Today, I stand as a confident woman. I don’t carry those negative labels given to me by society anymore. I’m no longer ashamed of my past and I don’t blame myself anymore. I had a death sentence over my life from the time I entered into this world. But no matter what trial was put before me, I overcame it.
—Rozlind Saumalu, sex trafficking survivor, leader, and expert
The United States is a place where significant sex trafficking takes place, and a large number of children who are sexually exploited are our own American children. Ernie Allen, in his September 15, 2010, testimony to the US House of Representatives, said of Americans,
Even if they acknowledge that this crime happens in the United States, they assume the victims are foreign children brought into this country who are trafficked only in large cities. In fact, we have learned that most of the victims of domestic minor sex trafficking are American kids who initially leave home voluntarily and are being trafficked on Main Street USA. One police commander said to me, “The only way not to find this problem in any community is simply not to look for it.”1
The prevalence of sex trafficking, including forced prostitution, is on the rise in part because traffickers have discovered that unlike drugs or weapons, people can be sold over and over again. A criminal who sells illegal drugs or weapons runs a higher risk of arrest and must always be putting out more cash to replenish their supply. In selling a human being, a trafficker brutally sells the person over and over. I have heard gang members declare that it’s a better business to sell “hoes” than drugs. If a police car pulls over a gang member, good luck explaining two kilos of cocaine taped under the dashboard. But if he just has his “nieces” in the car and is “heading to my uncle’s house,” law enforcement has little recourse when the girls and others back up his fictitious story. Once the two keys of coke is gone, dealers have to get more; human beings can be sold over and over again with very little risk. The bottom line in human trafficking is always money in exchange for people’s lives, which is why I consider it perhaps the most torturous crime on the planet.
“Human traffickers profit by turning dreams into nightmares,” says Michael Garcia, a US attorney in Manhattan. “These women sought a better life . . . and found instead, forced prostitution and misery.”2 Sadly, the same can be said about thousands of children as well.
A Life Lost
For most of us and for most of our children, turning thirteen and finally becoming a teenager is a time of excitement and anticipation. At that age, I hoped my parents would let me walk to the store alone or go to a movie or a roller-skating party with my friends without adult supervision. My most grown-up “naughtiness” at thirteen involved sneaking a little eye shadow, passing carefully folded notes to my girlfriends in class, or muttering a swear word when no adult was listening.
For thirteen-year-old Tiffany Mason,3 life looked much different. She and her twin brother William had been born to Lori Torres in San Francisco, California, in 1986. The eighties were an era when people in the “me generation” seemed to live for self-fulfillment and happiness “for today.” Sometimes that resulted in a mentality where people didn’t think ten minutes past what was right in front of their noses. As a part of that culture, and as a result of her difficult life, Lori listened more to the drug-addicted monster inside of her than the voice telling her to be a good mother.
By February 1988, Lori’s lifestyle and drug addiction had caught up with the young mother. Tiffany and William were sent off to live with family in California and Washington State, and were then juggled from relative to relative for the next eleven years. Consistency and roots would never be a part of their childhood. Although Tiffany craved loving, consistent discipline from someone, it was rarely available to her. She once told her cousin Jody Jensen, “I like coming to your house, because you have rules here.”4
Despite the hard hand she’d been dealt, Tiffany remained positive, always believing life would somehow get better. Meanwhile, the twins’ mother, Lori, continued to live a fast and irresponsible lifestyle until the late nineties when she began sobering up. Finally, in 1999, Tiffany and William were allowed to return to live with the mother they had only been able to visit sporadically. By then Lori had remarried and given birth to two additional children. So Tiffany and William shared their new home—room 305, a cramped and cluttered old room in the West Hotel on Eddy Street in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco—with their mother, her new husband, and two toddlers.5
The seedy hotel room was no place to reunite with and raise thirteen-year-old twins, and not just because of the lack of space. The Tenderloin district is infamous for its drug addicts, dealers, and prostitution (and combinations thereof). It’s not unusual to see people passed out in a doorway, lying in their own urine. It is also known as one of the roughest and most dangerous places for sex-trafficked individuals to walk the “track” (slang for the area where those selling sex solicit customers). Anything goes in the Tenderloin district.
