For the past two years, the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) has conducted an awareness and advocacy campaign to combat human trafficking, an initiative whose focus and scale are unprecedented in the organization’s history. In 2021 alone, the NBWA—a trade group representing beer distributors in the U.S.—says it trained more than 26,000 distributor employees to identify potential signs of human trafficking and anonymously report those cases to law enforcement. That’s more than double its original goal of training 10,000 employees. The effort will be in the spotlight this month as the NBWA makes a public relations push to recognize January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.
Human trafficking is not a cause directly related to the beer industry. Erin Donar, vice president of communications for the NBWA, says the group has not, to her knowledge, ever engaged in a “community initiative” of this sort, calling the Distributors Against Human Trafficking campaign a “first of its kind” for the organization. Because beer distributor employees are regularly driving on interstate roads and visiting gas stations, restaurants, and bars, Donar says they’re well positioned to spot human trafficking in places where it may most likely occur.
“Our employees have this unique access … it was a bit of a natural fit for our industry to take on this kind of initiative,” Donar says.
While righteous in its intentions, Distributors Against Human Trafficking can’t currently say whether its efforts have aided in cases of human trafficking, or how often distributor employees are putting their training into practice. The exact origins of the effort are also unclear while it is also hampered by a lack of clarity around the phrase “human trafficking,” leaving the concept open to sensationalization and confusion.
Human trafficking has grown as a national concern in recent years, one that’s been politicized through its ties to conspiracy theories including QAnon and the 2016 “Pizzagate” allegations, in which an armed man stormed a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., believing it was at the center of a child sex ring run by prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. As early as 2015, Slate identified sex trafficking as an especially salient concern on the political right, dubbing it “a Christian cause célèbre.” (The NBWA said it had no comment on the cause’s ties to QAnon and other conspiracy theories.)
But as the topic of human trafficking has gained attention, it’s also come under scrutiny from scholars and experts who warn that its sexualized presentation in popular culture overstates the actual prevalence of human trafficking, distracts from the pervasiveness of forced labor in agriculture and domestic services in the U.S., and causes harm to consenting adult sex workers. A December 2021 article in The Atlantic labeled the outsize attention to child sex trafficking “a moral panic.” The same month, a piece in The Washington Post detailed how a sex trafficking conspiracy centered around online home goods store Wayfair damaged the life of a 13-year-old girl who QAnon believers attempted to rescue from non-existing trafficking.
Despite these critiques, and given how large an effort Distributors Against Human Trafficking is for the NBWA, the group didn’t provide details about core elements of the program. These include:
Who in the organization chose this as a priority
How the program will measure the efficacy of training
Whether the human trafficking statistics it shares from its program partners are valid.
Rather, the organization sees the total number of trainings for distributor employees as the mark of success for this program. In that regard it’s been a huge achievement. Since launching in early 2020, Distributors Against Human Trafficking has:
Trained employees from 219 wholesalers
Spurred similar state-level efforts from distributors in Montana, Kentucky, and Texas
Placed anti-trafficking placards on beer delivery trucks around the country
Generated more than 30 print and broadcast news stories as well as repeated, regular mentions in the NBWA’s daily newsletter.
Donar says the organization has received a “tremendous response” from members, which has prompted an expansion in 2022 with additional training videos and assets (like posters and signs) for distributors.
“For us, if we can continue to see growth in interest from our membership and we continue to provide more offerings and resources for them, then we think that we’re seeing growth and success and that we’re doing good work in this space,” Donar says.
The anti-trafficking campaign is generating awareness within the middle tier of the industry, though it’s not clear how much conversation is happening outside of the distributors themselves.
“I don’t think suppliers really know what the campaign is, but I think distributor personnel does,” says Julie Rhodes, a Colorado-based strategic beverage business consultant and owner of Not Your Hobby Marketing Solutions. “Especially the fleet guys, the drivers, they’re aware, but I don’t think suppliers are really paying attention to that. … I just think maybe there could be some more marketing and whatnot around it because I think it’s a great campaign. It would be nice to hear more details about it.”
