 Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for North Central Minnesota, produced by Lakeland Public Television with host Ray Gildow. Production funding for Lakeland Currents is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airports, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport for information available at BemidjiAirport.org. Closed captioning for Lakeland Currents is sponsored by Niswa Tech Service, tax preparation for businesses and individuals online at NiswaTax.com. Hello again everyone and welcome to Lakeland Currents, where tonight we're talking about an issue that's really sad. It's sad that it's happening in our culture. It's even sadder that it's happening right here where we live in central Minnesota. And the topic is sex trafficking. And we're going to find out what is that definition? What are we when we say sex traffic? We're not just talking about adult prostitution. We're talking about things that are happening with very, very young girls. And it's something that's probably more prevalent than the average person is aware of. So hopefully from this program tonight we'll have a better understanding of what sex trafficking is. I can't say it. And what we can do about it. I guess this evening are Naomi Nelson, who is with Lutheran Social Services. Can't have to talk here. And Jim Eckstead, who is the chief of police at Maxner. Yes. Thank you both for coming on our show. We really appreciate it. And you asked me to ask this question, what is sex trafficking? So let's just start out with what are we defining here as sex trafficking? And our focus for the most part this evening is going to be on central Minnesota. Sure. Yeah, and I think you brought up a really good point already. Like people have an idea of what prostitution is. And so I think that's kind of the social stigma is an understanding of prostitution, which actually could translate to sex trafficking. But what we're going to be talking about, I think here is more the minor commercial sexual exploitation, which is this big umbrella term, which sex trafficking falls underneath. And so what that is, is when something of value is exchanged with somebody else for a sexual activity. And this could be something of value could be a place to stay. It could be a kid that needs, you know, is maybe on the run or it's cold in Minnesota and they're homeless or don't have a place, have been kicked out for whatever reason from their home. And somebody offers them a place to stay and they might trust them and say, all right, you know, I know you from my community, maybe you're somebody that's in my church or my school. But then the expectation is that there's a sexual activity that is exchanged for them for a place to stay. This is kind of two party involvement. When we move into sex trafficking, we're looking at three parties that are involved. There we have a trafficker who is kind of the controller, which often people will know this as the pimp. So we have a pimp. And then we have a youth who is who we consider to be the victim of this crime. And then we have buyers who sometimes we call johns. But we're trying to kind of change that terminology. So we have the trafficker, the youth or the victim. And then we have a john who is the buyer of commercial sexual exploitation. And so again, this can be kind of on this small, this small micro level where we have maybe a mother who is feeding a drug addiction, and she doesn't have any money to give her her drug dealer. And so she offers her daughter for an hour and says, Hey, you can have my daughter for an hour. And then in exchange, I'm going to get my drugs. It's not always money can be anything of value can be drugs, a place to stay transportation. It can be money as well. Then we can move into more of this big level where there could be a trafficker who is exchanging exchanging money with a buyer. And there could be six, seven, eight, 10, 15 different youth that are forced into a situation or coerced into a situation that they're essentially being raped by these people in order for the trafficker to get money. So it is the supply and the demand. It is kind of this business that the traffickers are operating, which is then considered sex trafficking. So the work that you folks do is that with age groups under certain age, so we're not talking about necessarily a 35 year old. Sure. And we do kind of work with both. However, under Minnesota state law, it is still part of what the safe harbor law that was passed in 2011 said is that a child can no longer be considered a child prostitute. And so they're considered a victim. And that is 18 or under the age of 17 years old. And so when they are a minor, they cannot be criminalized over the age of 18. They still can. But I think if I would speak to law enforcement often now they're wondering and asking the question, is this something that really is choice or is this something that maybe they were coerced at the age of 15 and now they're 19 years old and should we be charging them? Do they have a pimp or a controller in place? And so it's trying to understand the story. And if I just don't think anybody wakes up and says, hey, I'm going to sell myself for sex someday. That's not really that dream somebody has. And so it's understanding the topic. Yeah. And what it has been for us over the last three, four, five years in law