2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking! In celebration, Co-founder and Research Director Annjanette (AJ) Alejano-Steele, Ph.D. reflects on the past two decades of impact. Find out why research on human trafficking in Colorado has become such an important part of the statewide response. Join AJ in looking at the past, present, and future of Colorado’s anti-trafficking movement.
When did you first learn about human trafficking?
When I first learned about human trafficking, it was while I was preparing to teach courses at MSU Denver on interpersonal violence. At the time (2000), instances of human trafficking were framed in the news as transnational crime cases. I was overwhelmed by the numbers and the vulnerability of immigrants worldwide.
I attended a conference in the early 2000s and became grounded in international frameworks. By the mid-2000s, it was clear how the U.S. was also a place where this form of exploitation could happen.
How has your personal experience influenced your lens as a researcher?
My immigrant identity plays a role in everything I do. I can never set this identity aside, and it enriches the ways in which I conduct research because my love for family infuses the research questions I co-create. My identity has allowed me to move between cultures and has reminded me to attend to the privileges my family earned while here [in the United States]. It is so easy to stay in the bias of where we were raised, which shapes our perceptions and how we come at the world.
Over the years, our research team has worked hard to include multiple cultures and identities, along with multiple sectors and multiple disciplines. By doing so, we work hard to ensure inclusivity and sensitivity to the ways in which we shape research questions and how we collect data.
Why is research so vital to making progress in the anti-trafficking movement?
I’m biased as a career “pracademic” (academics who do their work in practice in communities) to understand the ways in which data help to confirm or counter what we think we know is happening in the field. It’s absolutely necessary to engage and listen to the questions that community members have to guide and co-design research. While community-based research takes time and trust, it ensures that we hear how human trafficking appears at the community level and who is vulnerable and most affected.
For years, we’ve noted how data helps to move practitioners beyond best guesses and assumptions. Data helps to affirm that we’re making progress over the years. Otherwise, we could be using precious resources doing the best we can—but potentially spinning our wheels.
Watch AJ’s TED Talk in 2012 on combating human trafficking.
Looking back on 20 years, how has LCHT’s research impacted Colorado’s anti-trafficking movement?
We have conducted The Colorado Project three times over the last ten years, and its design was borne of a team of lived experience experts, practitioners, and researchers from many disciplines. We have equipped our Colorado communities with knowledge about human trafficking and unveiled strengths and gaps along this journey. I don’t know of any other state that has this resource.
By assessing the progress, we are able to paint a more robust picture of how this issue manifests in our communities and the challenges we face in preventing and responding to the issue. Ideally, we will someday have more streamlined methods of reporting and sharing data amongst the many community organizations and systems. In the meantime, The Colorado Project helps to identify major challenges that we can prioritize and improve in better supporting survivors.
LCHT is committed to providing the best research and knowledge that supports our programs and community partners. One key memory that stands out was the opportunity in 2013 to hold a National Conference to share our methods and findings while holding “fishbowl panels” that allowed panelists to think together (as opposed to providing monologues in typical conference panels). To have such amazing minds illustrate conversations coming from the research is something I will remember forever.
How has your research evolved to include deeper exploration of “root causes” of human trafficking?
The Colorado Project 2023 allowed us to confirm the pervasiveness of root causes that make communities vulnerable to human trafficking and exploitation. The factors that endure are conditions that create housing insecurity and gaps in the immigration system, including processing time and biased treatment. Societal discrimination against people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals persists, and the ways that they are marginalized create vulnerabilities.
For us to move any needles on ending human trafficking, we must partner with and support our colleagues who have championed ending these inequalities. Much of this work has been evolving over time, and together, by collaborating across “movements” and by being committed and accountable allies, we hope to make progress together to end violence and exploitation.
What new perspective did your recent sabbatical bring you?
I have been privileged to have my first sabbatical in nearly 30+ years of university teaching. I spent time in several countries in Asia. These rare experiences can’t help but turn what we know sideways and upside down. I have been honored to learn with and from phenomenal anti-trafficking leaders in these countries, many of whom are managing far more difficult cultural and systemic structures so very different from the United States.
Corruption is a systemic-level structure that is hard to grapple with, and the pervasiveness of poverty is hard to bear witness to. It was far easier to understand the scale of large estimates of human trafficking when you could see community factors up close. I am still processing the travels, but I am haunted, committed to the sustainability of LCHT into the future, and forever changed by my time away.
What has kept you motivated and hopeful for all these years?
The opportunity to work with some of the most inspiring and incredible people—those with lived experience; people far smarter than me; colleagues who fully understand the sinister and systemic ways oppression sits at the center of this form of human rights violation.
From the start, LCHT’s work was borne and now sustained as a collaboration. Witnessing collaborative thinking has given me hope for humanity beyond the hard work we do on a daily basis. My motivation and hope is sustained by working in collaboration with phenomenal colleagues. It’s why we’re the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking. We strive for a mix of ideas every step of this marathon.
Looking ahead, what’s your hope for the next 20 years of Colorado’s anti-trafficking movement?
My hope is that LCHT continues to persevere as it builds upon its solid foundation. We know conditions are changing and will continue to change, but we stay true to doing our best to understand the complexities of this human rights violation. We are committed to making sure information is accessible and actionable to make change possible.
Twenty years can make a difference—and in the movement to end human trafficking in Colorado, it already has. Advocates, survivor leaders, and community members have transformed the way our state responds to exploitation. But the fight to end human trafficking is far from over.
After two decades of impact, one thing is clear: lasting change takes all of us. As we look ahead to the next 20 years, will you give $20 to sustain the work ahead? Your gift today will provide survivors with critical resources, strengthen prevention efforts, and fund the next wave of anti-trafficking research in Colorado.