Evan Vucci/AP

President Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit, Saturday, July 8, 2017, in Hamburg, Germany.

Nikki Haley, President Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, says the United States has “multiple forms” of “ammunition” yet to use to stop North Korea’s growing nuclear and ballistic missile threats.

And among the weapons the US holds in its quiver, the Trump administration’s tough cop on foreign policy says, is trade retaliation against China.

If Beijing fails to do more – or undermines international efforts to do more – to pressure Pyongyang over its advancing nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile programs, the US will slap the Chinese with punitive economic measures to encourage them to reconsider.

That, at least, is the position Ms. Haley has advanced over the past week since North Korea jarred the world with what some have called a “game changer” when it successfully launched an ICBM on July 4.

First at an emergency UN Security Council meeting Wednesday, then on Sunday TV news programs, Haley presented China with an ultimatum: Either you do more to stop North Korea, or we will come after you.

But would such an aggressive stance toward China work?

Some former officials with sanctions experience under the Obama administration think it could. They point to the way so-called “secondary sanctions” prompted action by affected countries – including China – that helped bring Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program.

The problem many analysts with long experience in Northeast Asia see is that China has much higher stakes in North Korea than in Iran. So similar measures targeting China are unlikely to achieve the intended goal, they say, while alienating the one power that does hold sway with the North’s Kim regime.

Fear of a failed state

“The assumption here is that if we thump the Chinese with a trade war or some other tough measures they’ll get the message and really turn the screws on North Korea, but I don’t think it’s going to work,” says James Walsh, a North Korea expert and senior research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program in Cambridge, Mass.

“When you slap people,” he adds, “they mostly just get ticked at you.”

The bottom line, Dr. Walsh says, is that the US is never likely to do enough to punish the Chinese (the world’s second-largest economy and America’s largest trading partner) to force them to reassess what they care about most – avoiding a collapsed North Korea on their northeastern border.

“I don’t know that there’s anything we could sanction or any measures we could take that would mean more to [the Chinese] than the prospects of a failed neighboring state,” he says.

What the Trump administration has to remember, others point out, is that the US is not alone in considering North Korea a serious security issue.

“I don’t believe the Chinese government would allow itself to be humiliated by the US into accepting things it considers are inimical to its national security interests,” says Doug Bandow, a North Asia analyst with the Cato Institute in Washington. “We need to look at this from the Chinese side and understand what a failed state on their border means to them.”

On Sunday news programs, Haley alternated between portraying eventual economic measures targeting China as retaliation for a failure to act, or as a form of prodding to encourage action.

“This is encouraging and motivating China to say this is a whole new level, this is an ICBM test,” she said on “CBS Sunday.” Economic measures would let the Chinese know, “We need you to do more.”

But on CNN, she portrayed the contemplated economic measures as retaliation in the case that China uses its Security Council veto to kill a North Korea sanctions resolution the US says it will present in the council “in the coming days.” Both China and Russia have indicated they favor dialogue with the North and would veto any new sanctions effort.

The Trump wild card

“Ammunition comes in many forms,” Haley said on “State of the Union,” insisting that the US has “a lot of options on the table” when it comes to pressuring China.

“China has a choice to make. They’re either going to go along with us and the rest of the international community and say, yes, we think that what North Korea did was wrong, or they’re not,” she said. “If they don’t go along with that [resolution],” she added, “the president has made it clear that he will start looking at trade relations with China.”

Nevertheless, Haley’s repeated references to trade measures against China over North Korea do not mean Mr. Trump actually intends to pursue such actions. The president has vacillated over the past week between praising and criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s willingness to get tough with Pyongyang.

And other senior Trump administration officials have discovered in recent days that there are risks to publicly promoting the president’s ideas – one of which being he might change his mind.

For example, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was also on Sunday TV news programs, where among other things he spoke glowingly of the idea of a cybersecurity pact with Russia, something Trump had said in a tweet that he discussed Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Mnuchin hailed the proposed pact as “a very significant accomplishment for President Trump.”