Concrete numbers about the prevalence of human trafficking globally and in the U.S. are notoriously difficult to pin down, and estimates range by orders of magnitude. Many of the more sensational claims have been discredited by experts, including a widespread figure often cited on social media that 800,000 child runaways are vulnerable to sex trafficking.
However, human trafficking does occur, and it happens in the U.S.: In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security reported it identified and assisted 2,670 human trafficking victims and 5,105 child sexual exploitation victims between 2015-2020. But many anti-trafficking organizations say those numbers vastly underestimate the problem.
If the exact scale of human trafficking is nebulous, so are efforts to measure the success of anti-trafficking campaigns, including the NBWA’s. By definition, it’s nearly impossible to fix a problem that can’t be accurately measured. The NBWA says it hasn’t asked its members whether they’ve intervened in cases of suspected human trafficking in order to preserve the anonymity of any reports. It hopes to do this in the future, though: Donar says it’s a goal for the group “to work with partners on national data to help demonstrate the reach of the initiative and continue to encourage participation.”
The NBWA relies on statistics from Polaris Project, a nonprofit that operates the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Media accounts have criticized Polaris Project’s data as inaccurate because it’s drawn from anonymous calls to its national hotline. Truthout, a nonprofit investigative news site, issued a special report on anti-trafficking organizations in 2015 and concluded there’s “no telling how accurate” data is from Polaris Project. Polaris Project itself shares in a footnote to its most recent report from 2019 that “this data must not be confused with the prevalence of human trafficking in the United States,” intimating that actual statistics may be higher. Yet these contested numbers are what’s cited in the NBWA’s materials.
Whether the numbers Polaris Project cites are overblown, as critics say, or underreported, as the group claims, they do not reflect the pervasiveness of human trafficking in the U.S. It’s impossible to say whether Polaris’ efforts—and those of the NBWA or other groups—will actually reduce national rates of human trafficking.
Instead, anecdotes and individual examples are used as proof that these campaigns work: In a March 2021 NBWA webinar, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt cites “sting operations” on public transit and at massage parlors as proof these campaigns are effective. He and other law enforcement personnel speaking on the webinar don’t cite distributors as directly involved in aiding those stings, but praise them as “eyes and ears” who could potentially spot human trafficking. Past investigations of massage parlors in Missouri, including one that then-attorney general Josh Hawley called the largest anti-trafficking raid in the state’s history, have not resulted in sex trafficking charges. Schmitt has filed four civil suits against massage parlors.
Anecdotes about alleged illegal sex work are powerful motivators. Mike Markovich, vice president of community relations for Summit Beverage and board member of the Montana Beer and Wine Distributors Association (MBWDA), says he was skeptical that human trafficking was as pervasive as it was, or that it happened in rural states like Montana. That changed through his contact with Montana-based anti-trafficking nonprofit The LifeGuard Group, where he met two women who had been trafficked from downtown Missoula. (Videos featuring these women sharing their experience are viewable online.)
“What I like to refer to is ‘the moment.’ Until you have ‘the moment’ you will not think it’s real,” Markovich says. “My moment was when I met the two young ladies … just to stare into the eyes of these poor, broken souls, it’s just devastating. For me, that was my moment and I said, ‘No longer am I going to pull the wool over my eyes.’”
After initially learning about human trafficking through the NBWA, Markovich helped the MBWDA form its own state-level anti-trafficking project, called Sentinel Project. This effort is operated in conjunction with The LifeGuard Group and trains distributors to spot potential human trafficking and report it to a state hotline operated by that nonprofit. Markovich says he can’t provide a number as to how many cases or people the effort has helped so far.
“I don’t have a concrete number because there’s so many variables and factors. … Maybe one guy called it in and the cops caught up with a perpetrator down the road. The police keep that stuff secret,” Markovich says. “I do know that a lot of distributor employees have called in across the state.”
Working to help potential victims of trafficking has noble intentions, but it’s a challenge without a currently accepted, measurable goal, particularly on a national level. Thousands of distributor employees across the country have dedicated time to this campaign, but a lack of clear data and unified definitions of human trafficking hinder attempts to assess the campaign’s efficacy.
