“It is a big problem in southwest Ohio,” said Bhumkia Patel, regional coalition specialist of End Slavery Cincinnati of The Salvation Army. “And so misunderstood.”
Butler County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Rick Bucheit said deputies have training in human trafficking investigation.
Today’s traffickers, though, are not stereotypical “pimped out men” portrayed in movies and television, he said.
“They are businessmen now,” Bucheit said. “They are educated and master manipulators.”
Kelly Heile, Butler County assistant prosecutor, said there have been a few human trafficking cases investigated locally involving children.
When traffickers are looking for victims, they target easy prey, including at-risk children and adults. They lure them with promises, then threats and force them into lives of sex slavery or hard labor, according to the attorney general’s office.
For many, the victimization begins between the ages of 13 and 15, according to Patel, and can be aided by the Internet or people looking in person for someone vulnerable. She said it is also important to understand traffickers are not always strangers.
“There was a husband trafficking a wife and a mother who trafficked a child,” she said.
Lisa Williams, founder of of Living Water for Girls, a Georgia-based residential, educational and therapeutic safe refuge for young American girls who have been brutalized by prostitution, human sexual trafficking and exploitation, presented her story to a group gathered Saturday at the YWCA in Hamilton.
Williams, who has helped rescue 181 children and young women from human trafficking and herself was a victim, said human trafficking crosses all gender, culture, ethnicity, socioeconomic and religion lines.
“Where you have people, where you have people with skin, where you have people with access to the Internet, you have this pattern,” Williams said. “Because you can buy and sell a child in three minutes on the Internet.”
Williams said she was driven to start Living Water for Girls after seeing a news story about a 10-year-old girl shackled before a judge and charged with prostitution.
“How can a baby, a 10-year-old child be charged with the act of prostitution,” Williams said. “How can we as a society allow a child to be charged with a crime that has been committed against her?”
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