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Morrow
County Sentinel
Human
predators seek prey in rural
Ohio
By Ed Taylor, Mt. Gilead
In
the twenty-first Century slavery
is still a global abomination. Human trafficking victims, modern-day
slaves,
are taken from their homes to new locations and are forced to work
without pay;
some in agriculture, fishing, mining, construction, hotel housekeeping
and some
in the sex trade.
Recently,
four hundred Thai workers
were promised good jobs in Hawaii. When they arrived, ready to begin
work,
their passports were confiscated by the traffickers who had “hired”
them and
they served as slave laborers for six years until one escaped and
brought
freedom to the rest. Some trafficking victims are sold as unwilling
organ
donors. Pregnant women are trafficked for their newborn babies, who are
then
sold on the black market. According to a Washington Times article, the
Taliban
will pay $7 — $14,000 for a child to be used as a suicide bomber. In
America,
35% of sex-trafficked girls are sold to traffickers by parents
desperate to get
money for drugs. These cruelly exploited girls can earn for their pimps
as much
as $720,000 per year tax free. The buying and selling of people is a
big
business, bringing in revenues estimated at $32 billion annually,
worldwide.
It
is impossible to imagine the
life of a girl held captive, forced into prostitution by beatings and
threats
and sometimes coerced into drug use. She might earn for her trafficker
more
than $1,000 per night servicing as many as 12
15 “customers.” Michelle Hannon of the
Salvation Army, long involved in
helping trafficked girls, said, “… the girl gets a trip to McDonald’s
or gets
her nails done as her only reward.” Younger girls mean a higher profit
for the
trafficker. Recently, when a prostitution ring in Harrisburg, PA was
shut down,
it was learned that seventynine of the girls were from Toledo, OH one was only ten years
old. Toledo is ranked
number four in the nation, per capita, in terms of arrests,
investigations and
rescues of domestic minor sex trafficking victims.
Even
when these girls escape their
captors, they can experience long-term suffering from STDs, HIVAIDS,
unwanted
pregnancies, malnutrition, Hepatitis B and C, improperly healed bones
from
repeated beatings, etc. Sixty-eight percent of these girls suffer from
PTSD,
the same rate as treatment-seeking combat veterans.
Not
so long ago, when
sex-trafficked girls were arrested, their sufferings were ignored and
they were
treated not as victims, but as criminals. They received little sympathy
from a
public which seemed to believe that they were bad girls who had
deliberately
chosen to follow this immoral lifestyle. But we are entering a more
enlightened
era, thanks to the efforts of Ohio House 45th District Representative
Teresa
Fedor of Toledo. She introduced H.B. 262, the Safe Harbor bill, to
toughen
Ohio’s human trafficking laws. In June, 2012, the bill was passed and
signed
into law by Governor John Kasich.
The
Ohio Attorney General’s 2012
Human Trafficking Report states: “One of the most important things the
legislation (The Safe Harbor Law) does is ‘view the person being
trafficked as
a victim instead of as a criminal … to keep them out of the juvenile
justice
system.’” The law also provides a mechanism for victims of human
trafficking to
apply to the court to have their prior solicitation and prostitution
convictions expunged. It provides for harsher penalties for traffickers
who now
face first degree felony charges with a mandatory prison term of at
least ten
years. The law also requires traffickers to register as sex offenders
and gives
victims the right to sue their traffickers for damages. Rep. Fedor
wants to
further strengthen the Safe Harbor Law in the new legislative session
by
extending the statute of limitations for filing trafficking charges and
to make
it more difficult for “johns” to claim they didn’t know the girl was
underage.
Read
the rest of the article at the Morrow
County Sentinel
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