Written by RAHAB’s Training Coordinator, Holly Reagan
When people first come to a RAHAB training, they typically come with a specific image in mind of a trafficker. They think of all the things they may have been told of trafficking or rumors they have heard. This often includes someone driving around in suspicious vehicles looking to abduct young women, someone who has a criminal history, is gang-involved, or fits into specific demographics. In reality, traffickers do not fit one specific demographic.
According to the most recent statistics posted by the Bureau of Justice, some things we do know about traffickers in the United States are the following:
My first introduction to human trafficking in the United States was through a form of trafficking called peer-to-peer trafficking, which is where youth exploit other youth. I was serving as an after-school tutor and program volunteer in a gang-controlled neighborhood of Chicago. The ages of this program were kindergarten to 8th grade. Each week I served I grew to love all the kids in the program more and more. After serving for almost two and a half years, I was talking to one of the program staff about our 8th graders aging out. She expressed concern for their dedication to stay in high school and stay out of the neighborhood gangs. As we talked more, she told me that some of the kids in the program would become gang-involved in their early high school years, at around fourteen to sixteen years old. Once they were in, they would be expected to earn income for the gang they joined, which would include “pimping out” or being “pimped out”. Every kid I had walked beside for the past two years flashed before my eyes. The sweet girl who asked to braid my hair each week, the boy who liked to test my Spanish slang, and the group of 2nd graders I played with during gym each week, all at fourteen would potentially be trafficked or become a trafficker. They did not fit the mold of who I understood traffickers to be. They were children. They were afraid. They were trying to survive and navigate the less-than-ideal conditions they were living in. This was not their choice; they had a diminished ability to choose.
Unfortunately, this tends to be true across all traffickers. Research has shown that traffickers are people who have experienced high rates of child abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. The DePaul College of Law found the following in a study on traffickers in the Chicago area:
- 88% experienced physical abuse while growing up
- 76% experienced childhood sexual assault with an average onset at 9.5 years old
- 88% grew up in a home with domestic violence
- 84% grew up in a home with someone who had a substance addiction
- 60% had a family member in prostitution
- 64% grew up in a neighborhood where there was prostitution
- 84% utilized alcohol as a child with an average onset of 12.5 years old
Most traffickers come into the work through recruitment or by someone suggesting they take on the role. Sadly, 68% of traffickers were sex trafficked themselves. This may make it confusing to understand why they would then go on to traffic others, until we realize that most traffickers tended to take on the role for three reasons: means of survival, coercion, or power and control.
Several years into my career of working with those in trafficking or high risk for trafficking, I met a teenage boy who was sexually abusing his siblings and trafficking his classmates and older women through means of sextortion. When I met this boy for the first time, he had a young face and a skinny build. He told me with tears in his eyes he knew he should not be doing these things but had no control over himself to stop. His childhood trauma was vast, and overtook his impulses, creating a dissociation between what he cognitively wanted to do, and what his impulses wanted him to do. He had been through extensive care to address his behaviors, but nothing had worked. He said through tears to me, “maybe [the new care plan] is what I need to not be a monster anymore”. That boy was trying to survive his trauma, and in the absence of proper care he hurt everyone around him along the way. The toll of his trauma was so great, he had no idea how to control himself. I never saw that teenage boy as “a monster”, like he labeled himself. I saw him as someone who was just as desperate for care as every other trauma survivor.
Demonizing traffickers will never help us win the fight against trafficking. Instead, we need to begin to address adversities that make people vulnerable to being exploited and exploiting others. We need to address the traumas that cause trafficking to be a prevalent issue.
Click here to learn more about general information about the issue of sex trafficking or register to attend one of our upcoming community trainings.
Sources:
“Human Trafficking Data Collection Activities, 2023 – Bureau of Justice …” Bureau of Justice Statistics, bjs.ojp.gov/document/htdca23.pdf.
Raphael, Jody, and Brenda Myers-Powell. “From Victims to Victimizers: Interviews with 25 Ex-Pimps in Chicago.” DePaul College of Law, Sept. 2010.