Saving Lives One Service Call at a Time

by Rhonda Gerson, Oil & Energy Magazine

When was the last time you thought about sex trafficking in America? How about in your neighborhood? Sex trafficking is something that we like to think of as happening in some third-world country. Unfortunately, it is happening all across the United States, and members of the liquid heating fuels industry are in a position to do something about it.

The statistics are staggering:

• The United States is among the top three nations for sex trafficking
• An estimated 300,000 children are victims of sex trafficking in the U.S. each year
• 66 percent are trafficked by someone they know
• 40 percent are sold by family members
• 36 percent are boys
• 99 percent are never identified
• Less than 1 percent receive care
• 80 percent of survivors end up re-victimized if they are not given resources after rescue

Sex trafficking is the commercial sexual exploitation of an individual through force, fraud, or coercion; and any time a child is sold for sex, it is considered sex trafficking, regardless of whether there is evidence of force, fraud, or coercion.

Members of the home comfort industry can take part in a nationwide effort to identify victims, safely report any suspicions of sex trafficking, and make a real difference, thanks to the Safe House Project and Cetane Associates.

Safe House Project

Safe House Project (www.safehouseproject.org) was founded by Kristi Wells and Brittany Dunn in 2017. Both had been in corporate positions and both were military spouses. They had volunteered to build a safe house for sex trafficking victims in South Africa in 2016, when people started asking what they were doing about the issue in the States.

“We didn’t have any answers to that,” Kristi Wells, Safe House Project CEO recalls. “Our husbands both deployed within weeks of each other, and between us we had five children under seven years old! So, we took that time to learn about the issue in America. Once we saw it, we saw 300,000 American kids sold for sex each year, only one percent ever identified, and without a safe place to heal, 80 percent are revictimized and end up back in sex work. So, we got to work.”

They started on a veritable shoestring, paying themselves less than minimum wage, and borrowing from Wells’ family to get certified as a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Fundraising efforts started small, with local 5K events. Those blossomed into gala events, which led to quantifiable results from the fundraising and the ability to apply for foundation grants, and then bigger grants, and then federal and county funding. “It’s always been intentional to have multiple streams of funding,” she explains.

“We train people to identify and report sex trafficking situations. Last year we helped 1,529 escape, but more than that, we helped them access quality care and healing, and gave them a safe place to stay. With the care, therapy, and education we offer, the revictimization decreases dramatically,” Wells relates.

According to Wells, the average age a victim is first entered into trafficking, that they can track, is 12 years old, but “anecdotally, it’s much younger.” Safe House Project has supported children as young as 10, and women who were in their late 50s and older. “But almost all of them have the same story of when their exploitation began, around the age of 12 or younger.”

Safe House Project first developed programs for the hospitality and transportation industries. These are sectors that “were almost forced” to step into the program, as they are on the front lines on the crisis.

The program offers free, survivor led training for the general public, as well as programs for home service providers and faith-based communities. In addition, there are several low-cost modules offering continuing education credits for health care professionals.

Safe House Project offers emergency housing in safe shelters; food, clothing, and personal essentials; medical care and detox; personalized support; and safe transportation to services and appointments. Survivors are then moved to long-term safe houses, which offer academic support, ongoing mental and dental care, life skills training, therapy, holistic activities, case management, and a nurturing environment in which to heal. The Safe House Project continues to support survivors with therapeutic foster care for younger victims, transitional housing and wrap-around services as survivors move toward independent living, financial literacy programs, trauma-informed work placements, career coaching, and mentorships. There are also scholarships and internships available to help survivors prepare for new careers.

Safe House Project currently supports 624 safe beds, the equivalent of approximately 30 safe homes, across the country to provide 227,760 safe nights for trafficking survivors. They have provided nearly $1.9 million grants to new or expanding safe home programs to increase capacity and reduce barriers to care, and deployed more than 17,000 mentorship hours to support new programs across the country.

Broadening the Home Services Outreach

When the pandemic hit in 2020, mandatory reporters lost access to the children they were meant to protect. The teachers and bus drivers Safe House Project had trained were at home with the rest of the world and health care workers were overwhelmed by the crisis.

“In 2021, we were approached by members of the pest control industry. It was pretty out of left field, but made sense, since their people were still going into homes, even during the pandemic. So, we worked with our survivors and members of the industry to create a training program for pest control technicians,” Wells said. “We realized that there were so many other industries that get access inside homes. That’s hundreds of thousands more potential reporters.”

Enter Barrett Conway. When Conway purchased Cetane Associates in 2022, he expanded the company’s services beyond the heating oil and propane industries to include lawn care, landscaping, and pest control. It was at a pest control benchmarking event that Conway first saw a presentation about Safe House Project training.

“When I saw this, I had a little ‘come to Jesus’ moment. A flash of light,” Conway said. “Cetane has more than 60,000 emails in our database. Those people are business decision makers – the owners and C-suite executives. I thought we had a great responsibility to share this.”

“Our clientele are all home services businesses. Their drivers, technicians, service people are going into the homes and working around the properties. And it’s not just residential. There’s a big commercial side, too – like the ag side of propane. You may not know it, but there’s a big human trafficking problem in the farm belt, the ag business. We needed to do something. We have an opportunity to make a big impact,” he added.

