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Ending Human Trafficking

338 – Survivor Alia Azariah – From Online Victim to Advocate for Youth and Aftercare

Feb 3, 2025 · 34 min · Episode 1 · 33.6 MB
0:00-34:38

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This episode is brought to you by Vanguard University and the Global Center for Women and Justice, who offer an incredible anti-human trafficking certificate. Whether you're a frontline responder, a social worker, in the ministry, a healthcare provider, or simply a community member who wants to help, this program is built for you. Head over to gcwj.org/ahtc to take the next step and apply today. 

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Alia Azariah joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss her journey from being an online victim of trafficking to becoming an advocate for youth and aftercare.

Alia Azariah

Alia Azariah is a passionate advocate and survivor dedicated to ending human trafficking and empowering those affected by this grave violation of human rights. Her focus lies in creating safe and sustainable communities through education and advocacy, service provision, and social justice. With a combination of professional knowledge, personal experience, and compassion, she works diligently at both local and national levels to create lasting change in the lives of trafficking survivors through specialized training and safe housing initiatives.

Key Points

  • Alia shares her personal experience of being groomed and trafficked through social media, emphasizing how vulnerabilities prior to being online contributed to her exploitation.
  • She describes how traffickers use psychological tactics, such as fulfilling unmet emotional needs, to build trust and manipulate victims.
  • The lack of awareness about the dangers of social media during the early days of platforms like MySpace contributed to the ease of exploitation.
  • Alia explains how Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs helps in understanding vulnerability beyond just economic hardship, showing how traffickers exploit various unmet needs.
  • Traffickers deliberately create or exploit a sense of dependence, offering victims what seems like support or love to gain control.
  • She discusses the importance of community and long-term support in a survivor’s healing journey, highlighting that recovery requires more than just therapy or shelter.
  • Alia emphasizes the need for survivor inclusion in leadership roles, pushing for organizations to provide survivors with professional development opportunities rather than limiting them to direct care roles.
  • She challenges organizations to evaluate their approach to survivor leadership, advocating for hiring based on character and potential rather than just experience.
  • The conversation highlights the gaps in services for minors exiting trafficking, emphasizing the critical need for effective emergency stabilization solutions in the first six months post-exploitation.
  • Alia advocates for policy changes at local, state, and national levels to improve services for trafficking survivors, particularly minors.
  • As a mother, she applies her knowledge by implementing strict social media guidelines for her children and having ongoing discussions about online safety.
  • She will be participating in the Insure Justice conference, where discussions on improving survivor resources and policy will continue.

Resources

Transcript

[00:00:00] Sandie: Welcome to the ending human trafficking podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. This is episode number 338 survivor alia Azariah, from online victim to serving youth and aftercare. My name is Dr. Sandy Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice and make a difference in ending human trafficking.

[00:00:35] Alia Azariah is a passionate advocate and survivor dedicated to ending human trafficking and empowering those affected by this grave violation of human rights.

[00:00:49] Her focus lies in creating safe and sustainable communities through education, advocacy, service provision, and social justice with a combination of professional knowledge, personal experience, and compassion. She works diligently at both local and national levels to create lasting change in the lives of trafficking survivors through specialized training and safe housing initiatives.

[00:01:22] Alia, it is such a delight to have you on the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. And as I was reading your bio, it sounded like you’ve been part of Global Center for Women and Justice for years. use a lot of the same language that we do in our work against human trafficking. So welcome to the show.

[00:01:47] Alia: Thank you.

[00:01:48] Sandie: So let’s start out withy experience go back a few years

[00:01:56] to when you were a young person and you were online on MySpace and tell us about that part of your story.

[00:02:09] Alia: Yeah, so I was vulnerable before I ever got on the computer, right? And so that’s important because I was already, like, experiencing a lot of bullying at school. I was already, lacking family support. I was involved in a group of students at school who were very young and yet making really scary choices already.

[00:02:31] And this was about 6th grade, and so I had a lot of vulnerabilities before I ever got to social media, and so when you mixed those things together, it was really a prime, situation for exploitation and for meeting people who were looking to fill a need, and I was going to social media Hoping to get a need met, right?

[00:02:52] So my, my goal for social media wasn’t to talk to the friends that I already had, wasn’t to communicate with family. My goal entering social media was to fulfill my needs of, one, having people who cared about me. I already had like mixed messages in my mind about how people were supposed to care about you.

[00:03:14] So that was really, really priming me for exploitation. So I was already, even outside of social media, looking for my needs to be met by adult men, believing that that was like how I could best get those needs met. And so social media seemed like a more streamlined version to a way of having those needs met.

[00:03:35] And then I was looking for people to, to, buy me new shoes and, and things that, most teens want, right, but are getting from their parents or the people that take care of them, usually. and so, this was also just a dangerous time, as it is even now, but in a different way with social media, in that at least now we know what the dangers are.

[00:03:55] And we have things to prevent some of those dangers. When MySpace launched, nobody knew what social media could present. Nobody knew or thought of what the dangers were because it was brand new. Right. And so these weren’t conversations we were having in schools or with parents or things like that.

[00:04:14] And so, nobody even really knew to know if I had a social, a social media page. nobody was wondering if I had a MySpace and, creating rules and boundaries around what that looked like. And so when I created a MySpace, I was going on there. To connect with people that I didn’t know, because I thought that that would, that would fill my needs.

[00:04:34] and in many ways, I think the hard thing is like it did. It fulfilled them in ways that were really unhealthy and really unsafe and led me to being trafficked. But that was the kind of the tool that my trafficker used was the fact that he was able to fulfill those needs for somebody who cared about me.

[00:04:50] He was able to say those things to me that he needed, to. And so I was already meeting up with people via MySpace when I met my trafficker. I was running away outside of social media. And I ...