Danielle Baker has long been concerned with human trafficking — the process whereby individuals are forced to endure inhumane abuses such as being forced into sexual slavery or subjected to organ removal and selling.
But her mission to promote awareness about the growing multibillion-dollar industry has grown even stronger in the wake of recently losing someone close to her who was trafficked.
“I missed all of the signs,” says Baker, 25, a second-year student in the occupational therapy doctoral program at the University of Michigan-Flint. “It was right in front of me and I missed everything.”
Baker, who began her three-year graduate program in 2019, has become a pioneer of sorts in the field of occupational therapy, focusing her scholarship and study on helping the victims of trafficking. Working for an organization called Sensational Brain, Baker has been barnstorming the country conducting presentations and teaching continuing education courses on the topic. She was invited recently to present at the prestigious Michigan Occupational Therapy Association annual conference, a rare opportunity that is often reserved for seasoned practitioners and researchers.
“The eye doesn’t see what the mind doesn’t know,” says Baker. “That’s something I always say, because contrary to what people may think, human trafficking happens right in front of our eyes. I think there’s this huge misconception around it where people think, ‘Oh girls are snatched off the streets and it’s a creepy white van and they’re chained up in a basement and that’s not how it happens at all,’” she says, adding that less than 1% of victims are kidnapped and forced into trafficking, compared to the vast number of individuals — mostly women — who are trafficked by someone they know.
The victims, she says, are often groomed by their trafficker for months. “It’s a form of mental manipulation.”
“Human trafficking is not some new phenomenon. It has been going on forever and it happens in every state, every county, every city in the entire world,” says Baker, adding that many falsehoods about trafficking are circulating across the internet.
