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FED CHANGES APPROACH TO PROSTITUTED PERSONS

10/28/2013

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Listen to this excellent news coverage by NPR.

by Jessica Pupovac

All Things Considered - October 24, 2013 6:03 PM

Across the country, newly formed task forces made up of local, state and federal law enforcement officers are starting to view what was once seen as run-of-the-mill prostitution as possible instances of sex trafficking.

With support and funding from the FBI and the Justice Department, agencies are starting to work together to identify and rescue sex trafficking victims and arrest their pimps.

The new approach is being hailed by victims of trafficking and their advocates as a much-needed paradigm shift — and, the FBI says, is reaping results.

Ron Riggin, a Maryland State Police sergeant who recently retired from a long career spent searching for missing children and runaways, says he’s been aware of the problem for some time, but just hasn’t had the resources or cooperation to effectively combat it. The recent infusion of support and coordination from the feds, he says, has been a game changer.

“At this point, there’s a federal task force that covers just about every state in the union, as far as I know, so that makes it easy for us when we have interstate cases,” Riggin said recently during a Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force sting operation near Baltimore. To tackle the problem, the task force regularly peruses online escort ads, conducts stings, and offers services and support to the women they encounter.

Some sex worker advocates say that the approach is throwing the net too wide and leading to the arrests of too many women who are in control of their situations.

But the feds point to their results as their justification. Since 2008, task forces like the one Riggin is a part of have recovered more than 2,700 sexually trafficked children and convicted more than 1,350 pimps.

Looking For A Sense Of Belonging

The volume of cases is exposing a problem that has long been hidden in plain sight: Child prostitution, or sex trafficking of minors, happens in every state in the country, in poor and rich communities alike. And more often than not, victims are children and are American-born.

“Typically they are not the ones who are highly supervised at home,” Riggin says. “I think they are running away from something at home, whether it’s emotional or physical abuse or lack of love, or call it what you will. There is usually a reason they are leaving home. They don’t have a reason to go to somebody.”

The pimps, Riggin says, give the victims the attention and sense of belonging that vulnerable children desire.

The emergence of social media and online escort ads, experts say, has only exacerbated the long-standing problem.

“This can happen in any town,” says Ron Hosko, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. “We’ve seen it happen in very affluent areas of the country. Each of our field offices has reported these crimes, so we think that it’s everywhere.”

Last year, Hosko oversaw a team that uncovered a sex trafficking ring in affluent Fairfax County, Va. In that case, gang members recruited several adult women and at least eight high school girls through social media networks and contacts inside local schools. They plied them with drugs and alcohol, and controlled them with violence and intimidation.

Getting To The Local Level

Congress changed the legal definition of sex trafficking in 2000 to include recruiting or transporting a person by force, fraud “or coercion.” As minors are legally unable to give their informed consent, anyone under the age of 18 is typically considered a victim.

It wasn’t until 2008, though, that federal efforts to bring local protocol more in line with federal law took off. Since then, the FBI and DOJ have pumped resources into training law enforcement officers around the country on what to look for, how to approach potential victims, and how to connect them with services like housing, job training and counseling.

They have also made it a priority to gather evidence needed to prosecute their pimps.

The number of sex trafficking cases investigated and prosecuted at the local level is not yet known, but the FBI is gathering that data for the first time as part of its 2013 Uniform Crime Report.

Advocates, including Suzanne Tomatore of the Freedom Network, a national coalition of anti-human trafficking service organizations, say the new approach is making a difference.

But, she adds, there’s still a ways to go — in training officers, in providing resources to those who want to help the victims build new lives and in making sure that victims’ rights are protected.

“We all want to do the right thing, but I think it is important that the individual rights come first and [the victims] aren’t pressured into cooperating with law enforcement,” she says.

Renee Murrell, a victims advocate at the FBI field office in Baltimore, says that just a few years ago, most police departments dealt with these cases as child prostitution and simply put the victims into juvenile detention facilities.

“[A victim] was seen as a delinquent child,” she says. “Because they’re giving her drugs, so she may have a drug charge. She might get a shoplifting charge. All of that was masked as the issue when the trafficking was really the issue.”

Of course, many law enforcement agencies still take that approach.

Hosko says that mindset is still the biggest ongoing obstacle for federal efforts to recast child prostitution cases.

“If a particular local law enforcement officer sees what they perceive as purely a prostitution issue, and they don’t dig deeper or take it to the next level, or don’t collaborate with someone who is interested in taking it to the next level, it is a revolving door,” he says.

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100 HOTEL MANAGERS AND OWNERS TRAINED TO PREVENT HUMAN TRAFFICKING

10/15/2013

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In May of this year, BEST and the Washington Lodging Association co-hosted the first Inhospitable to Human Trafficking Training in Washington State. The response by the community was outstanding, with over 100 leaders in attendance from the lodging industry, law enforcement, and victim services.

In September, BEST and the Tacoma Regional Convention and Visitor Bureau offered our second training and had 65 stakeholders in attendance! We are on schedule to host Inhospitable to Trafficking Training events in 3 additional counties within the next few months.