Young Target
Tiffany had just outgrown the stage in which many young girls play with dolls and imagine what adult life will be like while playing house. As the friendly youngster who loved to giggle and laugh began to venture out of her hotel room home onto Eddy Street, however, those childhood memories would soon be far behind her. At four-foot-eleven, a shapely young woman’s figure was already beginning to emerge from her preadolescent, more rounded body, and her pretty hazel eyes and wide, bright, innocent smile were endearing. Tragically, a thirteen-year-old virgin is like a neon money sign to the pimps who frequent that area looking for vulnerable girls to sell, especially since young girls bring more money than older girls because of their innocent and tender ways.6
Before long, Tiffany began coming home with hundred-dollar bills. When questioned, she confessed to her mom that the money belonged to Damien “Pairadice” Posey, the pimp who allegedly trafficked Tiffany.7
Stories of young girls being recruited by pimps into forced prostitution are not as uncommon as one might hope. Twelve to fourteen is the average age that a girl is first turned out for commercial sexual exploitation.8
Lori Torres, who worked at Blondies Pizza trying to support her family, could all too readily imagine the danger and trouble ahead for her daughter Tiffany if she continued to live in the Tenderloin district. So although she was glad to finally have her children back despite the inevitable stress involved, she immediately relocated the family to Santa Rosa where she had relatives. Lori and her young family took up residence in a Motel 6, and she found a job waiting tables at the Hungry Hog Restaurant. When DHS learned that Lori had moved to a hotel out of the county, however, they brought the twins back to foster care, placing Tiffany in a group home only ten to fifteen minutes away from the Tenderloin district.
The ninth grader immediately started staying out late, worrying her foster mother. Then Tiffany began bringing home “gifts” typically given to victims by their pimps, such as stiletto shoes and seductive clothing. In Tiffany’s case, those gifts were also accompanied by fresh bruises. Back under the pimp control of Pairadice, after just three weeks she threw all her belongings in plastic bags and left in his glossy black Ford Explorer. It should have been no surprise to DHS, or to anyone else who understands the dynamics of a girl who has been trafficked, that Tiffany would reconnect with her pimp and quit school or that he would once again traffic her.
Hindered by the Social Services Designed to Help
Tiffany’s mom went to battle for her daughter. She reported what she knew about Pairadice, hoping to prompt his arrest and Tiffany’s subsequent release from his grasp.9 When the authorities did nothing, Lori’s hands were tied. “I was homeless, not on drugs. They took away my parental rights and then didn’t take responsibility for my kids,” says Lori.10 “I wasn’t a good mother. But if you’re going to take my kids, then protect them.”11
A few months later, Pairadice was arrested and Tiffany chose to move back with her mother illegally rather than stay in a group home. But that didn’t last long. The twisted, addictive lure of “the life” is strong once a girl has been seasoned and turned out as a sex slave. It is nigh to impossible to explain that unreasonable and insatiable pull, but Tiffany continued to go back, as the majority of girls do. When she was picked up by law enforcement for prostitution, the authorities insisted she be put back in the group home even though they should have suspected she wouldn’t stay.
“The [social services] system sets up a girl to go AWOL,” Laurel Freeman, a counselor at the Youth Guidance Center, told Examiner staff reporter Adrienne Sanders, author of a five-part series titled “Poster Child for Broken Promises.” “[The girl] has suffered trauma on the streets. She has a pimp hanging over her. It’s easier for them to stick her in a group home—even when they know she’s going to run—than it is to come up with something different. It’s like a tar pit, miring the girls farther down.”12
Pairadice knew exactly what to do to maintain his hold on Tiffany. Although she wanted to go back to school, he kept pimping her. He even picked her up in front of Francisco Middle School and later Mission High School, as well as two group homes and the DHS shelter.13 It was as if the system allowed pimps like Pairadice the same access as a responsible family member.
He also kept Tiffany away from people who would try to help her break free from the life, and he even threatened to kill one shop owner who tried to help her by occasionally buying her a meal or allowing her to sleep on his couch.14
Pairadice let Tiffany know who was boss. He pulled her hair often—one time even dragging her down the street by her hair. He strangled her. A second pimp called Bautiese “B. Rich” Richardson, a self-proclaimed “super pimp” well known for pimping young girls like Tiffany, pimped her as well. Amazingly, both men had worked in city youth programs as mentors. B. Rich was also known for his violence against the girls he pimped. After beatings he would tell the girls, “I’m sorry, you know I don’t like to hit you.” They were made to feel like it was their fault that B. Rich “had” to hit them.15
It is not known how, why, or exactly when Tiffany was shifted back and forth between the pimps like the trump card in a game, but it is a well-known fact that between them they controlled Tiffany’s every move. Pimps decide, among other things, where a girl will go, whom she will see, and what she will wear. In Tiffany’s case, Pairadice decided that her hair would be bleached blonde. “We’ll make more scratch [money] that way, Little Momma,” he told her. “Dudes dig blondes and you know it.”16
The life Tiffany lived, as a child whose body was sold multiple times a night to strangers on the streets, was no secret to anyone. Her mother knew and could do nothing to help. Her brother, who was mired in a boys’ foster home where it was reported that the counselors smoked blunts (marijuana-filled cigars) and drank brandy with him and the other foster boys, could do nothing to help.17 The police knew and would pick her up for prostitution, take her mace and money, and drop her off at the DHS shelter where she was unable to receive the help she needed.
