 I would like to also thank Sharon Bartling for putting this program together for us this evening. She's worked very hard on it and I'm happy to see so many of you here. And with that, I will introduce our moderator for this evening, the second vice, or third vice president for program of the league, Evelyn Bonavida. I also wanna thank you for coming and thank Sharon as well. And Charla Dan, who is now cast as a, she's not here because she has a board meeting, but she's got her staff here. The League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan political organization and it encourages informed and active participation in government and influences public policies through education and advocacy. The League of Women Voters of Texas has adopted a study of human trafficking in the state of Texas. As our part of that study, the league in San Antonio is talking about human trafficking in Bear County. And so we have a panel discussion tonight. We will be taking consensus on questions concerning human trafficking and turning them into the state league and we will be then reaching in a position on various issues concerned with human trafficking. And the league then can advocate one way or the other on a lot of these issues. We never do take a position until we've done a study on the issue that we're taking a position on. So tonight we have a great panel. We have John. Well, I'm gonna do you an order. Okay, so Castellanos, who is the president of the Freedom Youth Project Foundation in San Antonio. It was founded in 2010 as a human rights organization dedicated to fighting and preventing human trafficking of youth in America, primarily through public awareness, prevention, and restoration. The majority of Mr. Castellanos' career was spent in the private sector as owner of a software development firm. In that capacity, he served as consultant, business analyst, process engineer, project manager, and facilitator. He brings all of these skillsets to the development of a nonprofit foundation dedicated to America's youth who are victimized by human trafficking. The league study is broken up into prevention, prosecution, and protection. Those are the various issues we will be addressing. And Mr. Castellanos will be talking to us about prevention. Our next speaker is Kirstah Lieber-Melton, who is the assistant criminal defense, criminal district attorney responsible, I knew what this would happen, for inditing and prosecuting human trafficking cases in Bear County. She's also the chairperson of the South Texas Coalition Against Human Trafficking. And as such, is responsible for the continuation of the local law enforcement and nonprofit response in human trafficking in Bear County and the surrounding counties. Mountain graduated cum laude from Cornell University in 1993. She then went on to obtain her law degree with honors and her master's in public affairs from University of Texas School of Law and the Lyndon Bain Johnson School of Public Affairs in 1998. In between, she worked, I mean, she's got, this is some bio, I'll tell you. In between, she worked for two years in the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. After law school, Kirstah worked for Morgan Lewis and Bacchius in Washington, DC before joining the Bear County District Attorney's Office in January of 2001. Our last speaker is a nice man who is stepping in for the fellow who was here who was going to come, but now has bronchitis and it's not a good thing to have if you're gonna be a panelist. His name is Scott Poole and he is an assistant supervisor in the gang unit with the Bear County Juvenile Probation Department. He has been with the Probation Department for 21 years in various positions. He's also a member of the South Texas Coalition against human trafficking and has been for three years. The last four years he's worked with other probation officers to develop a method to identify victims of domestic minor six trafficking. I think maybe minor, well, I'm sorry. Either way, we've got some really good speakers and we're gonna start with Saul who is going to talk to us about prevention. Okay, I'm gonna let my computer catch up to the projector here and I'll just log in real quick. A lot of the information that we like to share is the audience tends to benefit greatly from being able to see some images that, okay, hook's on, up and running. My name is Saul Casquiano. I'm the CEO of Freedom Youth Project. Freedom Youth Project Foundation, as she said, was formed in 2010. We got involved because we saw a big gap in services for victims who are from the US. One of the big issues that we basically uncovered and it's so blatant is that oftentimes the media narrative tends to highlight the international and the global aspect of human trafficking and it leads parents to have this false assumption that this is something you can go to bed at night and not have to care about. When the truth is, in the United States, statistically nine out of 10 victims are from the United States. And the target for traffickers in the US is about a 12 to 14 year old American girl. Now boys are also trafficked and one of the biggest challenges we have in this is statistics because I don't know how this statistic came about but the US Department of Justice tip report which is the Trafficking in Persons report came out by the State Department stated that only five out of a thousand victims are even identified. So you can imagine less than that get rescued. The statistic that the FBI has shared with us is that one half, less than a half a percent are rescued, four tenths of one percent. So what does that tell you? That tells you that if you're gonna have a strategy to deal with this, that prevention is absolutely critical if we're doing a bad job of rescuing, right? And so basically one of the things that I think is critical is for us to understand how do we address this issue in a way where we look for the critical gaps and understand where our intervention points are. And everybody here probably knows a basic understanding of what human trafficking is but sometimes the word trafficking tends to have people associated with transporting. But everybody here knows that drug trafficking is the selling of drugs, right? It's not the moving around of drugs but when you say human trafficking, people think oh those are the people in the semi trucks that are packed in like sardines coming across the border. That's transporting. Human trafficking is selling people and there are several definitions but basically it's a recruiting, harboring and of course transporting of any person for labor including slavery and DMST stands for domestic minor six trafficking. That's a subset of trafficking that excludes trafficking for labor. And we have people who are forced to work in farms and agriculture and restaurants and things like that. What our focus is at Freedom Youth Project is minors meaning under 18 years old from America domestic and that is a huge part of it. So everybody has a clear understanding. One of the challenges as I said, the rescue rate is very low. As I said four out of five, four out of 1,000 are even identified. We have them in our hands a lot but usually it's to prosecute them and there's reasons for that but there's also challenges and issues and controversies about that too. And one of the things that we're trying to do is to basically address the issue from a public health standpoint and that is to take victims and treat them like victims and address the things that the trauma and address the SGDs and things like unwanted pregnancies or current pregnancies that they're dealing with and to treat it like a public health issue. So, but one of the things that we found is that quite often places have them in their hands but they're not identified and as such they're not treated like a victim. And so when you talk about human trafficking there's a whole bunch of things that really come to mind when you wanna have a real good discussion about it. It involves deception mostly and you know the very first story of evil in the world was a story of deception and even today the tool of evil is deception. And so we really realized that prevention is such a critical part and we wanted to understand how does