enforcement, not just in this area, but across the state is kind of a paradigm shift along with the juvenile protections under the safe harbor law, the change in the language, the decriminalization and prostitution that forced us as law enforcement to complete that paradigm shift and and view them as victims and not the offenders, you know. So when we started getting into this about two and a half three years ago here locally, we weren't targeting specific issues related to juvenile sex trafficking, but kind of the whole feeder system. We know that prostitution and solicitation is happening in the adult world, but those individuals are going to be the ones that are probably going to venture off into the juvenile world at some time to or may already be doing that type of stuff. So we wanted to kind of start, you know, getting at the road of the problem, which is just the act of prostitution. And in Baxter specifically, we own the problem because we had the nine, 10 motels in town. And historically, that's kind of been where it's been happening over the last 15, 20, 30 years. One thing that kind of pushed us to going back a little bit further, I'd say now maybe eight to 10 years across the state, some of the bigger agencies, Duluth, Rochester, St. Cloud, Moorhead, those agencies were starting to do the details, kind of what I just explained a little bit ahead of everybody else and more resources, more personnel, bigger problems. But as they did that, they would push the problem out of their area and it doesn't go away. It just migrates somewhere else in the state. And we found out that a lot of it was migrating here to our area. And that's kind of how we started and got rolling on it. Why do you think it is migrating to this area? Four years ago, we weren't addressing the issue. You know, so it, after we started addressing the issue in various different ways, but we made contact with a female victim who was working out of one of our hotels. In the course of three hours that we were watching, there was four individuals who paid a visit to her room. We interviewed her afterwards. She wasn't charged. But she told our investigators, said, you really cramped my style up here. You know, I used to make $2,000 in a day easy. I'm struggling to make $800, $900 in a day now. And, you know, we kind of knew that. We suspected things like that were going on. But to finally hear it firsthand, you know, it was still eye-opening at that point. Well, I guess. $2,000 a day. Yeah. And this was coming from a lady who was just shy of 30 years old. And she had a home where she lived with actually her parents in a Northwest Metro city. And she would leave her kids with her mom in the morning and travel. We were one of the destinations for her, you know. So about every once every three, four weeks should be up here. Make her money. But we were one stop in a, you know, kind of a circuit that she had going. I used to work in a college and we had a law enforcement program that I don't believe I remember the curriculum focusing very much on this problem. So this is new for you to learn how to start coping with this, I would guess, for police departments. It was, yeah, well, prostitution has always been on the board. But this was a full 180 on how to deal with it. And what we did locally, we started kind of two groups. We had the law enforcement group who was going to address the problem. And then we created kind of an advocacy group on the backside to support law enforcement and to support that paradigm shift that we were going through. Because the prosecutors had to learn that they needed to rethink the way they were going to frame up the prosecution. We're not going to call them prostitutes. We're going to call them victims, because that's what they are. Like Naomi said, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know what, I want to be a prostitute. So we're addressing it that way. And I don't want to say it was a struggle, but it was a big change. But it threw some pretty hard work. We seem to deter at least the adult issue early on. And to date, we haven't had any criminal prosecution of any juvenile crimes here in our local area. But we're not too naive to believe that it's still not going on. And that's why, you know, law enforcement, it's hard to justify or quantify sometimes the work that you do. Is it paying dividends? Well, we kind of hope that it is, but we've got to keep doing it too. And that's why we continue to work together. So Naomi, your title is Navigator. What does that mean? So Safe Harbor was passed, as I said, kind of in 2011. And this was a law that thankfully, Minnesota took ownership of and said, we're not only going to pass this law, but we're going to give money to this and for services for those who have been victims of this crime. And so what that is, is that there are navigators throughout the state of Minnesota. There are eight regions. And so I cover eight counties, excuse me, that are in central Minnesota. And that's from down to Elk River, Wright, Sherburne, Benton, Stearns, Morrison, Aiken, and Crow Wing. Wow, that's a big area. Yeah, so kind of being able to- Are you the only one doing that in that area? In that area, yes, as a navigator. The other thing that they said is that not only do we need navigators that are going to help, whether it be child protection, giving them