By Jason Schoonover ’09, content specialist
May 16, 2019 | 1 p.m.
Lauren Peffley ’09 is dedicating her life to social justice efforts. After being inspired as a Bethel student to work with International Justice Mission, her work today focuses on preventing human trafficking and supporting survivors.
Learning about human trafficking just knocked me off of my feet. It really gutted me for a little bit. And I felt almost paralyzed at how upset I was about it and mad and sad and just overwhelmed by it.
— Lauren Peffley ’09When Peffley took a senior seminar course, Kooistra could tell her student had found a cause in social justice. “That is a passionate woman,” Kooistra says. “That has not diminished since leaving Bethel.” For her senior paper, Kooistra helped Peffly root that passion in history. Peffley wrote her senior thesis on the “comfort women”—women who were systematically sexually trafficked by the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII and several years after. “That really started my anti-trafficking research in a bigger way,” Peffley says.
After graduating, Peffley worked a year-long IJM internship in Chennai, India, where IJM works to quell labor trafficking and help people who’ve been duped into debt slavery and often years of labor to pay off small debts that accrue to huge sums. She assisted several parts of IJM’s work there and even participate in a few rescue operations and after-care weekend events, while also writing a few communications pieces.
After, Peffley returned to the Twin Cities to join AmeriCorps and work with College Possible, a college access program for low-income students. At Coon Rapids High School, she helped 34 students prepare for college, helping with things like ACT preps, college visits, applications, financial aid, and loan assistance. “The relationships with the students were everything to me,” she says. “Those kids were hugely, hugely inspirational and really put into perspective my own journey in college.”
This experience inspired Peffley to become a social worker. She attended the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, where she individualized a concentration on advocacy and empowerment for survivors of sexual exploitation. Through two research practicums, she connected with anti-trafficking service providers throughout St. Louis.
After working with Healing Action and then at Eden’s Glory, a two-year restorative home for adult female human trafficking survivors, Peffley is now the human trafficking social worker at the International Institute in St. Louis, and she’s taken a new role as a research assistant for a statewide manual of anti-trafficking resources in Missouri.
Guided By Faith and Education
Peffley’s faith has played a key role in the work she’s done, and she’s pleased that churches often lead efforts in the anti-trafficking movement. But Peffley cautions that some moralistic language and attitudes common in the church often pose challenges for survivors. For example, talk around purity and virginity can be tough for survivors of abuse. She says the “damaged goods narrative” often makes it difficult for some people to open up about their experiences.
While she’s seen public interest around advocacy efforts grow, Peffley still stresses education to overcome misconceptions. She urges people to follow the lead of survivors. “We spent too long as a movement silencing the voices of people we were actually trying got raise up,” she says.
Peffley says the mainstream trafficking narrative often tells stories of young white women kidnapped from their bedroom and forced to live in a basement, shed, or cage. While such stories exist, Peffley notes they’re rare and do not represent the majority narrative. Much more often, vulnerabilities play a key role in trafficking, and people from a lower socio-economic status or households with abuse or substance abuse are more likely to be affected. LGBTQ youth have an abnormally high rate of trafficking, she notes. “It really is something that just preys upon vulnerability in a really sick way,” she says. “So the more vulnerabilities a person’s identity has, the more likely they are to be exploited.”
Familial trafficking often happens and isn’t heard about often in the mainstream news, but at one point, Eden’s Glory was serving three women trafficked by biological or adoptive relatives. For a few, it was even a generational issue that became normalized.
Lauren Peffley ’09 poses for a photo on a trip working with the Invisible Girl Project, which was run by a former International Justice Mission coworker. Peffley, who majored in history at Bethel, is dedicating her life to social justice issues. She is currently working in multiple roles in St. Loius to prevent human trafficking and assist survivors.
A Life-Long Advocate
Peffley remains an outspoken advocate for survivors and the less fortunate. She co-wrote “Challenges to Sensational Imagery Used in the Anti-trafficking Movement and Implications for Practice," a paper on misguided imagery and language tied to human trafficking. It argues to follow the language used by survivor-led organizations. The paper was published in the book, "Social Work Practice with Survivors of Sex Trafficking and Commercial Sexual Exploitation.”
She’s also served as a public speaker for groups like Not For Sale and taught Responding to Human Trafficking, an online course for Bethany Global University in Bloomington, Minnesota. She recently took a part-time role as the teaching assistant for the Sex Trafficking Course at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.
While she acknowledges the social justice field is taxing and emotional work, she wants to work in a sustainable way. It’s transformative to her to be able to sit and be there with someone, even if she doesn’t always know what to say to them in their time of need. But it’s beneficial to be a support.
“I feel in some ways like I was created to do this work, and so I want to honor that calling as well as I can,” she says.
The story "Seeking Justice by Seeking Jesus" in the summer 2019 edition of Bethel Magazine highlights the efforts of the Bethel community—including Lauren Peffley—to use truth to fight for freedom and prevent human trafficking.
Read the current issue.