But by Sunday evening – after several Republican senators derided the idea as akin to putting the fox in charge of the henhouse – Trump tweeted that he did not think such a pact with Russia was possible.

The idea of slapping sanctions or taking other trade action against China over its support of North Korea is different, however, in that its trial balloon has remained aloft.

What worked with Iran

One reason for that may be that evidence is fresh of such action working. The Obama administration took aggressive action against banks and other entities doing business with Iran as a means of hampering Tehran’s ties to the international economy and access to financial markets – thereby sending the message that if it advanced its nuclear program it risked economic isolation.

Iran chose international economic access and negotiated a deal halting its march toward a nuclear weapon.

“In dealing with North Korea, the Trump administration should ... take a page out of the Obama administration’s Iran sanctions playbook and apply against North Korea the tool used successfully to bring Iran to the nuclear negotiating table – “secondary sanctions” on those who do business with the regime,” David Cohen, Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence under Obama, wrote in the Washington Post in April.

Resorting to secondary sanctions against Chinese banks doing business with North Korea could work for several key reasons, according to Mr. Cohen: first, because the Trump administration has said its end goal is a diplomatic solution to North Korea’s threats, the approach Beijing prefers.

But second, Trump continues to suggest that if diplomacy does not work, he will take whatever action is necessary, including military strikes, to prohibit Pyongyang from perfecting a missile capable of carrying a nuclear weapon to the US. And if there’s something the Chinese want to prevent about as much as a collapsed North Korea, Cohen suggests, it’s US military action on the Korean Peninsula.

MIT’s Walsh agrees that secondary sanctions played an important role in the case of Iran. But the North Korea case is different in ways that make the success of such sanctions much less likely, he says.

“The map is different, and then Iran’s economy is very different from North Korea’s,” he says.

The US should also remember what the ultimate objective of sanctions would be, Cato’s Mr. Bandow says, and whether the odds of success are high enough to risk making the Chinese less cooperative.

“The real question is, what’s the target?” says Bandow who recently spent four days meeting with officials in North Korea. “I’m skeptical that secondary sanctions can ever do enough to dry up the funding they need [in the North] to maintain control and to keep their weapons and missile programs going.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Marion Warren, shown at the Hancock County Library in Sparta, Ga., is a local landowner whose footage of a county board meeting led to an investigation of voter rights in Hancock County.

The tale of disenfranchisement in this Southern town starts with a squirrel.

In 2014, the rodent chewed some wires at the historic Hancock County, Ga., courthouse in downtown Sparta, Ga., about 100 miles from Atlanta. A fire ensued, destroying the county’s entire voting roll – more than 1,100 names.

The Hancock Board of Elections immediately started rebuilding the rolls by urging voters to come in and register.

The next year, however, white county board members challenged 187 mostly black voters following complaints that they actually didn’t live in the precinct. Fifty-three people, nearly all African-Americans, were kicked off the rolls at a board meeting.

Marion Warren, a city election official, happened to be present. When his county counterparts heard a motion to begin challenging voters, Mr. Warren’s camera rolled.

His footage of a barely-attended hearing in a small American town led to a deeper investigation. Earlier this year, a settlement was reached between the county and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. Once it’s signed off on, it will make Hancock County the first jurisdiction to earn federal election oversight since the United States Supreme Court invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

The problem: The local board effectively – and illegally – disenfranchised voters, according to the settlement.

The US has for decades sought to understand the scope of voter fraud. The bottom line has been that while US voter rolls tend to be outdated – Pew has found that some 24 million registrations, or 1 in 8, may be inaccurate – evidence of actual in-person collusion and impersonation at the ballot box is exceedingly rare. One much-cited study found a total of 31 credible reports of voter fraud out of the 1 billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014.