resources, whether it be a women's center or advocacy groups, school personnel, we want to make sure people are educated on the issue so they can identify it. And then they can call us and we can help give resources to the youth that they may have identified. The other thing is that they said that we need housing. That's something we're still getting more funding for because the truth is we do have many victims that are under the age of 18 years old that need housing. Some of them are in child protection. Cases, some of them are not. But they need a safe place to begin healing and restoring from what's going on and what has been going on. And they do say that right now the average age that somebody has a trafficker that maybe forces them or courses them into this industry is 15 years old. So we're looking at a 15-year-old and I think that that in itself, just thinking about somebody that young and being in a situation that they're forced to have sex night after night after night is just something that's really hard to digest. But thankfully our state is saying we need funding in order to best serve the people that have been victims of this. Are most of the victims that you deal with from Minnesota? Yeah I would say for the most they are domestic. At one time you know people maybe have this idea that sex trafficking was international or that it was only international that were being trafficked. Yes that is a problem but the highest percentage is going to be domestic. And just sometimes from our area sometimes you can have somebody that's from St. Claude being trafficked up to Brainerd to Duluth to Fargo Moorhead area and all the towns in between and back. But it really there's also opportunity that traffickers will say you know what I have somebody right here that I can traffic on the weekends and they can be in school on Monday. Their family's not going to know what's going on but I'm going to make a profit off of them. And so there are traffickers that are working in the area with youth from our area as well. So what what we would consider in the old days as a John? Yes. Do you work with them too? Do you ever try to rehabilitate those folks? Yeah so there's a program that's in St. Claude at the women's center there or sorry the sexual assault center there. And they have what they call the not not buying at school. And so it's not to say that we're going to take charges away but it's saying that you need to go to this class to understand what's going on. Because the truth is that this is supply and demand. If there was not a demand for this it would not be happening. It would cease to exist. So we know that we do need to focus on the demand and how can we stop this by focusing on the people that are buying and that are doing that. And one thing that they're learning interesting enough is that a pornography is kind of fueling this industry. And that's one of the things that has been unique across the board which is why it's leading to younger ages. Because we know that with the progression of pornography it also leads to younger children. And so if they were once it was a 30 year old that they're watching in pornography images and now it's down to a child that they are more likely than to go buy a child and want a child and insolicit in these situations. And so it all kind of intertwines into a big issue of the commercial and sexual industry. That's kind of what I was getting at too when we first started this you know getting to the road of the problem. You know and we've worked even through prosecution you ask about treating the Johns you know there's they call them Johns schools as well. So when we did our operations at the hotels it was all adults over the years now locally I think it's close to 30 some adult males that we've arrested for solicitation charges. And in those prosecutions you know I don't know the exact numbers but part of the prosecution was maybe to attend the Johns school. A piece of that is the education you know I can't tell you how many times during the course of our work we heard well it's just too consenting adults what's the problem. Well it's so much bigger than that I mean it it may be consenting adults at a level somewhere but like Naomi was explaining it tends to it becomes more criminal as people become used to it and you know that even that lady I spoke of earlier you know as we talked with her the story she was telling us you know things that have happened to her in a motel room while she's working it was just amazing that you know as a late 20s gal she's not been hurt and she would be the first one to admit it you know so again it goes back to okay is she really consenting maybe now at this point in time but through our conversations we also learned that she didn't get into this on her own she was trafficked out of St. Cloud she was a college student down there and you know now instead of getting a college education she's stuck in this world now she doesn't know anything else now there's a lot of money coming in she's dependent on it she's dependent on it and she can't get away from it so it's just this ugly cycle and for us in law enforcement we wanted to break that pattern and that's kind of what we we started to do and we committed to doing here and and across the state you know we received a grant at the same time Bemidji received a grant Bemidji police department we're