it happen? Who does it happen to? And so we had to get a picture, a big picture of the way human trafficking works to understand this. Globally, it's a $32 billion a year business. It is now past drug trafficking as the second largest crime in the world. The only crime larger than it is arms trafficking and that's because they sell million dollar missiles and billion dollar planes. It really caused, globally it is tied to poverty and like I said it involves deception and it could be trafficking for labor sex, domestic servitude. But when you look at the world, that's what it looks like. When you look in the United States, about 15 to 18,000 people are brought into the US from other countries. But if you look at the population in the US from the US, it's about 300,000 current victims. That ratio is 20 to one, Americans being trafficked to international. But if you look at the new occurrence every year, it is about one to 10. One victim is from another country and nine of them are from the US. That's the wake up call. That's the bell that we ring. That's the alarm that we sound because our job is to take parents, grandparents, teachers, anyone with children in their life that they love and care about, it could be their own children, their nieces and nephews and to connect the dots why this issue belongs to you, why you have a stake in it. That's one of the problems we have with the narrative that makes us feel like it's just a global third world issue. We tend to think, well, this is something we don't have to care about. So anyway, in order to address this, most of the information comes from real cases, but it's after the fact. It's after somebody's been traumatized, after they've been trafficked, after they've gone through coercion and... So where do you start? Well, in order to address it, you have to go through case, after case, after case, after case, and you have to start looking for trends. You have to look for how does it happen? Who does it happen to? What does the trafficker look like? And in order to get an accurate picture, the big picture will always reveal the details. And so we wanted to start with a macro picture, understanding of human trafficking. And so one of the things we wanted to learn is how do traffickers approach, connect, and to see victims, because that will tell us how to train people not to be a victim. And again, of course, we wanted to know who the victims are, where do they come from, and obviously we want to know about the trafficker. What does the trafficker look like? When I got in looking at this about four years ago, the picture I had in my mind was that they were all men. We found out that that's not true. As a matter of fact, what we found out is that you cannot, the stranger danger model for teaching your kids to be safe doesn't work anymore. As a matter of fact, we kind of think as parents that our job is to teach our children the difference between friend and enemy, but think about it, that's easy. It's easy to tell the difference between a friend and an enemy. The real skill that our young people and it's a life skill your whole life is to tell the difference between a friend and a fake friend because that is what's at play here. So we cannot tell children or teens or young people what they look like because they could look like a man, they could look like a woman, it could be a couple. There was a rest here, I think it was last year, 41 people arrested. There were people in professions that would shock you. There was a teacher, there was an EMT, there was an ambulance, I guess EMT, there was trying to think all the different. And so we're kind of shocked when we found, I remember last year there was a college professor who was arrested in Colorado. And he had a website and he was facilitating the buying and the selling of victims. And so we're not able to tell young people what do they look like. And so in order to help them we have to teach them to recognize deception. So it all starts with somebody who is targeted. One of the things that we learn is that traffickers pick victims. They pick them in a room full of people, they will eliminate people who are not easy targets. They're looking for low-hanging fruit, they're looking in a mall for someone who, a child, maybe a young teenage girl who doesn't have an adult with her, they're not gonna go approach a girl that has a parent. And they're looking for someone who maybe is alone, but if it's a group, as long as there's no adult there, so they always start with a targeted person. And obviously at some point, if a child goes missing, there is a question after two or three days if they are not located, are they being trafficked? And that's the question we ask a lot today. So it starts with a targeted person, this girl, a missing girl. You can see the devastation that trafficking inflicts on her, this is about three years forward in her life, the same girl. Now I wanna tell you, we don't have these pictures because she went to Olin Mills every year. We have these pictures because she was arrested. These are arrest photos. And so part of the issue that has been addressed, and I would say that law enforcement has done a great job of recognizing that when you're a police officer and you see the third girl from the end, and you're not thinking oh, that may be the missing girl that somebody's looking for. You're seeing someone who is working the streets and probably looks like they're addicted to drugs and they don't conjure up the feeling of that's a victim. And so law enforcement has been the very first, I believe, to start waking up to this notion that this person here might be somebody's missing child. Now we still have the problem that even if you try to take this person, help her, rescue her, take her home, she'll run away that night. She's addicted. She thinks she's in love with her trafficker. And so basically we have to learn, I think what is the optimal intervention point? Well it's way back earlier. And that's what prevention is about, taking what happens at each step and learning what those steps are. And so we started putting together kind of a life cycle of human trafficking to understand the stages. And so it starts with sort of being a target and then being deceived. And then there is an actual point where they're training you to be somebody who does sex work and introducing you to how you can make a lot of money which is a lie. And then abduction, you notice abduction happens kind of late. That's because during those early stages, they think they're with friends. They go and come freely. But there's a point where they go behind one door that it's locked and at that point they are now somebody who has gone behind the wrong door and our job in prevention is to teach children and teens how to stay on the right side of the wrong door. So abduction could happen anywhere in this stage. And then there's coercion and trauma. So we wanna understand what happens, how it happens, who it happens to in order to develop prevention. So let's look at this. Certain choices that teens may have a lot to do with how attractive they are to traffickers. But I'll let you know that choices that parents make also do the same thing. Like I said, dropping your 12 year old daughter at a mall where predators shop for victims is not a good idea. Now they do have mall cops, but they only care of your child's shoplifts. They're not there to protect anybody's children. So we teach young people that choices that you make have a lot to do with how attractive you are as a victim. Obviously running away, there is 2,000 reports a day in the US of a child that has run away. The actual number of runaways is 7,671. Now that's larger than about half of the small towns in this country. That's how many runaways happen a day in the US. And the Center for Missing and Exploited Children tells us that within 48 hours, one third of them have already been pulled into trafficking. So we wanna teach young people that you have power and that is that choices you make runaway, truancy, risky online behavior, poor judge of friends, and that includes friends on Facebook because social media has become a big part of making trafficking an equal opportunity victimization now. It used to be that