Yale professional student Nathan Earl uses personal experience to help eradicate human trafficking

Nathan Earl’s road could have dead-ended – literally – at age 29. Instead, the human trafficking survivor found meaning in life, and his way to recovery from violence, trauma, and substance dependency and out of the cycle of violence and trauma. He’s now using his experiences to help male youth at risk of violence and exploitation.

Earl is the principal at giantslayer, a South Florida-based organization he founded in 2014 to prevent human trafficking of teen males, while empowering young survivors in need of housing, case management, and mentoring. He enrolled in the Yale School of Public Health’s Executive MPH (EMPH) program, Class of ’24, to provide himself with the tools to further his advocacy work.

In April, he was one of four students appointed as co-chairs of the leadership team of the Yale Addiction Medicine Collaborative (AMC), an interdisciplinary student organization comprised of Yale’s health professional schools. The goal of the organization is to collaboratively enhance professional and public education concerning substance use.

“I actually moved to New Haven, to attend classes in person and work directly with professors, other students, and the community,” he said. “I wanted to immerse myself in all Yale has to offer. And it’s been amazing.”

Earl had the passion to help others, but he needed a disciplinary framework. A public health approach – researching the etiology of violence in order to develop targeted interventions to prevent trauma impacting males – made sense. He’s also interested in better understanding the syndemic relationships between male victimization and comorbid substance use, PTSD, incarceration, and HIV.

“Toxic norms around masculinity, shame, stigma, and homophobic discrimination make it really hard for males to disclose victimization,” he explained. “A public health approach allows us to serve males in spite of these barriers by identifying and treating the comorbidities associated with violence.”

And his presence has been a welcome one at YSPH.

“Although violence has been recognized by WHO, CDC, and other public health leadership institutions as a global public health problem, it has not received the level of attention and support from schools of public health that it needs,” said Kaveh Khoshnood, Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and EMPH’s track director for critical topics. “We are delighted that Nathan has a particular interest in this topic and has been active in tackling various forms of violence, in particular sexual violence and sex trafficking of boys and other young children.”

Before starting at YSPH, Earl collaborated with the University of Southern Mississippi’s newly formed Center for Human Trafficking Research and Training (CHRT), in the School of Social Work, in the hopes of obtaining funding for the center’s work. In October 2022, CHRT was awarded a $497,000 grant by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to help equip education and health systems to prevent human trafficking.

Southern Miss’s CHRT grant is for the first year of the five-year SOAR (Stop, Observe, Ask, Respond) to Health and Wellness Training Demonstration Program. Its purpose is to equip professionals in clinical health and social services settings to identify, treat, and respond to patients and clients impacted by human trafficking by delivering culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and patient-centered care. CHRT’s SOARing in Mississippi project aims to expand access to critical health services by working within its local community to assess service delivery gaps, engage individuals with lived experience, and establish strategic partnerships.

Drs. Kimberly Hogan and Tamara Hurst are co-directors of CHRT and co-principal investigators of the project. While Earl’s work is primarily with young males, the project covers both commercial labor and sexual exploitation, and trafficking of children and adults across the gender spectrum, including undocumented people. Hogan had collaborated with Earl at giantslayer. She invited Earl, who is internationally recognized as a leading expert in the trafficking of hidden populations such as males and LGBTQ+ youth, to be a part of the grant due to his innovative efforts to address LGBTQ+ and male victimization, and for his public health approach to early intervention.

“What we know about people impacted by trafficking and other forms of violence is that there are strong associations between human trafficking and various adverse childhood experiences, such as sexual abuse, domestic violence, substance abuse, and the unaddressed mental health of a caregiver,” Earl said.

In his case, Earl turned to drugs at the age of 12 to cope with sexual trauma. Access to education was his escape – he excelled in high school and went to the University of Florida on a pre-med track – but he dropped out at age 20. “Unfortunately, I just had so many years of unprocessed trauma as a child, as a boy, where drugs had served as a coping mechanism,” he said.

Battling a substance-abuse disorder, Earl wound up on the streets, where his relationship with a drug dealer became abusive, resulting in intimate partner violence. “Throughout those years, sexual violence and exploitation became the norm,” he said. “During my time in ‘the life,’ I endured repeated instances of sexual assault, rape and trafficking, and other violence. The situation would be defined as trafficking or sexual exploitation.”

Earl also found himself in jail several times in his 20s, the last time at 29. And there, the page turned.

A trauma-informed mental health counselor in a correctional facility where Earl was serving a sentence for drug-induced charges introduced him to the teachings of Viktor Frankl and his landmark book Man’s Search for Meaning. A quote from Frankl is on Earl’s giantslayer biography page: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Frankl’s argument, that if there is meaning in the good things in life, then there has to be meaning in the bad, resonated with Earl. “If there was a moment of transition, it was there, it was then. And I started fighting back.”

Earl put in the work, and eventually graduated from drug court and probation, and reunited with his family. He also went back to school, earning an associate’s degree in business and marketing from the State College of Florida in 2008, and a BS in marketing from the University of South Florida in December 2021.

And he began to fight for others. In 2014, with his mother and sister, he founded the Ark of Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit for boys who’d been trafficked for sex, which Earl ran until 2021. The specialized program provided street outreach to youth at risk of human trafficking. The Ark also provided housing coordination, case management, and mentoring to young men struggling with substance dependency who had been impacted by labor and/or sex trafficking.

Another inspiration driving Earl was the loss of his fiancé, Matthew, who worked with him at Ark of Freedom. Matthew was killed Sept. 19, 2016. The homicide is unsolved.

“My experiences certainly aren’t unique to the planet … but I think it’s how I’ve responded,” he said. “I’ve made a choice to assign meaning to those things so that I could help prevent them from happening to other people.”