In the summer of 2024, Conway and Wells met, and the new initiative was launched. The existing training videos were revised so they were no longer pest-control specific, and the first press releases about the program, underwritten by Cetane, were distributed in January 2025.

Sex Trafficking Awareness Training for Everyone

The free home comfort training program is housed at cetane.com/resources/safehouse-training/. The first module features Wells, but the other four training modules are introduced and moderated by a home comfort industry professional.

There is nothing like first-hand testing, and so this writer viewed all five training modules and five scenario videos and then took the five-question certification. The videos were easy to understand, to the point, and well produced. There should be no barriers to companies asking their staff to complete the training, as each video is only a few minutes long, and you can view them all in one sitting, or watch one at a time. The entire training program, watching the ten videos and completing the five-question certification quiz, can be completed in less than an hour.

There are many red flags for service providers to be aware of that might suggest a trafficking situation in the home. Wells says, “there are 25 different levels of human trafficking. Familial trafficking is going to look different than a gang-controlled situation.” However, she also provided some of the most common:

• Look for someone not in control of their circumstances
• Someone who is hesitant to speak to you
• A control dynamic, where one person appears to be controlling the other, not allowing them alone in a room, and/or speaking for the person being controlled
• Inappropriate clothing for the weather, such as long sleeves in the summer, which could be hiding bruises
• Sexually inappropriate clothing in children’s sizes
• Sex toys and pornography in public areas

Another red flag, which is highlighted in one of the training scenarios, is a child who appears to have inappropriate knowledge of sexual acts or exhibits behaviors inappropriate for their age. This training scenario video is based on a real situation. A home service provider walked into a home, and the 7-year-old girl walked up to him and put her hand on his groin. The child was so normalized and desensitized to this type of behavior, she anticipated that anyone coming into the home was a “buyer.”

See Something? Simply Report It!

In cases where there is an obvious, active trafficking situation, home service providers should report it to law enforcement immediately.

However, most situations are not as obvious, and law enforcement is not equipped to handle vague suspicions or generalized tips. That is why Safe House Project developed a free app, Simply Report, available through their website, at simplyreport.com, and on Google Play and the App Store, to enable individuals to report any suspicions of trafficking.

“Sex trafficking can be nuanced,” Wells explains. “Simply Report makes it easy for people to quickly and safely to report their suspicions. If an HVAC tech goes to a house and thinks something’s wrong, they can report it via Simply Report. That will get tracked. Simply Report helps to aggregate tips. Service providers can share their suspicion, what they saw, even if the household just feels ‘off.’ The tool is doing triage to vet the instances, and if there’s a likelihood that trafficking is going on, it will send a report to local law enforcement.”

Spreading the Word

Wells and Conway are speaking to the home services communities every chance they get. They presented at the National Propane Gas Association Conference in April, and will be speaking at the HEAT Show, Women In Energy Conference, and other events.

Based in Houston, Conway recalls how he heard a lot about sex trafficking in 2017 when the Super Bowl was in Texas. “It comes up more when the Super Bowl comes to town. I guess that makes sense. But then the Super Bowl ended, and two weeks later, I didn't hear anything more about sex trafficking. It’s still a massive problem. It seems to get brushed aside despite how large, how terrible a problem it is. You don’t think about it in your back yard. But it’s here. We have an opportunity to impact real change.”

Conway and the Safe House Project marketing team are working on an “onboarding” kit for companies that commit to certifying their drivers and technicians. It will provide instructions on how to talk to staff and customers about sex trafficking, and may include bumper stickers and fact cards to keep in work vehicles.

He has high expectations for the training programs, as well. They launched in January, at the height of the heating season, when companies were too busy to ask their people to even consider additional training. But spring is here, now, and Conway expects the training to take off, based on the feedback he has received from stakeholders.

“My hope is that we’ll have 10,000 employees trained by October of this year. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations work that out to reaching over 5 million customer homes and businesses. Many of these companies are doing the training in May, June, July, others in September. We have large nationally publicly traded companies putting it in their HR and onboarding programs,” he reveals.

“Someone asked me if CSRs should do it, and I said, ‘absolutely.’ They may hear something on a call. Or they’ll go home to a husband or partner who is in a different industry, and tell them about it. We’re going to light this match, and hope it catches on across many industries, not just those Cetane serves.”

Wells concludes with thanks to Conway, Cetane, and the home services
industry. “I’m so grateful for this partnership, and the opportunity to reach so many more people and help so many more victims.”

“I’m going to continue to talk about it as much as I can. It’s easy to talk about, easier than talking about selling your business, very often,” Conway says. “My father was a preacher, so I think it’s in my blood. This feels extremely rewarding and it’s easy for me to do.”

For more information on Safe House Project, contact Kristi Wells at kristi@safehouseproject.org. For information on the training program for home service providers, contact Barrett Conway at bconway@cetane.com.

Learn more or donate: www.SafeHouseProject.org

Home Service Provider Training: www.cetane.com/resources/safehouse-training/

Download the app: www.SimplyReport.com

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