we were, if you had a high risk victim model that you were mostly talking about children who had previous sexual abuse in their history, maybe they were in foster care and all of those things are still true. But what is also true now is that social media plays a big role in getting into any home in any neighborhood. There was a young girl here in San Antonio whose father was an executive at a major insurance company here. And she got on social media three years ago or four years ago and said on board, somebody come get me. And I think she was trafficked for three years. She came from a good home, good family. And so online social media where you can be in touch with people who you don't know and have conversations. And so Facebook is one of the areas where you get friend requests and you might get a request from somebody who you don't know, but oh, my friend knows them. And okay, well, if Amy knows her, okay, I'll go ahead and accept the request. Well, these people get online and they do that. Two years ago, there was a bust of 34 people in California who each of these people had about 20 fake profiles on Facebook, 10 fake teenage boys and 10 fake teenage girls. And each of these people were working, all these fake online identities and friending people on Facebook and setting up meetings for their friends on the outside. Now what I mean by friends on the outside is that these 34 people at the time they were doing it were all in a California prison. And so these are things that our young people need to know about. So one of the things we did is start looking at case after case after case to identify trends and to uncover how do you connect? How do you approach? How do you deceive? And so we started developing a picture of how it happens face to face. And face to face, we came up with these following red flags, location. Now somebody at a mall comes up to a child and says, hey, we got the party of the century at my house, we got beer, booze, drugs, all the kids are there, why don't you come on down? Now they're trying to get this child to go to a different location. One of the most popular approaches that traffickers and predators use is incredible offer. I work for a model agency and you have the face that we're looking for. Here's my card. We've got girls coming to Austin tomorrow to get their portfolio taken. Maybe you should come too. This could be big for you. Okay, that's incredible offer. And that's probably one of the most common ploys. There was a guy that was just prosecuted here. I'm trying to remember his name, but he was working UTSA girls. There was a story in current about him. But anyway, he was pretending to be developing a reality TV show. And he also told other girls that he represented a model agency that had a contract with Victoria's Secret. And so incredible offer is one of the common things. So what I'm getting at here is if you look at these letters of red flags, they spell liars. And this is a system that we teach young people because it's an easy thing to remember and it's an easy measuring stick to see that maybe something doesn't add up. And so we also uncovered that for being online, risky behavior online, that the red flags spell poser. And so liars and posers is a training we offer to at-risk youth. We also offer it to faith-based youth groups and to school districts and to organizations that work with at-risk. And we license it out to other organizations who wanna train it. But basically this is a training system that teaches how choices impact how attractive you are as a victim and how to recognize as a skill set be good at detecting deception. And so that is called liars and posers. And so we teach young people to recognize red flags. And so to start thinking maybe something's not right, we also teach how do you disengage from somebody at a mall that you've determined is somebody bad? How do you get away from them while you're still in this safe location? Because that's the whole idea is that it's not easy to get away from them if you've decided to go with them to their car. It's not easy even to get away if you decided to go outside the front door of the mall and now you're in the parking lot. So you have to learn how to disengage how to disengage while you're still in the safe location. So that's basically what we do from the standpoint of prevention. I will tell you we work on public awareness and we also work on restoration as well. But this is our prevention initiative. If anybody has any questions about it, I guess you can write down questions and that will come up later. But that's what I wanted to share with you today. I hope that I've answered some of your questions about what prevention is and how it works. You have some of these. We do have some of these handouts and we can, everybody here can take one and it'll give you more information. We also have a website specifically about this called liarsandposers.com. So anyway, I wanna thank you for your time. I hope that I've shared some good information with you. Thank you so much. I wanted to mention that if you've got questions, we have cards, if you wanna pass them out, Sharon, that'd be great. People can write them down and after they've made their presentations, the questions will come to me and I can read them off in that way that you can hear the answers because they all have mics. Our next speaker is Mr. Poole, who's going at this time because he thought it followed better than the way we have it set up. So, come ahead. Here's to him. Here's to him. That's a mistake. Yes. No, we thought it would work better because what we do, what my job is, is to find the victims. I work for Juvenile Probation and in about 2008, we kind of found our first girl that was involved in trafficking and it just happened to be that one probation officer went and asked a few questions to this young lady and it became a big case and I'm curious to actually prosecute the guys and it made some of us in the probation look at things a little differently and we tried to figure out a way that we could find the victims because what you have to understand, they don't come up and raise their hand and say I'm a victim of trafficking. They don't disclose this information freely, they don't give it out. So you have to talk to them and you have to convince them to tell you what's going on in their lives. So that's what we did. We came up with some ways to identify them because we had a lot of kids that are referred to our department and we tried to find a way to pull these kids out of the massive girls that come through there so that we could interview just a few of them. So what we did is we came up with, we have a 52 question questionnaire that's called a Macy. It's a Massachusetts Assessment of Youth instrument and on it it has specific sections like for suicide ideation, for trauma, for substance abuse and for different things like that and we thought we would look at the trauma part of it. If they have a high trauma score, that means that something has happened to them at some point in their life and so we wanna go talk to them and ask questions about that. We also thought that we would look at the runaway history. We talked to other people, there's a guy in Dallas who's been doing this for years, his name's Byron Fassett and we went and talked to him one time and he said what do you look for? For a kid who might be involved in trafficking and he always said runaways. So we decided that three or more runaways before the age of 13 would be another clue that that's a kid that we needed to talk to. We also found that CPS, kids who are involved with child protective services were more likely to be involved in trafficking. So if we had a kid who had a high trauma score, history of running away, they had a history with CPS and also we would look on the police reports and we would read them and if they were arrested with an older male or female, as Saul said, it's not just a male, it could be female. But we usually look if she's 14 and she's with a 25 year old guy or woman, not related, we wonder what she's doing with them. So we took that criteria out and we started a quest going down and having assessments on girls. And primary girls, because girls talk, boys don't, boys are