It might come as a surprise to some, but in the midst of Alaska’s beautiful outdoor surroundings, we have a human trafficking problem. Human trafficking takes two forms — labor trafficking and sex trafficking. As Alaska’s attorney general, one of my priorities is to combat this scourge and eliminate it from our communities.
Labor trafficking involves using force, fraud or coercion to induce another individual to work or provide service. Victims can be found in both legitimate and illegitimate labor industries, including sweatshops, massage parlors, agriculture, restaurants, hotels, and domestic service. Sex trafficking involves inducing or causing an adult to engage in a commercial sex act by force, fraud or coercion; or inducing or causing a minor to engage in a commercial sex act (no force required). Commercial sex acts include prostitution, pornography, or any sexual performance done in exchange for value, such as money, drugs, shelter, food or clothes.
A recent tour that I took of Anchorage with a group called Priceless Alaska was genuinely eye opening. Priceless is a non-profit organization dedicated to working with law enforcement to help women escape from trafficking by providing them the assistance and resources they need for their rescue. The amount of trafficking activity taking place in Alaska and Anchorage alone is staggering.
Trafficking is different from smuggling. Trafficking is the illegal exploitation of a person – trafficking crimes do not require any movement across state lines. Victims can be recruited and trafficked in their own villages and hometowns—and sadly, even in their own homes. Traffickers use violence, manipulation or false promises of well-paying jobs or romantic relationships to lure victims.
Traffickers prey on our most vulnerable citizens. Traffickers disproportionately target at-risk populations including individuals who have experienced or been exposed to other forms of violence — child abuse and maltreatment, interpersonal violence and sexual assault, community and gang violence — and individuals disconnected from stable support networks — runaway and homeless youth, and unaccompanied minors. Reports indicate that a large number of child sex trafficking survivors in the United States were at one time in the foster care system.
Children are particularly vulnerable. In 2018, over half of the criminal human trafficking cases active in the U.S. were cases involving children. Advocates report a growing trend of traffickers using online social media platforms to recruit and advertise targets of human trafficking. Often, traffickers use social media, the internet, and gaming platforms to make initial contact with victims.
In fact Alaska is a very hot spot for missing people. According to NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System), more than 600,000 persons go missing in the United States every year. Anywhere between 89 percent to 92 percent of those missing people are recovered every year, either alive or deceased. But how many of those disappear in the wild is unclear. Alaska has the highest percentage of people who stay missing. Investigators have compiled a list of about 1,100 people who remain lost. This in a state whose population — 650,000 — is less than that of San Francisco. “We live in a place,” Dolly Hills says, “where people disappear.”
Alaska – U.S. Attorney Bryan Schroder for the District of Alaska announced that more than $65 million in Department of Justice grants is available to help communities combat human trafficking and serve adults and children who are victimized in trafficking operations.
“Our nation is facing difficult challenges, none more pressing than the scourge of human trafficking. Human traffickers pose a dire threat to public safety and countering this threat remains one of the Administration’s top domestic priorities,” said Katharine T. Sullivan, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Justice Programs. “The Department of Justice is front and center in the fight against this insidious crime. OJP is making historic amounts of grant funding available to ensure that our communities have access to innovative and diverse solutions.”
Hopefully this will help slow down human trafficking and the people that just go missing. The hot-line number for human trafficking is 1-888-373-7888.
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