Human trafficking, exploitation is on the rise in Michigan
Published: Monday, September 06, 2010, 5:34 AM Updated: Monday, September 06, 2010, 5:46 PM
“It’s hard to come back to Michigan,” she says from her home in Ohio, where the carpet cleaning company runs its whirring machine and her teen daughter rings in from her cell phone.
Flores was a 15-year-old living in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham when she was held captive in a nightmarish sex slave operation for two years.
She lived in a nice house and went to school every day, where she was a member of the track team.
Almost every night, a black Trans Am picked her up, and she was taken to the basements of houses, where groups of men would rape and torture her while her family slept. They threatened her and her family if she told.
Flores, 45, will be the main speaker Friday at a panel discussion on human trafficking, joined by area experts with a mission to shed light on a dark subject.
“It happens here,” Flores says, “to white, middle-class teens who live in the suburbs. It’s easy to think that because you live in a nice neighborhood, you’re safe. Well, you’re not. We’ve let our guard down.”
What is human trafficking?
Experts say many people aren’t even sure what human trafficking is, often assuming it means smuggling illegal immigrants across borders.
Its real definition: when a person is recruited or transferred through some form of coercion or deception and exploited, mainly for forced labor or sexual exploitation. Women and children are the primary targets, but men also are trafficked.
While much of the illegal trafficking involves bringing women and children across international borders to be sold into sex industries, the number of girls exploited this way is on the rise in Michigan, according to a report released last month by the Michigan Women’s Foundation in partnership with Women’s Funding Network. The May study included the most popular outlets for domestic commercial exploitation: the Internet and escort services.
It found that in Michigan:
• 141 young girls were victims of commercial sexual exploitation in May, up from 117 in February, a 20.5 percent increase.
• Monthly domestic trafficking of adolescent girls in Michigan is more pervasive than the annual number of women 24 and younger killed in car accidents in one year — 106; and the annual number of women 24 and younger who committed suicide in a year — 31.
The foundation has received a grant from the Women’s Funding Network to raise awareness about the issue and to support services for victims.
Public misconception
Over at the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, law students supervised by professor/attorneys represent 18 victims of human trafficking, says Meredith Weill, a clinical fellow there who will join Friday’s panel discussion.
“Many people I talk to say, ‘How could this possibly be going on here? We have police. We have communities of people who know what’s going on. How could we miss it?’” Weill says. “But people are missing it, all the time.”
Part of her job is to research Michigan’s anti-trafficking legislation and devise ways to make it better, from better protection for victims to easier prosecution of traffickers.
Recognizing the signs
Among Fridays panelists is Rebecca McDonald, founder and president of Women at Risk International, a Grand Rapids-based nonprofit that unites and educates women and children in areas of human trafficking and sexual slavery.
She offers training throughout the country on how to recognize signs of trafficking. Her next session is Nov. 12-13 at Kentwood Community Church.
McDonald, a mother of four, tells how trafficking can start at teen oral sex parties when a trafficker steps in and tells girls they can make money at that.
“A girl wants to buy a pair of $100 jeans and she finds out she can make $100 in one night instead of working all weekend at Arby’s,” McDonald says. Teens get lured into this world, she says, “not really knowing what they’re getting into. Then, it escalates. Traffickers are recruiting girls to recruit other girls.”
Parents are shocked at her sessions, she says, “but I want to do more than break their hearts. I want to enlist them. I want to give them tools.”
Personal account
Flores travels the country to speak about the issue and has appeared on several national television news shows.
“Even though the news coverage is increasing, it’s not at the forefront, which is sad, because it’s epidemic,” says Flores, who has a master’s degree in counseling education and is a licensed social worker in Ohio. “The news reporters think this is something that only happens in other countries. You have to convince them.
“Mostly, people don’t want to know about it.”
Her story is horrifying. Flores writes about the ordeal in her book, “The Slave Across the Street.”
It started with a crush she had on a boy at school in Birmingham. Against her better judgment, she let him give her a ride home from school one day. But he didn’t drive her home. He took her to his house, where he raped her. She found out later his cousins had taken photos of the attack, but the photos looked as if it was consensual sex.
Soon Flores was being blackmailed by a group of men. Do what they say, they told her, or they would show the photos to her parents, her priest, the kids at school. Her father was a successful businessman who made it clear appearances mattered. Her mom told her she was to never have sex, or she would be thrown out of the house. Isolated, with no support system because her family moved every two years, she felt alone.
People always ask her why she didn’t tell her parents. Why she didn’t just refuse. It’s hard for people to understand the psychological place a trafficked girl is in, Flores says.
“It’s coercion,” she says. The men constantly threatened her family, her brothers, her dog. Someone always was following her. Dead animals showed up in her mailbox.
“They’re always watching you.”
One day, the family dog, Bowzer, was missing. Theresa’s phone rang. On the other end of the line she heard her dog bark, then the sound of a gun shot. She never saw her dog again.
“You’re terrified beyond anything you can imagine,” she says.
For two years, she was forced into basements, where groups of men waited for her.
“I always had hope,” she says, “that one day they’d say, ‘Here are the pictures.’ You have hope it won’t continue.”
Flores escaped the nightmare when her family moved to the East Coast for her dad’s work.
“I thought my scenario was rare,” she says, “but I get a lot of e-mails from women saying they had similar situations — a boyfriend who pretended he loved them, then tricked them, then blackmailed them. There are a lot of Theresas out there.”
Aftermath
Flores still has flashbacks and nightmares about her ordeal. She decided to go into counseling, she says, “because nobody helped me.
“It also helped me heal,” she says of the course work that led to her social work degree. “It gives me a purpose now.”
Flores is director of awareness and training for Gracehaven, a safe home in rural Ohio for girls 17 and younger who have been victims of commercial sexual exploitation. She works with girls who have been trafficked and offers training for professionals who work with trafficked teens.
“It becomes your identity, and it shouldn’t be,” she says. “I tell girls, ‘This is just one part of the puzzle of you. It’s not all of you.’”
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