like men. You know, you ask your husband, what are you thinking? Nothing, boys are the same way. You know, if we go and talk to them, it's harder for them to disclose. So we've assessed a lot of girls just to give you a stat because you can't go by stats. From 1980 until October of 2013, we had 117 kids arrested for prostitution, 117 in 30 years. So it doesn't look like we have a problem. We started identifying victims just from juvenile probation in 2009. We've had around 67 as of today, maybe closer to 70. We have another 20 who we know are working or prostituting, but they won't make an outcry. So in a few short years, we found more than they found in almost 30 years. So this method that we developed is working. So the biggest part of our deal is to find the victims and to get them services. Not only that, we try to do prevention, but it's maybe a little different because prevention to us is finding the pimps and finding the guys that are putting them out there. And if we're able to get a case good enough for law enforcement, can go and arrest these guys. That's what we like to do. And curious to can tell you about the long sentences. She's got some of these guys. So prevention is to also bust the people and get them off the street that are putting the girls out there. And then we're able to get them services quicker. If we determine that they're a victim of sex trafficking, I'm able to pick up the phone and call the rape crisis center and get them counseling right away, you know, within a couple of days. If not the same day, they start working with somebody. So that's one aspect of juvenile probation because our department saw that there was such a need in a short period of time, they decided that one of our judges decided to have a court and it's called the Restore Court. Judge Parker started that a few months ago. And what she does is she meets with all the girls on a kind of an informal basis and we discuss their cases, we discuss how they're doing at home or how they're doing in residential placement and just try to, she tries to be a mentor to the kids, tries to be a mentor to the families and just a little more intimate situation and then trying to help these kids, see them as victims and not just another kid in the court that's committed a crime because if you go back and look at their histories, these kids have horrible, horrible backgrounds. The sexually molested since the age of three could have been their dad or grandpa, the trusted neighbor, their mom, their brother and it goes on and on and you hear about how many times they've been victims of rape or things like this. She's 14 years old, she's been raped four or five times. She's been sexually molested since she was three. You wonder why she gets with this pimp and why she has such a trust because she doesn't trust anybody in her life and this guy gives her a little bit of something and she latches on to that and tries to stay with him and tries to build a relationship with this guy and it's hard for us to break her away from that because her whole life's been pretty crappy and they're just finding someone to latch on to. So that's what we try to do with Restore Court and through all the trauma-informed counseling and therapy that we give them. We also have a, we've opened a facility that's called the Mission Road Center for Girls and it's just for girls who've been victims of trafficking or who are high risk and it's in our juvenile probation detention center but it's not part of the detention center. It's in the same facility but they're separate and what they try to do there is they do trauma-informed therapy and they give the girls therapy that they wouldn't normally get. If we didn't find them as victims of trafficking they would go to some other placement, they would get anger management, they would get drug counseling, they would get some life skills and some behavior modification but since we know they're victims of trafficking they go there and they get trauma therapy and it helps them and we're hoping in the long run that, I know Kirsten and I was just talking, we would like to see them when they're 19 or 20 and they're doing well. That's probably gonna be a rare case more than it's gonna be a good case but at least we're giving them some skills so that when they do wanna make the change that they do. A lot of the victims, girls that get involved in trafficking, they don't make the change until they're in their mid-20s. They're like a battered wife in a lot of ways or a battered husband and they keep going back, they keep going back and you wonder why, you wonder why they keep going back. It's just that trauma bond that's built with them and after, as one of the women in a presentation I have says after four or five times of practice trying to get out of it she finally got out. Again, she was in her mid-20s and it just takes a while. It's not an easy process for them to get out of it and it takes a while. So the Mission Road program, it's brand new and we've been there, I wanna say I'm seven months. We're gonna see how it works. The girls will start getting out now and going back home if they have a home or they'll go back to CPS custody and CPS will place them somewhere. We're hoping that the skills they've learned there and the things they've learned there will help them and they'll have better lives. And that's pretty much what we're doing at Probation. We've got a lot going on. We're, y'all can be proud of Bear County because we're ahead of the curve. Not many probation departments are actively looking for victims. We are actively looking for victims. We have a facility in the whole state of Texas. There's only four facilities, Grandbury, Rockdale, Freedom Place, and I think that's it. And then we have the MRC here for girls in Bear County and nobody else goes there. But we're ahead of the curve on a lot of places. We have a lot of work to do and a long way to go and some better ways of doing things, but we're trying and that's it. I'll answer any questions you have after we get done. So Kirsten Melton gets to wind up. She gets to just talk about prosecution. Scott first is because hearing about prosecution before you hear about victims, that'd be a little bit hard, right? So I am the person in the end who's there to go after the bad guys. That's my job. But what I really wanna do today is talk to you about why you should care about trafficking in Bear County, okay? What is happening here? It's all gave you a really good sense of what is happening nationwide and what is happening worldwide. I'm here to tell you what is happening in your neighborhood, in your community, across the street, a couple of miles down the road, right next to the courthouse in the north side schools of San Antonio, on the south side of San Antonio, what is happening in Bear County, okay? What is happening in Bear County is that Bear County citizens are selling Bear County children to other Bear County citizens. That's it. That's the bottom line. Our people are taking our kids and selling them to willing buyers here in our community. That is a devastating truth, but it is something that is fundamental for you to understand. Human trafficking is the oldest crime in the book. Everyone always says, oh, prostitution is the oldest crime, right? It's been around since the dawn of man. Slavery's been around that long too. And that's what we're talking about. Human trafficking equates to slavery. And when you put it in those terms, we see it very, very differently. When we talk about trafficking, it often gets confused with smuggling of illegal alien. We then kind of conflated with the immigration debate, but human trafficking has absolutely nothing to do with immigration, and that's one of the first things I always tell my audience is, because for human trafficking to occur, you don't have to move somebody across the board. We think about trafficking that way. And those of you who have seen a documentary or watched something on television or read an article, it's usually about international trafficking. Somebody being moved across international lines. Can that be a trafficking situation? It can, but it is not the be-all, end-all of trafficking, and it's not primarily what we are prosecuting