CLEVELAND — It's been 24 years since the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and on Thursday, people paused to raise awareness about the dangers.
As part of National Human Trafficking Awareness Day, local women who survived attended a forum and shared their experiences, hoping no one else has to suffer as they did.
Human trafficking can happen anywhere to anyone. Andrea Thomas says she was trafficked at 11 years old when she became homeless after running away from an abusive home.
“I met someone who provided me with my basic needs — with clothing, with food and shelter. And as a result, I was trafficked from Cleveland...I went to various places, but ultimately, I ended up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” said Andrea Thomas, a human trafficking survivor.
Thomas couldn’t get away until she was 17.
For Jasmine Myers, it started at age 5.
“My stepdad sold me to another man that actually came to live with me,” Myers said. “For years, people would move in and out of my home and have access to me, and I was being sold to other family members, to friends with the family, to neighbors.”
Myers didn't realize till years later that she was, in fact, trafficked growing up.
“I never would have used to call it trafficking and I would have just described it as child abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. Just a bad childhood,” said Myers.
Kirsti Mouncey, the CEO and president of the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking, said that it's common when talking about human trafficking cases, because they all look different.
“So, this idea of white man driving down the street kidnapping someone and holding them hostage is not what trafficking looks like in our community,” Mouncey said. “What trafficking looks like in our community is a grooming process is again going back to vulnerabilities.”
According to a study by Polaris, victims of human trafficking can experience the following:
-83% experienced poverty.
-96% experienced abuse (physical, sexual, emotional).
-93% experienced substance abuse and mental health challenges.
It’s a problem affecting people worldwide and in Northeast Ohio. According to the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice services, in 2021, they identified more than 1,500 victims of human trafficking. Mouncey said it will first take an increased awareness and education to help end the problem.
“Being in tune into the people around us — the friends that we have, the friends that our kids have — often those subtle changes can tell us about anything,” Mouncey said.
It will also take help from the whole community to ensure no other person becomes a victim.
“I think it's really important that we continue to be informed. That means attending trainings, that means hearing from other survivor leaders and hearing their experiences,” said Myers.
So, how common is human trafficking in the US?
It's hard to know for sure, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes data on these crimes. The most recent report shows the number of people prosecuted for human trafficking offenses more than doubled from 2011 to 2021.
At the end of 2021, more than 1,600 people were in prison for these crimes.