Now, the Trump administration has launched its own investigation. At the end of June, the Election Integrity Commission sent a letter to all 50 states requesting their full voter-roll data, including the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security numbers, and voting history back to 2006 of every voter in the state. Results are due July 14, but so far 44 states have said that they cannot comply with at least part of the request. The Department of Justice sent its own letter the same day, asking all 44 states covered by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 for detailed information on how they purge their voter rolls.

“There are a lot of dimensions to the decision of an individual to vote and the administration of an election,” says Ken Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin studying the voter patterns of the 2016 election. But from his research, some of which documents Americans forgoing the vote if the hurdle is unfair or too high, he is convinced that the “end game is to provide rationale for massive purges, and it’s not going to be Jennifer Andersons but Hector Gonzaleses who are going to face this.”

It’s a fraught-filled gambit, he argues: “There are huge constitutional consequences to making a mistake.”

The impact of such voter integrity crackdowns can be seen in places like Hancock County.

There, voter participation fell by 40 percent after local deputies were deployed to hand out summonses in person to the 187 people whose registrations were being challenged. (Often, such inquiries are mailed.) The Lawyers' Committee accused the county of voter intimidation and filed a lawsuit in 2015, after the mayoral election that saw Sparta get its first white mayor in four decades. 

“If you look at what is happening now at the federal level, it is the exact same thing as what happened here in Hancock County,” says Mr. Warren.

Voter ID

Beneath two 27-inch Thunderbird monitors at the University of Wisconsin, Professor Mayer is pondering a question: Do strict voter ID requirements affect elections in real-time? Data from Mr. Trump’s critical win in Wisconsin last year already suggests they did. The question, he says, is by how much.

Surveys of past voters and analysis of provisional ballots – those cast by disputed voters – is yielding a trove of information about the extent to which stepped-up challenging, including involving sheriffs' deputies presenting summonses, leads especially low-income and minority voters to simply stop voting.

Georgia has become a major test case for a nation seeking to balance fraud concerns against the constitutional right to vote.

In 2005, with the help of Trump commission member Hans Von Spakovsky, Georgia pioneered a photo ID movement that is now status quo in more than 30 states. Former Secretary of State Karen Handel, who led that effort, was elected to the US House of Representatives last month. For two years in the Obama era, the state purged more names from its voter rolls than it registered new voters.

In March, US District Court Judge Timothy Batten Sr. found no problems with the state’s tactic of warning those who don’t regularly vote that they could be kicked off. “Maintenance of accurate voter registration rolls is a substantial governmental interest,” he wrote in his ruling.

But Emmet Bondurant, the lawyer who argued the case, has appealed the decision. He says not voting is just as much of a constitutional right as voting. “I expect a lot of people who have been purged in Georgia are people of color who were very enthused about Obama’s candidacy in 2008, voted for him, and then didn’t vote in subsequent elections, and were therefore purged,” he says.

The investigations going on from Hancock County to Washington, D.C., may help fill in the puzzle. In addition to the White House's voter commission and the Department of Justice's inquiry, the Supreme Court will hear several voting rights cases this fall, including an Ohio case that will test the extent to which states can purge voters from rolls.

In some cases, it has fallen on citizens like Warren in Sparta to hold officials accountable for unfairly or illegally denying people the franchise.

As the author of Cross Check – a system used by more than 30 states to check voter names against other states’ records – Kris Kobach, vice chair of the national commission and the Kansas secretary of State, has emerged as the nation’s foremost forensic fraud investigator.

But Mr. Kobach’s investigatory power has tested his own suspicions of “rampant” fraud. His office has prosecuted a total of nine cases of voter fraud since 2015. All but one were residents over 60 with properties in two states, who had gotten confused about where to vote. One was a non-citizen. Florida and Oregon recently dropped Cross Check, with Oregon officials complaining that the system was too error-prone.

'There is a reason I'm doing this'

But the White House commission has vowed to be thorough and fair in its investigation and recommendations. A letter sent to all 50 secretaries of State asks for voter data but also for input into how to prevent voter intimidation and disenfranchisement.

New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who has served in his capacity for more than four decades, joined the commission in May.

