The window of opportunity child traffickers exploit

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Brittany Dunn is co-founder of Safe House Project, a national nonprofit building the technology infrastructure to eradicate child trafficking in the United States. She led the development of Simply Report, an artificial intelligence-powered trafficking identification platform now deployed in partnership with state attorneys general offices across the country, and held a gubernatorial commission appointment in Virginia. A Wellesley and Thunderbird graduate with a decade in international mergers and acquisitions, she is also the author of four books on collective impact and anti-trafficking systems. She is a Navy spouse and mother of two. Learn more at safehouseproject.org and simplyreport.com.

My husband got his orders the same week my daughter completed the school year at her third school in four years.

I remember standing in the kitchen doing the math, the new base, the new neighborhood, the new start for both kids, and thinking what I always think during a PCS: how long before it feels like home? How long before they have friends? How long before the invisible roots that protect children, the ones that come from knowing your people and being known, grow back deep enough to hold?

I have thought about that question a lot differently since I started spending my days reading survivor case files.

I have spent almost a decade building anti-trafficking systems in this country. I have read thousands of files. I have sat across from parents who did everything right and still watched a predator find their child in the gap, the one that opens up every time a family moves, every time a parent is stretched thin, every time a child is lonely in a new place and hungry for belonging. And what I understand now that I did not understand then is that traffickers do not stumble across vulnerable kids. They look for them. Methodically. And the profile they are looking for looks a lot like a military child navigating another transition.

That is not a coincidence. It is a targeting strategy.

They look for children who have just lost their social footing. Kids who are new to a school, newly friendless, trying to find their people in a community they did not choose. They look for teenagers who are lonely enough to accept attention from someone they would otherwise find suspicious. They look for the window between where the protective relationships used to be and where they have not yet been rebuilt.

Military families PCS an average of every two to three years. That is two to three years for children to build the friendships and the trust networks that protect them, and then the orders come, and the roots come up with the boxes. Traffickers do not wait for kids to replant.

I am not telling you this to frighten you. Preparedness beats fear every time. What I am telling you is what I have learned building the systems designed to close that window.

In July, I briefed at the Department of Defense on this specific threat. Not a foreign threat in some distant theater. The threat near our installations, in our children’s schools, and inside the transition periods that define military life. The room already understood the data. What the room wanted to understand was what to do with the people already positioned to make a difference.

The military community is not a bystander population. It is the most structurally proximate protective force in the country. Service members and their families are already embedded in the neighborhoods, schools and installation communities where this threat operates. The question is not whether they have something to offer. The question is whether they have been given a specific capability to do it.

Here is what actually helps.

Know the signs. The behavioral indicators of trafficking are not obscure. A child who avoids eye contact with adults, who cannot speak freely in front of the person who brought them, who has no ID, who uses scripted or rehearsed language to describe where they live or who they belong to. These are observable patterns. You do not need a badge to recognize them, and you do not need certainty to act on them.

Stay connected to your kids, especially during transitions. Especially during deployments. The child who knows they can come to you with something confusing, not just something clearly wrong, is the child a trafficker cannot isolate. Most kids who are being groomed do not come forward because they are not sure what happened to them was wrong. They stay quiet because they are afraid of getting someone in trouble, or getting themselves in trouble, for something they do not fully understand. If your child only hears you react with alarm, they learn to filter what they tell you. If they know you can hear something uncomfortable without falling apart, they will tell you more.

Report what you see. Safe House Project built Simply Report, a free platform accessible by phone, app or web, for exactly this reason. You do not need proof to use it. You need a signal. Something that feels off. A relationship that seems more exclusive than it should be, an adult who wants to spend time alone with your child more than seems normal, a friendship with someone your teenager met online who always seems available at midnight. You do not gather evidence. You report a concern, and our system routes that intelligence to law enforcement and survivor support built to respond.

Military families hold entire communities together during the hardest seasons of service. We always have. The only thing that has changed is that the infrastructure now exists to make that protection systematic.

The window traffickers wait for opens every time we move. We are the ones who can close it.