There’s a certain commodities market for the bodies and souls of children in the United States, and it sometimes extends to men and women.
The beneath-the-surface crime operation was pictured vividly during a program Tuesday at the Texas Tech School of Law by the Texas Young Lawyers Association, the Lubbock Area Bar Association and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
According to David Boatright, executive director of the Texas Regional Office of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Texas has been at the forefront of a fight against the sexual exploitation of children.
“The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children stands ready to assist with resources and expertise and training for local communities,” he said.
“To combat human trafficking, it takes all hands on deck.”
He said, “Runaway children are a very high-risk population. At the National Center, we, every day of the week, 24 hours a day, track down and locate and recover missing children.”
The program drew an audience of lawyers, medical professionals and students.
C.D. Rhodes Jr., president of the Texas Young Lawyers Association, told the Avalanche-Journal shortly before the program began that a lot of the calls to a national human trafficking hotline come from Texas.
“It’s not just the big cities, not just Houston, Dallas and Austin — although those places are certainly hubs. We are finding they are in the smaller towns throughout Texas, and really all across the country.”
He said, “We have to be vigilant and help raise public awareness on this issue so that we can all be looking out for it and mindful of it.”
According to Ted Mitchell, president of the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center, the focus provided by Tuesday’s program is a relatively new approach to a problem that may have been around for a long time.
“I will tell you that part of standard histories now, when you take them with pregnant women, with certain populations in the pediatric setting, you do specifically ask, do you feel safe at home?
“So, there is an awareness that has been kind of seeping into the medical community about it.”
He noted the general attitude is that such things happen elsewhere.
Rhodes said a lack of love and attention in the home can contribute to a child becoming snared in the exploitation trap.
“Even children that come from some of the most affluent families get into fights and arguments with their families, and they may run away.”
Some estimates indicate one in three children who run away are snared by traffickers within 48 hours of leaving home.
He said, “There’s maybe a 25-year-old or 30-year-old hanging out at the middle school or high school, that starts to show them attention — attention they are not getting at home, telling them what they want to hear.
“And then it’s a trap — it all becomes psychological.”
He said, “We’re talking about girls as young as 11, 12 or 13. And once they’re wrapped up in those chains, we see those things continue into adulthood because they are scared. Their exploiters often beat them, they rape them, and they really do some horrific things to them.”
During the program, a video titled “Slavery Out of the Shadows” was shown. It featured an interview of a woman who had been taken into the slave market and addicted to heroin.
Identified only by the name of Debbie, she recalled with tears that she used to long to die and prayed for death to come.
Her story didn’t end in death, though.
Rhodes said she had found help through an outpatient clinic after gradually telling her story, and now lives in San Antonio.
At the last she was able to keep her children.
She was able to wake each day and no longer say, “God, please take me.”
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