Once, when one of her “regular” customers, a forty-nine-year-old man, was caught having sex with Tiffany, he was cited on a misdemeanor of soliciting a prostitute instead of for statutory rape or child molestation.18 According to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), any person under eighteen years old engaging in a commercial sex act (that is, exchanging a sex act for something of value) is a victim of severe human trafficking. According to that definition, there is no such thing as a “child prostitute.” Citing a sex buyer for soliciting a prostitute instead of arresting him for buying sex with a child only reinforced what Tiffany had been told repeatedly by her traffickers and others—that she was a “prostitute” and that’s all she was good for.
Nobody Should Be a Throwaway
“Protecting johns like this is collusion,” said the late Norma Hotaling, founder of the First Offenders Prostitution Program. “And it gave Tiffany the message that she was a ‘toss-away.’”19 Surprisingly, neither the streets nor the message of worthlessness hardened Tiffany. “Keep your head up,” she always told her friends.20
Despite her own difficult circumstances, Tiffany, who loved children, especially those with disabilities, still cared about others and did what she could to help them. “Tiffany was a bright spot in my life and she was generous,” says her cousin Jody Jensen. During a time when Jensen and her family were surviving on macaroni and cheese, Tiffany came and filled their refrigerator with groceries. Jensen told Tiffany, “I know where you get your money. You don’t have to do that, you’re a fourteen-year-old little girl.” Tiffany helped them out anyway.21
Sometimes when I’ve told her story, people have questioned why Tiffany, as a sex-trafficked girl, occasionally had money to spend or give away. While we know that pimps demand 100 percent of the girls’ money, some victims have been known to risk stashing small amounts of cash for a prospective escape or to help a family member as Tiffany did. Tiffany, however, would never get the assistance she so obviously needed.
One person, veteran child welfare social worker John Paul Carobus, did his best to help Tiffany, whom he called a “wounded dove.”22 Although he saw what was needed and tried to give her the services she deserved, he met with repeated opposition from his superiors. DHS bureaucrats seemed to be more interested in protecting their own reputations and preventing legal liabilities against themselves and their department than in saving Tiffany’s life.
Even so, Carobus made repeated attempts to get Tiffany off the streets. One afternoon he saw her sitting in an outdoor café on Market Street and ran across the street to greet the person he termed “the delightful brat.”23 He bought her lunch and talked to her about leaving the area to go be with some of her family in Santa Rosa, where her great-grandmother was celebrating a big birthday. Tiffany initially rejected his advice, but the thought of visiting certain relatives softened her resistance. After expressing embarrassment at her relatives seeing her in what she called “ho clothes,” she allowed Carobus to buy her a new outfit at Marshalls that would be more appropriate and to put her on a bus to her relatives.24
Knowing her lifestyle and that she was likely to go missing, Carobus asked a passerby to snap a picture of the two of them before she left. He figured with that picture, he could at least have something to put on a missing-child poster when it was needed. One might think that the higher-ups at DHS would applaud such caring actions toward a child so desperately in need of attention. Instead, Carobus was berated in front of his co-workers at a subsequent staff meeting. “I’m giving you a direct order,” Carobus’s superior told him. “If you see her again you don’t go talk to her. . . . You could be liable.”25 When Tiffany eventually did go missing, Carobus requested permission to print the picture he had taken for a poster to be distributed in the search for her. His request was denied by the city attorney’s office.26
Tiffany did not remain in Santa Rosa long. When Lori Torres went looking for Tiffany in San Francisco on June 5, 2001, she knew her daughter was in trouble and must have wanted to help her in the worst way. She found Tiffany on Mission Street and took her to KFC, where they ate dinner together.27
Tiffany knew she was in danger, as well as who was responsible. A few months earlier she had told Lori, “If anything happens to me, Mom, make [Pairadice] pay.”28
Tiffany and her mother discussed Tiffany’s current situation as they ate their chicken and mashed potatoes. Finally, Tiffany relented. “I’ll go with you,” she told her mother. “But I need some cash first. I’ll be back in a half hour.”