here in Bear County. Those aren't the cases that we tend to see. So let's talk real quick about the law, about a couple of differences between smuggling and trafficking. Smuggling is a voluntary crime. I pay you to take me across the border, okay? I'm committing a crime by going across that border illegally. She's committing a crime by taking me across that border illegally. But I've paid her. We have a voluntary arrangement. There is no imprisonment there, no slavery there, no force, fraud or coercion. We're both engaging in a voluntary crime. Can a smuggling situation where people are brought in illegally become trafficking? Yeah, those people can be brought over and then told, I'm sorry, the price has gone up. Oh, you don't have the money? You're gonna work in this brothel. Oh, you don't have the money? You're gonna work in this field. Oh, you don't have the money? You're never, you're never getting out of here. So it can become a situation where you, through the use of force, fraud or coercion, cause someone to become enslaved or in debt bondage. But they too are not the safe, okay? When you're talking about trafficking, you're talking about something that is involuntary and under a taxis law, we have all different kinds of trafficking, okay? We've got adult trafficking and kid trafficking. We've already talked about the difference between international trafficking and domestic trafficking and then we've got trafficking per se or trafficking for other types of labor. When we have adult, the prosecution has to prove, to prove human trafficking, we have to prove that there's been forced fraud or coercion, right? We're grown up. We have the right to work, okay? If I didn't, if every type of labor were trafficking, the district attorney would be trafficking, right? Their bosses would be trafficking you, okay? So there has to be an element of forced fraud or coercion when we're talking about adult and that's either for labor trafficking or for sex trafficking because grown up, we're allowed to have sex under the law, okay? So again, there has to be this element of forced fraud or coercion. When we're talking about kid and labor trafficking unrelated to sex, we have to prove forced fraud or coercion. Okay, we have to use forced fraud or coercion but that's because you all have children or grandchildren and I am assuming that most of you in this room have made them do chores, right? If you haven't, that's Kirstis' parenting tip for the day, make your children do chores, okay? So if we didn't have to prove forced fraud or coercion when it came to kids and labor, we'd all be traffickers, okay? So the difference when it comes, it comes when we've got kids and sex, okay? Just like child sexual abuse across the board in Texas. If you have a child under the specified age and for most child sexual abuse in Texas, that's under the age of 17 but for trafficking it's under the age of 18, that kid cannot consent to the sex with an adult, period, they cannot. They are legally unable to, okay? So therefore when it comes to trafficking, if you obtain a child by any means and you cause them to become a victim or to engage in any of the child's sexual abuse offenses like compelling prostitution, like aggravated sexual assault of a child, like indecency with a child by context, sexual assault of a child, continuous sexual abuse of a young child and any number of another list that I can give you, you have engaged in trafficking, regardless of whether you know the age of the child and regardless of whether that kid went along with it because we don't have to prove consent or lack of consent when it comes to kids and sex. That's the difference in the law, okay? So that kind of gives you a foundation when you're thinking about what the laws are here in Texas. Now, why does all of this matter, okay? That's my part to talk to you about today is to tell you about some of the things that are happening here. The case that Scott talked about, the very first child who was identified as a trafficking victim here was 13 years old. She was living over in a neighborhood near Bargains which is a few miles away from the courthouse. She has a mom, she has three siblings. Her dad had gone to prison, her mom was on her own and was taking care of all those kids and was working full-time. This kid was not going to school most of the time. She would go sometimes, but not often. She was pretty much hanging out on the street corner and if you saw her, you could see her at the corner store at the street corner when everyone else was supposed to be in school. So on one day, she and the local alcoholic lady from the corner store went to the drug house of the two Moreno brothers. These guys were in their late 40s, early 50s. They were pretty much bumps. They were members of the Otahones gang and they were alcoholic drug dealers essentially who hung around, partied, caused fights and supplied drugs in the neighborhood. They went there. They both purchased some drugs. The child needed to go to the bathroom and when she went to the bathroom, they locked her up into that bathroom. Now we all think of a house as having, excuse me, normal doors. We think of it as having electricity and water. This place didn't. They had outside doors that were shoved into the door lentils and they locked her in with this iron door. They got rid of the lady who came with her. And once they knew for sure she was gone, they grabbed her, the two of them, thank you, they tied her up with those yellow nylon ropes that she used to tie things on the top of her car after they stripped her naked, spread her eagle on a bed and then they raped her, the two of them. And then they came up with the bright idea that they would keep her and they would sell her to anybody who had extra money to buy her after they brought their drugs. So for a week and a half, you could come in, buy your crack and if you had 25 extra dollars, you could rape a 13 year old child laying in her own urine and feces tied to a bed. And that happened here. 20 or 25 different individuals paid to do that right here in our city. Now she was eventually rescued by a guy from the neighborhood who knew these guys who had partied with them before but who saw that kid and said, that's a bad thing that she's there. And he found a way to run her out of that location. And it was when she got picked up by juvenile that she finally told somebody about what had happened to her. And that case was able to be prosecuted. It took, of course, years and years. But we finally got it done. Both Moreno brothers went to prison for life without parole. And we were able to identify at least two of the Johns that had had sex with her and we sent them to prison as well. That is just one example of what is happening here. And isn't an extreme example? Absolutely, absolutely. But it's the kind of example that we all think that couldn't be happening in our community. And that's why we share it with you. Who are the most likely kids to end up as victims of domestic minor sex trafficking? Obviously, it's your runaways. It's your truants. It's your kids who are what I call throw away kids. You know where your kids and grandkids are. You know what they're doing. You know generally that if they're supposed to be at piano, they're at piano. If they're supposed to be at their after school sport, they're there. You are picking them up. You are taking them where they're supposed to be. But there are kids in this community who nobody knows where they are. There are kids in this community who are at the local corner store at 10 in the morning. There are kids in this community who are sitting in their house, playing a video game, texting on the phone, looking on the internet. And those kids are very easy prey for people who are taking advantage of them. Those of you who have ever had children or as I tell my jury's trick question, those of you who have ever been children, okay, so that's everybody. You know how easy it is for a teenager to get upset with their parents. Rightly or wrongly, you've been there, you've done it, and you've seen your own kids and grandkids do it. I have cases, a 12 year old child, mad at her parents. She doesn't even need the internet. She's not even going high tech. She gets on the phone, on the phone chat lines. And she starts telling people how bad her life is and how she wants out of there. Some grown man says, I'll come pick you up. Come picks her up from her north side house. He rapes her, he gives her to a buddy. He rapes her. They're about to hand her off to a third guy when she runs. Well, when she runs, she runs into a man in his 60s who's habitual criminal who lives here in Bear County. And he says, oh, I'll take care of you. Come live, come stay with me, come stay with me. She stays there for a little bit. He says, well, you're gonna need to make money, right? Yeah, I guess I am. I'm 12, what do I know? Let me show you how to do that. And he puts her out on the street corner and he starts prostituting her. One of the first guys that she meets says, hey, you don't wanna be with that old guy. I'm better looking, I'm younger. I wanna be your boyfriend. Come with me. Takes her to his house. He has sex with her every which way. And then he puts her out on the street and sells her to his buddies up and down the street. 