Transcriber: Haru Yamaguchi Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
Not long ago, I sat across the table from a beautiful young woman
who told me about her daughter's upcoming birthday
and she wanted to buy her a gift but she couldn't,
because she didn't have any money, because she didn't have a job.
Because no one will hire a former prostitute with a drug record.
So with tears streaming down her face, she told me about her only option:
to trick herself out for 30 bucks so she could buy her daughter a gift.
(Audience) You can do it!
(Applause) (Cheers)
So if I were to ask you your thoughts at this moment about this woman,
I wonder if any of them would include trafficking.
By the end of this talk,
I want you to make the connection between prostitution and trafficking.
And I'll show you, in part, how it works in our nation
and in our state of Delaware.
There are 300,000 American children
being trafficked in our country every year.
These are kids that are in the US, from the US,
being sold for sex in the US.
And they often grow up to be the prostitutes that we know and judge.
So I want to tell you a story about a young girl
I'll refer to as Tasha.
She went with her mom and grandmom to town
and when they arrived, Mom and Grandmom took her to a hotel
where an older man was waiting so he could sexually assault her.
She was younger than twelve.
He paid these women, her mom and grandmom,
so he could rape her.
And this is the man from Homewood, Alabama.
Tasha's family members were her traffickers.
Traffickers and pimps are one and the same.
This is familial trafficking -
one of various types of trafficking that happens in the US.
Sex trafficking of all kinds is occurring in Delaware now.
And the demand for this exists because there are thousands of Johns.
Now, anyone who purchases sex with a minor
is a pedophile and a child rapist,
so we're going to call what it is.
But for the purpose of today's talk,
I'll be discussing adult victims as well,
so I'll refer to anyone who buys commercial sex as a John.
So here's an example: These two men are Johns,
church pastors from Knoxville, Tennessee.
One is a pastor for children age birth through fifth grade,
and he responded to an ad soliciting sex with underage girls.
He negotiated a hundred dollar fee
for a half an hour of sex with a female minor.
The other pastor was also charged for soliciting sex with underage girls.
And these men are not alone.
There were 300 contacts made in response to that one ad placed online.
Ads just like this one on backpage.com.
So I want to show you a recent Delaware backpage search,
and anybody can access this.
Many of these are individual ads
placed by pimps selling girls and women for sex.
Sometimes the girls and boys, because males can be victims as well,
are forced to place their own ad.
Words like "new," "petite" or "extra small"
are code words that the pimps use
to let the Johns know that they're minors.
So when you click on one of these ads,
a video clip or a photo like this one will appear.
And while this may not be the girl that they're actually buying -
it may be a random image used for bait -
you get the idea:
they are luring men with photos of underage girls.
And do you see how brazen the pimps are?
"New young girl."
So you call the number and you talk to the pimp,
who sets up the time, place, service and cost,
and then there's incall and outcall,
depending on whether the pimp travels to the John
or the John travels to the pimp.
So by now, are you asking yourselves, How do they get away with this?
If any of us can pull this up on our computers,
why are these traffickers not being caught?
And we'll look at that in a bit.
But for now, we're going to look at a different type of trafficking victim:
an adult.
This woman is a probable trafficking victim.
She was arrested in Delaware for prostitution.
She offered an undercover officer a happy ending at this spa in Kent County.
Now, how do we reasonably assume that she's a trafficking victim?
She was the one soliciting, right? She was the one offering sex.
Nobody was holding a gun to her head.
And maybe not at that moment,
but part of trafficking is the force, fraud and coercion that occurs
during the grooming phase,
which comes after the luring phase, and we'll look at that in a bit too.
This a typical room in the back of a trafficking spa.
These are the working conditions and often the living conditions
of these women.
Rubmaps.com displays a total of over 90 spas in Delaware
offering sex for sale,
and this is one of multiple websites like this in Delaware.
So if you click on one of these ads, it includes reviews by previous Johns,
rating the prostitutes' body parts and sexual services.
So see at the top where it says "Paid to House."
A man may walk in and get a legit massage for 60 bucks.
At the bottom,
you can see where it says "Extra tip - $40."
That often goes for the happy ending.
That money gets turned over at the end of the day
to the pimp to meet her quota.
A typical quota in a day for a sex trafficking victim
is anywhere from 500 to 750 dollars a day.
And this is what happened when one young victim did not meet her quota.
(Video) Woman: And then one night,
he sent me outside in the area where we live
to make 500 dollars,
which is impossible.
Yolanda Schlabach: So the earlier article
speaks to the arrest of the prostitute in the spa -
no mention of the guys buying the sex.
And often these guys possess a dark and disturbing mindset -
an attitude of perverted entitlement.
"I paid for you.
I can do whatever I want to you.
I own your body for the next 30 minutes."
So who are these Johns that pay for commercial sex?
They are from every walk of life, every race and culture.
People you work with and rub shoulders with every day.