Without any legal rights to detain her own daughter, Torres couldn’t stop Tiffany from getting into a shiny black Lexus and leaving. She waited in vain for her return. Torres would never see her daughter alive again.29
On July 31, police picked up Tiffany at 18th and Capp Streets. When their computer check revealed that Tiffany was a missing juvenile, officers dropped her at a DHS shelter. Tiffany called her mom and begged her to come and pick her up. Although she had spent nearly two years in the dangerous and degrading life of being forced into prostitution by adult pimps, she was still too young to drive. But Torres had no gas and no money. She told her daughter to ask the staff at DHS to put her on a bus home to her mother. Later that night, Sprint shut off Lori Torres’s cell phone for nonpayment. That was the last conversation she and her daughter would ever have.30
The Circuit
Lori would find out after Tiffany’s death that on August 3, four days after their last conversation, Pairadice had driven Tiffany to Sacramento. Pimps often move their victims from city to city, and even from state to state, to minimize the chances of victims successfully reaching out for help and to satisfy the wants of those who buy sex from children like Tiffany. In the process, they increase their profits by providing variety for the sex buyers in the alternating venues, and the movement also helps them escape detection by law enforcement agents.31 After a couple of weeks, pimps again relocate their victims to the next place. “The bottom line is that they keep moving, especially [when] a child is [involved],” says Keith Bickford, a US Marshal working against human trafficking in the state of Oregon. “If a kid leaves foster care and ends up with a pimp, that kid is gone . . . within a couple hours. We’ve found them down in Las Vegas and we’ve found them up in Seattle.”32 Along the way, truck stops and strip clubs serve to season newly turned-out victims and provide plenty of clients to pad the money clips of pimps.
The objective is to keep the trafficked individual producing income, no matter what. If she looks like she’s on the verge of getting help, she’s moved. And if she gets pregnant, that’s taken care of too. Forced abortions are not uncommon among sex-trafficked girls. It makes no difference to the pimp if she wants to keep her child. One Mexican girl who had been trafficked across the border complained about terrible vaginal pain to no avail. “I asked repeatedly to be taken to the doctor. No one ever took me,” she recalled. “But they did take the girls who became pregnant to a doctor where they performed forced abortions.”33
The sex slave’s health and well-being is simply not an issue. Neither is her safety, as Tiffany’s story shows in heartbreaking detail. Tiffany was killed on August 4, the day after being driven to Sacramento. Her pimp, Pairadice, states that he remembers seeing her cross Stockton Boulevard and get into the car of a man who paid to have sex with her.
Five days later, a fisherman reported catching sight of a corpse drifting slowly with the current in Lake Natoma. Folsom police cast a large net and dragged out Tiffany’s nude body. Local campers, park rangers, law enforcement personnel, and medical examiners stood and watched the operation from the shoreline. Security officers stood guard on the edge of the crime tape to keep the public and reporters at bay.34
John Carobus, the social worker who had tried on many occasions to help Tiffany, had been denied permission to print her picture on the missing child poster because California law states that the child’s confidentiality can’t be broken. “Tiffany’s confidentiality certainly was broken when she was floating in the lake,” he remarked bitterly when her body was found.35
It is not known how many sex-trafficked children like Tiffany are murdered by sex buyers or by their pimps. They’re usually estranged from their families, so their relatives might not even know they are missing and be able to report it.
“They’re not going to file a missing person’s report,” a former pimp told me in an interview. “Her family may assume, ‘Oh, she’s probably out doing something bad somewhere and nobody really knows where she is.’” 36 Pimps won’t report a girl missing—or even check with the family to see if she has run home—because the finger will be pointed toward them. Besides, according to pimps, the girls are expendable. “There’s a big window of opportunity for girls to become [murder] victims [without anyone knowing],” the pimp told me. “It could be months to years before they’re ever found.” If they’re found at all.
Pimps Recruiting on the Internet
Tiffany was trafficked from 1999 to 2001, when most sex was still solicited on the streets and most victims were recruited in person. A growing demand for purchasing sex has now made the internet the most prominent place that victims are sex-trafficked. Traffickers still recruit in person but also utilize the internet and gaming sites to recruit behind the guise of a computer where they can easily assume varied identities.
Traffickers often troll for young teens in chat rooms and even younger children playing online video games. Xbox and PlayStation have become an avenue for complete strangers to communicate with our children while they are distracted with games. Sometimes they let the potential victim win in an attempt to establish a relationship. In many video games, playing with strangers in your own living room is the norm or even required for the game. Predators use these games to tell unsuspecting children whatever they need to in order to suck them into their web. Online threats such as these have substantially broadened the numbers of children now at risk. Before the easy access into our homes via the internet, perpetrators “had to sell the dream face-to-face . . . one girl at a time,” said Dallas police sergeant Byron Fassett, of the high-risk victim and trafficking unit. “Now the pond to fish out of just got even bigger.”37
After befriending a young person online for days, weeks, or even months, the trafficker often talks the youngster into running away from home to meet them. Once they are out of the protection of their home, the trafficker has great latitude to continue the process of grooming and begin trafficking the youngster for profit.
