When people think of modern day slavery or human trafficking, they often think of women from distant countries being smuggled into port cities.
It’s far less often that people think of children in their state, their school district, their own neighborhood.
Yet, that is increasingly the reality in Mississippi and across the U.S., according to Drake Bassett, the president and CEO of Palmer Home for Children in Columbus.
That’s why Bassett and David Foster, the vice president of Palmer Home, became part of the Human Trafficking Task Force which Gov. Phil Bryant created last December.
The task force’s job: Assess human trafficking in the state and come up with ways to combat the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world.
Bassett and Foster both sat on the “Victim Services” subcommittee. The governor recruited Bassett because of the Palmer Home’s work not only with children who have been exposed to the underground human trafficking industry, but with organizations that rescue children who have been sex trafficked.
And that’s not a small number of children, Bassett said.
He is exposed to human trafficking on an almost weekly basis, he said, either because the Palmer Home takes in children whose mothers were trafficked or because it works with rescue organizations to get trafficked children to a home where they can get the attention they need.
“Trafficking is the new horizon,” he said.
Bassett is glad Bryant created the task force and brought together both government agencies and private organizations to work together to solve the problem.
“It has motivated me to make sure that (we do) everything we can do with our resources, with our counselors, with our partners,” Bassett said. “This organization will definitely be involved in the forefront with this particular problem.”
A $32 billion industry
An estimated 400,000 children per year are trafficked in the U.S. alone, Bassett said. Often the children are forced into labor or their organs are harvested. But the predominant form of modern slavery for children in the country is sex trafficking.
It’s a sophisticated crime syndicate, Bassett said. In the last few years, human trafficking has become a bigger industry than the illegal weapons trade and could bypass drugs within a few years.
“The bad guys have figured it out,” Bassett said.
Criminals can sell marijuana or cocaine once, Bassett pointed out. A child they can sell 20 times in one day.
The faces behind the numbers
The average age of children recruited into the sex trafficking is 11 or 12, Bassett said, though they can be recruited as young as 7 or 8, and even younger children are kidnapped by traffickers.
Most of the time, kids who end up in the trafficking industry were sold by their parents or guardians.
“Families themselves are bartering their own children,” Bassett said.
Sometimes financial difficulty or drug abuse motivates parents to sell their children for sexual services. It’s one of the reasons Bassett wants laws and law enforcement to be as aggressive as possible when prosecuting human traffickers.
“I can imagine no greater crime possible than subjecting children to something like this,” he said.
Other times children with abusive or neglectful parents run away from home and disappear into the trafficking underground.
Even when those children have been rescued, their problems are far from over, Bassett said. Authorities and organizations who rescue children have to be sure they send those children places where they can get proper treatment.
The “Victim Services” subcommittee discovered that fewer than 10 organizations in the U.S. are appropriately equipped to handle the particular services that a child who is a victim of sex trafficking needs, Bassett said. Plenty of organizations exist to help children, he said, even abused ones. But it’s a very specific problem counselors and social service workers face when they’re dealing with a teenage girl who has spent years being sexually abused for someone else’s profit.
“That child has been impacted in a way that requires special care,” Bassett said.
He currently has plans to train employees and get the resources for Palmer Home to be a place where trafficked kids can get the care they need. That was part of the reason Bassett was eager to be involved in the governor’s task force. He wants to know what the state and other organizations are doing to combat the problem of human trafficking so he can know what to do.
The good news is that rescued kids do have hope, Bassett said. With proper care, the children can grow into mature adults with loving, functional families and productive lifestyles.
“They can get past the brutality that has happened to them,” he said.
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