Unseen tragedy revealed
Portland has a big problem with sex trafficking. Pimps target girls, who are as young as 12, in public places such as malls and schools
by BETHANY PAVLIK
Illustration by Elysse Bennett
Sex trafficking is not just an international issue; it hits close to home, too. Every week Portland police come across one to two victims of sex trafficking.
“[Portland is] the second city in the nation for sex trafficking,” said Lia Thompson, referring to a nationwide search for pimps and victims in February 2009. Thompson is an intern from Transitions Global, an organization that helps victims of sex trafficking in Portland, India and Cambodia. Other cities with a high percentage of sex trafficking of U.S. citizens include San Francisco and Seattle.
A sex trafficking victims are someone forced to engage in commercial sex, such as prostitution or pornography, with payment going to someone else like a pimp. Any form of human trafficking is slavery.
“There might not be chains involved, but she’s enslaved,” Thompson said.
“Pimps can find a victim anywhere,” Keith Bickford, Director of the Oregon Human Trafficking Task Force, said.
“The popular places are movie theaters, malls, schools or any place lots of kids hang out…. High schools and middle schools are targets of pimps,” Bickford said. “A pimp I spoke to referred to a high school as a ‘buffet of girls.’ It’s a great place to recruit,”
Malls are one place pimps find victims because of the variety of people. Pimps can quickly establish who may be a good target based on the group-of-three rule, said Wynne Wakkila, Executive Director for Oregonians Against Trafficking Humans, an organization rasing public awareness of human trafficking.
“With the group-of-three rule, you don’t go after the prettiest girl because she knows she doesn’t need you; you don’t go after the least attractive because she knows something is fishy because she can’t imagine why this guy is trying to pick her up,” Wakkila said.
“They go after the middle girl because she thinks ‘Well, this guy likes me better than the prettiest girl,’ and she’s the one most likely to fall for it.”
A pimp finds someone with low self-esteem, and compliments her.
When a pimp spies a girl he thinks may have low self-esteem, he may say, ‘You have really beautiful eyes.’ If the girl says “Thank you,” he moves on because she is confident enough to believe his compliment. If the girl says, ‘No, I don’t,’ then he continues talking because he knows she needs someone in her life to love her.
“They’re looking; they’re hunting for folks that fit that demographic,” Greg Moawad, the deputy district attorney for Multnomah County, said.
The transition from making a girl think she is his girlfriend to making her into a prostitute is a brainwashing process. The pimps first make girls feel loved.
“For a lot of girls, that’s the first time that’s happened to them since they can remember,” Moawad said.
“The pimp becomes a ‘knight in shining armor’ who truly seems to care or them, and [the girls] find themselves willing to do anything to continue that,” Moawad said.
“Often, these guys don’t have other sources of income. [They] don’t have jobs, and they can put themselves in the position of saying, ‘We need you to do this so we can pay the rent, so I can get a car, [because] I need to be able to drive you around and provide for you.’ It’s almost sort of a really powerful guilt trip,” Moawad said.
A girl may be forced to sleep with 10-20 men a day. Meanwhile, her pimp might make up to $200,000 per year on her alone. She will never be able to use the money. One victim found by Portland police was starving and malnourished, yet $700 was in her pocket. She would not spend any of it to feed herself; it all had to go to the pimp.
Attempts to escape are dangerous and possibly life-threatening.
“Usually they don’t try to escape because they are afraid and dependent on their pimp,” Wakkila said.
Part of the dependency results from girls being moved around a lot; taken away from anything associated with their previous lives. One reason Portland is ranked with larger cities is because of the easy access to I-5 and I-84, making it feasible for pimps to transport victims from California to Portland, north to Seattle or east to Las Vegas.
“The pimps will only keep girls in an area for a short time, and then move on to the next city because they don’t want them to be found or become too familiar with the place,” said Wakkila.
Another reason Portland has a high percentage of victims is due to Oregon’s lax laws.
“Oregon’s laws are behind some of the national standards [and] definitely international standards. [The laws] are not as strong as California and Washington standards, which makes Portland a magnet for criminal enterprises thriving in trafficking networks,” Kathleen Dunn, an international human rights and international criminal lawyer, said.
Women over 18 are still considered sex trafficking victims if they are forced to prostitute themselves. Only two percent of prostitutes choose their profession.
According to Moawad, most prostitutes start as sex trafficking victims.
“The vast majority of prostitutes have been trafficked at some point in their career. There are very few prostitutes that are out doing this because they enjoy it or because it is empowering for them…They may very well be continuing in the business at some point because they don’t know how to do anything else. Starting at 12 to 14 [years old], they haven’t been at school, they can’t go down and get an office job somewhere,” Moawad said.
Because of technology, sex trafficking is not overtly obvious in Portland.
“It is not like they stand out on 82nd Avenue like they used to; now it’s usually done over Craig’s List or the Internet. A lot of it now is done electronically,” Wakkila said.
In the United States there is no long-term place for rescued victims to stay and heal.
“It takes about [60 days] for a girl to realize [it] is not her fault, that she didn’t ask to be raped by 10 men a day and have the money to go to someone else…. If they are [rescued]… most of the time they will run away, back to their pimp,” said Wakkila.
Plans are being made to a build a shelter for victims to stay and gain skills needed to rejoin society.