Alumni-founded nonprofit Project Exodus has announced it will be ending operations effective April 1. The organization, founded in 2009 by alumnus Mike Masten (’08) and then-student Blake McAllister (’11), has worked in and around the Los Angeles metro area fighting human trafficking.
In an email to supporters and volunteers, Masten revealed that the organization would not be able to continue operating.
“We found that inherent difficulties in running a volunteer investigative program, coupled with issues facing law enforcement and the justice system, have made the activities of Project Exodus unsustainable,” Masten said. “Faced with this truth, we understood with heavy hearts that the time had come for us to shut down.”
The Project Exodus system was based around running a network of volunteers, including many Pepperdine students, working as investigators for brothels and other potential human trafficking sites. The volunteers would compile the information gathered into reports to be handed over to law enforcement in the hopes that they would be able to shut the target down, and create a case to take to court.
Masten cited three issues behind the organization’s closing. The volunteer time requirement was extensive, and extremely specific training was required in order to get quality information. Most local law enforcement were vastly underequipped to deal with human trafficking, even with the added help from the Project Exodus reports. Furthermore, the inherent difficulties of getting a conviction for human trafficking make taking the cases to court difficult.
“Even if law enforcement was able to build a case, the justice system was so overcrowded that the prosecutors were extremely selective in the cases they were accepting. … They were really looking for cases where the women themselves would admit to being trafficking victims,” Masten said. “Very rarely will a victim actually come forward to admit that because of multiple fears of retaliation and punishment. Sometimes, the nature of the crime is that they don’t even realize that they’re victims. They don’t know what human trafficking is, they wouldn’t identify themselves as being trafficked. It’s a very hard burden of proof to try and present.”
While progress was made in refining the organization’s methods, the conclusion reached was that it would continue to be ineffective until structural changes in law enforcement and the criminal justice system were made.
“Given these three main obstacles, we discovered that even if we were to perfect every single aspect of the investigations on our end, we were still facing a very unrealistic possibility of our cases going through,” Masten said.
“We started Project Exodus in order to serve the Kingdom, and I think it’s clear that we’ve done a lot of good, but we’ve decided that our time and energy will see an even greater return if we invest it elsewhere,” McAllister said.
The genesis of the organization came when Masten and McAllister wanted to find a way to get people involved in fighting human trafficking beyond just spreading awareness.
“We wanted to create a system that allowed civilians, average everyday individuals, to try and get involved with the abolitionist movement,” Masten said.
Added McAllister, “There were many organizations that spread awareness but few that allowed you, as a volunteer, to be involved in the process of liberating victims.”
The complementary goal of getting people directly involved was leading to the freedom of the victims.
“Mike and I wanted to create a tangible, direct way for volunteers to fight the human trafficking industry,” McAllister said. “Education was certainly an important part of our vision (and something that we were quite successful at doing), but our main desire was to rescue victims of human trafficking.”
Despite the closing of Project Exodus, their past four years of work will not be lost. All of the information gathered will be compiled into one large report on the illegal brothel network of Southern California and will be published for law enforcement use.
“We had very tangible, undeniable evidence that these were brothels,” Masten said. “We had the most comprehensive database anywhere of the brothel network in Los Angeles. We almost have a public responsibility to let this information be known.”
Coupled with a media campaign called “Brothel-Free SoCal,” they hope to continue finding new ways to fight human trafficking. Masten admitted that while taking down brothels was not as directed at freeing trafficking victims, he explained his theory that in getting brothels taken down, it would, by proxy, give more opportunities for human trafficking rings to be busted, and for victims to be rescued.
“It’s the difference between fishing with a pole, versus fishing with a net.” Masten said. “If there is a crackdown on brothels then that would create a situation where if there are brothels participating in human trafficking, through this process victims would have that opportunity to get out.”