12 years old. This goes on for several months. By the time this child turns 13, she is living under the bridge next to the jail because she's run away from these guys. And I said, how could you do that? How could you be living under the bridge and not be scared to death? It's scary to drive by. Okay, what used to be under the bridge? And she said, well, my boyfriend there was the lead drug dealer. So that's how I survived. And this child was picked up in the park for prostitution. She gets back home, never really fully talks about everything that happens, ends up going back to this neighborhood. Later on, ends up being raped by a couple more people. And finally, after she's rescued from that second situation, this all comes out. But today, she's 19 years old. She's had three children, one adopted, one not here, and one that she doesn't really know what to do with to be perfectly honest with you. And when we look at what's happening, you know, was she abducted? No, she wasn't abducted. Did she make a horrible choice? Yeah, but guess what? That's why we have laws that say teenagers shouldn't be having sex, okay? Because if you are under that age, you lack judgment. I think that's pretty much the definition of a teenager. Many of you who have elementary school students know that some of your elementary school students have much better judgment, frankly, than your 14-year-old, or your 16-year-old, or your 17-year-old, who by that time think they are absolutely invincible, absolutely no better than their parents, and are willing to take risks without a second thought. What we're seeing here in Bear County is that it is so incredibly easy for kids, whether they're from a rough situation or a home with both parents, to be pulled into a situation that they then can't get out of. I asked this kid, why did you not call your parents? You knew they were looking for you. Why didn't you go home? Well, how could I tell my dad? How could I tell my dad what had happened to me? How could I tell my dad what I did? And that goes to an issue, I think, that is extremely important for this community to begin to address, which is that as a country, as a nation, and as a culture, we very much glorify the trafficking side, okay? We don't like to use the word pimp because it's so much a part of popular culture. But when we talk about pimp culture, it means something, so that's what I'm gonna talk about. We talk about the fact that this is glorified in our music, it's glorified in our movies. In your schools, I've been training schools across this city for the past year as part of the coalition work. I talk to teachers and counselors and I say to them, what is it that the guy who has all the girls, the guy who's got the cool car, the guy who's got the money, what did we call him? That guy's a pimp. And it's meant as a compliment to call that guy a pimp because he's got it all. He's got the women, he's got the car, he's got the jewelry. What do they call the girls or the boys who are being prostituted out by that person? They call them hoes, they call them bitches. Those people aren't respected, they're shamed. They're shamed by us, frankly, members of good society. Obviously, do we want our husbands or our family engaging in illicit prostitution sex? No, okay, but members of our community are. And it doesn't matter whether they're rich or poor, whether they're laborers or doctors, whether they're lawyers, sailors, members of the military, they are, okay? But where does all of that fall when it comes to shame, when it comes to not being able to go back, when it comes to the damage that's done? It falls on the people that are considered castaways, that are considered just prostitutes, that are considered hoes or bitches. There are video games online where you can have sex with a prostitute and then kill her and get your money back so you can get your money back. And part of the online discussion is how, what are the best ways to kill the prostitutes to get the money back? Okay, when that's our culture, when that's what we're thinking about, when that's kind of par for the course and something that's accepted and our kids fall into that category, how do they come back? How do they ever fit back in with other 12 or 13 year olds? And then we have this other issue which is that kids who have been through what these kids have been through, they don't fit in. They've often been changed on the inside. They've seen things that is grown-ups you haven't seen. And I hope you never see. They value things, their values are turned upside down. I had a victim, this gal had been prostituted for more than two years in Houston, then came down here, was being pimped out here and eventually was witnessed to a murder that occurred right in front of her. When her old pimp decided that her new friend, okay, who was not a pimp but he thought he was, was taking his rightfully owned money, he kidnapped this girl back, he told her if you don't call him, I'm gonna kill you. She texted him, he came over and a whole group of guys shot him right in front of this 16 year old child, okay. That girl, when you sit down and talk to her about her future, what do you wanna do? What do you wanna do, okay? This kid had been, she'd been through foster care but there was a period of time in her life when she had been adopted, she'd been an AB student, she was bright, she was a student athlete for a period of time but when you ask her what do you want to do with your life now that you're not in this situation? Her response was, I'm gonna keep doing my business. I just wanted to have a hotel someday that's my hotel that I can put up a closed sign when I don't wanna do it. When that's your vision, I ask you where do you think these kids are gonna go and what's gonna happen to them? Another child who was set to go out and to age out of juvenile and to go to a program that was designed to deal with commercial exploitation, help her get on her feet, help her with education and when it got right up to it, she chickened out. That's the bottom line, she chickened out and I said, well then what's your plan? What are you gonna do? I'm gonna stay here, I'm gonna get on welfare I'm going to go to one of those schools to become an assistant to an assistant to an assistant to something else. I'm gonna wait till my dad gets off a prison where he's currently in prison for molesting her. That's why he got sent back and his parole got revoked. We're gonna get a house and live together and that's my plan. That's my plan. Where there is no vision, the people perish. We are in a place right now where there are many of our children with no vision and it's up to us as a community to begin to cast that vision and part of that vision is a vision, one, for preventing this crime from occurring and that requires public awareness. That requires us being willing to intervene beyond our own circle and that's a tough thing to do. Two, it requires intensive restoration and I don't know that we've got the answer yet but I'll tell you so far I've got victims from three and four years ago who are sitting in jail awaiting first-degree felony charges right now. I have another victim