APAIT working to assist underserved communities

Efforts to combat sex trafficking not limited to LGBTQ victims

By SIMHA HADDAD

A beacon of hope for underserved vulnerable communities of LGBTQ+ adults in LA can be found in a non-descript almost fortress looking concrete high-rise office building located at 3055 Wilshire overlooking Koreatown.

The offices of the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT), whose stated mission is to positively impact the quality of life for those medically underserved communities, is a labyrinth of meeting and counseling rooms, art therapy spaces, offices, and a large, private, outdoor patio for events. The walls are lined with posters of inspirational banners like “Heroes Work Here,” as well as breakdowns of case studies on sex trafficking, mental health, and addiction.

With the Koreatown location plus offices in Orange County, APAIT‘s work focuses on the quality of life for vulnerable people experiencing behavioral health challenges, housing insecurity, and who are at-risk for HIV AIDS.

“I know the lingo everyone uses is BIPOC,” Jury Candelario, a licensed clinical social worker and the Executive Director told The Blade.

“But for us, we say communities of color. Even in our staffing, we try to re ect our consumers. This is how we roll. This is our mission and we have to re ect the community that we serve.”

Candelario explained that APAIT started thirty-five years ago with a focus on the HIV AIDS crisis.

“We started out really grounded in the work of HIV AIDS primarily addressing grief counseling for gay Asian men,” said Candelario. “Many of these men died alone from HIV AIDS because most of their families didn’t even know they were gay let alone they were dying from the disease.”

Overtime, APAIT expanded their services not just to HIV AIDS, but to a broader range of sexual health issues. APAIT deals with a range of issues not just impacting gay men but those that impact the larger queer community.

“The core pillars of APAIT services are sexual health, behavioral health, housing, forensic treatment, which is basically for folks who are coming out of jails in prison, and human trafficking,” Candelario emphasized.

Even with four different offices and seven different housing sites, the organization often has to outsource resources due to the high need for their services. Jazzmun Nichcala Crayton, Associate Director, told the Blade that the American socio-economic system is in large part to blame.

“They say the system is broken,” said Crayton, “but no one really knows how to navigate the system. Plus, the system was never designed with people of color in mind, so you are asking us to perform at a level and to perform in ways that we were never trained or designed or had the opportunity to. We were never given access to that information.”

Crayton explained that the system often produces broken homes, especially within atrisk communities of color, leading to a cycle that can often feel impossible to break.

“If your mother was in survival mode, and she was a single parent, and you are coming up through that system and that way of life, the only way you’re going to break the chain is to break the chain yourself. It is very difficult for a child to make that shift. Already they are familiar with poverty, they are familiar with not having. That’s not the story for everybody, but that’s the story for a lot of people. You see it a lot,” Crayton noted.

“If you don’t have all those dynamics like a mother and father, making a certain amount of money to provide for a family, that causes a lot of problems. A lot of times, you see Caucasian counterparts where the mother does not work, and she gets to stay home and be the caregiver and nurture the children. But even that is changing in our society. More and more often, the parents are out of the home. Children end up raising themselves and end up fending for themselves because everyone is trying to make money so that they can live a certain way.”

“But can you imagine people of color with more than one child Often, especially in Black families, the father is absent for whatever reason, so the mother is the matriarch, running the entire household, trying to work and go to school and provide for children.”

“People use this term ‘strong Black woman,’ but Black women don’t want to be strong all the time. Women don’t want to be strong all the time,” she added.

According to a pre-COIVD survey by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law on Victimization ates and Traits of Sexual and Gender Minorities (SGMs) in the United States, SGMs are at greater risk of experiencing violent crime than their white cisgender heterosexual counterparts.

The Williams study showed that LGBTQ+ people were nearly four times more likely than non LGBT people to experience violent crime. The odds of experiencing a violent victimization were higher for SGMs than non-SGMs .

SGM persons experienced more criminal victimization than non-SGM persons. SGMs experienced 71.1 violent victimizations per 1,000, compared to 19.2 per 1,000 among nonSGM persons.

SGMs had a higher rate of serious violence, defined as rape or sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated assault, than non-SGMs, including higher rates of violence involving a weapon and violence resulting in serious injuries.

“There have been increased attacks in the Asian community,” acknowledged Candelario. “Unfortunately, I would say hatred got bigger with COVID-19 and how it was blamed essentially on the Chinese community by the last administration. It coronavirus was called ‘the China u,’ so there’s definitely a lot of that in uence in that.”

APAIT offers self-defense classes as part of their program to help women who find themselves the victims of attacks. The staff are also encouraged to take these classes. As Candelario pointed out, “No one is safe. We are all at risk.”

While the rise in hate crimes has propelled the self-defense program, the classes initially started after a group of trans women were conducting a makeup class for gender representation at APAIT. The class itself was broken into and robbed, leaving the women defenseless and scared.

When asked why queer people of color are so often particularly affected in statistics like those from the UCLA study, Crayton said that she blames the social dehumanization of queer people within society.

“We get dehumanized on a daily basis,” said Crayton. “Our humanity is laughed at. It is ridiculed. There are policies in place all over America to prevent us from even trying. We don’t even get a chance to try as a whole.”

“We are very special here in California. We have different dynamics, but some of our siblings in other states are limited by the law. They can’t do a Drag show anymore in Tennessee. I mean, what is that Why is that important Our purpose is to educate to bring these people up so that they can go out in the community and provide for themselves.”

Candelario added that words like “faggot” and “groomer” which are deeply ingrained in right-wing rhetoric, help to propel this dehumanization and so should be eradicated.

“I think we have to watch trauma informed language,” said Candelario. “The words that we use impact how people are perceived.”

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