Denton County law enforcement and victims’ advocates met with their peers and the public Tuesday to debunk common misconceptions about local child sex trafficking.
Children’s Advocacy Center of North Texas CEO Kristen Howell led the discussion. Panelists included Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound; Dustin Gossage, a prosecutor for the Denton County District Attorney’s Child Abuse Unit; Lt. Brian Baker of The Colony Police Department; Little Elm Police Chief Rodney Harrison; and experts from the advocacy center and its partner, Traffick911.
These panelists discussed what child sex trafficking looks like, how parents can prevent it, and what local and state leaders are doing about it.
What is trafficking?
The Texas Penal Code defines trafficking as “to transport, entice, recruit, harbor, provide, or otherwise obtain another person by any means.”
This broad legal definition provides prosecutors with a wide array of options, Gossage said. It also allows prosecutors to charge perpetrators with not only trafficking but for each individual sexual offense that occurred during the trafficking. A child sex trafficker is typically going to have a plethora of charges, he said.
“This legislature has given me the ability to really bring a hammer to the guys that we know should be in prison for the rest of their lives,” Gossage said.
But this comprehensive definition doesn’t always match the public’s understanding of child sex trafficking, he said. It is really any instance of a person moving a child from one place to another and committing a sexual act.
“So say a stepdad moves his stepson to a baseball field for baseball practice,” Gossage said. “But then he decides to sexually assault the stepson. In that scenario, that is indeed human trafficking under the code. It doesn’t meet your traditional idea of a kid being snatched from the front of a yard and sold into sex slavery.”
Common trafficking cases
The panelists agreed that a majority of the child sex trafficking offenses they see start on the internet.
“The internet is the devil,” Harrison said. “ ... It is the beginning of a very stereotypical trafficking case in your community.”
Some children are just taken, but that is an atypical trafficking case. Typically, the perpetrator invests a lot of time and effort into bonding with the child before the trafficking offense occurs.
Often, the children have experienced some sort of trauma, abuse or neglect. While child abuse spans all economic classes, trafficking victims tend to come from impoverished environments.
Children in typical cases are searching for some sort of connection with individuals online because they are lacking connections in their home life. Additionally, they don’t see traffickers they meet on the internet as strangers because of the amount of time spent getting to know each other before ever meeting.
The perpetrators provide a false sense of safety, security, love and support that the child might not get from their family. Over time, they gain the child’s trust. Eventually, the child could agree to meet the trafficker and voluntarily go to another location with them.
The panelists said many of the trafficked children are not runaways or homeless. They are groomed and recruited while still at home. Often, they don’t perceive what’s happening as trafficking.
A breakdown of the Children’s Advocacy of North Texas’ cases:
The center has seen an overall increase in cases over the years. This is due, in large part, they said, to more reporting because of an increase in awareness.
Victims by race
- Hispanic: 34%
- White: 33%
- Black: 22%
- Asian: 6%
- Other: 5%
Victim sex
- Female: 89%
- Male: 10%
- Other: 1%
While cases are underreported for both boys and girls, forensic interviewer Elines Negron said, the center suspects cases involving boys are especially underreported.
Victim age
The most common victim age the center sees is 15 years old, Negron said. The youngest the center has seen is 9 years old, but the center knows it happens to children who are younger but might not report it. Sen. Parker said he is aware of cases with 4-year-old victims.
Changing views on runaways
So-called “troubled kids” are some of the most likely victims of trafficking. Now away from home, likely without a safe means to eat or sleep, the runaway child is vulnerable. So, in swoops the trafficker.
These traffickers might offer food or shelter to a runaway child. Eventually, they will provide these necessities conditionally, in exchange for some sexual act. They also might introduce the child to drugs or alcohol, the panelists said, which can devolve into pimping.
Within 48 hours of a child running away from home, they will come across a human trafficker, according to research from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
“They are known to go to bus stations and McDonald’s, places in your community where the runaway kid is down on their luck,” Gossage said. “They have got the expertise in finding those children and offering to be a safe haven.”
This alarming statistic, along with advocates’ educational efforts, has changed the way law enforcement treats runaway child cases. Previously, officers often treated runaway cases as if the child had behavioral problems.
“We would track these kids down, say, ‘Don’t you run away again,’ and drop them off to mom and dad,” Baker said. “Then the cycle would start all over again.”
Now, with habitual runaway children, Baker said law enforcement is digging deeper into the “why?”
Law enforcement can bring the habitual runaway child to forensic interviewers, who specialize in handling child interviews. This can sometimes unveil abuses occurring in the child’s home.
“We were actually feeding the process,” Baker said. “The whole time we thought we were doing the right thing by getting them back to their parents, which may not have been the right thing.”
What do perpetrators look like?
Harrison asked the attendees to look to their right and look to their left. The perpetrators could look like any one of us, he said.
“That’s the scary part about it. They walk amongst us every day,” Harrison said. “They look like everyday human beings. They work in every profession we can think of. They’re Black, white, Hispanic, you name it. It’s not just men. It is women also.”
Howell recounted a conversation she had with Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphree after the Sheriff’s Office conducted a sting operation. She said Murphree was surprised to see how many of the people they caught soliciting minors online were just normal members of the community.
Children are more likely to be trafficked by someone they know and have a relationship with.
What can parents and residents do?
The panelists most importantly cautioned against children having unfettered access to the internet, saying parents should restrict and monitor children’s activities online.
Harrison asked that members of the public report anything they think might be off about the interactions they see between an adult and a child. It doesn’t matter if their hunch is wrong, he said. It could possibly save a trafficking victim.
While women can be traffickers, too, they are often men. Parker called for men to hold one another accountable.
“Men, we need to live life in an appropriate and honorable way,” Parker said. “We need to stand up and call out this behavior as not acceptable. ”
What are leaders doing?
Parker has been influential in educating other legislators about child sex trafficking, he and Howell said. He has brought legislation like Jenna’s Law and, recently with State Rep. Lynn Stucky, Athena’s Law, to fruition.
The center also participates in educational efforts to speak with Denton County students directly about trafficking. However, parents have to opt in, and it is often students with uninvolved parents, who don’t sign the paperwork, that are the most vulnerable to trafficking, they said.
Parker said he would work to change state legislation to make it so that parents opt out instead of opting in.
But, ultimately, panelists said there are not enough financial resources, not enough crimes against children investigators, not enough training for officers, not enough prosecutors, and not enough advocates and psychologists to tackle this issue.
The panelists encouraged citizens to join the cause or reach out to their local leaders to advocate for the allocation of more funds to preventing, solving and prosecuting crimes against children.