Selling Flesh Online
Using the internet to recruit victims as well as to connect sex buyers with sex—a huge and fast-growing method for the “marketing” of victims—provides consumers of sex with anonymity as well as relatively easy access to nearly anything sexual that could be desired. “The Internet serves as a virtual clearinghouse, a sex bazaar connecting demand and supply,” wrote one observer.38
The underhanded use of the internet to connect buyers of human flesh with those being sold isn’t limited to online porn sites or other sexually-oriented webpages. Shockingly, traffickers and others who sexually exploit unsuspecting victims frequent many well-known websites with legitimate uses—sites such as Facebook, Instagram, MySpace, and Snapchat.
Craigslist, which was the first well-known site to have an adult services section, has discontinued their adult services ads within the United States (although law enforcement occasionally still recovers trafficking victims as a result of investigating some Craigslist ads). The New York Times estimates that those discontinued ads would have brought in $44 million to Craigslist in 2010, the year they shut down.39 While Craigslist succumbing to public pressure is good news, this is a drop in the bucket. Children and adults continue to be marketed online as sexual commodities. Still, it does prove that we as the public have the power to pressure businesses into cleaning up their acts.
In addition to connecting buyers to sex-trafficked individuals, the internet also facilitates the trafficking of women from foreign countries into the United States through “marriage” to American men who use online mail-order bride services. Most mail-order brides coming to America have little understanding of their basic rights, and too often they are abused, sexually exploited, or recruited into forced prostitution almost as soon as they set foot on American soil. “I didn’t plan to go in for prostitution,” said one such woman. “I just wanted to be a wife.”40
Sex Tourism
Sex tourism, defined as traveling to a foreign country with the intent to engage in sexual activity with a child, has become another unfortunate part of American human trafficking. It is illegal for a US citizen to engage in such activity, which is prosecutable under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The fact that it’s illegal does not stop it from happening. American sex tourism is prevalent in a number of countries, including Cambodia, where Americans make up 38 percent of that country’s sex tourists, and in Costa Rica, where Americans make up 80 percent of their sex tourism visitors.41 Overall, it is estimated that Americans make up about 25 percent of all sex tourists around the world.42
Sex buyers often attempt to justify their actions by saying they are giving money to children who are being sold for sex so the children and their families can eat, or that sex is not looked upon the same way in many foreign cultures. Both of those arguments are absolutely empty. Sex tourism is a form of human trafficking. Like any other form of human trafficking, the trafficker is the one ultimately profiting, not the victims or their families. Also, we must never downplay the fact that paid sex disregards the humanity of the victim and is horrifically damaging to a person of any culture. If the buyers’ intent was to benefit children in foreign countries, they could instead give their money to any of a multitude of humanitarian agencies instead of spending their money to exploit innocent victims.
Warning: It Can Happen to Your Kids
Americans, however, certainly don’t have to travel outside our borders to buy sex. Even sex with a child or young adult is readily available right in our communities. American-born US citizens, our daughters and sons, make up the largest portion of sex-trafficked minors in the United States.43 Though statistics aren’t clear regarding the number of children like Tiffany and Sarah, whom you met earlier in this book, we do know that the average age range of a child first forced into prostitution is twelve to fourteen for girls and eleven to thirteen for boys, with some much, much younger.
It is difficult for most people, especially those who grew up in fairly “normal” families, to understand that teenage girls from families like yours and mine regularly fall for the tactics pimps use. “When they hear the term ‘child trafficking,’ most Americans naïvely believe that it only happens somewhere else, in Southeast Asia or Central America,” reads Ernie Allen’s written testimony presented to the US House of Representatives.44
Unfortunately, some in our country appear determined to believe just that. One day I talked to an educator who knew a significant amount about international trafficking but seemed to take the position that human trafficking wasn’t a problem in middle-class America.45 He struck me as someone who considered human trafficking to be a political problem more than a national and international crisis that affects real people—even our own daughters, sisters, sons, and brothers. I also realized that this man didn’t understand just how widespread and pervasive the danger of human trafficking really is in the United States. So I asked him, “What if one of your daughters, when she becomes a teenager, is lured into being friends with an online predator—on Facebook, MySpace, Instagram, or Xbox Live—and that predator talks her into meeting him, and she becomes a victim?”
