Open Your Eyes Defining Sex Trafficking in Rural PA
for the past
almost 20 years i have been
an educator a trainer an advocate
and a counselor
the agency that i work for provides
services to victims and survivors of
domestic violence sexual assault
and all other serious crimes hmm
all other serious crimes what exactly
does that
mean well armed robberies carjackings
muggings stalking and human trafficking
now when i was first approached to be an
educator for
human trafficking i’ve been a
pretty perceptive person all my life and
i felt that
if that was going on in my community in
my hometown
i would have seen signs of that by now
so i always start out
all my talks with the quote from d h
lawrence that says
what the eye doesn’t see and the mind
doesn’t know doesn’t exist
and what that means is i didn’t see it
i didn’t know it existed there were no
signs around me
so therefore i thought it wasn’t an
issue
but i also realized that i had a very
wrong
definition of what human trafficking was
so i’ve seen the movies i’ve seen the tv
shows
just like all of you have probably seen
taken taken
one taken two taken again still
taken matter of fact on netflix i think
you can be taken weekly
but all joking aside that’s
not what the definition is that’s not
what’s happening in our hometown
we don’t have a father like liam neeson
who is traveling continents to bring his
loved ones back home
what i’m going to talk about today is
human trafficking of minors
that are happening right here in our
community that are the throwaway kids
they’re the forgotten kids they’re the
ones that nobody goes looking for
and nobody cares to venture out for
human trafficking by definition just so
we’re clear
is modern day slavery it’s
the exchange of a sex act
for an item of value usually one person
selling another person like a commodity
and that doesn’t have to be
cash it doesn’t have to be money it can
be food it can be shelter
it can be clothing it can be anything
that has
any assigned value to it whatsoever
it’s an act by a means for
purpose so all of these things you see
on the slide behind me
the act transports facilitates
harbors any of those where
the minor victim or any victim
is being coerced forced or through fraud
tricked in to the life
that has been very misleading to them
for the means which is
whatever it takes for a trafficker to
trick
a victim into this situation and the
purpose
is ultimately to sell that victim for
sex
who is trafficked i want to give you all
the who what where whens and whys
of all this and i want to be able to
prove to you that this is happening in
our hometowns in our communities and in
our backyards
so it can happen to anyone what my
conversation is about with you is that
this happens to mostly minor girls
that’s according to statistics through
the department of justice
and other data that has been gathered
across the board so
with it happening to anyone men women
boys
girls they can be us citizens
they don’t have to be u.s citizens they
can be
vulnerable populations are mostly the
targets
and as i mentioned mostly minor girls
now we ask ourselves how do these kids
get themselves into these situations
well it’s not necessarily these kids
getting themselves into
this situation it’s these kids being
tricked
and lured into this life they’re
promised
hope and that any future is better than
the position that they’re in many
are approached by individuals claiming
to be boyfriend
material or husband material and i can
guarantee you a better education i can
guarantee you a better life i can give
you
more love and attention than what you’re
getting now
but if the grass is greener on the other
side
that’s something that we have to think
about and sometimes things are too good
to be true
and if they’re too good to be true
that’s because they are too good to be
true
but manipulating a child’s mind
if an adult is very savvy and very
clever
and knows exactly what to do and what to
say they’re able
to do that the mind of a child
is easily manipulated
my first encounter with a victim of
human trafficking in my
own area was several years back
when we as individuals that work
in our agency go on an on-call rotation
and i happened to answer the phone on
one particular day
having the phone for the weekend and a
young girl
on the other end was explaining to me
her situation where she was
what was happening to her what was
expected of her
and she just gave me the whole situation
but
she didn’t consider herself a victim
of trafficking she was telling me about
the abusive relationship that she tried
to get out
contacted a friend back in this area who
drove to harrisburg to get her
to bring her back to here anna
was the young woman that had been placed
in a motel room
less than seven miles from my home
it got real i drew blank i didn’t know
what
to do i had to kind of scramble
and i gathered my thoughts and i thought
this woman is describing to me
everything that i have learned about
victims
of domestic sex trafficking
the commercial sexual exploitation of
victims
in pennsylvania and in our community is
prevalent
she was three and a half months pregnant
she reached out to a friend who ended up
turning out to be
the bottom girl a recruiter for a
well-known trafficker
just in the next county over
he still walks around today now
she was being added to his stable
when they brought her back into this
area in
just the snap of your fingers they took
her to walmart
bought her clothing very seductive
clothing had taken pictures
of her and had posted her for sale on
backpage.com
now for those of you who don’t know what
backpage is
backpage is much like craigslist
they have a lot of different
classifications a lot of different
categories of things for sale
and in this particular case there was an
escort service section
where they were selling minor kids for
sale
now when the federal government reached
out to craigslist and told them
that they were also selling kids for
sale craigslist immediately shut that
portion down
but backpage because of the revenue this