who ended up in federal prison for doing the same thing that was done to her, okay? But we've gotta have that prevention, we've gotta have that restoration and three, we've got to have a commitment to root this problem out. Law enforcement-wise, investigatively and then see prosecutions through to the end. No matter how hard, no matter how squirrely things get and so part of that is a commitment from you as a community to make this a priority because it's hard, it's hard to find these victims, it's hard to keep a hold of these victims and it's hard to see these things through and just like child sexual abuse we all don't wanna think about this in our daily lives. Until I became a prosecutor who worked in child sexual abuse who worked in family violence, I didn't think about those things, I may have read a story about them but they weren't part of my daily life because they're hard, they're hard to deal with and so this is kind of a clarion call for you and for the people that you will be in contact with to share this message and to make the prevention of human trafficking and the prosecution of human trafficking and the restoration of our victims a priority in Bear County. We have any questions? Yes. You were talking about fake prevention? Yes. Why do, where do you go to talk to the young people to have them learn about liars and posers? I know Ms. Melton goes to the teachers and counselors. Right. But you, it seems to me, you need to go to the kids and do you and how? Okay, we reach out in a lot of different ways. One is we have a website where people find us. Number two, we do reach out to the faith community. A lot of churches have youth groups and you might say, well, you're not gonna find at risk people in a youth group but that's not true. Behavior online, it's ubiquitous, it's everywhere and there isn't any social, it happens in all socioeconomic levels. So we also reach out to schools and school districts and other agencies who work directly with at youth. We've done training for Child Protective Services, training foster parents. We have a version of Liars and Posers specifically for foster youth. And so we go where kids are but we go to the adults who work with them. Sure. Thank you. For Scott, here's a question. How do the females continue to get trauma therapy when they age out of the juvenile system? Well, we refer them to some faith-based groups and it's up to them to follow through with that and we can't follow once they age out of our system. And a lot of times they're already in the adult system by the time they age out. But some of the faith-based groups can help them. They can also go to the rape crisis center from now on. There's no end to that. And we usually set them up with a rape crisis center while they're with us but they can go to that forever and there's, I guess, no ending of the funds for that. And that's the only things that I know in Barrick County or any city that we have. I don't know who this would be addressed to, maybe Kirsta. Some people believe if prostitution was legal, the trafficking problem would be eliminated. Please address how prostitution is not a victimless crime. The legality argument has been tried in other places and it's not been found to be effective. When you, when there has actually been studies of people engaged in prostitution, and this is primarily looking at adults, many of them did not get into prostitution as adults but got into prostitution as children, okay? When they look at that population, a 2004 NIH study found that 60 to 90% of those people had been victim of either physical or sexual abuse prior to going into prostitution. So first of all, you've got typically very damaged people who are in the industry already, okay? And many of those came in as kids, okay? When you legalize prostitution, first of all, I think there's a significant problem with doing that as a society because we are saying it is okay to sell people. It's okay to sell people. That's not okay for us to say as a society. I don't believe we can stand up and say that we are the country that we are and say it's okay to sell people. Second of all, if you legalize it, because the theory is you legalize it and then you regulate it, right? You set rules, okay? Well, those rules, for instance, would be you can't buy sex from kids. Well, guess what? Those are our rules right now. You can't buy sex from kids. So legalizing adult prostitution is not going to put you in a situation where all of a sudden, oh, nobody wants to have sex with kids. There are people that are specifically looking for sex with kids. We have cases where we put out stains. We put out back page ads or ads on the internet advertising sex for sale. People come and answer that ad. We've had cases where we give them you can have sex with an 18-year-old, which is an adult, or you can have sex with a 15-year-old and they choose the 15-year-old. So when you have people who are looking to have sex with minors, legalizing prostitution so that selling of sex is not illegal isn't going to deter them. So it's not going to change the dynamic of domestic minor sex trafficking at all. In addition, what Saul has talked about where he's talking about the grooming of the kids or the choice of these kids, the same is very true of child sexual abuse across, across whether it's familial, whether it's stranger, whether it's a trafficking commercial sexual exploitation system. Kids are easier to control. Kids are easier to deceive. Kids are easier to be put in a position and easier to manage than adults. So why on earth if I am out to make a buck, if I am out to keep people from out crying or escaping, I would certainly choose one, the people who are gonna, I can get a higher dollar for kids and then I can keep them under control easier. So none of the, from my perspective, legalizing it has a moral bad that we don't wanna do but it's practically an ineffective way to fight trafficking. Thank you. Saul, are there ways to identify victims after they've gone through the wrong door but before they are arrested? Well, I would say that there's always behavioral signs that you could look for with young people. One of them is obviously their online behavior and you know, one of the biggest problems is that they don't outcry and you heard basically that one of the things that we have to do now is to give them a 50 question, questionnaire to determine their level of I guess it was the level of trauma, is that right? Hardly. And so liars and posers is the red flags of deception. We are currently working on the red flags of detection and kind of the thing that we've been hearing is that you look for scars, marks, tattoos and clues and things like that that are visual signs. There are also behavioral signs but there are ways to determine and one of the things we're working on is to provide a tool set for teachers, for school nurses, for emergency EMTs to be able to identify certain characteristics that are visual and certain characteristics that are behavioral to at least have some level of suspicion that that's what you have. But when you're talking about a parent, you know, you have more control. One of the biggest things that we do and I think is a big mistake is that we have controls on the internet in our home but then we give them a cell phone that has the full internet on it and they can go anywhere in private and they have the exact same access to the same dangerous world online. I'm not sure what this is referring to but whoever feels qualified to answer. How is this problem, how is the problem being resolved after the passing of HB915? HB915. HB915, if I heard of reference to foster care, a CPS and that problem, are you guys familiar with that bill? Not by number. No, not by number. The one that caused it in the last legislation as far as the kids in the foster care system in that high rate point is happening. As to that study or to see the results of this study. We did not do that study. I know that currently they are working on new standards for CPS and qualifying levels of care. I know there are some public hearings on that in the beginning of the new year. Well, HB356 was specific as far as the foster care the state facilities put children that did fall into this on