His answer reaffirmed my belief that one of the biggest obstacles to stopping human trafficking in the United States is that people don’t believe it can happen to them or to their loved ones. “She’s not vulnerable, because we don’t live in poverty,” he answered. “It’s not possible, because we are middle class, not poor. This is about poverty.”46
This kind of thinking concerns me. While it’s true that traffickers and pimps prey much more often on the underprivileged and economically vulnerable than on those in the middle classes and above, the simple truth is that under certain circumstances, anyone, regardless of their economic and social status, can fall into the hands of traffickers and pimps. We saw that in the story about Sarah in chapter 1 of this book.
Unfortunately, in the majority of stories I hear, the victim and their family didn’t believe sex trafficking could happen to them. Human trafficking can happen to any child.
The notion that this is about only impoverished, abused, at-risk children simply is not true and is one of the myths that has hindered the level of awareness about human trafficking. This is the second-largest and fastest-growing crime in the world. Yet in our middle and high schools we have mandatory curriculum about drugs and bullying, but seldom hear any talk about human trafficking.
Until we can raise awareness to the point that we all—normal citizens, civic leaders, government officials, law enforcement, social services, and others—know it can happen to anyone, we will not win this battle.
It can and it does happen to anyone. One only needs to ask my friend Kayla.47* Her mother was a real estate agent and her father was a police captain. She had obviously been warned repeatedly about stranger danger and other such pitfalls. However, at seventeen years old she was unsuspecting when a seemingly gentle and caring man befriended her as she worked the cosmetic counter at a high-end department store.
I recently asked Kayla if her parents had ever warned her about trafficking and that it could happen to her. “It’s an unspoken issue in a lot of families because they don’t think it could happen to them, or don’t even know about the issue, or are too scared to even acknowledge anyone they love could be a potential target.” Like many traffickers, the man targeting Kayla watched her for days before he approached her. She had no idea she was being watched, but by the time he first talked to her, he knew her daily habits, how she interacted with people, her food and clothing preferences, and what kinds of topics would interest her. “I guess my pimp got lucky when he started watching me.”
For Kayla, the seemingly kind and gentle man turned out to be a brutal pimp who trafficked her for almost three years. During that time he regularly took her phone and sent disrespectful texts to her parents and other family members, lying to them and telling them Kayla didn’t want them in her “business.”
As a result, her family had no idea she was being trafficked and instead thought she had made bad choices about friends, drugs, college, and jobs. They called her the “black sheep” of the family, which further reinforced the message she was constantly receiving from her trafficker.
Preying on the Weak
Pimps and traffickers know how to sniff out and exploit vulnerability, and not just the kind that comes from living in situations of poverty, neglect, and abuse. The most prevalent common denominator for trafficking victims is a history of sexual abuse. According to one study, 70 to 85 percent of sex workers report childhood sexual abuse.48 This is why when I am speaking to a group of young people, I often address the topic of sexual abuse and urge them to tell a responsible adult if they have been sexually abused and to get counseling to facilitate their healing from that trauma.
Perpetrators know that in many cases just being a typical teenager can make any young girl vulnerable. As the mother of two adult children, I understand how even teenagers who grow up in solid homes go through times of insecurity, times when they want to experience new things and push against the boundaries and limitations their parents place on them. In addition, even the most well-balanced, emotionally happy teen living in a loving, affirming home can go through seasons when she believes (often wrongly) that she is not loved or appreciated at home or liked at school. These normal insecure feelings and emotional stages in the lives of healthy, normal teens make them vulnerable to human trafficking predators.
Yes, pimps are predators. The very nature of the word predator should give us a good idea of how pimps operate. Every spring in central Oregon, people begin to venture into the woods to hike, camp, and fish. During that time of year, local television channels broadcast news spots to instruct the public about what to do if they encounter a cougar in the woods with cautions like: “Anyone spotting a cougar should take certain steps—don’t run, but make a noise and appear as large as possible. Open your coat if you have one. Raise your arms, but do not turn your back. If attacked, fight back and use whatever might be available. Always keep children and pets close by when hiking in cougar habitat.”
Cougars, like most predatory wild animals, can spot vulnerability. If the cougar sees a small human, a child, or a small animal, it is likely to attack because it knows it can win the fight. An adult who curls up in a ball upon coming into visual contact with a cougar is likely to be attacked because the animal perceives the human has become small and defenseless.
