Chasing Tornados: A Glimpse into Modern Human Trafficking in our Own Backyard
It was mid-day in the deep south of Missouri and the sky had just turned a sick greenish color as the sun disappeared and darkness took over. It sounded like a train as it flew by in the sky. As the tornado passed over “The Garden,” the 11-year-old boy prayed, “Please God… let this tornado take me now.” His family endured winters with no heat or hot water, periods where they had no food, and no way to wash, used baking soda to brush their teeth because the cost of toothpaste was beyond reach. But none of that compared to the hardships of “The Garden.”
This infamous “Garden” began as hope for a better life. The mother was offered an opportunity to move in the deep south onto a 30-acre property with her children to tend the land in exchange for reduced rent on the farmhouse and a percentage of the agricultural proceeds. The dream opportunity sank to the depths of a nightmare. This plot of land had not ever been plowed or tilled, so it was full of rocks and boulders. They also didn’t have a functioning tractor, so they used a rototiller to plow the majority of the 20 acres assigned to “the garden.” They worked 16-hour days picking rocks so the rototiller could do its work without breaking tines. They passed out from heat exhaustion multiple times, with no respite from the heat and sun. The “landlords” regularly beat and intimidated them if they perceived that they weren’t working hard enough.
This happened right here in the US.
This happened to me.
I was that little boy wishing the tornado would take us up into that green sky and away from the nightmare. I begged for the mercy of death.
We eventually escaped this indentured servitude. Like any challenge we face, it can destroy us, or we can adapt and forge a better path. “The Garden” experience taught me how to face evil, how to dig deep and find something stronger within, and it gave me grit that I harnessed later in life as a US Marine and police officer. This whole ordeal occurred when I was 10-12 years old, long before indentured servitude and human trafficking became a federal crime.
With great solemness I share this experience so that I can discuss with you some harsh realities about modern human trafficking occurring here in the US. I am certainly no expert on the matter, but I am not uninformed. I aim to share personal experiences, review the actual data, and discuss what we can do about it.
I have two more personal experiences with human trafficking I’d like to share; one of a foiled plan to induce someone into sex trafficking, and one of a young girl who was convinced to leave her family.
A Boy’s Story
This story is about a young man I know. We’ll call him Jeff. Jeff’s parents went through a nasty divorce when he was 12, which rocked his world. When he was 13, Jeff found an Instagram account full of images of race cars, new shoes, anime characters, professional athletes, and other things that would draw the attention of kids. Jeff started following this page, started “liking” several images and engaging with the page. Jeff then got a private message from another account which said something to the effect of, “hey, I saw you liked my public page, this is my personal account. Let’s talk here in private,” to which Jeff engaged and began a conversation. Over the next 6 months, this person showed Jeff attention he had never had before and eventually convinced Jeff that they were in a deep relationship; Jeff believed that he had fallen in love, despite not really knowing much his new friend. He believed the account owner was someone about 16 years old, and Jeff only knew his first name. Their conversations were horrifically explicit and lewd beyond description. Jeff’s mind gradually became warped and controlled by this person. He progressively sexually groomed Jeff and controlled him with emotional volatility and threats of rejection, not dissimilar from many classic domestic abuse cases. To avoid detection, Jeff deleted every conversation on Instagram messenger each day. One day Jeff’s father asked to look at Jeff’s phone, and Jeff’s response betrayed that there was something amiss on the phone. When Jeff’s father discovered their conversation, this child predator was attempting to set up a time and place to meet Jeff. The father turned everything over to the FBI, but the FBI was unable to locate the predator, gather any additional information, or continue the investigation. All leads went back to burner emails, VOIP phone numbers, and account access points which were routed through multiple VPN’s. These were pros.
The official assessment was that this was a trafficking ring composed of multiple parties: one party to cast a “net” with the first Instagram account, another party to groom, and a third party to set up the meeting and abduction. The damage done with Jeff’s mind is likely irreversible short of intensive therapy, there are likely images of child pornography of Jeff that were harvested by these pedophiles sold on the dark web, but at least he wasn’t physically taken, unlike so many other children who follow this path.
A Girl’s Story
Like the story of the boy, this story has been modified to protect the people involved. I was dispatched to a gas station to respond to a teenager who called in to 911 who said that she was a missing person. I got to the gas station and met a 13-year-old girl who was reported missing out of Scranton, PA. We’ll call her Julie. Julie said that she had a boyfriend who was 25 years old, we’ll call him Tom. Tom convinced Julie that he loved her and that her family didn’t love her or understand her, so she should run away with Tom. Once Julie decided to leave, Tom kept Julie captive for roughly 6 months, traveling around the state and keeping her in hotel rooms while he traveled. He recorded many sex acts on his phone; it is still unclear whether he was selling access to her in the hotels or the videos from his phone. After a few weeks of this, Julie started asking Tom if she could go back home… at which time Tom started to beat her, and he beat her worse every time she asked to go back home. She felt as though this was all her fault because it was her decision to leave; no one “made” her go, so she never saw it for what it truly was. On the day I met her, Tom was driving and Julie was in the passenger seat when she again asked to go back to her mom. Tom pulled into a local parking lot and began beating her again. She managed to bail out of the car and escape down the road, hid at the gas station, and found a way to call 911.
Data Tells a Story
Every time I travel the highways and stop at the rest areas along I-76, I see signs on the bathroom mirrors beckoning to victims of human trafficking to make themselves known. They call on them to use discrete hand signals, to call hotlines, and to report their abusers and captors. There are excellent private sector groups focused entirely on combating human trafficking of children, such “Children’s Rescue Initiative” (1) based here in Pennsylvania, “Veterans for Child Rescue” (2) out of Tuscan, AZ, and dozens more can be found with a simple search of the web. Despite all of the attention on this crisis, it seems to me that the common perspective of “it can’t happen to me” is all too prevalent.