doing the same type of work and it it seems to be working but now you know the focus is kind of changing again within law enforcement world kind of shifting towards the guardian angel aspect of it that is where we specifically are getting into doing undercover work to go out and find the people who are specifically targeting juveniles and that's that's some interesting work too and it's amazing it's interesting because the people who are the johns parts keep using that term sorry the buyer buyer it can be anyone we saw a chief of police in minnesota that was arrested for that i fished with his neighbor about a month ago and it was devastating to that whole community a congressman in new york and he got into the pornography stuff too i guess i i've not made that connection as much as you're saying they owe me that pornography has led to a lot of this developing because people are getting access to the younger picture what's the youngest victim you've dealt with the youngest i've dealt with is a oh man how old is she been 14 years old um but again is she at eighth grade or ninth grade yeah about that about ninth grade wow and the other thing you look at is um you know some of the youth they say 15 years old and so you're looking at very young i know people that have worked with a lot younger that have worked with an eight-year-old or a four-year-old who have been trafficked um and you really see that more when you're looking at familial trafficking which is harder to detect and identify um because it's been something that's going on within the house and it's in the house and it's word of mouth um and so it's not on craigslist or backpage dot com that they're putting up ads um and selling them it's that it's through word of mouth somebody knows i can go to that house and there's going to be a young a young girl or a young boy um that are going to be there and i can do what i want for this amount of money and so again when it's familial it's a little bit harder to detect and we know that that is very prevalent as well in a lot of communities yeah and a lot of times it can blend in with the drug world as well i mean a lot of that intersects in a lot of ways you haven't made it sound like all of this is necessarily related to drugs no it's related to like you said just getting a place to stay or i i guess i've never i i i've always thought that so much with this would be drug related sure somebody's doing the work that yeah and the work that we did at the the local motels we kind of anticipated that maybe as we got into it we were prepared we had our drug task force agents who were there um i don't know i think maybe a handful of times or less did we actually come across individuals who had drugs on them or were you know anyway any sort of drug connections so that was kind of surprising yeah to us too um you know the the list of individuals who we arrested was it was somewhat broad but somewhat narrow at the same time i mean it was a lot of the white males in that 25 to 60 year old age group that were somewhat local i mean they traveled a little bit to to get to the destination but i think now you know it we worked hard on the front end too with the local newspaper we wanted to make a big splash we wanted it to be deterrence which was i'll be honest kind of hard on the officers because they really enjoyed doing the work i mean we couldn't believe how productive we were in that first detail that we we ran and um it was my call on the back end to bring the the paper in and have them that intimately involved from the front and the deterrence worked it really did we dropped off almost immediately as we continued to work the details once they realized you were looking for them yeah but the problem is and again we knew that we weren't solving any issues we were just probably pushing it elsewhere so now i think a lot of our work is is on the education side of it um we're getting into kind of a risk assessment role too where how do we better identify the juveniles who who are at risk who may be victims so who are they who is at risk right and i think this is something um that sometimes is hard to grasp that all youth are essentially at risk for this um traffickers can lure um youth in on social media that's a big thing it can be on instagram snapchat whatsapp there's multiple different applications that are out there that parents aren't monitoring um they don't even know how to sometimes operate the app so they don't know who they're talking to and you can be anyone behind a phone um so the traffickers kind of lure them in through this um love adventure i'm gonna have a great life for you reaching out at times when maybe a kid is like my mother beep beep beep beep beep and freaks out and the trafficker at that point can step in and say oh honey it's okay what's going on right now let me have a conversation with you about that you can trust me um and they start to build this rapport with this youth until they get to a point um that maybe they come in contact with them and at that point they're gonna use violence and they're gonna use fears and threats against their family they might blackmail them and say you know what i have this picture of you and i'm gonna show it to the rest of the world um unless you comply with me um and so traffickers really um they're businessmen they know they can make money off of this