Human sex trafficking occurs in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and former Soviet bloc countries. It is also rampant in Cambodia, Thailand, and Mumbai. But what about in the United States? What about in Tennessee?
What about in Hamilton County?
“It’s happening everywhere to an extent we didn’t believe possible two years ago,” Assistant Special Agent Margie Quin of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said last week during a town hall meeting at the Development Resource Center, located downtown. The City of Chattanooga of Multicultural Affairs hosted the meeting along with the TBI.
To dispel misinformation, Quin offered a simple definition of human trafficking: “Human trafficking is when a commercial sex act occurs and the victim is under 18 years of age,” she said. “There’s no such thing as child prostitution.”
The definition is the same for adults, although the victim must prove force, fraud or coercion. “If you don’t get out and work, then you don’t eat. That’s coercion,” Quin said.
State Representative Eric Watson (R-Cleveland) preceded Quin at the podium. “How accessible is human trafficking? It’s ten seconds away on your phone. In that time, you can punch in the correct words, and you’ll be en route to them, or they’ll be en route to you,” he said, waving his phone in the air as a few dozen people looked on. “We want to kick this out of the great state of Tennessee.”
Watson was recently part of a 25-member delegation that cast off political affiliations and met with Vice President Joseph Biden in Washington, D.C., to discuss human trafficking. He related to Biden the details of a recent TBI investigation that led to the indictment of 29 Middle Tennessee individuals affiliated with the crime. Some of their victims were as young as 12.
To dismiss any lingering doubts, Watson offered more horror stories of human trafficking in Tennessee. “In 2010, an East Tennessee man was arrested for trafficking over 400 women. And a few weeks ago, a federal jury in Memphis convicted a man of running a human trafficking ring in which one of the victims was 15. Jurors heard stories about the defendant beating her,” he said.
Closer to home, Watson said, a Chattanooga police officer recently responded to a call about a fight at a house. Two young girls answered the door and, in broken English, directed him to the backyard, where the altercation was taking place. The officer saw mattresses lying in a hallway behind them. When he returned to the front of the house after dealing with the pugilists, the girls were gone.
“People want to believe they live in a good community, but our society has changed. Human trafficking is everywhere,” Watson said.
Quin later defined by “everywhere” by bringing up a red- and blue-blotched PowerPoint slide of Tennessee. The red blotches represented counties that have reported at least one human trafficking incident in the last two years. Eighty-five percent of the counties bore red.
The TBI arrived at the number by conducting a study together with Vanderbilt University aimed at quantifying human trafficking in Tennessee. The results, issued in a 2011 Senate and House Judiciary report titled “Public Chapter 1023: Human Sex Trafficking of Children,” revealed that in 2009, the TBI received 9,276 reports of missing children. Of those, roughly one third, or 3,051, were girls between the ages of 13 and 17. With one in three of those girls being approached by a human trafficker within 48 hours of having hit the streets, according to the TBI, about 1,000 youth were potentially at risk for commercial sexual exploitation in Tennessee in 2009.
The numbers have gone up since then, as human trafficking is the fastest growing and second largest criminal enterprise in the world, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Today, 600 to 900 kids a month are reported missing in Tennessee, 50 percent of which are runaways, Quin said. By applying the same math, up to 1,400 girls are at risk for commercial sexual exploitation.
Compounding the issue is the certainty of lethality, Quin said. “The life expectancy of an underage girl who becomes involved in commercial sexual exploitation is seven years,” she said.
To stem the tide, the Tennessee Assembly in 2011 passed legislation aimed at addressing the needs of the victims of human trafficking. Under the new law, victims are no longer treated as criminals. Prior to its enactment, law enforcement charged girls as young as 13 with prostitution – and perpetrators were wrist-slapped with a Class C felony.
Training is another important component of the war on human trafficking in Tennessee. TBI Director Mark Gwyn, who also attended the meeting and spent a few minutes at the podium, said law enforcement in Tennessee isn’t specifically trained to report or deal with the crime, so the Bureau has launched a training module aimed at addressing this gap. “We need to put our arms around this problem in our state,” he said.
Steps in addressing the problem include identifying the conditions under which it occurs and recognizing when a person is at risk for falling victim to the crime, said Quin. According to “Public Chapter 1023,” human trafficking victims are typically children who are marginalized and have vulnerabilities that isolate them from peers, children in foster care, children who spend a considerable amount of time unsupervised, children abducted by strangers, and truants, runaways, throwaways and homeless children. “No child is safe from or immune to stranger abduction,” the report says.
The report, which is available online, also says “children become ensnared in human sex trafficking when pimps play to their vulnerabilities, ply them with gifts, and commiserate with them about bad home life. Once lured in, the pimps’ threats, physical beatings, psychological control tactics, and brutality hold the girls in bondage.”
While the numbers are staggering, Tennessee has been recognized for its efforts to combat human trafficking. In 2011, the Polaris Project, an organization that battles human trafficking around the world, ranked Tennessee second in the nation for passing laws aimed at curbing the crime.
Despite the unified front in the battle against human trafficking in Tennessee, there’s still much to be done, Quin said, and the lives of Tennessee’s children are at stake. “During the first week of January, a 13-year-old girl was recovered in Memphis. In Murfreesboro, a 15-year-old girl and a 16-year-old girl were recovered. One of them had been forced to have sex with eight men in the first three days,” she said in closing. “How do you measure the impact of that experience on a young mind? I’m not sure we can.”