Concerned parents, educators and citizens of the Jackson community gathered in the Bowld gym Monday night to learn about human trafficking, warning signs and how to help prevent the crime from authorities in the field.
Special Agent Chris Carpenter, who works in the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s human trafficking unit, is responsible for organizing human trafficking investigations, supervising enforcement operations and providing training in the field of human trafficking for West Tennessee. He has been employed in law enforcement for 30 years and has served with the TBI for the past 27 years. Having been a homicide detective for 16 years, human trafficking, he says, is by far the “slimiest” thing he’s seen.
Carpenter began by stating that there is nothing pleasant about the topic of human trafficking and that is a reality. He then defined human trafficking.
Human trafficking is “whenever a trafficker uses fraud, force, or coercion to control a victim for the purpose of engaging in commercial sex acts.” A commercial sex act is whenever “something of value is traded, exchanged or swapped out for sex.” The exchange is not necessarily money but can be anything from clothing to makeup to food to rent to repayment of a drug deal.
Carpenter said that we all have a preconceived notion of what sex trafficking is, whether we think of pimps dressed up in nice outfits or prostitutes portrayed on television.
“In reality, trafficking is really isolation, abuse, trauma,” Carpenter said. “When you get down to it, all human trafficking is is slavery. It is one person making another person do something that they don’t want to do. It’s one person controlling the actions, controlling the money, controlling the movements, controlling the thoughts of one person. It’s just slavery.”
Carpenter warned that human trafficking occurs right here in Tennessee, including in Jackson. Several years ago, the TBI teamed up with Vanderbilt University to find what is really going on with sex trafficking and to get a handle on it, contacting law enforcement, hospitals, jails and social places. Out of all the cases in Tennessee, 49% of cases were found to be in rural counties.
“[These cases] weren’t in Memphis,” Carpenter said. “They weren’t in Nashville. They weren’t in Knoxville, Clarksville, Chattanooga. They were in these rural counties that probably most of us are from.”
Carpenter said that we have to change our mindset about those being trafficked before any real change occurs.
“Things are not going to change until we as a society change the way we look at [sex trafficking], until we as a society, me as a law enforcement, you as the public, changes how we look at these people,” Carpenter said. “We have to look at them as victims. They’re not criminals.”
Carpenter said that the days of locking up the prostitutes and letting the buyers and traffickers go free have to change because that has contributed to where we are.
“We have got to look at these people as the victims because every person that I’ve sit down with and I’ve talked to has a back story,” Carpenter said. “They all have a reason that they’re involved in what they are. We have got to put more of an emphasis on the trafficker, on the buyer, and we also have to increase our emphasis on rehabilitation, recovery, getting them out of the life, trying to help them, giving them services.”
Carpenter then discussed terminology that people might hear in reference to trafficking. Traffickers refer to their environment as the “life” or the “game.” Victims call their trafficker “daddy” or “king” because he is head of the household and makes all of the decisions. A “stable” refers to the group of women that a trafficker has.
“He calls them ‘stable’ just like they’re horses, they’re cattle because that’s exactly what he sees them as,” Carpenter said. “He sees them strictly as someone that can make him money just as if they’re animals.”
The “bottom girl” usually refers to the girl who has been with the trafficker the longest, helps him recruit other girls and helps keep the other girls in line. The “track” is a place where the girls walk to find clients. The track is very violent and drug-infested and is a place where the girls can be sent as punishment for coming home without the money they were supposed to make for the day, having to go on the track until they can make the extra money. Just about every large city has a track.
A “john” generally refers to the person buying sex. To be “turned out” refers to whenever the victim enters the life. A “date” or “trick” is the actual sex act.
Victims can be anyone and can come from every demographic.
“Just because you live in a gated community in north Jackson does not mean that your child cannot be recruited,” Carpenter said. “Just because you live in a trailer somewhere doesn’t mean that your child cannot be recruited. Just because you go to church every time the doors are open does not keep your child from being recruited.”
Runaways are the biggest pool for traffickers, largely because of their age and vulnerability. Young teens do not generally make the best decisions and could be willing to do anything for gas, food or a place to stay. Traffickers see these cues and prey upon these kids, and runaways will seek the respect that they think they deserve.
“They don’t make good decisions,” Carpenter said. “They’re very vulnerable, plus the fact that they’re running away for a reason. They’re very open, they’re very susceptible to being recruited. They’re very susceptible for their desire to be loved and respected.”
The average age that a child enters the commercial sex industry is 12 to 14 years old because children are easier to recruit and control. One in three runaways are approached for commercial sex acts within 48 hours of leaving home.
Carpenter shared about a young victim he is currently working with in Memphis. She was kicked out of her home at age 13 and went to the only place she knew to go: McDonald’s. She sat there for under an hour before a man approached her, showed concern for her and offered to buy her a drink. By that evening, she had made him $1000. When the TBI rescued her, she was 16, and she pleaded with Carpenter to release her trafficker and let them leave because her trafficker was the only one who loved and understood and took care of her.
