A national conference, Sparking Action Against Sex Trafficking, began in St. Louis this weekend and will continue through Tuesday with the purpose of bringing awareness to the problem of sex exploitation in America. Speakers will promote federal legislation to escalate the punishments of those who do the exploiting and to offer more help to the victims. The organizers also want to increase awareness among hotels and travel planners to recognize signs of sexual victimization at their places of business.
The Cons

A trafficker rarely approaches a girl looking like the Grim Reaper. He presents himself as an adult boyfriend that showers an underage girl with gifts and warm words and affection while steadily helping build a wall between her and her parents. He’ll appear as a modeling agent that promises to help her get into the business, or in the recent case of Brittney Cason, as a talent agent that gives her a chance to report the Olympics at Sochi.

Professional radio and TV personality and former NFL cheerleader Brittney Cason was nearly duped by a man who showed every indication of being a professional agent, complete with Twitter connections to famous celebrities. She spent four months applying through him, sending reels of her work, filling out paperwork before she got “approved.” Cason had her suitcase packed with a brand new wardrobe for the big opportunity in Russia, fully convinced the “agent” was legitimate. When he asked her about a talented girlfriend that might go along as well, but requested the girlfriend’s social security number and passport number before asking for reels of her work, Cason got suspicious. She called the reputable agency the man had said employed him, but found he didn’t actually work there. The FBI are allegedly investigating the case, and Cason believes she nearly missed being sold into a trafficking ring just in time for the Olympics.

“That’s what makes this so scary,” Cason said. “The amount of effort he put into making this experience seem legit.” Cason, an experienced adult, marvels about how easily she was sucked in and is concerned about younger women and girls who can easily fall for the life-threatening scams these criminals can pull.

Jillian Mourning didn’t get out as easily. A top student, Mourning was in her first semester at college when she was contacted by a girl at a modeling agency who said her manager liked Mourning’s look. The manager appeared completely sophisticated and he spent months mentoring Mourning and helping build her portfolio. His powerful personality intimidated the 19-year-old young woman, but she grew to trust him completely over the first several months of their working relationship. One night at a five-star hotel, though, her manager and two other men entered her hotel room in the middle of the night, set up a camera, and each one raped her.

“I was physically hurt but even more so I was emotionally broken,” Mourning said. “The denial, the hate, the shame, embarrassment, self-blame, the realization of vulnerability were all consuming my mind. I remember thinking, How does someone like me who is intelligent, accomplished, never tried a drug, never been in trouble, let something like this happen?”

Her manager then told her that if she didn’t do what he said, he would sell the video to websites. Through various threats and manipulations, he pressured Mourning into working as a high-class prostitute for him. Wealthy, well-dressed men paid to sleep with her, men with wedding rings, maybe even daughters of their own. Mourning wondered how they could do that to her. Her manager was eventually investigated by the FBI for various kinds of financial fraud, and Mourning was finally free of him.
Education And Awareness

The two above cases involve adult women who were exploited, but many victims of exploitation are just little girls, hungry to be loved. Grown men come into their lives and make them feel important and special. They think these men are their boyfriends and they fall in love with them. Then the boyfriend says, “Would you do this thing for me? I need the money, and it would help me out a lot.” If she doesn’t want to, he threatens her or her family, he beats her up or makes her fear that she’ll lose him. It’s not long before she is trapped in a cycle of prostitution for her “boyfriend” who ends up as her pimp with all the money while her innocence is systematically destroyed.

These men are clever, and they know how to manipulate emotions. They keep these young ladies psychologically locked up even if they are not physically trapped, and the girls continue doing whatever they are told.

Our children need to know what a healthy relationship looks like and how to stand up for themselves in an appropriate way. They need to have dating guidelines with specific boundaries that they understand. They need to know how to recognize manipulation and how important it is to get help from the adults in their lives – parents, teachers, law enforcement – if they get into a bad situation.

Businesses, hotels and gas stations, hospitals and truck stops also need to be educated about how to recognize signs of victimization. Via Christi Health in Wichita, Kansas has started training its employees to recognize signs that a patient might be in need of more than just medical assistance. Fear and anxiety, lack of eye contact, sexual trauma or a large number of sexual partners are clues that hospitals can look for in patients, who rarely come out and identify themselves as victims.

“You have to build the rapport and gain the trust of the patient. You have to reassure them that you’re there to help them,” said Tina Peck, forensic nursing services project coordinator at Via Christi.
Support Organizations

It took another four years for Mourning to discover that a large number of other girls had been victimized under the power of the same man that had called himself her manager. Mourning went through a horrible, emotional time until she focused on turning back to God and finding healing. After talking to other women who had experienced similar exploitation, she decided to start an organization called “All We Want Is LOVE,” a legal non-profit dedicated to educating young women and men about trafficking. So far, the organization has spoken to 5000 students and has distributed 50,000 bars of soap to hotels, truck stops, and gas stations. The soap includes a human trafficking hotline number and comes with information to help the businesses recognize the signs of trafficking.

Since 1998, the international organization Shared Hope has been dedicated to stomping out human trafficking through training and research, restoring the lives of victims, and bringing the perpetrators to justice. Shared Hope encourages men to take a pledge against sex trafficking, calling on all men to stop paying for sex and to therefore stop the demand that creates these victims in the first place. Pimps only make money because some John pays him.

We all can do something to fight the terrible evil of sexual trafficking, whether by inviting speakers to our schools to help our kids recognize and avoid manipulation or by giving local businesses the tools to report trafficking when they spot it. We need to do something, because every day millions of women and children precious to God are being destroyed for financial profit.

Koinonia ©March 2014