 Hello, I'm Michael Mercer with Keeping Kids Safe, and we have a guest today, Representative Amy Voek, and thank you for being here with us, Amy. Thank you, Michael. I'm excited to listen a little bit and talk a little bit about what your plans are. You're running for office now. You hold a position right now, and what's that position? Currently, I'm State Representative for Coastal Scarborough District 127, and I'm running for Senate, so it's District 30, covers most of Scarborough, all of Gorham, and most of Buxton. Great, and Keeping Kids Safe has worked with you, and you've worked with us, and we certainly support you, and especially in the anti-trafficking bill that you sponsored and wrote that was then eventually signed into bill. Can you tell me a little bit why you felt you needed to be involved in something to involve yourself into the anti-sex trafficking? Sure. Well, sex trafficking is something that I have known about for a long time, and so I knew that a lot of times, or almost all the time, when you have a lot of drug trafficking, then sex trafficking goes hand in hand, and Maine has a huge problem with drug abuse, especially with prescription drugs. So it just makes sense that we have a high rate of drug trafficking that we're going to have sex trafficking as an issue here in the state as well. You know, I agree 100%, I'm a retired police officer, and I see, I never really recognized that sex trafficking was so rampant in Maine. I worked here, and I also worked in Arizona, and I kind of knew, but I think the paradigm and because of your bill, that law enforcement, the thought and the paradigm that law enforcement have is changing because of your bill, because law enforcement and the criminal justice system in itself is more aware and more educated that these girls are not out there because they want to be out there, that they're actually out there because they're victims. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Absolutely. And you know, I think that that sort of education was beginning to happen before I introduced my bill, but there was a lot of press coverage of the bill because of the fact that it was initially rejected because it was the second session of the legislature, and bills have to be justified on some sort of emergency basis and approved by a bipartisan legislative council. And unfortunately on the first go around, they questioned whether or not this was truly an issue in Maine, and even suggested that I had submitted it for political reasons, which couldn't have been further from the truth. In fact, at the time, I absolutely had no intention of even running for reelection, let alone running for Senate. So you know, eventually they did approve the bill and it was sent to the Judiciary Committee, and I went into the Judiciary Committee and I said, you know, I want to put the partisan ranker behind us, and I want this bill to be bipartisan, I want everyone to work on it together, and not only that, but I would like to have a unanimous report out of this committee. So let's work together. And we did. And so the product is an excellent product that law enforcement has told me on more than one occasion they're actually using. And so I couldn't have been more pleased, and Governor LePage was very happy to sign it into law as an emergency. That's great. Now that we have a law with your name on it, I did see that there was a statewide task force that was just put together for sex trafficking. So that you can see, I can see where the hard work that you put into writing that proposal, that bill, then now to law has now made it possible for certain arms of the government to be able to recognize, number one, sex trafficking is here, how do we stop it? And so there are a lot of education, a lot of different organizations involved with the anti-sex trafficking movement. I call it a movement because we are part of that movement, keeping kids safe, is involved with the education and awareness part, you know, and being involved with, and I think this whole wheel, we all play a part in the wheel. Absolutely, yeah. And we all have a spoke in this wheel. Your goals as we see, as you move forward as a senator, did you see any more legislation going through, or how do you see yourself going forward at this point? Yeah. Well, one of the things that, one of the pieces of the bill that we weren't able to get passed, because it was going to result in a fiscal note, meaning there would be a cost attached, and in tight budget times, that's sort of the death knell for some bills, but direct request from a drug prosecutor in Cumberland County was to have it be an enhanced charge if you furnish drugs to a prostitute or someone who is being sex trafficked, and she actually felt that that would be an easier charge in some cases to get somebody on, but that would result in longer prison sentences and hence the increased cost, so we didn't get that into what became law, but I would possibly like to see us try again on that. And I would be willing to submit anything that law enforcement thinks that they need. Part of what I did in writing this legislation was to meet with various members of law enforcement as well as some of the special interest groups, and like I said, get everybody on board, and it's about protecting victims. We're talking about young women and sometimes even men. You don't hear about men as much, but I've seen one study that was done in the Atlanta area where they discovered that it was close to 50% of sex trafficking victims were male, so we can't forget the young men out there as well. A lot of times these are runaways, and they're lured by an adult who acts as though they're going to be their patron in some way or their boyfriend, and they take them to get their nails done and their hair done and they take them shopping, and then they sort of lure them in that way and they furnish them with narcotics as well, and they get them hooked, and so we definitely need to continue to make sure that we're being proactive, but I did want to mention there actually was a sex trafficking task force in Maine, and the problem was that it hadn't been funded, and so they had lost their staffing, but they were continuing to meet, and they just hadn't really been able to accomplish a whole lot because of the lack of staffing. However, this new task force, my understanding, is it's actually international in nature, so we're working with our neighbors in Canada as well as in other states, New Hampshire and Massachusetts to make sure that, and federal authorities, to make sure that there's a comprehensive approach to this problem. Right. Well, a lot of work has been done. You continue to do great work. Keeping Kids Safe is very involved with the child sex trafficking. To us, to keeping kids safe, child prostitution should never ever be in the same sentence. You're a child, and you can't consent to that, so it's child rape to me, and we're going to do everything possible to get the awareness and education out amongst schools, amongst youth groups, and let all these kids know that there are bad people out there that want to do harm, and the more education, the more awareness that surrounds this, your bill, and surrounds this topic, at least we're having people talk about it. Absolutely. People's heads are coming out of the sand, so I really appreciate you coming by today, Amy, and good luck with the campaign, and best wishes in the upcoming election. Appreciate it, Mike, and all that you do. Thank you.