Human trafficking is modern day slavery and happening around the world with alarming frequency. Join RECOIL OFFGRID Editor Tom Marshall as he interviews a panel of experts on the front lines battling this epidemic to learn more about what it is, how it’s happening, and what you can do to protect yourself.
Yousef Badou – owner/lead instructor of Emergence Disrupt
Bazzel Baz – founder of Association for the Recovery of Children
Theresa Flores – trafficking survivor and founder of The SOAP Project
Bruce Ladebu – founder of Children’s Rescue Initiative
Our Panel: Bazzel Baz is a graduate of The Citadel, former Captain USMC, former CIA SAD/SOG Paramilitary Case Officer and founder of one of the longest running child rescue NGOs in the U.S. established in 1993, known as The Association For The Recovery of Children aka ARC. ARC is a non-profit consisting of former military, intelligence and law enforcement personnel dedicated to the safe recovery of missing, exploited, and trafficked American children. Thus far they have a 100% rescue rate in that every child they have gone after, has come home.
Bruce Ladebu spent 20 years as a professional adventurer, explorer, and guide traveling to some of the wildest places on Earth. Since then, Bruce has started a number of organizations and has advised leaders in many nations. In the early ’90s Bruce traveled through ex-Soviet Union countries and saw the terrible conditions children were forced to live in, including the marketing of young girls and boys forced into sex trafficking. Then in 2009, after witnessing labor slavery firsthand, Bruce worked to develop a strategy to rescue these individuals, and Children’s Rescue Initiative was formed. As of September 2020, Bruce and his teams have rescued over 2,300 children and adults from slavery and given them a start in a new life.
Theresa Flores’ incredible true story is of an all-American teenager who survived two years of being a sex slave while living at home in an upper middle-class Michigan suburb. Since her escape, she has helped rescue numerous missing children with her nonprofit The SOAP Project — Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution. SOAP’s Mission is to educate and bring awareness to human trafficking in the U.S., mobilize volunteers to rescue missing children being trafficked, and to help restore survivors of trafficking.
Yousef Badou is a former Marine Infantryman with multiple combat tours, and an industry leading expert in the areas of Situational Awareness and Behavioral Analysis. Founder of Emergence, Badou’s organization is the premier provider of subject matter expertise and consulting to increase organization’s situational awareness and pre-event threat detection.
Read our full features on human trafficking in Issue 39 of RECOIL OFFGRID.
