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By Stephanie Taylor Staff Writer Published: Sunday, November 7, 2010 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, November 7, 2010 at 12:05 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, November 7, 2010 at 12:05 a.m.
TUSCALOOSA | Two years ago, Tuscaloosa attorney Shelly Standridge was appointed to represent a young Guatemalan teenager accused of trying to harm her infant son.
In Alabama
Alabama became the 45th state to pass legislation criminalizing human trafficking. The bill, passed in April, made human trafficking a felony and allowed local law enforcement to investigate suspected trafficking crimes, which was previously done only by the FBI. The law requires mandatory restitution for victims and allows victims to sue traffickers.
She soon realized that the girl had a mental disability and showed signs of having been sexually abused. Standridge dug deeper, and found that the girl and another teenager were victims of sex trafficking who had ended up living in Northport.
“They were told that they would be coming to the U.S. and were going to be nannies,” Standridge said. “When they came across the border, they were taken to hotels where they worked as prostitutes.”
The case against the 16-year-old was dismissed and she was deported to Guatemala.
Although it may surprise many, sex trafficking is taking place in Alabama.
In August, a man pleaded guilty to bringing a young woman from Nicaragua to work as a prostitute in Northport. She was paid $25 of the $35 he charged for men to have sex with her at a house on 10th Street.
Tuscaloosa resident Jaena Eidson read about the Nicaraguan woman who was trafficked in Northport and decided that she wanted to get involved and help the victims.
“This beast is crouching at our door. It will change the face of our community if we don’t stand up and say that we won’t stand for it,” she said.
Eidson’s small group at The Church at Tuscaloosa has been raising funds for Sisters in Service, a global advocacy group based in Atlanta that works in communities in places like India, China, North Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The group has raised around $20,000 for a project in Nepal, where an estimated 12,000 girls are trafficked into India each year.
Workers interview girls crossing the border into India and provide educational and life-skills instruction.
Eidson said that by working with Sisters in Service, her group in Tuscaloosa can better learn how to run an advocacy organization and eventually start a safe house and provide other services for victims in Tuscaloosa.
Eidson, a stylist and manager at New Creations salon in Tuscaloosa and the mother of two young girls, said that traffickers prey on poor, uneducated girls.
“They send out decoys, who are the same age as the girls — around 15 or 16 years old — to woo them in,” she said. Men will buy the girls things, or perhaps start a relationship with them to gain trust.
“They’ll say ‘If you love me, you’ll do this,’ ” she said.
Other times, men will bring the girls into the country, and act as if they must work as prostitutes to repay the costs of bringing them from their home country.
In September, a federal jury took less than 30 minutes to convict a Florence man of prostituting a 15-year-old Mexican girl in August and September 2009.
Joyce White Vance, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, said that labor and sex trafficking have increased in recent years, but that it was hard to quantify the problem.
“When you talk about human trafficking, people might think of Russian mail-order brides. It never occurs to them that there is modern-day slavery going on, but in fact, there is,” she said.
Many victims are in the country illegally and are less likely to report the crime to authorities, she said.
Victims are sometimes young runaways, she said. Men will advertise their services on Craigslist or travel to cities along major truck stop routes.
“You may see one guy with a few girls,” she said. The men are often working within larger organizations.
“It isn’t that different from drug trafficking. Our real goal is to reach back from these tentacles into the deeper roots of the organizations and really stamp it out,” Vance said.
Alabama became the 45th state to pass legislation criminalizing human trafficking in April. The bill made human trafficking a felony and allowed local law enforcement to investigate suspected trafficking crimes, which was previously done only by the FBI. The law requires mandatory restitution for victims and allows victims to sue traffickers and provides for asset forfeiture.
In Birmingham, a group called Freedom to Thrive organized as an advocacy group for victims of human trafficking. The group helped draft the bill that the Legislature passed earlier this year.
Eidson said that an estimated 27 million people are victims of some kind of human slavery across the world. She said that 49 percent of those are involved in forced prostitution.
“That’s 10 times greater than it was at the peak of the African slave trade,” she said.
Eidson said that her group will focus on creating a system that will help rescued victims of sex trafficking receive the help they need.
“We’ll need to meet their physical needs, get them the medical care that they need and the love they need when they realize that they’ve been hurt and abused,” she said.
“I think we can make a difference. This is lurking at our doorstep. It’s not at our back door, it’s at our front door and we can no longer close our eyes to it.”
Reach Stephanie Taylor at stephanie.taylor@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0210.
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