma-responsive systems to support vulnerable individuals and communities and she is also the founder of Open Arms Transformation Living (OATL), a nonprofit organization focused on addressing youth homelessness, teen dating violence and human trafficking.

Williamson, a distinguished professor of Social Work at the University of Toledo, is the executive director of the Human Trafficking and Social Justice Institute School of Social Justice.

Royster focused her presentation on the types of dangers that young people face, particularly teens, from a combination of physical, emotional/mental, sexual, financial and digital abuse.

“Kids do what they see, not what you tell them to do,” she said of the way young, unformed minds can operate. Those various abuses that teens face lead, according to available statistics, to violence that can and should be prevented. Seventy percent of youth homicides “have to do with relationships,” she noted.

Interestingly, the most vulnerable parts of the population, contrary to the emphasis that one so often finds in the media, are Black female youth. The reasons, said Royster, range from poverty, a lack of two-parent households, a tendency to grow up too early.

“Black Girls need to be kids – let them be kids,” she implored her audience. Race and poverty are certainly factors in the susceptibility to fall prey to violence, but so are other factors such as LGBTQ status and disabilities.

Royster presented eight warning signs to determine if young people are having issues with one type of violence or another: a need to check in constantly, sudden isolation, anxiety when phone notifications pop up, mood swings, deleting messages quickly, fear of upsetting partner, loss of confidence and personality changes.

Royster’s emphasis on Black girls’ issue with violence is well founded. Locally 36 percent of youth have reported being survivors of dating violence and 50 percent of those reported survivors are Black; 86 percent come from low-income families.

As parents or guardians, Royster urged adults to “be a safe, non-judgmental person,” in order to preserve a youngster’s feeling of self worth.

“Our biggest issue with our girls is a lack of self-esteem,” she added.

Williamson focused on the issue of human trafficking, an issue she has been working on for 32 years. She founded the first anti-trafficking program in Ohio in 1993.

“Trafficking does not require movement,” she said at the onset of her presentation, dispelling the idea that the only victims of trafficking are those who are abducted. “You can be in your home and be trafficked.” She explained that fear, dependency, shame, distrust of authority and trauma bonding (with a trafficker) are all ways in which people may be victims of trafficking.

“When you believe that someone is responsible for your very breathing, then you are unable to leave.”

While there is the snatcher – the “gorilla pimp” – she said, there is also the “finesse pimp” who manipulates.

Trafficking also includes more than just the sexual variety, it also includes labor trafficking – getting someone into a job, for example, from which he or she will never be able to earn freedom.

Who is at high risk? Williamson asked of her audience. The typical response, she noted, is that anyone can be trafficked. But reality is different. Those at high risk are youngsters who are not doing we, are runaways, are in child protection or juvenile court or in relationships with older adults.

Of the 94 percent of trafficked victims who are female, 40 percent are Black, she said.

The media “often portrays the ideal victim as a young white female,” said Williamson. But the reality is much different. Exacerbating society’s attempts to deal with trafficking is the common attitude about runaways. “The common approach is that we wait for kids who run away to run back,” she said.

Typically a community has no well thought out plan to deal with the issue of runaways. In Lucas County, for example, there are about 1,000 runaways every year. The Toledo Police Department has assigned one officer to deal with the issue.

The problem of human trafficking is also one that the African American community and individuals need to deal with internally. Who are the society’s heroes, for example, said Williamson as she showed slides of various male film stars of the 1970s in their “blaxploitation” roles.

But in addition, “we adultify … we treat kids as if they are fully-formed adults.” This attitude can lead to suggesting that the child is the problem. Boys are praised for being premature (“he’s a little man”) in a way that foster a certain toxic masculinity

Queens Village Toledo is an initiative of the Northwest Ohio Pathways HUB and an organization of Black women who have come together to help each other and to help the community at large in enhancing health outcomes and enabling connections to health and social services for area families.

The key priorities of Queens Village Toledo are: to reduce Black women’s stress; to change the narrative about Black women by creating spaces that celebrate their voices; to invest in Black women’s leadership; to promote economic and professional pathways for Black women to succeed and to engage with social, political and medical organizations to support equity and reduce implicit biases that affect Black women.

To learn more about Queens Village go to Facebook; Instagram (Instagram.comqueensvillagetoledo); website (blackwomenforthewin.com)

 

Queens Village Toledo is a program of the Northwest Ohio Pathways HUB whose mission it is to support enhancing health outcomes, promoting healthy births, and enabling connections to health and social services for Northwest Ohio residents impacted by social risk factors through collaboration with local partners and community health workers.

Here in Toledo, Queens Village (QV) is a supportive community of powerful Black women who come together to rest, relax, re-power, and take care of ourselves and each other. In addition to providing a safe space for Black women to relieve stress and build authentic community, we also strive to improve access to QV and other health and social services by reducing the barriers Black women face when receiving care.

Contact us
Crystal Martin – cmartin@hcno.org
Amber Currie, Pathways HUB Coordinator – acurrie@hcno.org
Follow us
Facebook: @qvtoledo
Instagram: @queensvillagetoledo/