Most experts agree that hard numbers on human trafficking are almost impossile to verify. Sociologist and George Washington University professor Ronald Weitzer wrote in the May 2014 edition of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: “None of the trafficking claims—huge magnitude, growing problem, ranking among criminal enterprises, most prevalent type—have been substantiated. It is impossible to satisfactorily count (or even estimate) the number of persons involved in or the magnitude of profits within an illicit, clandestine, underground economy at the macro level—nationally or internationally.”
There are several challenges to gathering reliable statistics on human trafficking. The most significant of those is the definition of human trafficking itself. Different organizations use different definitions of human trafficking that encompass varied acts, such as:
Child sexual abuse
Forced migration (When people are forced to migrate by coercive circumstances, whether human-caused or a natural disaster.)
Exploitative domestic labor (Such as housekeepers or nannies who are forced to work long hours for less than minimum wage.)
Bonded labor (People who work for low or no wages to repay debts or advances, for example, to repay a contractor who loaned them money to travel to another country for work.)
The NBWA uses the Department of Homeland Security’s definition: “Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act.” This definition doesn’t require transport or transit to constitute trafficking.
It’s a broad definition that could conceivably include everything from wage theft to child prostitution to illegally employed babysitters. Yet the NBWA’s partner on its campaign, an Atlanta faith-based organization called Street Grace, has a mission that is centered around only combatting the “commercial sexual exploitation of children.” It does this through numerous initiatives including outreach to churches and religious groups, law enforcement training, youth programming, and street-level outreach.
As seen in the NBWA’s training video, this creates a situation where statistics about global human trafficking are linked primarily with the notion of child sexual abuse. Such statistics immediately follow information about child sexual abuse in the U.S., without any clarification as to how the two are distinct.
But the two are different. Professor Janie A. Chuang notes in a 2017 piece for the American Journal of International Law that category conflations and broad definitions create difficulties for people who want to engage in anti-trafficking efforts: “But what exactly is everyone trying to fight? Notwithstanding the global consensus that trafficking is something to be rid of, the anti-trafficking field is a strikingly ‘rigor-free zone’ when it comes to defining the concept’s legal parameters. … The definitional muddle has resulted in the indiscriminate conflation of legal concepts, heated battles over how best to address the problem, and an expanding crowd of actors fervently seeking to abolish any conduct deemed ‘trafficking.’”
Not only does a slippery definition of human trafficking make statistics difficult to discern, it can also hamper efforts to combat actual human trafficking. If everything from an underpaid immigrant landscaping employee to a child forced to be photographed for pornographic purposes constitutes “human trafficking,” then what, precisely, are distributors to be on the lookout for in their day-to-day jobs?
Ben E. Keith Company, a Fort Worth, Texas-based wholesaler, says its employees have not encountered any cases of human trafficking since they began particiapting in anti-trafficking training more than three years ago.
“Fortunately, our employees have not come across any potential cases to date, but they continue to stay vigilant,” Alex Weaver, Ben E. Keith’s director of legislative affairs, said in an email.
The NBWA acknowledges that it can’t point to statistics about how many human trafficking cases its efforts have uncovered. The training module teaches distributor employees to alert law enforcement or the National Human Trafficking Hotline about what they interpret to be suspected abuse. Because those calls are anonymous, they can’t be quantified. The NBWA also says it has not asked distributor members or their employees how they are using this training in order to maintain the anonymous nature of the reporting.
“One question that we get asked is: ‘What’s the impact? How many cases has this stopped?’ The thing is that the hotline and the reporting is anonymous and that’s important, though, because especially in our industry, there is concern that some of the places where there may be suspicious behavior are accounts or clients,” Donar says. “So there aren’t examples of saying: So-and-so made a report and an arrest was made. We can’t point to it, because it’s anonymous.”