“Cash is a 32-year-old man that came up on a 13-year-old in McDonald’s and told her what she needed to hear, gave her protection, gave her attention,” Carpenter said. “She’s so under his power that she’s crying to me, who just put her pimp in jail, to let him go. That’s the kind of power they have.”
Traffickers find their victims anywhere, including social media, the internet, clubs, parties, the street, jail, shopping areas and sporting events.
“Any place that victims gather, that’s where you’re going to have trafficking,” Carpenter said.
Traffickers will recruit in various ways, typically offering promises of protection, adventure, travel, modeling, money or stability.
“These kids, these runaways are looking for something, but the biggest thing we find is that they’re being recruited with love and affection,” Carpenter said. “They are being recruited with the false relationship that this trafficker is providing.”
This false relationship can make the trafficker seem as though he is the victim’s “boyfriend”, showering the victim with gifts and love. The victim, in turn, thinks they have found someone who cares about them.
Carpenter shared about a girl in Springfield, IL, who went on three dates with a guy she met online before he asked her to run away with him to his “business” in Memphis. He promised that he loved her and would take care of her, but soon had her dye her hair and get contacts and told her that she would helping pay for rent and food. Later, she was dancing at a club in Memphis.
She was okay with doing this because she loved this guy and he showed her affection and attention, until he brought in another girl and told her that she was going to help make more money. That’s when it dawned on her that he wasn’t her boyfriend, and she was able to get away because she had been secretly been maintaining contact with her family.
“Once that trafficker has his kid, his child, his victim underneath their control, they’ll do anything to maintain it, through threats, through coercion, through force, through beatings, through drug addiction, isolation, shame, anything he can do to maintain control over that victim,” Carpenter said.
Human trafficking is built upon supply and demand, which means that there are people who want it and people willing to supply it. The buyer fuels the market with money, the trafficker exploits the victim to earn their revenue and the victim is treated as a product that provides the commodity.
Victims have to meet quotas, or certain amounts of money each day. If they don’t meet their quotas, they won’t get food, have to work the track and can get beaten and abused.
One victim has told Carpenter that she sees five johns a night on average and makes $150 from each, which means that that single girl can earn the trafficker over $234,000 in one year.
Buyers come from every demographic and background. Carpenter said that they have arrested people such as teachers, lawyers, airport executives, construction workers, football players, painters, plumbers and county representatives.
Buyers will also frequently be married and have kids, and many are willing to travel. Carpenter said that they have had buyers travel from two states away during undercover operations.
The trafficker is the middle man who distributes and uses the product and then throws the victim away. Traffickers can be men or women, and Carpenter said that there has been an uptick in women involved because they’ve grown up in it and gotten sick of a man taking all of the money.
Gangs are also getting more involved. Carpenter said that law enforcement needs to better enforce trafficking laws and address it just as much as gangs, drugs and guns. He said that guns and drugs are gone when they’re sold, but girls can be sold over and over.
Carpenter said that one of the biggest problems is that the traffickers, as well as society, are embracing the lifestyle, driving with license plates that say “I’m Pimpin” and dressing kids up as pimps on Halloween.
The leading cause of death for people in the commercial sex industry is homicide. There is a seven-year life expectancy for someone who enters commercial sex trafficking, which can lead to tragedies like homicide, suicide, accidental death and overdose.
According to Carpenter, between 100,000 and 300,000 girls between the ages of nine and 18 are being prostituted in America, and one out of every five pornographic picture on the internet is of a child. The United States is responsible for over half of the child pornography on the web, and as of this month, Tennessee has over 23,000 registered sex offenders, not including juveniles.
Since May 2015, the TBI has worked with local law enforcement and conducted 12 operations, arrested over 268 people, rescued 55 females and had over 2,500 contacts.
Carpenter advises people to look for warning signs, ask the right questions, report suspicions and make connections to the people who have resources. He also advises looking for “barcode tattoos” that traffickers have branded on their victims, physical abuse and sexual emblems.
Carpenter then gave some of the warning signs for educators and parents to look for in children. He advises educators to notice children talking about older boyfriends, new tattoos, new sexualized clothes, sudden attitude or personality changes, truancy, talk about traveling to many different locations for short periods of time, darker or more inappropriate writing assignments, new sexualized drawings and reading material, classmates trying to recruit other kids for modeling, references to sexual situations and slang that are beyond age-appropriate, and a lack of interest or change in future plans.
He advises parents to notice new tattoos, kids not allowing them access to their technology or having more than one phone, chronic runaways, older and unfamiliar boyfriends that kids refuse to bring around, isolation from usual set of friends, an increase in privacy concerns or secrecy, and unexplained amounts of money, clothing, and gifts.
Carpenter said that the number one rule of prevention is “to be your child’s parent and not your child’s friend.” Other ways of prevention include being active and involved in your children’s lives, knowing what they’re doing and where they’re going, discussing hard truth with them, screening their relationships, considering code words and check-in times and discussing modeling agencies. He said that, ultimately, the best thing to do is to educate kids.