The same principle holds true with predators who are traffickers and pimps. They aren’t guided by any sense of morality or of right and wrong, only by the feeling that they can overpower certain targets. Of course, when it comes to young children, their intentions of victimizing a young person become easier because of the naïve nature of their potential victim. Like a cougar stalking a child, they swoop in for the kill.
Until now, we have talked mainly about American girls becoming victims of sex trafficking. However, girls who are foreign nationals are sometimes trafficked into our country, and even boys, both foreign nationals and US citizens, can be victims of sex trafficking.
Arturo*49 did what he always did when he was nervous or bored or afraid. As the van bounced along the rough Mexican road, he ran his brown calloused fingers over the rosary that belonged to his mother. He was excited and nervous to be going with Marco,* a twenty-something Mexican American who had offered him a new life and a job in America. Not only was the salary good, but his duties would include being an extra in the movies. Once when he was twelve, Arturo had gone to see a movie with his friends. He had heard of movie stars and the life of luxury they lived, and he dreamed of having his own house, plenty of food, and even a shiny black sports car with flashy chrome wheels.
When his mother was alive, they had taken care of one another. She would often sing to him as he was going to sleep at night, and he would think of funny jokes to make her smile. He had never known his father, and he had grown up feeling like the man of the house. He knew how to work hard and also how to raise everyone’s spirits.
He had loved to see his mother’s smile, so it bothered him that now, just a few months after her death, he sometimes had trouble remembering her face. He promised her he would never forget her and would make her proud.
Since his mother’s death, Arturo had taken odd jobs handing out flyers for a promotional company to earn enough money for food. He had been hired partially because of his good looks and charm, which seemed to be an asset that opened doors for him. But now he had the opportunity to live up to his deathbed promise. He rubbed the beads of the rosary between his fingers and thought of how proud she would be of him going to America all by himself at only fourteen years of age.
Arturo slept through the night in the van traveling to America, his stomach no longer aching with hunger because Marco had fed him tortillas as well as potato chips and cookies. As daylight broke and they neared the Tijuana border, Arturo wondered if they would really let him cross. He had heard stories of others who had paid large sums to come to America and had been turned away at the border. Marco told him that after he arrived, he would only have to pay back his transportation costs with his earnings, which wouldn’t take long with the great job he was about to get.
At the border station, a man with a gruff voice asked Marco for their papers, which Marco quickly produced. Soon they were speeding along the freeway on the American side of the border. Arturo gazed out in absolute amazement at the Southern California homes they passed. Riches seemed to be everywhere. He was going to have a better life than he had even dreamed.
When they got to Oceanside, Marco took him to a house with boarded-up windows in a neighborhood much nicer than the ones he had known in Mexico, though not as nice as the houses they had passed along the way. As they walked inside the front door with its four dead bolts, Marco spoke with a man named Tito.* After an argument about price, Marco accepted some money from Tito and left Arturo with him.
There were two other boys and also two girls living in the house, all four about Arturo’s age. He was happy to meet other kids, but they seemed to be very guarded in all their actions and spoke very few words. One boy, Martin,* seemed friendlier than the others, almost as if he wanted a friend as much as Arturo did. They exchanged names and nervous glances.
Nighttime came and the children were all allowed a small portion of beans and rice from the big meal they had prepared for the adults who lived there. It wouldn’t be long before Arturo found out why the children seemed so afraid.
Just after dark, Tito began opening the door to various men. Arturo was told to sit on the couch with the other children as the men looked them over. The first man took one of the girls into another room. A few minutes later Martin was told to go with a man into the next room.
As Martin shuffled off with the man, another unshaven American man with gray in his red-colored beard and hair pointed to Arturo. He was told to stand up and turn in a circle so the man could see him front and back. When the man nodded his head, Arturo was told to go to the back bedroom with him.
What happened in that room could only be described as worse than Arturo’s worst nightmare. Arturo fought the man’s advances to no avail. After the forced sex, Arturo scrambled to get his clothes back on and curled up in a fetal position on the bed. Tito came in within a few minutes and hit him across the face with his fist. “Quit being a baby and get out on the couch,” he demanded. There were more customers to serve. The small amount of rice and beans came up Arturo’s throat as he took a quick detour to the bathroom.
Arturo serviced three other customers that night. His body screamed in pain by the time he fell asleep just before dawn. He had heard of places like this but never dreamed he would be trapped in such a hellhole. And trapped he was. With the windows boarded and the doors locked, he barely saw daylight. He understood now that there was no promotional job, no acting as a movie extra. Instead, he had been brought here to “work” in this brothel.