“There is a reason I’m doing this,” he told a local public radio station. “I care a lot about this. I’ve spent my whole life dealing with it, and it’s too bad that over half of the people in the country feel that there is vote fraud. Let’s find out why.”

The problem, voting rights experts say, is less gathering evidence than understanding what it means.

There’s little doubt that voter fraud and impersonation happens in the US, and has happened historically. But there is no evidence that it is widespread. Usually, the reasons are mundane mistakes. No elections in the modern era have been swayed by fraudulent in-person voting, according to research by political scientist Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the Election Law Blog.

'If you really want to vote, you can find a way'

That building tension between voter integrity and suspicions of fraud is evident here in Sparta. Yes, some voters kicked off the rolls had moved, primarily for work and school. But they still considered Sparta home, which is why they had not registered to vote anywhere else.

Hancock County election supervisor John Reid says that the voter roll purge “probably did turn some people off because it was intimidating.” But to him, the voting right is also in part a matter of personal responsibility – something worth fighting for. “If you really want to vote, you can find a way,” says Mr. Reid, an African-American.

For many African-Americans, however, such hoop-jumping has a familiar feel. Historically, from Reconstruction to the civil rights era, gains in voting rights have been followed by retrenchment, often at the hands of white officials seeking to preserve a demographic and political status quo against the country's growing racial and political diversity. Since the 2013 Supreme Court Shelby v. Holder decision, which invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act, formerly DoJ-supervised states such as Texas, Alabama, and North Carolina have invoked stricter voting rules that courts have found disproportionately affect young people and low-income minorities, who tend to vote Democrat.

Up in Wisconsin, Mayer's research may help resolve some of the tension. He says county clerks are awaiting his fact-finding report on the 2016 election to help them encourage, not discourage, people to vote.

On a recent Friday night, when many women are spending time with their families or going to see a rom-com movie with friends, Renee Jones is doing something unconventional. She’s driving around Cleveland’s seedier neighborhoods, visiting some of this city’s most notorious strip clubs.

Her intention isn’t to see the young women perform. It is to connect with them in hopes of preventing the women from falling prey to one of the country’s most overlooked but vexing social problems: sex trafficking.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Carla Lovejoy, a volunteer with the Renee Jones Empowerment Center, packs up gift bags to be handed out to women at strip clubs who are at risk of being recruited by sex traffickers.

Around 8:30 p.m., in front of a small storefront on the city’s west side, she and three volunteers – including a nurse and a Roman Catholic nun – climb into Ms. Jones’s Mitsubishi Galant. At the first destination, the Lido Lounge, the women approach each dancer and hand her a gift bag. The packet contains a cornucopia of cosmetics, candies, and trinkets, along with a personal note.

The note does not include any expli­cit instructions for the women to leave the strip club, or the owner wouldn’t allow them to distribute the bags. Instead, it contains a general message of support about their dignity and value. It is signed “Your friends from the Renee Jones Empowerment Center,” with the organization’s phone number. 

The women get the subtext: If they are approached by anyone trying to coerce or compel them to work as prostitutes, they have a group they can turn to for help – and often do. The dancers gleefully rummage through the bags.

“I can’t explain what it is,” says Jones. “But I believe we have a grace to do certain things. These girls have a need, and we’re filling something that’s missing from their lives. [What we’re saying is] you’re a woman, and you’re worth it.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

The gift bags contain cosmetics, candies, and trinkets, as well as a personal note. The note includes a general message of support for the women and gives them a number they can call if they feel they are being coerced into working as prostitutes.

Fearless and passionate, Jones is on a crusade to stamp out sex trafficking and provide women survivors with a place of comfort and safety. Her novel outreach effort is part of a broader campaign under way in Cleveland that is making the heartland city a leader in trying to eradicate a problem that affects thousands of young people each year.

The initiatives range from tougher laws against sex and labor trafficking, to special “safe harbor” courts that treat children caught up in prostitution more humanely, to a billboard campaign reminding Ohioans that all this “Happens Here Too.”