Some state-level efforts are tracking data, though the NBWA doesn’t aggregate these into national statistics. For example, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) says that since it began educating businesses to spot and report suspected human trafficking in 2018, it has received a +275% increase in reports provided directly to the Commission. (The TABC itself collects reports of human trafficking through its online Alcohol Industry Management System portal.)
According to a January 2022 announcement from the Wholesaler Beer Distributors of Texas, “at least 287 victims” were identified and rescued, and more than a dozen TABC permits have been cancelled related to human trafficking. The TABC has not provided requested clarification about its efforts, including:
Why the agency receives reports of suspected human trafficking
Whether those complaints are also directed to law enforcement
Whether it could provide more details about the more than a dozen permits it has revoked
Ben E. Keith began its anti-trafficking training in 2018 in conjunction with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. Since then, it has trained nearly all of its employees on anti-trafficking efforts, and is working with the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas to expand training in-state. A spokesperson for the company says it has not polled its employees about their feelings about the training.
“This is something that everyone feels is close to their hearts in a way,” Weaver says. “Since it’s such an important position … I wasn’t aware that it is such an issue in the backs of these stores and that some of these guys are going to see it firsthand. I never really thought about that. So when that was brought to our attention, we wanted to make sure our sales guys knew that as well and were cognizant if something weird was going on, that they knew how to kind of figure that out.”
Human trafficking is a complex, contested, and multifaceted topic. To become more familiar with it, beer distribution employees are presented with what the NBWA calls a “brief, easy” seven-minute video filmed in conjunction with Street Grace. (Some state-level initiatives have their own training modules: Montana’s Sentinel Project’s coursework includes a series of nine videos, including a 90-second video focused on trafficking within Montana’s Native American population, as well as a three-hour anti-trafficking course that is free to all MBWDA members.) The brevity of the NBWA’s video is intended to make this training a simple time commitment for distributors’ staff. However, experts are clear that the topic requires a global and intersectional approach.
“Human trafficking is an enormously complicated problem for which there is no easy fix,” Chuang writes in a 2010 article for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. “Knowing how even to approach the task of finding better practices requires understanding the trafficking phenomenon in all its complexity and situating it in the broader context of labor migration in our globalized economy.”
The NBWA’s video focuses on teaching employees to identify potential warning signs, which are further reiterated on posters and cards employees can carry in wallets. Once employees have watched this seven-minute training, their employer can submit a form to the NBWA saying their employees have completed the training. The wholesaler then receives marketing materials that designate them “Distributors Against Human Trafficking Certified.”
The training video begins with statistics on human trafficking, and then introduces warning signs that distributor employees should be vigilant of as they go about their work. Some of these include identifying whether a person:
Is under 18 and engaging in commercial sex work
Displays fearful, anxious, or submissive behavior
Shows signs of poor hygiene, malnourishment, or fatigue
Shows signs of physical or sexual abuse
Lacks freedom of movement or is heavily monitored
Lacks control over money, identification, or phone
Is dressed inappropriately for the climate or their age
Areas that look suspiciously off-limits or have locks
Most of these are nebulous and undefined. Appropriate clothing is subjective, as is what fatigue or submissive behavior looks like. What “signs of physical or sexual abuse” are is not explained.
In training materials, distributor employees are discouraged from intervening in suspected trafficking situations. Instead, employees are directed to get to a safe location and either call 911 or the National Human Trafficking Hotline. (Several state attorneys general are also part of the NBWA’s coalition, though no one except distributor employees sits on the Distributors Against Human Trafficking advisory committee.)
Contact with law enforcement has myriad potential outcomes for suspected trafficking victims. It could alert law enforcement to an instance of human trafficking. It could also involve law enforcement in a non-trafficking-related situation where there is, in fact, no victim or no person seeking law enforcement help. Given the pervasive stereotype that trafficking victims are foreign-born, this could have negative consequences for people who are not in the country legally, especially because the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a lead agency in U.S. anti-trafficking prosecutions.
