SWLA law enforcement receives Protecting Louisiana’s Families training on fighting domestic violence, sexual assault, trafficking

Lake Charles, LA (KPLC) - It’s not just about catching criminals for local law enforcement, it’s also about helping the victims. The Louisiana Department of Justice is teaching law enforcement to better help the victims of sexual assault, domestic violence and human trafficking.

“This kid was a victim of human trafficking. Back then, we didn’t recognize it for that, now we do,” said David Duplechain, Vice President at Family & Youth Counseling Agency.

“We are doing nine trainings in eight locations throughout the state of Louisiana,” said Monica Taylor, Special Projects Coordinator Office of the Attorney General. “We find it super important to bring the trainings directly to law enforcement.”

Attorney General Jeff Landry wanted to make sure law enforcement had the correct training, and the right tools to deal with these specific cases.

“We have asked law enforcement to do these jobs and we haven’t always spent the time to really train them and work with them, and so he wanted to make sure that we did that, especially when we’re talking about domestic violence,” said Taylor.

The trainings are funded by a grant from the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, and new trainings are rolled out every year.

“Every year we create a training with with different topics all within domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, and we travel the state and bring it to law enforcement,” said Taylor.

When it comes to human trafficking, runaways are often targets.

“We always look at runaways as runaways; that’s one of the major indicators for trafficking,” said Duplechain. “Kids that are running away or not going to school; the question becomes, what are you running from or what are you running to?”

Knowing what someone is running from can help law enforcement prevent others from falling victim to trafficking.

“If the only person in the world that tells you you’re good at something is the person that’s buying sex from you, you’re going to keep going back,” said Duplechain. “Think about that for a minute - a lot of these kids and kids become adults, are running from bad situations at home.”

Several positive changes have come in terms of law enforcement understanding these complicated cases.

“Law enforcement is much more compassionate, much more aware of what a victim of domestic violence goes through, and a victim of sexual assault, and then we’ve also seen the change of the narrative when we talk about human trafficking,” said Taylor. “So a lot of times you know, we used to say, oh, that person is a child prostitute, there’s no such thing as a child prostitute; that is someone who is being human trafficked, and so I think you will see the state will release numbers on human trafficking and they keep going up and up. It’s not that we have more human trafficking, it’s that law enforcement is doing a much better job at identifying what it actually is.”

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