By Chelsea Warren
In a highly religious community with low crime rates, many residents assume Utah is exempt from the insidious effects of underground crime. But even in Utah, human trafficking, one of the world’s top three most profitable hidden industries, has reared its ugly head.
DeWayne Hopkins, a 27-year-old Salt Lake City resident pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of children. The charge was part of the first case taken on by the newly formed Utah Human Trafficking Task Force.
The sex trafficking industry is an underground epidemic that is now considered the third-largest and fastest growing criminal industry in the world, according to the Polaris Project human trafficking cheat sheet. It is the modern slavery industry, and it rivals illegal arms and the international drug trade in profitability.
“People need to learn about human trafficking because they might themselves be seeing human trafficking situations,” said Karen Stauss of the managing legal and policy council of the Polaris Project.
Stauss said the biggest problem is a widely held misconception about what human trafficking is.
The Polaris Project Web site defines human trafficking as “victims trafficked for a wide variety of purposes, such as commercial sex or agricultural work, housekeeping or stripping, yet they all share the loss of one of our world’s most cherished rights — freedom.”
“Once [human trafficking] is understood, it becomes easier to create policy to combat it,” Strauss said.
Human trafficking does not only happen to immigrants or foreign nationals that are brought in.
“In the U.S., a lot of people assume that these cases are all foreign victims coming into the country,” said Katie Pitchlynn, media director of Shared Hope International. “There are a lot of domestic American children that are being inducted into human trafficking.”
Estimates of the number of minors trafficked within the U.S. each year range from 100,000 to 300,000, and the children are typically between 12 and 14 years old when they are first abducted.
Nathalie Staffler, a Swiss graduate student studying social work, said many people assume trafficking doesn’t happen in their communities.
“It’s more common than we think,” she said. “One reason it is so unseen is because it is hard to recognize it.”
An intern for the Utah Health and Human Rights Project, Staffler said her organization educates law enforcement to not revictimize trafficked women by treating them as criminals or delinquents.
“Once you really look at these girls and understand their lives, I don’t know how anyone could see them as anything other than victims,” said Linda Smith, director and founder of Shared Hope in a training video for law enforcement.
Traffickers go to great lengths to ensure their victims’ silence, including the threat of bodily harm or deportation for foreign nationals. To provide incentive and protection for people in these situations, the U.S. passed the Trafficking and Protection Act in 2000, which provides access to a T-visa, allowing victims to remain in the U.S. and receive federal resources. Victims must be willing to participate in the prosecution of their captors to qualify.
“This makes people very hesitant,” Staffler said. “It is very difficult for them to confront their abusers.”
There are numerous things people can do to combat human trafficking on a local and national level.
Staffler said communities must recognize and address the issue in public discussion.
“We are ashamed as a country to accept that we do contribute to human trafficking,” she said. “Unless we decide to face it, it will be the same throughout history.”
By realizing the impact of human trafficking on the community and taking the initiative to fight it, people can help overcome this serious problem
“It affects all of us in some way,” Pitchlynn said. “It could be your sister or your child that deals with this. There are thousands of people in slavery in your community. Would you not want to take a stand and free them?”
Copyright Brigham Young University 14 Jun 2009
