State task force to tackle human trafficking

When you say “human trafficking,” the phrase can conjure images of poor, beaten victims being smuggled from a Third World country into some form of slavery.

The crime, however, is often something different, something that hits closer to home, said Emily Russell, a crime victim advocate for the Missouri Sheriffs’ Association.

In Missouri, human trafficking can come in the form of a parent who trades sex with their child for drugs, a prostitution ring that forces or coerces women into selling sex, and forced labor outside of the sex trade, said Russell, who as a victim advocate helps train law enforcement on how to spot human trafficking.

“It’s a crime where it’s the exploitation of vulnerable people for profit or personal gain,” she said.

Earlier this year, Russell discussed her job with a friend who took an interest in the issue. That friend was Rep. Elijah Haahr, R-Springfield. Haahr’s conversation with Russell led him to introduce two pieces of legislation during the last legislative session that sought to combat human trafficking.

One, which failed to pass, would have allowed prosecutors to go after middlemen who post ads for sex with children.

The other, which did pass, created a task force aimed at finding ways to strengthen the state’s anti-human trafficking laws and raising awareness of the crime in Missouri.

Haahr said he got the idea to create the task force after introducing the other bill. He said anti-human trafficking advocates kept telling him how ill-equipped the state was to tackle the problem.

“It was just kind of a snowball effect where once I filed that legislation, it brought me into this whole new world of people who work on this issue,” he said.

The task force will meet three times this month — Thursday in Kansas City, Oct. 13 in St. Louis and on Oct. 28 at the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce.

Among the task force’s members are state lawmakers, victim and child advocates and state and law enforcement officials.

The task force plans to publish a report in January that will discuss its early findings and make recommendations to the General Assembly regarding how Missouri could improve its laws, Haahr said. It will then continue to meet throughout 2017 looking for ways to combat human trafficking, Haahr said.

One of its biggest challenges will be identifying just how prevalent human trafficking is in the Show Me State.

“It’s brutally difficult to get the kind of data we need,” Haahr said, noting there are not strong statistics on the prevalence of human trafficking in Missouri.

Although Missouri law recognizes human trafficking as a crime, many law enforcement agencies around the state don’t track incidents of human trafficking, Russell said.

“There is just no data collection on it right now,” she said, later adding, “You know it’s really hard to actually get specific data because it’s not always recorded as human trafficking and that’s why training about this, particularly with law enforcement and prosecutors, is so important because a lot of this might look like one incident of sexual assault, or domestic violence” or prostitution, Russell said.

Part of the struggle, Russell said, is human trafficking is not really part of people’s everyday vocabulary, which makes it harder for people, both law enforcement and citizens, to wrap their minds around the issue.

Human trafficking happens in southwest Missouri, said Casey Alvarez, the founder of an all-volunteer faith-based organization called GO:61 that works to fight the crime.

The group tracks sex advertisements made for Springfield, Branson and Joplin on a well-known sex-solicitation website, and it has found an alarming amount of advertisements, many of which Alvarez believes are for minors, she said.

“It’s a significant problem here, but most people don’t think that it is because they confuse human trafficking with human smuggling,” Alvarez said, noting trafficking doesn’t necessarily mean victims are taken from one place to another against their will, although that can be part of it.

Both Alvarez and Russell said they believe there are organized prostitution rings that engage in human trafficking along Missouri’s major freeways.

Just as alarming, however, are the instances of less organized human trafficking, they said.

Russell said there is often a relationship between drug use and human trafficking, including the exploitation of children by parents who trade them for drugs.

Other times, it is the users who are trafficked, Alvarez said.

For example, GO:61 has worked with a woman in Springfield who was coerced into prostitution by her drug dealers after she ran out of money and had no place to stay, Alvarez said.

Bringing back the bill

Haahr said in addition to heading up the task force, he also plans to again file his human-trafficking bill that failed to pass last year.

That bill — which would have made it illegal to advertise a child for a commercial sex act — had made its ways through the House but died on the vine in the Senate during a filibuster over the contentious right-to-work legislation in the last days of the legislative session earlier this year.

Haahr said he is reasonably confident the bill will pass next year.