Human Trafficking is often thought of exclusively as sex trafficking, with the perspective of the “Taken” movie series as the prime example of how this all plays out. While the story of the beautiful, unaware, naive, girl visiting a foreign country and getting spotted and exploited happens far too often, that is not how it begins most of the time, and human trafficking is not just limited to sexual exploitation. Human trafficking also includes organ harvesting and involuntary servitude, the victims of this crime don’t need to be “taken” anywhere (it can happen right at home), and the victims of human trafficking span every age, gender, race, and nationality. One perspective on the international child sex trafficking dynamic of this equation can be seen in the movie “Sound of Freedom” with Jim Caviezel.
It is estimated that there are a greater number of modern slaves and trafficked people in our current day than ever before in human history. The US Department of Justice compiles data on human trafficking and releases an annual report on arrests, prosecution, convictions, and sentences of human traffickers, but it is hard to track actual numbers of victims of human trafficking. For this article, I am going to be referencing the “Human Trafficking Data Collection Activities, 2022” (3), which is the most current at the time of this writing.
The victims of this travesty are often silent about their victimization, those being trafficked often do not understand what is happening to them, and traffickers will often victimize many people before they are ever caught. One statistic showed that 66% of all traffickers arrested in the US had no prior convictions (4), but they were certainly not new to this trade.
- A total of 2,198 persons were referred to U.S. Attorneys for human trafficking offenses in fiscal year 2020, a 62% increase from the 1,360 persons referred in 2011.
- The number of persons prosecuted for human trafficking increased from 729 in 2011 to 1,343 in 2020, an 84% increase.
- At year-end 2020, for the 47 states that reported data, 1,564 persons were in the custody of a state prison serving a sentence for a human trafficking offense. It kind of makes you wonder how many folks WEREN’T caught…
The United States, along with Mexico and the Philippines, was ranked one of the world's worst places for human trafficking in 2018. In the US, there is no official number of human trafficking victims, but estimates place it in the hundreds of thousands, with roughly half of those numbers estimated as being sex traffic victims.
How can we stop this??
I wish that someone had the complete answer to this question. I don’t know how to stop it, but there are several things we can do to make an impact.
The first thing we can do is to reduce the demand – first: stop watching pornography, which is likely the highest volume product for human trafficking. The highest revenue for human trafficking is likely the actual sex trafficking. Indentured servitude and forced labor are so often overlooked and intentionally ignored that it remains an insidious form of income for the greedy and evil. Instilling a fear of consequence into the predators who would prey on the trafficked is critical, but I’m not sure there is anything that will curb the true appetite of evil.
The people that were victimized in the above stories were folks that were at-risk due to depression, abuse, or manipulation and then participated in their victimization to one degree or another. Some of them thought they deserved it because of their low self-esteem, some of them thought they were stuck because they made a bad decision (e.g., they were manipulated and made to believe it was their choice). If you are a teacher, pastor, parent, or a friend and you see indications of depression, poverty, or a broken spirit, I implore you to reach out and share love. Often, simply knowing that someone cares for you and genuinely has your back can be an incredible force in a person’s life. People need HOPE; without hope, there are huge voids in their hearts and minds that make them ripe for victimization. We can’t change every life we see, but we can make a little impact in those around us every day. If you feel like you know someone that is truly struggling, talk to them about it, speak to a trusted counselor, pastor, teacher, or loved one who you know has that person’s best interest in mind. We might not be able to change the entire world at once, but you can change a single life.
As parents, we need to be deeply involved in our children’s lives. We need to be able to have honest conversations and hold their hearts tenderly when these hard times come up; we need our children to feel safe speaking with us about these things. In Jeff’s case, the father checked the contents of his phone on a regular basis, but Jeff found a way to bypass his father’s observations by deleting every conversation right away; it was simply luck that he found it when he did. We can put things in place to lock down our kids’ phones, to monitor them, and to screen them… and we should. But we should also know that the ingenuity of the human mind is much faster than the creation of technology. We cannot and should not rely on these as the primary means of guiding our children; we need to relate to their hearts and be able to have these hard conversations in a way that the children feel safe and welcome to share. We must teach them HOW to think, not WHAT to think. And also… check your kid’s phones.
If we see behaviors that we believe are indicative of human trafficking, it never hurts to report it. Could you be wrong? Sure, but I’d rather report something and be wrong than live the rest of my life wondering if I just let a life slip by. There are incredible resources available on this topic, to include the resources I listed above.
Volunteering, donating, and supporting counter-trafficking groups, charities, and non-profits goes a long way in fighting this epidemic. I strongly recommend finding an organization that aligns with your beliefs and supporting the mission through these professionals; the boots on the ground doing the work.
Lastly – you absolutely must know how to physically protect yourself in the case that someone does try to take you against your will. I cannot stress enough how important this is. I have dedicated my life to teaching people how to avoid victimization and how to fight back when it does happen because no one should have to endure the terrors the wolves in this world would bestow upon you if not for your capacity for resistance. We cannot outsource our own protection to anyone – not to the police, our husbands, our fathers, or our care takers… Our protection is solely our responsibility because in the most desperate moments, you are your own first responder. As we train, we learn what those indicators look like, we begin to see patterns of behavior that just don’t look right, and we become highly sensitive to the behaviors of exploitation, manipulation, and aggression. The more you train, the less you’ll need to use it.
Human Trafficking Hotline (5)
1-888-373-7888
Text* 233733
TTY: 711
— LTAC Ash
(1) https://thechildrensrescue.org/
(2) https://vets4childrescue.org/
(3) https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/htdca22.pdf
(4) https://www.foxnews.com/us/human-trafficking-in-america-among-worst-in-world-report