HUMAN Trafficking: A Global Scourge In Our Own Backyards

On the occasion of National Human Trafficking Prevention month, journalist turned investigator David Heinzmann looks back on a story that should have gotten more attention.

A shoe store in Detroit may seem an unlikely place to start a story about human trafficking, but as this National Human Trafficking Prevention Month comes to a close it may be useful to consider that the exploitation of vulnerable people is not always a story about Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe. Sometimes it’s happening in the strip mall in your neighborhood.

Inside the Detroit shoe store on a January afternoon in 2003, a 17-year-old girl walked up to the security guard standing near the front door and whispered that she needed help. The people she was with, she said, had abducted her weeks before in Cleveland. Through intimidation and violence, she was being held against her will.

An older woman who had come to the store with the girl tried to get her to leave with her, but the teen stood her ground as the security guard called 911. When police arrived, the girl told a shocking story of rape, beatings, fear, and, ultimately, commercial sexual exploitation. And it wasn’t just her. More than a dozen girls had been lured into the same trap, taken from hotel to hotel in cities and resort towns across the Midwest. 

It did not take police long to determine that she was telling the truth. The teenagers were under the control of a prostitution ring that was trafficking them around the region, never staying in one place long enough to draw attention from law enforcement. Until the shoe store in Detroit.

As the story unwound, most of its threads led to Chicago, the last known address of the man who had orchestrated the abuse and exploitation. At the time, I was about six months into covering the crime and police beat for the Chicago Tribune. When the paper’s editor saw the first wire story about children forced into the sex trade, she had questions. Who were these girls disappearing from their homes and towns, and why were we just finding out about this issue? 

So began more than a year of digging for me, of reading research reports on human trafficking and sexual exploitation, talking to the women who ran shelters for trafficked kids, and trying to get those young girls to trust me enough to share the stories of what had happened to them. 

By the time I had earned enough trust for three girls to sit down and talk to me, the newsroom had lost interest and moved on. Plus, it was a hard story to tell. The victims were minors estranged from their abusive parents or guardians. They were fragile kids trying to rebuild their lives, so publishing their real identities was out of the question. 

It was easy for their stories to go untold. While the plight of these kids was right under our noses, they shared one essential trait with the trafficked women we think of from faraway countries–a lack of basic safety and security had made them vulnerable to evil people taking away control from them over their own young bodies.

The U.S. Department of State estimates there are about 25 million people worldwide subjected to some kind of human trafficking. When I was working on the issue, I was shocked to find a 2001 University of Pennsylvania study report that there were 325,000 children being sexually exploited in the United States alone. 

All three girls I eventually spoke to back then had ended up on the street, under the control of pimps, after being abused in their homes. One girl’s father had started renting her to his friends when she was 9 and she was pimped on the street at 11. Another was sexually abused by her father in her suburban bedroom at 12, leading her to run away, into the hands of a street gang that used her body at parties before she ended up working in nude modeling and a massage parlor before the age of 18. 

The third girl was from California and I met her at a conference in Washington, D.C. She was accompanying the legendary San Francisco anti-sex-trafficking activist Norma Hotaling. After long discussions with Hotaling about protecting the girl’s identity and establishing ground rules to make her feel safe, we talked about her life on the street. It too had started in an unsafe and abusive home. She was very shy, very quiet, and struggled to express how she felt. 

Months later, I saw that a national morning talk show was dedicating its entire program to “teenage prostitution.” I tuned in and was stunned to see the issue presented as every parent’s nightmare, a sort of when-good-girls-go-bad narrative. And then my jaw dropped as the show came back from a commercial break and the shy, damaged girl I had interviewed in Washington was brought out onto the stage as America’s favorite talk show host commiserated with her parents about what the girl had put them through. It was awful. 

I contacted Hotaling immediately. I know, she said. She had advised against going on the show but the parents really wanted to do it. But the parents were the reason she ended up on the street in the first place, I said. Hotaling, of course, knew that, too.

Prostitution or sexual exploitation have always carried a cloud of victim blaming and victim shaming. And that further abuse has always made fighting the problem more difficult. As far as the courts are concerned, abused and intimidated women with arrest records make unreliable witnesses to testify against their traffickers.

Eventually, I published a pair of short articles around the FBI’s announcement in 2005 that it was making prosecuting the sexual exploitation of children a priority. But the stories came and went without much attention. The girls were anonymous. Easy to forget.

Looking for something to do with all the unused material I had gathered, I wrote a crime novel with trafficked girls at its center. Activists often used the term “throwaway kids” because, in their view, that’s how society regarded the trafficked teens they served. I called my book Throwaway Girl. People told me the title was a bit of a downer.

Hotaling died in 2008 and I don’t know what happened to the girl thrown onto the television stage by her parents. The girl who had been pimped by her father at age 9 was working with advocacy groups and trying to get out of the sex trade when I interviewed her. A couple years later I checked up on her and found court records indicating she was still being arrested for soliciting prostitution on the street in Chicago. The girl who had been abused by her father had found a job working in a cosmetics store and earned a GED, but then she got pregnant by the much older boyfriend she was living with. She was still a teenager.

I don’t know what happened to the girl from Cleveland who had started all of this in that Detroit shoe store. But back when I was covering that story, a lawyer who had volunteered to represent her family told me that the traffickers had made a massive error when they took her. She was not like the other girls who came from abusive and unsafe homes, who had nowhere to turn. This girl came from a loving and stable family, he said. And when she got the chance to speak up she didn’t hesitate to sayone thing that many trafficked girls could not say–that she wanted to go home.

Additional Information

• More information about the global problem of human trafficking can be found here.

• If you or someone you know needs help, please call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at (888) 373-7888 or click here for additional resources.

• Additionally, click here for a tip for how you can help be more aware of victims in your own community who may be silently reaching out for help.