If ICE identifies non-citizens who are potential victims of trafficking, those victims may apply for a T Visa, which if approved, provides them four years of residency in the U.S. among other benefits. However, that T visa is conditional upon the person’s status as a victim of trafficking and those victims are “encouraged” to aid law enforcement in any alleged trafficking or other illegal activity. This creates another complicated layer—victims may be hesitant to help if alleged traffickers are family members or friends, if they fear retribution for testifying against traffickers, or if the potential victims suspect they themselves played a role in the illegal activity.
The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, has recommended a shift away from a law enforcement-centered response to suspected human trafficking, and toward a more systemic human-rights framework. (Different countries take different approaches to suspected human trafficking; the U.S. and many others rely heavily on law enforcement.) Giammarinaro’s 2020 report states: “It is first essential to disconnect trafficking from the law enforcement paradigm and to think strategically about how a comprehensive protection framework could be applied to a wider group of persons in a situation of vulnerability to trafficking and exploitation.”
Law enforcement involvement also potentially harms adults who choose to participate in sex work—a criticism that’s been repeatedly leveled against anti-trafficking campaigns. The conflation of adult sex work and human trafficking is present in materials published by Street Grace, the NBWA’s partnership organization, though the NBWA does not directly link to these materials on its website. The caption of a YouTube video called “Your Brain on Porn,” created by Street Grace, states: “Pornography has direct links to sex trafficking and can lead to someone becoming part of the demand for the sexual exploitation of children.” A poster from Street Grace also mentions the size of the “commercial sex economy,” ranging from $39.9-$290 million annually, and links it to child sexual abuse.
Street Grace calls itself a “faith-based organization,” which could explain the moral tone of some of its training materials. One flier cites data from Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling firm, to state that practicing Christian men are less likely to view porn than non-Christian men, and then links pornography viewing to the sexual exploitation of children. (Determining whether Christian and non-Christian men view pornography at similar rates has proven a difficult research question, in part because of a spectrum of religiosity within the definition of “Christian.” An analysis of data from the General Social Survey by demographer Lyman Stone concludes that “people who attend religious services more frequently are far less likely to view pornography” but “Nominally-Protestant men are nearly five times more likely to view pornographic films as men who frequently attend religious services.”)
Donar said she wasn’t aware of the religious aspect of Street Grace’s work and that Christian values have “never really come up as an issue as part of our working relationship.” She says the NBWA chose Street Grace as a partner for this initiative because it is “a well-respected nonprofit in [the human trafficking] space.”
Street Grace’s executive director, Camila Zolfaghari, was formerly the chief human trafficking prosecutor for the Georgia Attorney General’s office and previously served as the executive director of pro-life group Georgia Life Alliance. Street Grace has also partnered with the Georgia Attorney General’s Office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on the issue of human trafficking.
The NBWA remains committed to its anti-trafficking campaign. Donar says the group plans to continue training additional distribution employees this year, and hopes to launch at least one additional training video that covers the topic in more depth.
“Our distribution employees want to do the right thing. And I think part of the success is that we’ve made it very easy to learn what to do,” Donar says. “As far as the commitment from NBWA, this is definitely something we’re extremely proud of and want to continue to grow and expand so that we can continue to do good work in communities.”
But the questions of why precisely the NBWA launched this program and who was behind the idea remain unanswered. Donar says only that “the communications team runs the program and it was conceived in partnership with NBWA leadership.” She couldn’t name who initially brought this idea to the group’s attention or why it became a priority of this scale quickly. Markovich says he recalls former NBWA board members, either from Texas or California, initially raising the topic to the rest of the board in 2019.
However it began, distributors are running with the example set by the NBWA. Wholesalers in Kentucky joined a statewide campaign called Your Eyes Save Lives to combat human trafficking. The Georgia Beer Wholesalers Association is a part of Georgia First Lady Marty Kemp’s Human Trafficking Awareness Training Program. Across the nation, beer wholesalers are becoming synonymous with anti-trafficking efforts.
For the NBWA, that’s a huge win, both in terms of reaching the initiative’s goal, and in creating political goodwill with attorneys general and elected officials.
“It’s great because it brings attention to this issue and shows the good work our industry is doing,” Donar says.
Words by Kate Bernot