WHY THE LODGING INDUSTRY?
In a study of police reports of 67 human-trafficking related cases prosecuted in King County between October 2008 and January 2012, 63% of the reports cite hotels and/or motels as locations where the crimes took place. Seventy-two percent of the victims named in these cases were children.

OUR GOALS
The training is one part of a broader project that aims to see lodging employees working actively to prevent sex trafficking in their facilities by collaborating with law enforcement to accomplish the following:

  1. Identify more victims and connect them with services,
  2. Catch more traffickers, so that these perpetrators will be brought to justice, and
  3. Train staff to implement best practices to prevent the sexual exploitation of children and women in hotels and motels.
The hotel owners and managers who attend are provided with resources to take back and train their own staff.

THE OUTCOMES
Of hotel managers/owners in attendance at our King County training, only 3 said that they had received human trafficking training from their brands in the past.

Ninety-six percent of managers/owners said that they would train their employees to identify and prevent sex trafficking in their hotels as a result of the training!

After our training, one hotel manager offered to allow law enforcement to do a sting operation in his hotel and several adult survivors of prostitution were identified. Because the average age of entry into prostitution is somewhere between 12-15 years old, most prostituted adults started in the life as victims of trafficking and face serious barriers to exiting the life as adults. 

Victim advocates who participated in the operation told the women to contact them if they needed help. A week later, one of the women called and said she had been beaten by her pimp one too many times and she wanted help getting out. The hotel manager played a key role in helping this woman escape her pimp.

BEST is so grateful to the stakeholders who are collaborating to identify and prevent this horrific crime against children, women, and sometimes other men.

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THE WASHINGTON LODGING ASSOCIATION AWARDS SANDIP SOLI AND MAR SMITH

10/15/2013

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At the Annual Conference of the Washington Lodging Association on October 7, Dr. Mar Smith and Sandip Soli, JD, were presented with awards for their leadership and service to the lodging industry in Washington. Mar and Sandip received this honor in recognition of their work on BEST’s Inhospitable to Trafficking project.

As an attorney at Cairncross & Hemplemann, Sandip provided hours of pro-bono legal counsel for the development of the BEST Practices to Prevent Human Trafficking in the Lodging Industry. Sandip also made invaluable presentations at the Inhospitable to Trafficking trainings in Seattle and Tacoma and he has continued to serve BEST and the industry.

One service provider who has worked with child sex trafficking and adult prostitution survivors for many years said, “When BEST set out to do this work, I honestly didn’t think it could be done. I have never seen the hotel industry willing to address this issue. And now they have become our allies, helping us protect vulnerable kids and women in the community.”

Mar expressed her gratitude: “This award is one further demonstration of the courageous commitment by our lodging industry. Congratulations to the Washington Lodging Association, led by CEO Jan Simon and Chair Cindy Fanning, and to the many, many hotelier leaders who are making such an incredible contribution to our community in Washington State. You are leading the nation in your proactive help for victims of trafficking!”

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BEST RECEIVES GRANTS TO SCALE IMPACT

10/13/2013

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Since May, BEST has received several grants totaling over $60,000 to enable us to expand our work throughout Washington state. BEST is extremely grateful to Stolen Youth, The Seattle Foundation, Carlson and Carlson Family Foundation, and a community foundation in Tacoma for their generous grants in support of trafficking prevention efforts. BEST is a nimble organization with low overhead and the ability to make a sizeable impact with limited funding. Here’s what these grants will accomplish:

Inhospitable to Human Trafficking Training in Pierce CountyThis funding enabled us to complete the Inhospitable to Trafficking project in Pierce County in September. We are also on schedule to replicate this project in Yakima County, Snohomish County, and Spokane County. In addition, we will be providing a second training for King County hoteliers. We’ll do all of this by June 2014!

Second, BEST is very excited to work with a researcher to measure and evaluate the real impact of our work. A research evaluation will set us up to scale our work beyond Washington state by quantifying the social change and impact of this model. BEST is already receiving requests from cities like Portland and others who want to see us scale our project. We are currently seeking grants and donations for scaling the project beyond Washington state.

Third, the grants have enabled us to hire a new Program Manager, Cressida Slote. Cressida first encountered victims of trafficking while working for USAID in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina. She has an MBA from University of Maryland and deep passion for business sustainability and human rights.

Fourth, our board is extremely pleased that a portion of the grant funding we received this year has enabled our Finance Committee to create operational reserves. Building up our reserves is essential to ensuring that the programs of BEST will be sustainable for the long term.

Thank you to those foundations and individuals who have donated toward our work!

We are also grateful to training sponsors including the Seattle Hotel Association, the Pierce County Lodging Association, The Hotel Group, the Zonta Club of Yakima Valley, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, Sunrise Dental, The Plumbing and Drain Company, Whitman Global Carpet and Floor Care, WMS Aquatics, Cairncross & Hemplemann, PSAV, Red Lion Hotel on 5th Avenue in Seattle, and Red Lion Hotel Tacoma.


Special thanks to Marjorie Chadsey for her advocacy and support of the Inhospitable to Trafficking pilot project and subsequent expansion.

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