Today's conversation is with Valiant Richie.

Valiant started his career as a prosecutor where he moved to the Special Assault Unit,

handling sexual assault, child exploitation, and human trafficking cases for a decade.

He now works for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,

an organization that works on security issues and human rights for 57 countries.

Val is an ambassador for the organization, working with countries on how they can better combat

trafficking. His extensive experience and work with so many countries give him unique insights into

how consistent the patterns and functions of human trafficking are from country

to country. In this episode, Valyan talks about how trafficking is fed by a demand for people

willing to pay for sex, how sexually explicit material further drives the demand for sexual

violence, and the connection between how victims are treated and their abusers' use of pornography.

Valiant discusses how rampant sex trafficking is and what we can do to address it on a macro level,

as well as individual shifts in our perspectives and attitudes towards sex buying,

can help decrease the demand for sex trafficking.

With that, let's jump into the conversation. We hope you enjoy this episode of

Consider Before Consuming. I guess to jump in really now, can you give our listeners a little bit of

background on how you got involved in working in the anti-trafficking

space? Before coming to the OSC, I was a prosecutor in Seattle, Washington for about 13 years.

And I didn't start as a prosecutor on trafficking. I started as a prosecutor, as all prosecutors

did back then, which was working, first of all,

in juvenile court and then in the drug unit.

And I really loved prosecution.

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