January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month; if you see something, say something

To the Editor:
Human trafficking often conjures images of girls in Bangladesh or Hong Kong, drugged and incoherent, being sold for sex and being raped by men. 
While this statement is absolutely true, the face of human trafficking can also represent a “homegrown” commodity here at home.
In 2015 a CBS news report, KELO’s Leland Steva reported on sex trafficking in South Dakota and interviewed a girl rescued from sex trafficking. This girl, Melissa, was trafficked by her own mother at a young age.
Many adults will sell their own children to cover the cost of their drug and alcohol addictions. 
America’s youth are being targeted and manipulated into the sex trade, and in fact Ortelli and Burlingame (2018) states, “The U.S. nonprofit organization Polaris, which runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline, says that in the United States victims may number in the hundreds of thousands. Trafficking cases identified via the hotline (from calls, texts, web forms, and e-mails) provide the largest publicly available data set on human trafficking in the United States. In 2017 there was a 13-percent increase in reported human trafficking cases from the previous year …” (p.1) 
In our small community we can feel immune to these tragedies, but the reality is that we can no longer keep our heads in the sand and think it can’t happen here.
The University of Minnesota did a study, Mapping the Demand: Sex Buyers in the State of Minnesota (2017), and found “sex buyers are predominantly middle-aged, white, married men from across the whole state of Minnesota. They are representative of men in the general population of Minnesota, which is about 85 percent white” (p.3).
Furthermore, they found that “… data described sex buyers from a wide variety of employment sectors, including businessmen, doctors, lawyers, dentists, judges, professors, police officers, correctional officers, pastors, executives, truck drivers, manual laborers, farmers, and sailors.” (p.3)
The Minnesota Attorney General’s website states, “sex trafficking is not just a Twin Cities problem. Trafficking affects people from all parts of Minnesota. An online sting in southwest Minnesota led to the arrest of 48 individuals. One 16-year-old who was trafficked in northern Minnesota stated that she was exploited on average by five men every day — which means that she was exploited over 1,800 times in a year.” (2018) 
January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month and so I wanted to do my part to make our community aware.  If you see something, say something. Hotline number: 1-888-373-7888 or text 233733.
Barb Austin
Luverne