But behind all these efforts are a few individuals who are striving to chip away at a problem that many experts believe receives too little attention in society: people like Jones, a former corporate executive who used to work in the realm of pumps and pinstripe suits and now navigates an underworld of pimps, drugs, and fatal shootings. 

“Renee is an angel, and I want her to be my mom,” says state Rep. Teresa Fedor (D) of Toledo, who has championed anti-trafficking bills in the Ohio legislature. “She’s incredible in what she’s built as a model for our nation.”

According to global estimates, sex and labor trafficking represent a criminal industry worth as much as $150 billion each year, second only to illegal narcotics. The dark enterprise victimizes nearly 21 million people, mainly women but also some men, and about 300,000 minors. Trafficking is believed to happen in every country in the world. Perhaps most disturbing, experts say that there are more sex and labor slaves in the world today than at any time in history.

Ohio is indicative of the problem. The National Human Trafficking Resource Center ranked Ohio fourth in 2016 in the volume of trafficking calls to its hotlines, after California, Texas, and Florida.

The state is susceptible to trafficking for several reasons. It has an extensive highway system that allows easy transport of victims, as well as a large number of truck stops that serve as active prostitution sites. Numerous strip clubs statewide provide fertile recruiting grounds for traffickers. Moreover, the current opioid epidemic that has hit the state hard – Ohio leads the nation in opioid overdoses – allows pimps to use people’s addictions as a way to coerce them into prostitution.

Jones does strip club outreach, for example, because she knows that traffickers recruit many women who work as dancers. Typically, the process starts with a pimp complimenting a dancer on her beauty, tipping her $50 or $100, and then asking her out on a date. At that point, he will identify the woman’s vulnerabilities – love, poverty, heroin – that he can leverage to control her life.

Sometimes, fake “boyfriends” take advantage of impressionable young girls. 

This was the case with Rachel Kaisk. Growing up in Barberton, Ohio, she was excited about a future as an equestrian. She was 16 and in the process of applying to the horse veterinarian program at The Ohio State University in Columbus when a slightly older and very friendly man talked her into going on a getaway weekend. It devolved into 15 years of subjugation. 

According to Ms. Kaisk, the man coerced her into prostituting herself at a truck stop in Youngstown, Ohio; he got her addicted to crack, and then relocated her to New York and New Jersey for many years.

Kaisk eventually made it back to Cleveland in 1998, where she was able to escape that life and begin a slow process of recovery. She has regularly attended events at the Renee Jones Empowerment Center (RJEC) since she sought help roughly five years ago. Now, she’s become a public speaker for the center, sharing her story to help herself heal and keep others from becoming victims.

“I love Renee and don’t know what I would do without her, because she just gives you all that love and caring, and she helps you with anything,” says Kaisk.

In the United States, recognition of the extent of sex trafficking rose after Congress enacted the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act in 2000, which sought to both crack down on those who enslave people and provide greater support to victims. Ohio did not pass a law against the offense until 2010. Much of the concerted effort here, both before and since then, has come from activists like Jones, who find the thought of trafficking humans abhorrent and unconscionable.

In the mid-1990s, Jones was leading a comfortable life. She was working as a human resources manager at Medical Mutual, a Cleveland-based health insurance firm, and then transitioned to a similar position at the Great Lakes Science Center, a museum and educational facility. Her two children were both in college.

In her free time, she rode horses in parades and at Civil War reenactments as one of two women members of the Buffalo Soldiers, a group that honors the legendary African-American troops who fought for the Union Army. Yet working downtown, she was becoming frustrated at seeing all the homeless people wandering the streets who were not being helped. They were getting free meals, but little was being done to address the root causes of their plight. So she volunteered to conduct workshops on employment skills at a county center. 

She taught people how to use computers at the library to write résumés and search for employment. She ended up placing 75 people in jobs.

