PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — Human trafficking has gotten worse over the years, with a noticeable uptick since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Often when we think of human trafficking, we think of it’s international; it happens in other countries, 3rd world countries," said John Long, VP of Abuse Services for Hope Villages of America. "But the truth is domestically, we have human trafficking as one of the largest growing crimes in our nation. Soon it’ll be the number one crime in our nation,”
Florida has been a hot spot for human trafficking for years.
“It’s happening here, it’s happening in Hillsborough County, the state of Florida, and it's something that just continuously grows,” said Long. “There are some things that we can do to start making a dent in the amount of people that are trafficked.'
That includes:
- Educating the community about what human trafficking is, and how prevalent it is
- Normalizing conversation around trafficking
- Being aware of what your kids are doing online and who they’re talking to
One of the top ways traffickers are recruiting people is over the internet and social media.
“So being involved in your child’s life, your teenager’s life, your grown kids’ lives. Knowing what they’re looking at, knowing who they’re talking to are great ways that we can prevent trafficking,” said Long.
Many people are trafficked by someone they know.
“When we look at the statistics, almost half of the people that are involved in trafficking, victims of trafficking, were recruited by a family member or a pre-existing relationship. That’s the number one way people are recruited. We have the internet and pre-existing relationships. So that could be a boyfriend, that could be a girlfriend, a neighbor, someone from work, from church, someone they knew prior to being trafficked. That happens because it’s easier to groom somebody who trusts you,” said Long.
It’s important people realize anyone can be trafficked.
“There’s no poster child of who would be trafficked. It can be anyone. We often think it might be a lower-class problem. But we know there’s people in gated communities that are victims of trafficking,” said Long.
It happens to men, women, and kids.
.
“100,000 kids are sold for sex in the United States every year. That’s U.S.-born children that are being sold to U.S. citizen and 36% of those would be boys. Which is a conversation we never have. We always think of women as the sole victim of trafficking. And we always think of the men as the only ones who are trafficking. There’s hundreds of women who are trafficking people and there's thousands of male victims throughout our country,” said Long.
On average, the typical age someone is brought into trafficking is between 12 and 14 , but anyone could be at risk.
Long has worked on cases with victims as young as 5 to as old as 80.
It’s every race, every religion.
It’s happening in our backyards.
“It’s happening here, it’s happening in Hillsborough County, the State of Florida, and something that just continuously grows,” said long.
Taking preventative steps is key and with educating the community comes with knowing the signs that someone is being trafficked.
Those include:
- Changes to social habits, is someone becoming more isolated?
- If someone doesn’t have access to their personal items like a driver’s license or their social security card
- If someone doesn’t have enough clothes; for example, if someone is dressed for summer when it’s cold outside
- Somebody who’s showing signs of being controlled
“The number one sign often times, if somebody is with another person, and you ask them a question, like ‘where are you going?’ and the other person answers, oftentimes a victim of trafficking isn’t allowed to speak for themselves. The trafficker is there or somebody a part of that circle is there to answer the questions,” said Long.
He encourages people to report anything suspicious.
“We always hear ‘what if I report trafficking and it wasn’t?’ Well what if you don’t report it and it was. So we rely on our great law enforcement and first responders to make that call,” said Long.
"I’ve gotten exhausted from FEMA. We’re 62 and 72 years old, and we’re on Social Security/Disability. What the hell does this country want from us?”
John King shared with ABC Action News the flooding in his Zephyrhills community - more than 3 months after Hurricane Milton.
