Powell is executive director of FAIR Fund, a District-based anti-human-trafficking group. She discusses the increased focus on combating domestic sex trafficking.
How have anti-trafficking efforts shifted in recent years?
What I’m seeing right now is an increased focus on the policy level to look at the issue of domestic minor sex trafficking here in the United States. I think that’s of critical importance, because there are somewhere close to 100,000 young people at risk of being trafficked just in the U.S. In terms of young people being trafficked into the United States, we are also continuing to push to identify children who are victims of labor trafficking who come predominately from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Why the increased focus on domestic trafficking?
People are paying attention to it more because it’s being more addressed in the news, but also because we’re covering more and more cases. … In 2009, we together with partner organizations and law enforcement identified close to 56 cases of commercial sexual exploitation of minors just in the D.C. area.
Is there anything unifying those cases?
What we’re typically seeing is an adolescent girl, predominately from a family experiencing family violence, or neglect or sexual abuse in the home against the child. These are kids who are also part of the foster care system, the child welfare system. And these pimps and traffickers are looking for these kids to exploit, they’re looking for the most vulnerable children out there … and so the trafficker pretends to be a father figure or a boyfriend and convinces these girls that they’re going to love and take care of them.
At what point is intervention most successful?
I think that it really oftentimes starts out from the community side, so the teacher, a social worker an advocate from an organization like FAIR Fund or community member.
– William C. Flook