Martin seemed to understand what Arturo was feeling and offered an occasional understanding smile. He even helped Arturo with his daytime chores of scrubbing the baseboards and floors. As the months went on, the two boys developed as much of a friendship as was allowed. Although Arturo would never get used to the men using him for sex every night, the friendship with Martin helped him cope.
During that time, however, Tito became more and more violent. He had frequently threatened Arturo with his big knife. One Thursday evening, he actually used it. While cooking the evening meal for Tito and his friends, Arturo had accidentally burned some of the potatoes. Tito was furious. In the beating that ensued, he cut Arturo’s thigh almost to the bone. The wound bled so much that Tito realized it was going to need medical attention. He called a friend who was a nurse to sew up the wound. As the gentle man carefully stitched and dressed the wound, Arturo thought this might be a way out. But his hopes were soon dashed when he was required to give the nurse “payment” for this medical service. It seemed that no one would help him, and the severe pain in his leg matched the hopelessness in his heart.
As the months wore on, he and Martin dreamed together of a time they could live in the “America, Land of the Free” they had been promised. They wondered aloud how long they could endure being enslaved in this prison and the nightly shame and pain. Martin had been there longer than Arturo and had started younger. It seemed like their incarceration and sexual exploitation was harder on him than on any of the other kids. Despite the comfort he took in Arturo’s friendship, Martin began to withdraw. Arturo knew the life was getting the better of his closest friend.
It had been a particularly rough week for all the kids. In addition to increasing numbers of customers, Tito was drinking more and more. At 4:00 a.m., the customers finally quit coming for the night. Arturo noticed that his friend Martin had been in the bathroom for some time and decided to check on him. He opened the door a crack, then saw blood covering the floor and splattered all over the sink, cabinet, tub, and toilet. As fear gripped him, he pushed open the door. Martin lay in a pool of his own blood, without breath, without pulse. As Arturo screamed his friend’s name over and over again, the other children came rushing in, followed by Tito.
Tito picked up Martin’s body, roughly shoving it under one arm. As Martin’s hair flicked blood on the carpet and walls, Tito lugged his limp body down the hallway and gruffly barked orders to the other children to clean up the mess. “I’d better not be able to see one drop of Martin’s filthy blood when I return,” he ordered.
The next two years were harder for Arturo. He had lost his only friend in the world and had learned in the process not to allow himself to get close to—or to feel for—the others. He kept to himself and survived by pretending he was someone else, somewhere else when the men came to use him each night. Sometimes he wondered whether he should end it all as Martin had done. The memory of Martin’s blood always stopped him from following through.
One particularly hot and humid day, after Tito and his cohorts had consumed plenty of drugs and liquor while celebrating a birthday, Tito opened one of the high windows in the kitchen so that a fresh breeze would blow through the house. He then continued to party. Eventually, the men passed out and the children saw their first chance to escape. Arturo and Victor,* the boy who had replaced Martin, wriggled through the open window. They tried to pull the two girls through the opening but couldn’t manage to get them out. When Tito awoke and began to yell, the two boys ran.
Arturo and Victor had no idea where they were going but knew they never wanted to go back to that house. So they forced themselves to keep running even when they felt they could go no farther. They were convinced that if Tito found them, they would be killed. On the outskirts of Oceanside, they found a park where many homeless persons and illegal aliens gathered. There Arturo was befriended by a couple. Eventually he came to trust them and told them about his horrific ordeal of coming to America.
The caring couple sought out options for Arturo and found a place for him across the country in Florida. There he received shelter, counseling, education, and acceptance. His caseworker cared for him in genuine ways and believed in him. Although his trauma was great, little by little the healing began.
Arturo is now in his twenties and is finishing school to become a social worker. After experiencing the support he needed, he wants to help others who may have experienced hard lives to overcome their issues the way he has.
He carries regret that will last a lifetime about having to leave the girls at the brothel that night. Because he couldn’t provide the police with the location of the house once he finally learned to trust the authorities, nothing was ever done about the operation, and to his knowledge the other kids were never rescued.
How might one recognize a house where children or adults are sex trafficked in our neighborhoods? Some red flags might be cars coming and going at all hours of the day and night, children or adults who can sometimes be seen through the windows but are rarely outside, children who do not leave for school each day, or sounds of violence such as screaming or banging. If you see some of these signs in a home in your neighborhood, you can call local law enforcement or the National Human Trafficking Hotline 1-888-373-7888 or text “HELP” to BeFree (233733).
Protecting Children from Sex Traffickers
As a parent myself, I know the fear and terror that can strike the heart of a parent reading these accounts. You may be asking yourself what you can do to protect your children from becoming a victim of sex trafficking. I have listed some suggestions below: