Human trafficking is not just about bringing people
across borders and selling them. The
issue is far more complex than that. According
to the Department of Homeland Security, “Human trafficking is modern-day slavery and involves the use of force,
fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act”. In the
research we have done, human trafficking is between a $32-42.5 billion/year
industry worldwide and it is happening right here, in our own city. It is between a $5-$9 billion/year industry
in the US alone and rising. In
2008, the United Nations estimated that 2.5 million people from 127 countries
were trafficked. The average age for
boys and girls is eight and 11, respectively. Two years ago the average age for
girls was 12 years of age. About half of
the females trafficked worldwide are under legal age. When it comes to females, the traffickers are
praying on younger pre-teen/teenage girls, who are ditching school, having
social issues, suffering from depression, experiencing sexual/physical assault,
mental abuse, etc. The pimps/traffickers
are either sending a girl close to the victims age or a “Romeo” pimp to befriend them and gain their
trust. These girls often times go to
school and work from the inside to recruit for the pimp/trafficker.
More times than not,
the victims have suffered from physical abuse, sexual assault or mental abuse
in their own home. In a presentation to
NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), CASA’s (Center Against Sexual Assault)
Human Trafficking Outreach Worker explained that the pimps use The Maslow Hierarchy
of Needs to seduce and manipulate their victims. This way, they make the victims believe that
they are prostituting on their own free will and that they want to be working. The victims are manipulated by the pimp to
the point they protect the pimp and will not ask for help, even in very public
places. Upon initial contact, if the
victim does not have any vulnerabilities, the pimp will try to break the victim
down, create a vulnerability, then build them back up. The pimp then becomes the person that built
them up, even though they initially are the ones who broke the victim
down. However, the victim is so
manipulated by that point, that he/she doesn’t ever see that. The pimp and his prostitutes create a
family-like structure, giving the victims the “family/stability” and even “love”
that they were not getting at home. Yes,
this is a lot of work, but imagine the pay off.
CASA’s Outreach Worker explained that this is not like a drug
transaction where the drugs are sold then consumed. Once consumed, drugs cannot be re-sold. However, with human trafficking, the product
(in this case children, males and females) can be sold many times a day, every
day. From the trafficker’s perspective,
there is a high return on investment. What are the repercussions?
Survivors of human trafficking suffer from PTSD, at minimum. The mental, physical and emotional trauma
they experience is horrific.
The Maslow Hierarchy of Needs
1.Physiological needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep.
2. Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, stability, freedom from fear.
3. Love - friendship, intimacy, trust and acceptance, receiving and giving affection and love, being part of a group (family, friends, work).
4. Esteem needs – achievement, independence, status, dominance, prestige, self-respect, respect from others.
5. Self-Actualization needs - realizing personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.
Why Hemet? It is still fairly rural. There are quiet back roads in and out of
Hemet. As we can see, this activity is taking place in bus
stops, motels/hotels, truck stops, massage businesses, etc. There are known strips of prostitution. In
Hemet, this area is Florida Ave. Aside from attending the presentation
given to NAMI, I recently met with the Human Trafficking Outreach Worker for
CASA. The Human Trafficking Division formed in May of 2016 and it is being
built from the ground up. The outreach worker
told me that there are also workers coming into Hemet from out of town. They are
coming in from San Bernardino, Los Angeles, San Diego, out of state, etc. Hemet is the place to be right now. The idea is to keep the sex trafficking victims
disoriented on time and location, so that they do not gain any stability and
ground – keeping them from thinking about goals and a life of their own. The victims are often times branded with
tattoos. Before, hands were tattooed
with symbols. Now, what we are seeing is
the tattooing of bar codes. In an
article from 2014 by The Independent (UK media source) the “symbolic tattoos
assert ownership over 'assets' that can be sold for thousands of pounds”. We are
also seeing this locally. An article regarding
human trafficking out of San Diego is below.
Most of the
time the advertising is done on-line, making it seem as though the problem has disappeared.
The prostitutes have been dressing
differently to blend in more into the surrounding environment. Just because a
woman is wearing skimpy clothing does not mean that she is prostituting and
vice-versa. We have massage businesses and motels interwoven and lining Florida
Avenue. The statistics on trafficking are
difficult to collect because a good portion of the time, the victims do not
even know that they are victims. According
to CASA’s outreach worker, they are trafficked into Hemet from out of the county
and state for only a portion of time, approximately a day or two. The
advertising is done on-line and appointments are usually set-up prior to their
arrival. There have been ordinances (Chapter
18, Article VII – Massage, Sec 18-211 – Sec 18-233) created in the City of
Hemet for massage businesses, but when you check www.backpage.com, there are a
multitude of locations that pop-up in Hemet alone, not to mention surrounding
areas. There are also ordinances
regarding adult businesses and adult business performers (Chapter 18, Articles
X and XI). According to the article by
The Independent, other places where victims are being recruited include “online
dating, social media sites and fake job adverts online”. The selling is also happening on mainstream social
media sites. Facebook actually addresses
this on one of their Help Center pages, “What should I do if someone posts
something related to human trafficking?”
Another issue – The pimps and traffickers are no longer
just your stereotype. It has expanded to
include your CEOs, elected officials, local business owner, etc. They have their day job or business that they
run, then have this entire enterprise set-up on the side. There is a hierarchy. The victims do not get
any of the money that they make for themselves.
The pimp/trafficker controls all of the money. The victims barely eat. However, they may be given a roof over their
head to sleep at night. If the pimp/trafficker
thinks it is worth the investment, then they will give the victim money to get
their hair and nails done. They may get the victims gifts on occasion, but that
is just to further the manipulation. It
has also been the case that to keep the victims from escaping/leaving, the
pimp/trafficker will tell the victims that they will kill their family members
if they leave. Victims come from all different backgrounds. The victims do not just come from low income
or impoverished neighborhoods. They also
come from wealthy neighborhoods.
Are human trafficking and homelessness related? Yes. There is the issue of drug addiction on
the streets. In some cases, if a person
was addicted to drugs before they came into the streets, they are pulled into
trafficking to maintain their addiction.
If they were not addicted prior to entering the streets, then the goal
is to befriend them, gain their trust and then get them addicted, so they can
prostitute and deal the drugs for the trafficker/pimp. Women on the streets are sexually assaulted
on a constant basis. The pimp/trafficker
may offer them a place to sleep for the night, so that they can get some sleep
instead of taking drugs to stay up all night, trying to avoid being sexually
assaulted.
It was discussed during the NAMI presentation and my
interview with the outreach worker that SB 1322, the bill that passed that no
longer prosecutes minors for prostitution, could backfire. The contact made with the survivors of sex
trafficking (offering resources) to get them out of that life when they are
able/ready (remember the level of manipulation) was done when they were
arrested and taken into the stations.
Because youth are no longer being prosecuted for prostituting, this now
removes the ability to make contact and offer resources in a safe place, away
from the eyes of their pimp/trafficker. Some of the backlash those working in
the field are expecting is a significant increase in the number if underage
prostitutes. This also means that the
amount of drug use among the youth is going to escalate. Just one of the things that happens when we
elect people who do not fully understand the policy they are creating, and
hence, create bad policy.
Below is the story of a local trafficking survivor. The survivor’s name has been changed to Abigail
to protect her identity. It will not,
under any circumstances, be revealed.
Abigail grew up locally. She learned from a very young age that if
anything happens to her that it is a result of her actions; that she did
something wrong. This was constantly
reinforced by family, including her mother and later, her in-laws. Her parents separated when she was a
baby. She remembers telling her mother
when she was with her dad that she did not want to visit him any longer because
he beat her. Her mother would respond
with; you must have done something wrong. This would stay with Abigail. She figured at an early age that it was
useless to say anything to anyone. She
felt that if I deserve the treatment, then it doesn’t make any sense to speak
up. Abigail was also told, by family,
that the only thing men would want from her is her body. When she was 12, she
starved herself. She started very young
looking to boys for validation and love because she did not have that at
home. When Abigail was 14 years old, the
“cool boy” in school wanted to go out with her.