“I learned firsthand from that experience that if you can get people who feel so hopeless to hope again, you open them up to a whole new life of possibilities,” she says. “You empower them to take charge of their lives, and I enjoyed seeing their lives renewed through the process.”

A friend told her about a vacant storefront in her neighborhood and pressed her to start a center to help the homeless. Jones opened the RJEC in 2002. 

But, in doing her outreach work, she began to meet women and young girls working the streets who were facing much bigger problems than being homeless.

“When I saw how trafficked victims suffered at the hands of their traffickers physically and mentally, how most of the victims had no support or resources to help them get out of this life, I was compelled to create a treatment model to help victims recover and help them rebuild their lives,” she says.

Jones continued to work in human relations while helping victims of trafficking at night and on weekends. Then, last year, she received a grant from the Ohio attorney general’s office, which allowed her to work full time at the RJEC, where she spends 50 to 60 hours a week when she’s not roaming strip clubs.

The center serves as a one-stop shop for a variety of services that survivors of sex trafficking use to heal from the trauma they’ve endured by being forced to have sex with strangers, sometimes as many as 20 times a day. The victims usually have to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other related maladies.

To help them do that, RJEC’s Project Red Cord offers programs ranging from art therapy and mentoring, to legal and financial assistance, to free dental care and health classes. The center remains the area’s only nonprofit agency committed to providing life coaching and aftercare services to help break the human trafficking cycle. 

“I have never met anyone who cares more, does more, and sacrifices more to help and empower victims of trafficking to live healthy, happy lives,” says Maureen Guirguis, who also obtained a grant from the Ohio attorney general’s office in 2016 to fund a human trafficking project at Case Western Reserve School of Law. “Renee truly is a visionary, a role model, and a hero to countless women and girls.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Judge Marilyn Cassidy greets participants in a Cleveland human trafficking court, which offers treatment for victims charged with a misdemeanor.

Marilyn Cassidy is trying to help victims of sex trafficking in Cleveland as well but through a different venue – the legal system. In 2012, the municipal court judge attended a workshop in Chicago held by the National Judicial Institute on Domestic Violence.

She had regularly seen women coming through her courtroom who had alcohol and other drug problems and who were frequently the victims of domestic abuse. What she didn’t fully appreciate was that many of them were also being forced to work as prostitutes by human traffickers. She started to realize that all of the women’s problems were often bound up together – and required special attention to get at the underlying causes. 

“Part of it was recognizing who these women are that are arrested for prostitution or a drug-related felony,” says Judge Cassidy. “It was also the recognition that these women are being victimized in different ways and that we were in a position as a municipal court to identify and directly impact some of these women by helping them address those issues.”

In 2014, she started a specialized court that dealt with victims of human trafficking. It was set up under a specialized docket program established by the Ohio Supreme Court. The idea was to not just lock up adult women who have been forced into prostitution but get them into drug or alcohol rehabilitation programs, safe shelters, and trauma counseling, as well as to connect them with places such as the RJEC.

The twice-a-month court sessions are certainly different from the standard adversarial courtroom clashes between lawyers. Before each gathering, Cassidy meets with her treatment team to review the case of every woman who will appear before her. 

When the women enter the courtroom, they are offered coffee and an array of baked goods laid out on the table normally occupied by defendants and their legal teams. Participants who are already in jail for other offenses, such as drug possession or drunken driving, sit in the jury box in their prison scrubs.

When the court session begins, Cassidy steps from behind the bench, sans robes, and begins dancing to the B.B. King song “Better Not Look Down.” She encourages everyone to clap. She approaches each woman and shakes her hand or gives her a big hug, except for those who don’t want to be touched. “They’re used to being beaten down and ignored,” she says. “Especially since court traditionally is, ‘Do what I say or I’ll lock you up.’ ”

Then each woman steps up to a lectern facing Cassidy’s bench. Karen Stanton, the docket coordinator, reviews the details of each woman’s status, her successes such as landing a new job or a certain amount of time sober, and what she may still need to do, such as find a new place to live or receive more drug counseling. A public defender assists women with pending legal issues. 

