The See It-End It! Film and Arts Festival brings together a lot of people fighting the good fight against the very worst: human trafficking. Filmmakers, poets, dancers, visual artists, even standup comics. The festival takes place Friday, March 29 and Saturday, March 30, in San Pedro at the Warner Grand Theatre and Grand Annex.
Patrick Erlandson, founder and director of the festival, thought an arts festival was a good way to address an ugly subject. It’s a subject that deals in the most ancient and base aspects of human behavior and yet, is not as simple to see or understand. Though popular culture would have people believe trafficking—for both sex and labor—takes place in a brutish, overpowering manner, the fact is, much of it occurs gradually, traffickers being expert at insinuating themselves into the lives of the vulnerable.
Erlandson knows all about this through his work with the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force. He also has personal experience.
“My youngest daughter was approached at Del Amo [shopping mall] by someone saying ‘You’d be a great model. Come down to our office.’ In Southern California, modeling and acting work as a lure to get kids to visit, to inch them into it. The traffickers know who they are looking for, if they tell a young girl, ‘Hey, you’re so beautiful’ and she is shy, shows signs of low self-esteem, that’s what they want. If the girl says, ‘I know I’m beautiful,’ and shows confidence, shows she’s a kid who has a sense of her own self-worth, they’ll avoid her and move on to another.”
We spoke to Erlandson about trafficking and the festival.
How did you come up with the idea for an arts festival to address human trafficking?
I’ve been working with Long Beach Human Trafficking Taskforce and I would keep going to films that dealt with human trafficking and I started to think about gathering together all of these films in one place where people could see them, and inspire them through films, music, poetry and dance. It’s important that this not be some dark, depressive event where people feel it’s hopeless. And it’s not. We can end this. There’s a place for conferences and symposiums, but first, you need to engage people’s hearts. That’s why we want to come at it from so many different aspects, different art forms.
To the point, one of the artists is a standup comedian.
Yes! We have Marti MacGibbon who was locked in a hotel room in Tokyo and trafficked and yet is able to tell her story with humor and humanity. That’s the point I think I’d ultimately want to make, that every single person we lose to trafficking is someone we lose who has something beautiful to contribute.
Now, when you talk about this subject and film, the first one that will come to most people’s minds is Taken. Yet, the premise of that film is not typical when it comes to human trafficking.
Not at all. There’s an example of a film that takes on the subject, but instead of moving people to do something positive, it’s more likely to want them to go get a gun, sit at home and wait to shoot the bad guys when they come. That movie is the reason why I wanted to follow each block of films with people, survivors, boots-on-the-ground people, who are working in this every day, to provide context and some clarity to the complexity of all of this. I think it’s important so that people know that things can be done, and they are being done every day.
Another misconception is that human trafficking has something to do with our southern border.
Yes, it gets confused with smuggling, that’s why you’ll hear people say we need to build a wall to stop human trafficking. A wall isn’t going to do anything about a 13-year-old girl who is pissed at her mother and so they become vulnerable to traffickers who know how to exploit them, forcing them into prostitution, pornography, slavery. There’s anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 trafficked for sex in the U.S. We’re producing vulnerability to this at an alarming rate.
Social media is making it even easier for traffickers to find their victims. We interviewed a former trafficker who told us, “Because of social media, we don’t have to do grooming anymore; the kids are so accessible.” And now we’re finding the same is true of online gaming, the kids don’t know who they are playing with and the traffickers are expert at building friendships over time that eventually they will exploit.
You work with Long Beach Human Trafficking Taskforce, where does this city figure in all of this?
Long Beach is rather unique in that it’s a port city and always has a lot of tourists. Any time you have a lot of men showing up, like say for the Grand Prix, you’re going to have traffickers. Things like that just create an environment for this to grow. And gangs are involved. I’ve heard of an 11-year-old autistic girl who was sold for sex by gang members. But Long Beach is very progressive when it comes to this, nobody is in denial. When an underage girl is arrested for prostitution, the police treat her as a victim. And the school district [in Long Beach] is willing to address the problem. We’ve come across some school districts that will not address trafficking because they don’t want to discuss sex in the classroom.
Patrick, I can’t help but notice, that as we’ve been talking about the absolute, absolute worst in human behavior, you’ve been remarkably upbeat, optimistic. How do …
[Laughs] I know, I know, I hear this from other people. How can you be so upbeat when working in such a horrible, miserable thing? Well, one, I think I would be hopeless if I wasn’t working in it and I just looked at it from the outside and saw it as hopeless. But, I know that we are making progress, that there is light at the end and we can see it. That’s one thing we want people to get from the festival.
And then there are the survivors, they are such amazing people. Of course, there are serious problems that come with this, the PTSD rates of victims [of human trafficking] are at rates higher than soldiers in Iraq. I’ve met a girl, 12 years old, who said she never buckles her seatbelt in a car or locks the door because she wants to be able to get out of that car as quickly as possible if necessary. Imagine being a 12-year-old who must live with that as your daily reality. And yet, they go on. It’s just astounding. Of course, there is drug addiction and other things that come from this, but it’s amazing how they confront the worst in humanity and somehow come out the other side. They really show how amazing human beings are, and that’s another thing we want to show at the festival.
The Warner Grand Theatre is located at 478 W 6th St., San Pedro. For more information or tickets to See It End it, click here.