Bumping for Corinna. I found an interesting (somewhat long) article about human trafficking I want to share with you. Knowledge and consciousness about it is important, IMO.
Sex Trafficking: South Florida’s Youngest Victims | The Crime Report
To this day, the man who raped 13-year-old Laura Skelly has not been arrested or charged, according to her mother.
“The Fort Lauderdale police never showed up at my house the day I first reported my missing child,” she recalled. “I don’t know why.
Laura finally turned up on her mother’s doorstep 10 days later, with a flower tattoo, bruised, beaten and raped. (They would later find out she had
chlamydia, a disease transmitted by sexual contact, but the hospital did not do a rape kit test).
But getting her daughter back was only the beginning of her mother’s ordeal. Although Mary provided the Fort Lauderdale police department with the name, date of birth, address, and even the Instagram account of the 22-year-old man who trafficked her daughter—details she obtained from her daughter and her own investigation—no one allegedly followed up on the information.
According to John Rode a private investigator who searches for missing and runaway children in south Florida, with an organization called
Global Children’s Rescue:
“What’s missing within police departments is an understanding of what human trafficking really is. Human trafficking is not
only on the border of Mexico. It’s not
only in Arizona and Texas, with young girls coming out of containers.”
“Human trafficking starts out as a simple runaway case. Girl runs away from home. A few days later someone takes her in, gets her on drugs, and she’s held against her will. Now she’s a victim of human trafficking. It’s a local community problem.”
“The public doesn’t realize that, and the average police officer on the street doesn’t realize that.” Few Americans, in fact, are aware of the scope of the problem.
More disturbing still: Florida authorities say more than half the victims are under 18.
And for some of the youngest of them, victimization begins a few miles from home—within shouting distance of their families and beneath the radar of local authorities.
“Traffickers aren’t shipping these young girls to France. They are (often) just going up the road.”
The victims are almost exclusively runaway youth, whose vulnerability and desperation are exploited by older men. In 2017,
an estimated one out of seven runaways reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were likely child sex trafficking victims.
Justin Payton, also from Global Children’s Rescue:
It’s happening under our noses every day and a trafficking victim could appear willing and happy.
etc....