André Gallant is standing on a street corner in Freetown, Sierra Leone, when inspiration strikes. Amidst motorcycles and cars noisily zooming by, he shoots a video of his coworker, from Sierra Leone, explaining how child trafficking occurs in the country, and how crucial it is to work together to put an end to it. Gallant returns to the United States, edits the video and shares it online. Before he knows it, his video is playing on national television three times a day for three months. 

Gallant is the director of communications for the Center on Human Trafficking Research & Outreach at the University of Georgia. At CENHTRO, researchers collect data and implement it into programs to stop human trafficking worldwide, with a concentration in Africa. 

Gallant’s expertise in communications allows him to directly make an impact on the lives of children who are either at risk of being trafficked or who have been trafficked in the past.  

“We created this poster and this poster was used to help train like a couple 100 people like family members who were like, who use it every day to, to like inform their community about human trafficking and protect so it's like, like some little PDF I made was printed out and taken to a very remote village in Sierra Leone and used to train dozens and dozens of people,” said Gallant.

He then went on to explain that the education brought about from a seemingly simple poster allowed members of the village to become more aware of trafficking in their community, thus likely preventing a great deal of trafficking cases. 

According to the U.S. Department of State, a study published by the International Labour Organization estimated that around 49.6 million people were in “modern slavery” in 2021. This statistic includes both forced labor and forced marriage.

Gallant explained that while this may be the case globally, trafficking looks very different in America, and many statistics misrepresent reality. 

“I think it’s like it’s less about facts, and more about the myth, okay,” said Gallant, “I think really, when you actually look at human trafficking outside of the sensationalism, outside of how it’s been politicized in this country, human trafficking actually indicts us as humans.”

He explains how everything we enjoy in our society, such as phones, chocolate and clothes, are probably all sourced from child labor trafficking. Yet, hardly anybody talks about it. 

Instead the focus is on sex trafficking, which Gallant says is entirely different than the way the media portrays it as kidnappings. He says that there is no data to back this up; rather, the sex trafficking problem in Georgia is most commonly the result of someone in a person’s close circle grooming them. Usually, groomers focus on vulnerable people, such as Black, Hispanic or LGBTQ youth. 

He explained that poverty is the root of the problem both in America and worldwide. 

“That's a deep rooted societal problem of exploitation and inequality, because it's happening to poor people, mostly people who are economically vulnerable. It's happening to people who society devalues, and then they first start to devalue themselves and make themselves even more vulnerable,” said Gallant. 

These underprivileged people are the ones Gallant and the rest of the CENHTRO team are trying to reach with their efforts. 

Umaru Fofanah, one of Gallant’s coworkers from Sierra Leone, discussed what an asset Gallant is to the team, saying “He's somebody that is very innovative, very creative and thinks outside the box, is somebody that is very much, he supports and gives his all.”

Gallant hopes to use his knowledge and experience to leave behind a legacy in which he can establish guidelines for those who follow in his high-stakes field of work.  

Topics: Human trafficking, Sierra Leone, Africa, Child labor, Center on Human Trafficking Research & Outreach