All the girls wanted to be with him, but he chose her. She was invited
to his house and being very naive, she went in the house to his room where she
was sexually assaulted, even though she asked him to stop.
She met someone
else not long after and got pregnant. As a young mom, she began to heavily
party to cope with what had happened regarding the sexual assault. She ended up moving out of her mother’s house
and with the baby’s father at her in-law’s house. There, she was physically assaulted,
continually. Her in-laws would tell their son, just don’t beat her when she has
the baby. She wanted to leave, but was
told that she was not allowed to take the baby with her. She was not going to
take her baby and be homeless on the streets. So, in 2002 (at 22 years old), she
packed some things and went to Weston Park.
She would stay there at night, then go back home in the morning to take
care of her child. Of course, as she was at Weston Park during the night, she
turned to drugs to heal the pain and to try to stay awake. The times she fell asleep, chances were that she
was woken up to someone sexually assaulting her. This happened numerous times. The
first time she was sexually assaulted, she had only been living on the streets
for two weeks. She chose to continue the
drug use so that she could stay awake and walk up and down the street at night
to keep from being sexually assaulted.
Shortly after she started spending her nights at
Weston, she was approached by some women who told her that she could stay with
this woman in her house. Abigail explained that she didn’t understand at the
time what that was going to entail, but she wanted off the streets and out of
Weston Park.
When she went to stay with this woman at her house,
she was sent to motels to perform whatever act she was told. The lady had everything set-up so that her
girls were not on the streets but going to homes or motels. She never saw any money that she made. She said the woman was very mean. Eventually this woman, who was pimping her
out, passed away and the woman’s daughter was thrown in prison. Abigail turned
to prostitution herself for survival. Remember,
she had no money, no self-esteem, had been routinely beaten and sexually
assaulted. She didn’t know anything else
and was still living on the streets. She met a guy, who ended up being her
boyfriend. He would sneak her into his
mom’s house every now and then, so she had a place to stay for the night and
could sleep. Then, he started beating
her and pimping her out. He even put her
up for sale on the online sites without her knowledge. He had a huge amount of control over
her. He would tell Abigail that he loved
her and made her believe that she was the only person. Again, he had control over the money. So, she may have had a place to sleep at
night but food was another story. She
was constantly hungry.
On more than one occasion, they would be in a motel
room and her boyfriend would tell her that a man was coming to pick her up and
that she had to go with him. Otherwise,
she would be physically assaulted. Her
boyfriend was in and out of prison due to crimes he was committing. Every time, he was incarcerated, she would
feel free. However, she was far from
being free. This is a small town and
every time he was released; he knew where to find her. One of the times he was
incarcerated, she was picked up by some people who knew him (she did not know
this at the time) and was taken to Banning and beaten where she was left. They
were teaching her a lesson.
Another time, someone she thought was a friend picked
her up to go out. She woke-up in a motel room and bleeding to the point she couldn’t
even sit down. Even to this day, she has
no idea what happened to her that night. During the interview, she stated that
there are not enough showers that she could have ever taken. She knows that there are locations in this
valley that has had her blood splattered on the walls from being assaulted.
Due to the manipulation, she felt abandoned when her
boyfriend was in prison. Her thoughts
are, he at least offered her a place to sleep and there was no way to fuel her
habit and afford a motel/hotel room. Her body and her life were not her
own. Abigail was controlled with abuse
and drugs.
Since 2006, she has been out of the life, sober and has
been reunited with her family. She has a passion to help others, who have been
or are in a similar situation.
The amount of love Abigail has is truly a testament to
her strength; proving that we can overcome anything.