Cassidy makes her exchanges as conversational as possible, but she employs a no-nonsense, tough-love approach. One woman holds a baby she delivered three days earlier. When she gets flustered by the judge’s resistance to her desire to move to Florida before completing the program, Cassidy calms her by saying, “Relax. You just had a baby! We’ll figure it out.”

While Ohio may be doing what it can to help victims of sex trafficking, it is not being lenient toward the traffickers themselves. The Safe Harbor Law, passed in the state legislature in 2012, raised the penalty for trafficking in persons from a second-degree to a first-degree felony with a mandatory prison term of 10 to 15 years. Brian Vigneaux, who recently served as investigator for the human trafficking unit in the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office, says pimps used to actually boast about serving time in prison, because it gave them more street credibility and the sentences weren’t too long. That’s no longer true.

The retired FBI agent notes that the county has also formed an extensive regionwide trafficking task force that includes local and federal law enforcement agencies as well as social service groups.

“Departments are joining us because they get a lot of bang for their buck when they pursue a human trafficking charge rather than a penny-ante narcotics or promoting-prostitution charge,” says Mr. Vigneaux. “When you have a team of several guys working a particular pimp case, everyone uses his particular expertise to develop the case further, so it’s a lot quicker and more efficient.”

As much as courts and cops have cracked down on trafficking, though, experts say another key to eradicating the problem is public awareness. It helps to keep police and politicians focused on the issue.

One of the most ambitious efforts in this area is an organization that distributes posters and fliers and puts up billboards that proclaim the problem “Happens Here Too.” Founded in 2007 by Karen Walsh and Toby Lardie, the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking provides a range of education and advocacy services for the prevention and abolition of human trafficking.

The group teaches health-care officials how to support victims and provides training for hotel and restaurant staff so they can recognize when pimps are deviously plying their trade. Additionally, the collaborative acts as the lead coordinator for more than 30 agencies and groups that constitute Greater Cleveland’s Coordinated Response to Human Trafficking initiative. 

“Our mission requires a multidisciplinary, victim-centered approach to educate,” says Ms. Walsh, who began her career as a teacher but became an attorney in her 40s. “Our work continues to evolve because this is really a generational change, since the crime isn’t new, but we’re changing how we look at an old reality.”

Despite all these efforts, sex and labor trafficking remain major problems in Cleveland and across the state. The increased use of the internet by pimps to recruit women has contributed to the difficulties. So, too, has Ohio’s opioid crisis, which is aggravating social problems of all kinds.

Jones and other experts agree that several things still need to happen to have any chance of reducing sex trafficking. One is encouraging even more collaboration among police and social service agencies. 

Another is helping judges, cops, and others to recognize the signs of human trafficking so women can be treated as victims rather than criminals. More resources are also needed, they say, to house, counsel, and treat survivors.

But people like Jones are helping, one victim at a time, and often at considerable risk to themselves. At one strip club she and the volunteers regularly visit, gunfire erupted after an apparent botched robbery in November. 

At another club, Magic City, two men ended up in a gunfight with Cleveland’s SWAT team in March. The security guard there won’t let the volunteers in with their gift bags anymore. He takes them at the door and gives them to the dancers.

Still, Jones is not one to focus on the dangers to herself. She’s too busy concentrating on the problem at hand. When she and others were training Kaisk, the trafficked survivor, to become a public speaker for the RJEC, Jones told the woman at one point:

“Every time you come to the center, Rachel, even though you may still be struggling and in pain, you’re helping someone. We’ve had many young girls, 15 or 16, who we couldn’t get through to. But when you shared your story as an adult who’d been trafficked, you helped save their lives.”

Tom Sherlin/The Daily Times/AP

Tremont Citizen Science Coordinator Tiffany Beachy holds a black-throated green warbler before releasing it after it was examined and banded at Tremont Institute at Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Townsend, Tenn., during Citizen Science Day bird banding, May 25, 2017.

