When his sister survived sexual assault, John Nehme wanted to support her, which put him on a path to eventually lead Allies Against Slavery, a nonprofit that advocates against human trafficking.
“Walking through what our family walked through, learning what it meant to be an ally to my sister and brother and for her experience really shaped my sense of purpose and calling, if you will, to stand up against that sort of injustice and stand up for others,” said Nehme, president and CEO of Allies Against Slavery.
Founded 10 years ago by a group of 25 volunteers in a public library, Allies Against Slavery is a grassroots community-lead effort against sex trafficking. Initially, Nehme showed up as a volunteer but as the group eventually organized into a 501(3)(c) non-profit, he became the first paid staff person in the role of executive.
“We really like to say that our origins are in the community and we were co-founded by a group of ordinary abolitionists here in Austin,” he said.
Human trafficking is a $150 billion industry and enslaves 25 million people worldwide, according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and in 2018, 23,078 domestic victims were identified. Texas has the second-highest rate of human trafficking in the United States with the number of identified cases rising annually.
“We're talking about especially vulnerable young people who don't have a lot of social supports and are falling through the cracks in our system that could be in and out of our neighborhoods,” Nehme told the Lone Star Standard. “These are people that live across town or live down the street or come into our homeless youth shelters. I think we need to reframe that it is something that happens here and it is something that happens closer than we would think.”
Thursday, the organization unveiled a statewide data platform that has been under development for more than a year with the assistance of the child sex trafficking team of the Office of Gov. Greg Abbott.
“Because of our history working with survivors and working in the field, we don't come in at the data piece just because we're excited about the charts and graphs," Nehme said in an interview. “In our mind, better data collection saves lives. We think that if we have the right information then we can better serve survivors. It comes back to the impact we can make in real people's lives every day, even though we're a step removed.”
Nehme is most proud of using the data to discover a pipeline of how many individuals across Texas are being screened as vulnerable or at risk of exploitation and how many are receiving services.
“We get to look at what were the indicators that they scored on that were most vulnerable,” he said. “What are some of the vulnerabilities that correlate that experience of sex trafficking or makes them more vulnerable to sex trafficking and how do those vulnerabilities change based on the region. It's not going to be a one-size-fits-all report but really it is more about getting people into the data themselves.”