It may not be that creepy guy lurking in the shadows;
it might be your mail carrier
or the person next to you in the pew on a Sunday morning,
or your in-law, or your friend, or your child's teacher.
Here's a teacher from a Baltimore public charter school.
He trafficked a 16-year-old girl.
He dated her for two months before forcing her to prostitute herself
so he could take her money.
Police said that the 16-year-old girl was advertising prostitution online
and offered to meet an undercover officer at a local hotel.
Now, she was recognized as a trafficking victim
and not cited for prostitution,
in part because there's no legal definition
of a child prostitute,
but there are prostituted children.
But what if she was 22 or 26?
In Maryland,
she still would have been seen as a trafficking victim.
But in Delaware,
we have a lot of work to do in that regard.
In many states,
law enforcement, judiciary, and state agencies
have received statewide trafficking training,
and I wish I could say the same for Delaware,
but that has not happened yet.
But it's not just their responsibility; it's our responsibility.
We all have to dig deeper and change our filter,
and our state needs a paradigm shift,
that when we consider prostitution,
we have to understand that it might be trafficking.
Anytime the person is lured, forced, or coerced into commercial sex,
they're automatically a trafficking victim,
and that describes most prostitutes.
So where does this happen?
The US has been referred to as the land of opportunity, and it is.
But it's also the land of opportunists.
So look at all the places identified in the US for probable trafficking
via national hotline.
Delaware is a hotbed because of the I-95 corridor.
So how does this start?
Most prostituted adults begin as trafficked children.
They are lured and then trapped,
and as they get older and keep having birthdays,
there's no viable way of escape, there's nobody to help them.
They find themselves as adults
now able to take the fall as a perpetrator cited for prostitution
rather than being recognized as the victim and receiving help.
So back to the discussion of luring and grooming.
A pimp will date a girl, lure her into relationship.
She falls into love with him
after he promises her attention, security, a future together,
that they're going to be a family.
But she has to help out and make some money.
So he sets up her on her first date,
which includes her being sold to a stranger for sex,
and then forced to give him the money.
Now she might agree because she wants to please him,
but if she refuses,
she may be gang-raped or beaten and then forced to comply anyway.
So she learns quickly to acquiesce
because she knows she'll be forced to do it
and she may as well save herself the beating.
She begins to believe that what has happened to her is her fault.
She believes that what has happened to her becomes who she is.
She takes it on as her identity, which then determines her behavior,
and that principle is true for every single one of us.
But her life consists of being bought and sold,
exploited for the lust of a stranger and the greed of a pimp.
And she is trapped and enslaved
and surviving in life without a voice or a choice
because of her perpetrator.
So how did these perps get away with this?
How does this become a 99 billion dollar a year industry
and the second-largest criminal enterprise behind drug trafficking?
Because drugs can be sold and used once,
but a human body can be sold over and over,
used multiple times a day for years,
creating an endless supply of income
until she is discarded or dies.
One FBI agent suggests
that from the time of lure to the time of death,
the average lifespan of a victim is seven years.
They die of homicide, suicide, drug overdose, and HIV and AIDs.
So, I want you to look at these photos.
This girl is in the luring and grooming stage,
but this is the same girl six to seven years later.
Does the girl here in this image
seem a little more worthy of our help and understanding?
Often what happens is by the time we see her as an adult,
our compassion wanes,
and we cover our kid's eyes,
and we cross to the other side of the street,
and we feel relieved when we read in the paper
that a prostitute's been arrested,
because we feel like our communities are safer.
But we have to recognize this is the same girl,
and it begs the question:
how did she end up here?
So how do these perps get away with selling people for sex?
Because most of us are not even aware that this is happening.
So we don't report it;
there's no tips to the hotline or to the police,
our medical field, our educational system,
and many state agencies have no idea that this is even happening.
So Delaware has become a safe haven for trafficking,
and pimps know that.
So how do we send a clear message
that we don't want Delaware to be a safe haven anymore?
Just five days ago,
law enforcement and prosecutors in Sussex County, Delaware,
made our first human-trafficking statute arrests
(Applause)
and identified eight victims.
So what can all of us do to make a difference?
I’m going to give you three action steps to help.
The first one is to educate yourself so you know how to identify victims.
Here are two documentaries that you can watch
on domestic minor sex trafficking.
The second action item is to call your legislators
and request funding
for professional training and public awareness
along with services and housing for victims.
We have up to 300,000 American kids every year being trafficked
and less than 475 beds in this country for them,
compared to 13,000 animal shelters.
The third action item is to call law enforcement if you suspect trafficking
along with this 1-800 number.
This is held by Polaris out of Washington, DC.
They’re a national anti-trafficking organization.
They provided the heat map we saw earlier.
I’ve given you three actions steps to help.
Those who choose silence, choose trafficking.
Silence is complicity.
Please consider what you can do to be a voice for the voiceless.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)