Human trafficking becomes a local issue

By Mara Stine

The Gresham Outlook, Mar 19, 2010, Updated Mar 19, 2010

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“Without a place for the girls to escape to, they return to life on the street and to the same men who exploited them in the first place,” he said. “That leaves police and prosecutors with no victim and no case.”

In the U.S., there are only about 70 shelter beds for sex trafficking victims across 50 states, Wyden said. “So the pimps are just playing the odds,” he added.

McKeel is focusing her efforts on opening a secure 22-bed shelter in the Portland area for child trafficking victims. Security is critical, she said. Brainwashed victims, even if placed in foster care away from their pimps, often run back to them and refuse to testify. Or pimps find their victims and intimidate them back into working the streets.

Either way, the legal case against the pimp is lost.

“Just one girl could be a combination of a victim, evidence, and a witness all in one misguided package,” wrote Keith Bickford, deputy sheriff with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office who heads the state’s human trafficking task force, in a newsletter.

Meanwhile, the community at large is left wondering, “Why don’t they just leave?” McKeel said.

Tightly controlled

These women, and in some cases men, are under the control of pimps, who intimidate, brainwash and beat them into submission. The pimps control every aspect of their lives — when they eat, sleep, use the restroom — as they are shuttled across cities, states, even countries.

Often, victims are runaways who’ve been sexually abused. They have no family or home to go back to and consider their pimps and fellow trafficking victims their family.

Once trafficked, many are arrested, resulting in criminal records that make it difficult to return to society. Also, many victims become addicted to drugs — to either cope with their lives or at the urging of pimps who know it’s one more way to control them.

All of this makes it less likely for victims to leave their pimps, McKeel said.

And then there’s the money.

One girl or woman generates an average of $200,000 a year, money she or he rarely sees a dime of, said Wyden during his Feb. 26 testimony before the federal Senate committee on human rights.

Meanwhile, there seems to be an endless supply of potential victims. Pimps typically target runaway and homeless youths, McKeel said. Many have histories of sexual abuse and trauma, making them ideal targets.

But don’t be fooled. Victims come from every neighborhood and every socioeconomic background in the Portland-metro area, she said.

Through her efforts to fight human trafficking, McKeel has learned pimps wait outside schools to target children. Also, because students are allowed to be in school until the age of 21, some pimps send prostitutes back to high school to recruit other girls from within.

“These are young girls,” McKeel said of those being groomed and recruited into sex trafficking. “I think it’s our mind set that it happens somewhere else. But it’s happening right here, right now. And it has to stop.”

Human trafficking statistics

• An estimated 300,000 minors or children are being trafficked for sexual exploitation in the United States. Of those victims, about 90 percent are U.S. citizens. An estimated 15,000 to 18,000 victims are brought into the U.S. each year.

• Average age for a victim’s first encounter with forced prostitution is 13.

• Since it started in December 2007, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center Hotline operated by the Polaris Project had received more than 14,000 calls.

• One in three runaways who end up on the street will be lured or forced into prostitution within 48 hours.

Sources: The U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigations

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