Dr. Kristen Kirkland

speaker

373 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Dr. Kristen Kirkland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Cate & Ty Break It Down · Dr. Kristin Kirkland: When Adoption and Human Trafficking Intersect · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

And the day I did, I really, I've wrestled with it for a good bit of like

Could this seriously be true?

But I think that it is.

And I started to notice other people talking about that, too.

So though I no longer practice clinical medicine, I have shifted into an advocacy through writing and authorship primarily and then also educating online.

And I think a big reason I'm able to kind of separate the personal feelings about some of the nasty comments I get and really focus on education is I truly think people just don't understand.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the definitions from the United States and also the United Nations are similar in structure.

The wording is just slightly different, but the meaning is the same.

We use a model called the Palermo Protocol, which is just, we got to put a fancy name on everything, but it's just the structure of how we describe trafficking in the law.

So it's the act of obtaining a person, and there are a few other words for obtaining a person, by means of forced fraud or coercion for the purpose of exploiting them for profit.

So the interesting thing about acts that I always like to point out is that if a minor is involved, you do not have to prove

that one of the other subtypes of act have happened.

If the minor is involved, the act is already qualified, if that makes sense.

So if I think about it through that lens, which is very much how I came to this after years and years of studying trafficking and then coming out of adoption fog, the minor's already involved in private infant adoption, private infant adoption.

And then the means, force, fraud, coercion, I started learning about, especially the coercion.

There have been periods in history of force, and certainly there's been fraud in adoption too, but the coercion's a really big piece.

And I know you know this well from other conversations I've heard you all have on this podcast.

Unfortunately, coercion is a big part of recruiting parents to relinquish.

And then I truly feel that if we use maybe the term identity trafficking, it'll make more sense.

Showing 21–40 of 373 · page 2 of 19