'Human Trafficking Happens Here': Junior League Launches Billboard Campaign

Emily Todebush doesn’t understand how so many people look the other way when confronted with Michigan’s notorious standing as one of the five worst states in the country for human trafficking.

A state Junior League leader, she hopes motorists won’t do the same thing when they see the Junior League of Birmingham’s billboard message at Eight Mile and Mound, chosen because it’s one of the busiest intersections in the metro for the call to action: “Human trafficking happens here. Let’s stop it.”

“I don’t understand how that’s not the top story every night in the news,” Todebush of Birmingham, the state public affairs chairwoman for the Michigan Council of Junior Leagues, told The Observer & Eccentric.

“I hate to scare parents but it’s important to know what your kids are doing online, what they’re doing in sleepovers, what they’re doing at night,” she said. “This is something that crosses economic barriers. It happens everywhere.”

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Junior League chapters across the state have made raising awareness of human trafficking a key focus in their community service projects for about six years. Julie Gheen, president of the Birmingham chapter, said the organization has been fighting on the front lines against human trafficking.”

“This crime is abhorrent to all people,” Ghenn said, “but especially (to) our female membership.”

Past efforts have included League sponsored town hall meetings to increase support for anti-human trafficking legislation. Estimates vary on how many people are caught in the web of human trafficking.

Some estimates put the figure at 1.5 million missing and exploited children in the United States alone. The Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking estimates that 2.5 million people are forced into labor and sexual exploitation as a result of trafficking around the world with 10.8 percent of incidents occurring in industrialized countries.

Junior League members hope the people most affected by human trafficking will see the six-week billboard advertising campaign.

“We’re looking to reach people who may have found themselves in a victim situation where they are being trafficked and don’t know how to get help, folks who have noticed something off either in their neighborhood or with someone they know, and reach men who are either current or potential customers and remind them that these are victims – and they are someone’s daughter or son,” Todebush told the newspaper.