Shelby Butler, a Union grad and therapist at Pathways Behavioral Health Services, volunteers at The Scarlet Rope Project, a local nonprofit providing an escape for women who have been victims of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. Butler, who typically speaks to high schools about social media, sex, pornography and human trafficking, spoke to the crowd about the dangers of social media and the internet and their effects on human trafficking.
In 2008, 24% of Americans were on social media. Today, 78%, or 3 out of 4, Americans are on social media.
“Kids need to be educated about what they’re doing online,” Butler said. “Kids need to know what they’re talking about. They need to know that what they put online will always be there.”
Butler said that we need to be aware of strangers on social media. During her discussion, she downloaded an anonymous chat app called Whisper and received over 130 replies from strangers in a little over an hour, replies that could lure children into dangerous situations.
“You have children looking for love in a lot of places that they shouldn’t,” Butler said.
She also warned about oversharing information on social media and hidden information that can be found in photos. She warned that tagging your location or using Geofilters makes you an easy target.
“Those people who are looking for victims… that’s easily accessible because you’ve tagged yourself where you’re at,” Butler said.
Butler shared about a photo that her RA took of a bat one night outside of Butler’s room. Butler’s dorm room door and room number could be seen in the photo, which could have made it easy for someone to track her down. Three years prior, she had had a stalker, who could have been Facebook friends with her RA and tracked Butler.
“Someone who was there to protect me put me in danger unknowingly because we post everything online,” Butler said.
Butler talked about the staying power of social media.
“Everything that you put on the internet is there on the internet,” Butler said. “You can delete it, but there is some way you can pull it up.”
She says that, if people aren’t careful, someone can screenshot a social media post and know where you live, what you did today or yesterday, or where you’re going. She warns people to be aware of what they post, posting too much personal information or including something in a post that could reveal a location. Some internet searching could make it easy for a stranger to track them down and pretend to know them.
“Put me in the place of one of the kids that you know,” Butler said. “Do you think they have enough information online for me to track them down?”
She encourages parents to have open communication and talk to their kids about what they’re posting.
She also warned about the dangers of the “dark web”, which makes up 96% of the internet and cannot be accessed on a normal browser. The dark web consists of illegal activity, and 80% of the dark web is child pornography. Kids who use the dark web can come into contact with many criminals- including human traffickers.
Butler then talked about the dangers of pornography and its effect on human trafficking. Pornography produces a surge of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that makes users happy and creates new brain pathways that can lead the user back to the behavior that triggered the chemical release. The more pornography is consumed, the more those pathways get rewired, making it easier and easier for a person to go back to using whether they want to or not.
This surge prompts users to want more and more to get the same high, building up a higher level of tolerance and sometimes escalating into violent pornography. Butler says that pornography portrays a power difference and can “make dominance seem normal and can set the stage for eventual acceptance of verbal and physical aggression.”
“It means that it can make girls think it’s okay for a guy to talk to them like that,” Butler said. “They think it’s okay for a man to hit them, dehumanize them, use them as an object. It means that [boys] think it’s okay for a man to treat a woman that way.”
Butler said that multiple studies have found watching pornography is linked to “the user being more likely to use verbal coercion, drugs, alcohol, or any other substance to push women into sex.” She said that those who consistently view porn are more likely to support statements that “promote abuse and sexual aggression of both women and girls.”
She warned that producers create the illusion of real entertainment and enjoyment, while it is likely that the women smiling on camera have a gun pointed at their heads.
“Just because someone looks like they’re having a good time doesn’t mean they’re doing it because they want to,” Butler said.
Butler noted that human trafficking is an underground business that is hard to track and was not heavily talked about until 2015. She said that the average age a person is exposed to pornography is eight to 11 years old, which is closely linked to the average age of entrance into the sex trafficking industry, which is 12 to 14.
“The more that they watch these things online, the more that they see that there is a demand,” Butler said. “We’re increasing people that are trafficked just by watching the video in our bedroom.”
Sex trafficking is the second largest crime in the world that is growing because the goods can be resold. Traffickers use violence, threats and other forms of coercion to get people into sex trafficking. Social media can be used to find victims. At-risk factors include foster kids, runaways, someone looking for love, gang involvement, mental health issues, sexual orientation, family dysfunction, poverty, abuse, neglect, or parents that have prostituted or been involved in substance abuse.
Carpenter hopes that this discussion will change attitudes, open eyes and encourage research, noting that women don’t choose to have sex with strangers and get beaten down.
“If there’s anybody in this society that needs help, it’s these children, it’s these young adults that are locked up in hotel rooms, that are enslaved, that are being heroin-addicted against their will, that they are being traumatized every day all day,” Carpenter said.
While there are four main rescue and recovery programs for victims across the state, Carpenter says that the Scarlet Rope Project is an “outstanding resource” in the Jackson community.
For more information about human trafficking and how you can help prevent it, visit The Scarlet Rope Project at http://www.scarletropeproject.com.
For resources and links you can go to with your kids, visit https://www.ithastostop.com.
If you have suspicions of human trafficking, contact law enforcement, the Department of Child Services or the Tennessee Human Trafficking Hotline (1-855-55-86484).