was generating did not
polarisproject.org operates the national
human trafficking hotline
and as you see here what i’ve singled
out
is the commonwealth of pennsylvania and
if you look at common
the commonwealth of pennsylvania you
will see all the hot spots
that the signals indicate where there
has been suspected or reported cases
of trafficking mostly of minors
when you look through there
you will see the line that is supposed
to go
up through the center lining aligning
with route 15
is the number one corridor in our
geographic area for transporting victims
of trafficking now we all know our
geographic location right here today
and route 15 is not that far from us
these victims are transported north and
south east and west
all across pennsylvania all across our
country
and they are sold for sex sometimes
bouncing from trafficker to trafficker
to trafficker
but many of them will be branded or
tattooed with their trafficker’s name
because they’re a piece of property and
that way when they want to be
or can be returned to their trafficker
people know where to take them and where
to drop them off
these victims are through force fraud
and coercion tricked as i mentioned
they’re addicted to a variety of drugs
as another means
to get them to do what they’re supposed
to do
to do what they’re expected to do and to
do what they’re being demanded
to do it’s
shocking to think that the number of
victims when we think of trafficking
we think of the victims being
transported in to
our country and although the numbers are
staggering
the numbers are only fourteen thousand
five hundred to seventeen thousand five
hundred victims are trafficked into
the u.s every year according to the
department of justice
but the victims that are trafficked
within the u.s borders
in a given year are between 100 000 to
300
000 and again mostly minor girls
the department of justice indicates that
if a child runs away from home
three or more times in a 12-month period
they have an 80 percent higher chance of
encountering a trafficker
and being trafficked this is one
kid too many one kid too many that’s out
on the street
that are being forced into this life
being threatened
being beaten being told that yeah you
can leave
but your ten-year-old sister will take
your place they’re embarrassed by the
fact that they’re doing what they’re
doing
they’re being blackmailed they’re being
horribly horribly
treated and scared and terrified to
death
to leave their trafficker now some
people have said why don’t you just
leave
why don’t they just walk away because
they’re scared fear of the known
for these individuals beats out fear of
the unknown
they know what to expect they know
what’s happening to them
and they know that and they fear that
but getting out on their own pointing
the finger at their trafficker
is in some cases a death sentence for
these victims
the number of minors that are trafficked
throughout
the united states could fill 1 300
school buses
that’s how many kids are being
trafficked and sold for sex
i want you to take a look at the
pictures behind me just quickly what
you’re going to see
is the mug shots from a denver police
officer
who had these individuals arrested
this is the same one this one girl was
arrested for prostitution
and every time she was arrested for
prostitution they took a mug shot over
and you can see the progression from
each mug shot
as how to identify the types the abuse
that this victim suffered and the
addiction
the drug use that this victim
traffickers will use a drug
as well here this will help you get
through this
this will help you do what you’re
supposed to do or
they will withhold the drug and say well
if you don’t do what you’re supposed to
do
then you don’t get this drug and to an
addict
withholding a drug is just as bad as
giving them the drug in the first place
who are the traffickers can be anybody
can be the guy next door it can be the
neighbor it can be the businessman
see my superhero capes are in three
sizes
the first one was let’s go talk to the
victims
tell the victims this isn’t how you have
to live your life there’s services
there’s agencies there’s people out
there that can help you
well these victims are terrified they’re
not going to leave they’re scared to
death to point the finger or testify
against their trafficker
and so we’re kind of at a loss
my next one was these are pimps
these are sometimes boyfriends these are
sometimes parents
step parents foster parents grandparents
the list goes on of those who decided
that getting out of poverty
was the way to do it was to sell
a family member and cash in on all this
the profit because it looks so good
is a hundred and fifty billion dollars
a year that’s an income
that is generated across the u s for
trafficking
so the money is the motivation
traffickers are one step ahead of the
law they don’t have to follow the law
now police do in order to make an arrest
but traffickers know
how to avoid all that and they usually
have the victim end up
holding the cash holding
the phone that made the appointments
everything
these victims of trafficking are
helpless they feel hopeless
they feel that there’s nothing more in
their life for them than this
so when we couldn’t reach the victim and
we couldn’t reach
the the trafficker we decided to
investigate a little bit and through
documentation of arrests and criminal
charges
we found out that the profile of a sex
buyer who drives
the organization and the
the demand for trafficking is a white
male works full-time
educated married makes a pretty good
income between the ages the first
category was 30 to 39
and the next was 40 to 49.
one of the things we need to understand
is these kids
they are not for sale they shouldn’t be
for sale
when we see something when we suspect
something we need to report it
and we need to make sure that we’re
doing everything we can to help these
kids
not get tricked into this life remember
that
i am not for sale have conversations
bring awareness to this issue make a
difference make a change
thank you