ST. LOUIS, Mo. – A Missouri group hopes to bring a dark underworld to light by hosting what it says is the first national, comprehensive conference on sex trafficking.
Molly Hackett, principal of the anti-trafficking group Exchange Initiative, is organizing the event.
It’s called Ignite: Sparking Action Against Sex Trafficking and she says it will bring together professionals from law enforcement, medicine, education, faith-based and community groups to help better understand the problem and coordinate action.
"Everyone needs each other,” she stresses. “We need the school counselors to understand what they're seeing – much as for law enforcement, what resources are available in safe housing, who can they call – to make everyone's efforts just so much more effective."
The conference takes place March 2 through March 4 in St. Louis. More information is online at ExchangeInitiative.com.
Saturday is the 8th annual National Human Trafficking Awareness Day.
Hackett says while it's clear the problem exists in Missouri, it's difficult to get a handle on exact statistics.
"It hasn't been categorized very well,” she points out. “When you look at police reports, it's different from every state as far as arrests and the victim, or if they're being trafficked, versus the john and the pimp.
She adds it is estimated that there are at least 300,000 children nationwide, and more than one million worldwide, who are at risk of being victims of sex trafficking.
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Wildland firefighting is a tough job and the industry has long struggled with worker retention. Training boot camps have helped bring new firefighters, especially women, into the fold in recent years, but federal cuts could threaten progress.
About 84% of federal wildland firefighters are men, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Boot camps targeting women have been popular. Montana saw its first just last year.
Riva Duncan, vice president of the group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, worked in fire for more than three decades and said the boot camps offered a "safe environment" to raise concerns.
"Beyond the actual required training, just having discussions about, 'Well, how do you address hygiene? What do I do if I feel like I'm being treated unfairly?' And those kinds of questions that don't get covered in a classroom setting," Duncan explained.
Since the boot camps are designed to increase workforce diversity, future programs have been cut under the Trump administration's DEI rollbacks. Following the firing and then rehiring of 6,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture employees since February, including some with firefighting duties, the Interior Department announced permanent pay raises for wildland firefighters in the new federal appropriations budget.
The U.S. Forest Service has seen a 45% attrition rate of wildland firefights over the last three years. Duncan argued the DEI cuts will not help.
"We need people who want to do this work. We need the kind of people that value working on the public lands and serving the American taxpayers," Duncan emphasized. "This has detrimental effects to the overall recruitment and retention strategy to try and get firefighters into these jobs."
Fourteen different scheduled women's boot camps have been canceled. According to the USDA, about 65,000 wildfires burned nearly 9 million acres across the U.S. in 2024.
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March is Women's History Month and an Arkansas native has made history by being honored with a $1 coin from the U.S. Mint.
The late Raye Montague was an engineer with the U.S. Navy and created the first computer-generated rough draft of a U.S. naval ship in 1971. Because of her work, ships could be designed in 18 hours instead of two years.
David Montague, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Raye's son, said his family worked closely with the mint to create the coin's design.
"It was her with her hand over her heart, which is patriotic, and then looking over the ship that she designed, the Oliver Hazard Perry," Montague explained. "That struck me immediately. And then the background, underneath the ship is the sea, and then that is actually a computer grid."
He recalled when he was a child, he collected coins with his mother, so it is fitting she would receive the honor. She died in 2018.
Last year, the federal building where she worked, in Bethesda, Maryland, was renamed the Raye Montague Center for Maritime Technology. Her son pointed out although his mother faced obstacles, she created time to help others.
"She saw it as the natural course of her professional opportunities," Montague observed. "If she was able to gain opportunities to do things and grow as a human being, she wanted to make sure that she opened doors for other people and was trying to make the world a better place."
The coin was released earlier this year and Montague noted it is already being used to continue his mother's legacy. The currency was shared with kids in an Arkansas youth group.
"They used the coin to say you all are Arkansas youth and this person was an Arkansas youth, and look, they're on a dollar coin," Montague added. "If she can do great things, as long as you work hard and you push for opportunities, then you have options as well."
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Women in rural areas struggle more with menopause than their urban counterparts, according to a study from the University of Washington.
Rural women reported more symptoms like joint pain and mood swings in one of the first studies to look at menopausal rural-urban discrepancies.
Dr. Susan Reed, program director at the University of Washington Women's Reproductive Health Research Center and an author of the report, said she's not surprised by the results. She stressed the study is a signal medical providers need to do better for the rural population.
"If people transition through this period in a healthy fashion, they live longer," Reed outlined. "They have fewer cardiovascular problems and perhaps better brain aging."
Reed noted other studies have shown women in rural areas are struggling with higher mortality rates and other health issues like higher suicide rates and obesity. She added there is decreased access in rural places because of the long distances people often have to travel to receive care.
"People providing menopause health care in rural areas, many of them are really passionate and do a good job," Reed observed. "There just aren't enough of them."
Reed emphasized there are other factors contributing to poor menopausal care, not just for women in rural areas but urban and suburban areas too. She argued hormonal therapy is a safe and effective treatment and there should be a higher prevalence of its use.
"The challenges there are due to misinformation on the internet, fear of patients," Reed explained. "And then providers not being skilled enough to help people understand risks and benefits of menopausal hormone therapy."
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