a high rate of psychotropics. But you're aware of that and where there's resources being out of the recognize. If you're talking about the use of medications on CPS children. That's kind of outside the scope of what we are talking about. Well, they were a high number that went into sex trafficking out of the foster care system when they were put under psychotropics. Yeah, anytime you have kids in the foster care system, you've already got a population that's been identified as abused or neglected. When you have that, yes, those kids are gonna be at a higher risk for trafficking. No, this was specific in the bill. As far as the health programs and the resources for those that are falling into even making the psychotropics with the kids that are going to prison or that being the real high rate here in Texas. Not far from the high. Some of the studies we've done with the cases and now that the bills have passed, wouldn't you all be part of the resource to create for that being a cause? You know, I just wanna point out that youth that are in foster care, the path that they were in that led them to foster care puts them at high risk for trafficking whether they end up in foster care or not. If you were to create a model for who's most likely to become a victim, they were already scoring very high before they got into foster care. And so the fact that the high rate of, Is that what child care concerns? Yes, the fact that youth in foster care tend to also have a high propensity to be trafficked. It's also true that whether they end up in foster care or not, that same child is on the path because they're most likely to run away and they're leaving a home where there's abuse or neglect. That's correct. That's feeding system as far as that causes that process. Yeah. I think, well, you know, we've covered this. If you wanna talk afterward, that's fine. Yeah, I don't think we can answer your question about the psychotropic stuff. Here's one I think maybe Scott would like to address. The Houston Police Department has several police officers assigned to seek out young prostitutes in the hope of getting them out of the business. Any chance we could do this in San Antonio? Isn't that exactly what you're doing? Well, we do it on the probation side, and that's all for kids. Not the police, but the probation side. That's the only for kids who are brought to the probation department. It doesn't include other kids, but we do have Task Force where SAPD is working with the FBI. They have that here. We had the Department of Public Safety also has a Task Force that we work with here. And so there are groups here working on with the trying to get the traffickers here in San Antonio. Kirsten could probably answer that even better. One of the big issues in trafficking kind of across the country is that because we don't have a large population outprime because victims do not self-identify, it's hard to find them, okay? And when you think about your police department, they are typically responsive, right? You make a call, say I've been burglarized, something has happened to me, the police come, they investigate. So one of the things I think that is going to be occurring and it takes time is kind of changing the model of how we are addressing this on the law enforcement side, being proactive in our investigations, looking for potential areas, for instance, of the city where these things are occurring over and over and over again and trying to attack it via locale. Setting up something like they're talking about where it's officers specifically designated. While our community has all of our police resources are indeed part of the coalition and are working on the issues of human trafficking, we're not yet at a place where we have entire units that are assigned to human trafficking specifically. Thank you, I think we have one more. As a retired school principal and district executive, I fought for meaningful sex ed rather than the joke we have now. How do we fix this? And I think the assumption is the sex ed education classes would cover this information. That is what addressed many of the issues that our assistant district attorney talked about in regard to our social status within society. And for years, those of us who really care about this have fought valiantly that sex ed which really talks about all the realities of sex and we've never in this state been permitted by state legislature to do that. The sex ed that's now currently available is filled with inaccuracies, myths and falsehoods. So it's really of no use at all. And we know that large numbers of families in our community and across the state are very hesitant to talk about that. So schools, the idea of location in Texas has never gotten there. What can we do to change that? Well, I hear what you're saying and it's actually been echoed by some of the counselors and social workers that when I go and address them they're like, okay, how is this talk gonna get to the students? And of course the things I'm talking about are rape and all sorts of things that are generally taboo subjects because what's usually covered is kind of a general safety message and then the biological... And it just say no or write a pledge card you're not gonna have sex with them. Follow the rules. And so my way of thinking is that and I come from a conservative Christian home, I am a conservative Christian and so I have that sense of I want my children to learn the birds and bees from me at home and I get that. But I would tell you this, I see this as a danger issue. This is, I'm not trying to legislate morality for your home or for your family. I'm trying to help you and your children recognize that there is a significant danger out there and just by ignoring it you actually place yourself in further danger. And so I think there's a difference and we as a state and as parents and as PTAs and as population are gonna have to start thinking about that and obviously there's different ages and what's appropriate and all of that that will have to be worked out. But I think we've got to get the message of this danger in a fairly specific way to our young people and here's the other thing that I think is sometimes hard for us as parents to recognize is your kids are hearing a whole lot about things in school that you don't approve of and that you may not realize they're hearing and I'm not talking about from their teachers. I'm talking about from friends. I'm talking about from something they heard or saw on the internet. So I think that when we as parents give kids facts about danger that are real and that are specific without being ugly. Ugly, you know what I'm saying, but specific. Then I think that helps them and that's my view. That's my view as a parent. I have talked to my 11-year-old about trafficking. I have talked to her about those dangers and at an 11-year-old level, but I've done it. Well and Susan Reed is 100% behind anti-trafficking movement here in Bear County and has been a statewide leader on the anti-human trafficking task force for the entire state. I'd like to chime in on that. Sex education really comes under the purview of health education and this is, to Kirsten's point, this would fall under mandates from the state like to cover cyber safety and cyber safety is actually a component that needs to be taught to prevent human trafficking but this would come under those kind of initiatives to educate. But the state consistently. Well, it's just. And they're driven by this idea that children really don't have to cure. Yes, they do because they are in fact the victims and I happen to believe as an educator that the more they know, the better they can protect themselves. Well, that's true. Teenagers may be foolish, but they're not stupid. In the same way that I would say that rape isn't about sex, it's about violence. This issue isn't about sex, it is about safety and so that's why it should be treated that way because it's not gonna get their attention if it's just treated as a course in your health or a chapter in your health class. I want to thank all the panelists. It's been really very informative and very interesting and thank you for giving some of your time to us today. Hope you learned a little bit today. Thank you.