one person are the traffickers always men for the most part but not always i actually i shouldn't even say for the most part no we oftentimes will see traffickers that are females it doesn't make a difference um the gender i would say the only gender that you're gonna see most prominently male is in the buyers when we're looking at buyers but when you're looking at traffickers when you're looking at victims um they're all they're they could be anybody um all different ages as well um and so again they could make a hundred thousand dollars a year with one person wow hundred thousand and that's on like the the low end um so they're very tactful and who they're gonna lure in and who you know sometimes it can be those at-risk youth maybe families um that are not engaged in their life that are out you know roaming around in the streets it could be those that are runaways or the lgbt community if they're not um feeling that they belong somewhere this person might be somebody that accepts them so again the traffickers are are tactful and bringing it back to the drugs one thing i i like to make the connection with and um is that you could exchange drugs for money or drugs for whatever and those drugs are gone you have a human being and you can use them over and over and over and over again you don't give it away and it's gone you have that person use over and over again which is why it's such a big money maker um and so when you get into the mind of the trafficker you realize that they don't care about this person and really they are just a price tag to them your commodity doesn't disappear you always right you always have it wow do you see much disease yes when you're looking at stds and stis unwanted pregnancies um i worked with the youth and um yeah she i mean she ended up she was pregnant and at the very beginning wasn't sure you know who who the dad was and and that was really difficult for her and something she had to her whole pregnancy had to wonder and think about and so you just think of all the different things that um will be unexpected to somebody that just kind of ended up in the situation what what services do you have for the victims well minnesota is doing it right um that they've thrown a lot of money at this and they continue to increase funding we're very fortunate here in our area in the throwing coney brainer baxter area um we've had neomy is our navigator now she's she's out of brainer so that helps us she talked about her eight counties when we first started doing this our first navigator um she had 22 counties that so as the state continues to build this out they're doing it right um the resources we have the the saving grace home we haven't even really talked about but that's one of the foster home specific to traffic youth in the brainer area in the brainer lakes area and we've had that for a couple years now for a while that was one of the only out state i don't know if it still is so we're we're fortunate to have that here um luther and social services has received more funding to hire another coordinator position um so we're we're fortunate that way what we see in law enforcement is in the metro area the the problem and the resources that they're putting toward the problem is much greater there and resources are probably two three four times we're you know putting into it right now but the bca has just taken on in the last month and a half um they've started to own this problem and i'm i'm excited to talk about it because they've started their own human trafficking task force within the agency and they're they're applying for additional funding and they're doing it right they've reached out to the out state communities um which sometimes you know we're out state we feel ignored but they're making us feel like okay we understand the metro is really attacking this problem we need to cover our bases out state too so um they're doing it right and and they're bringing us in on that we're down to a minute okay what should community people but who should they contact if they see something that makes them suspicious i would say um first of all educate yourself so you know what to look for and you can go to our saving grace um luther and social service saving grace on our facebook page um otherwise you can you can always call us as well we have a 24 7 hotline that's luther and social services social services luther and social services and our 24 7 hotline is 1-866-824-3770 um and that you can always call for us to give you more information give you identifiers um let you know what to do in a situation that you think somebody something might be going on um we can always consult with you otherwise we always say call you know call law enforcement call law enforcement they're they are in a position that they can respond and we were trained now to deal with it right over the last two years we've we've done training specific to this um in baxter brainard crowing county area we've trained probably 75 percent or greater of our officers specific in a two to four hour course on that excellent well thank you for coming on the show it's very eye-opening and and sad to see but good to see that you're making progress in dealing with this issue thank you both of you thanks you've been watching lakeland currents or we're talking about what you're talking about i'm ray gildow so long until next time