Andrew Grey doesn’t fit most people’s vision of an astronomer. He works in a garage, not in a lab or university, yet the Australian mechanic discovered a star system hiding in data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope.

Mr. Grey is one of millions of citizen scientists helping researchers to expand collective understanding. Ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds have been contributing to science for centuries on a small scale, but advances in technology have brought a higher level of democratization to science.

“This is a collaborative endeavor that anyone could get involved in,” says Chris Lintott, an Oxford University astrophysicist and cofounder of Zooniverse, a platform that hosts dozens of citizen science projects. Citizen scientists can contribute to breakthroughs in almost any field, from ecology to astrophysics.

As long as pattern recognition is involved, there are no limits to what can become a citizen science project, Dr. Lintott says. Anyone can identify patterns in images, graphs, or even seemingly boring data after a short tutorial, he says. Machine learning allows computers to do some pattern recognition. But humans, particularly amateur scientists, get distracted, Lintott says. And that’s good, he says, because distracted people notice the unusual things in a data set.

And citizen science doesn’t have to be directed by a scientist, says Sheila Jasanoff, director of the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard University. “Citizens generating knowledge in places where official organs have failed them” can also be citizen scientists, she says. That’s what happened in Flint, Mich., when a local mother initiated drinking water tests that prompted a broader investigation of lead levels.

Citizen-powered research is as old as scientific inquiry. For centuries before science became professionalized, regular people looked for patterns in the world around them. Despite a wealth of sophisticated equipment and computer models, scientists still welcome help from everyday people.

As a professional scientist himself, Lintott says, “people think that we’re intelligent, but science is easy and we need your help.” 

Daniel Bockwoldt/AP

A man looks through the broken window of a shop in Hamburg, Germany, Saturday, after antiglobalization activists rioted during the G20 meetings.

For Germans, in particular, last weekend was eye-opening. 

For some time, the country has been concerned about its far-right political fringe. Recent years have seen rallies by Pegida, an anti-Islamic group, gain momentum, as well as those by the far-right Alternative for Germany party. Germany, it seemed, was in the midst of its own turn to the populist right.

But at the Group of 20 summit last weekend, something entirely different came to the fore: left-wing extremism. Germans were shocked by what they saw in the streets of Hamburg: protesters turning the event into a gallery of water cannons and broken glass. 

We’ve seen this before, at the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests, at President Trump's inauguration, and elsewhere: a class of hardened left-wing protesters turning free expression into something darker. The German Ministry recently concluded: “In the past few years the acceptance and intensity of violence in the far-left scene has noticeably increased. This is especially true of violence against police and political enemies (particularly real or imagined right-wing extremists.),” according to the German news agency Deutsche Welle.

The point is not to chart right-wing and left-wing violence in order to assign blame and decide which is worse. The point is to recognize that extremism in whatever form is a red flag – a signal that sections of society are feeling so impotent and adrift that they see no choice but to resort to violence and extremist ideologies. 

One expert has long seen more similarities than differences among extremists. Daniel Koehler of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies has worked with neo-Nazis and Islamic State recruits. 

“They talk a lot about justice. They talk a lot about freedom. They want to change the society into a positive direction. They believe that they're doing something good for humanity,” he told NPR.

Indeed, for many radicals, violence is a desperate, though misguided, step to do good, he said. “Positive aspects like quest for significance, justice, help [for the] poor, [defense of] women and children, Syria, delivering humanitarian aid,” he said. 

What kindles violence is the mix with the negative: “they have not felt that they are part of a society,” Mr. Koehler said. 

Koehler’s answer: Flip the equation. Take away the bad influences and turn up the volume on the good, like finding role models for extremists to look up to, he told the Monitor’s Warren Richey for his ISIS in America series.  

“The only thing we can do is build up the family or the social environment as a counterforce,” he said. “That is the only way we can succeed.”

It might sound like Parenting 101. In many ways, it is. And that puts the battle against extremism of all stripes in a different light.