Catholic Charities of Louisville, along with three partners, has received a federal grant to combat human trafficking in Kentucky.

The $240,000 Rescue and Restore Victims of Human Trafficking Regional Program grant has allowed Catholic Charities, the Bluegrass Rape and Crisis Center in Lexington, Ky., the Women’s Crisis Center in Covington, Ky., and the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs in Frankfort, Ky., to launch their efforts in the state.

Receipt of the grant and the start of the program was announced May 30 at a morning press conference held at the Muhammad Ali Center in downtown Louisville.

Steven Bogus, executive director of Catholic Charities, told those at the event that one of the new program’s main goals is to identify victims of human trafficking so they can begin to receive the services they need.

“Victims of this crime are often camouflaged,” he said, living and working among the rest of the state without anyone being aware of their situation.

“Rescue and Restore will engage in four main activities,” Bogus explained. “It will conduct training sessions and provide information forums so people who may be in contact with this population can learn what to look for. We’ll develop and make available posters, brochures and other materials to help in the education campaign. We’ll encourage law enforcement, health officials and others who are often in contact with the public to become familiar with Rescue and Restore, and with the problem and nature of human trafficking.”

And the new program will help create a state-wide human trafficking task force to locate, identify and bring help to victims.

“This first phase will focus on outreach to those who encounter victims on a daily basis, but who also may not recognize the signs of human trafficking,” he added.

Health Department workers, along with law enforcement officials, “may be the only ones who can find, rescue and assist victims of trafficking,” Bogus said.

The new program was announced by Catholic Charities officials last February, but the federal money to make it a reality had not been forthcoming until recently, Bogus said. The program is now up and running, and efforts to locate victims of trafficking are broadening, he said.

Dr. T. K. Logan, a professor at the University of Kentucky and the author of a 2007 report called “Human Trafficking in Kentucky,” told the press conference that no one knows for certain the extent of human trafficking in Kentucky.

“We need to be honest and say that since the start of my involvement with this issue, there has always been a question of ‘just how big a problem is this in Kentucky?’ ” she said. But in preparing the 2007 report, she said researchers found “modern-day slavery, horrendous conditions and horrible abuse” of people who had been brought into the state by human traffickers.

“There is a tremendous deprivation of rights in these situations,” Logan said, “and the more I learned, the more I wanted to call up and say ‘I quit; I don’t want to know about this.’ ”

She didn’t quit, of course, and instead interviewed 140 people with knowledge about human trafficking in the state, including police officials, attorneys and others.

“About half of them reported they had worked on a case of human trafficking in the state,” she noted. Many of those who fall victim to trafficking come to the state after being promised good employment, then find themselves working as agricultural workers without freedom to search for other jobs.

“These people end up as forced labor in fields, in restaurants, in prostitution, in domestic servitude,” she explained. “In cases we found in both Northern Kentucky and Western Kentucky, women were forced to work as domestics for a family, and then repeatedly raped. And, of course, they saw no money.”

Workers in some rural areas are forced to labor 12 hours a day and then are not allowed to leave the farm — or in some cases, the restaurant owner’s home.

“One couple we found had come to Kentucky with the promise of jobs on a horse farm,” Logan said. “Instead they worked in the fields with no pay. Another woman we learned about was kept chained as a sex slave.”

At the core of the problem, the professor noted, is poverty — and the dreams people have of escaping it.

“People come here hoping for a better life for themselves and their families,” she noted. “It’s those hopes and dreams that get exploited, too.”

Marissa Castellanos of Catholic Charities will serve as project manager for that agency’s role in Rescue and Restore. She noted that Catholic Charities and its Kentucky partners the program are one of just five national recipients of the Rescue and Restore grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.