Alaska has a disproportionate rate of young homeless people being trafficked for sex. For Heidi Ross, it began with running away from home

Heidi Ross was a senior in high school when she hitchhiked from the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River into the city, leaving a dark childhood behind.



“I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she said of that day, around 20 years ago. “I had the clothes on my back.”

After she arrived, without a way to pay rent, she soon found herself trading sex for a place to stay. Next she traded sex for drugs. Using sex to get things she needed made her feel powerful, she said. At 21, she went to work for a pimp who promised to take care of her.



“It felt strange at first, because I was so used to taking care of myself,” she said. “It felt good. It felt like a piece was missing and it had finally come back.”



Ross said sex work became her “lifestyle”. Eventually, however, she would be the one exploiting young men and women as adrift as she was on that ride into Anchorage.

Sexual exploitation has been an undercurrent of the state’s male-dominated frontier culture since Russian explorers first came to the region, and men flocked to the state during the Gold Rush. Law enforcement, prosecutors and victim advocates have long suspected the state has a high rate of sex trafficking, but the problem has been largely unstudied. Recently, though, a small study of trafficking among homeless youth offered some data to support these suspicions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I’ve never had a tattoo done professionally,’ Heidi Ross says. They were all done on the streets or in prison. This one, which reads ‘For the Love of It’, references both the love of money but also the love of life as a sex worker. Photograph: Ash Adams/The Guardian

In April, researchers at Loyola University New Orleans released statistics based on interviews with youths aged 17 to 25 at Covenant House youth shelters and other service centers in 10 cities across the country. They found that Anchorage had the highest percentage of respondents – more than one in four of the 65 interviewees – who reported being trafficked for sex or labor. The average among shelters was roughly one in five.

The definition of trafficking in the study is “exploitation of a person’s labor through force, fraud or coercion”. The study found that 27% of young women interviewed at the Anchorage shelter and 17% of young men reported being trafficked for sex. LGBT youth were more likely to be victims. Most of the youth who said they had been trafficked, or engaged in sex in exchange for housing, were homeless at the time.

There is a demand for sex and there are sexually vulnerable people who can be swooped up Josh Louwerse, youth engagement worker

Alaska consistently leads the nation in rates of child abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, homelessness and substance abuse. Being a victim of violence or sexual assault or having a substance abuse problem increases the risk someone will be trafficked, said Josh Louwerse, youth engagement program coordinator at Covenant House in Anchorage. So does homelessness, he said.

According to Louwerse, every young client at the shelter has experienced trauma. Many have been victimized and abandoned by their parents and let down by government systems set up to protect them. About 40% of the youth served by the shelter serves have a mental health diagnosis. More that half are Alaska Native, some from villages in rural Alaska.

Alaska’s economy is built on a host of industries that employ younger, single men, including oil, fishing and the military, Louwerse said. A robust tourism industry also fuels the sex trade. “There is a demand for sex and there are sexually vulnerable people who can be swooped up and manipulated to deliver that sex,” he said. “We have all these places around the state that are essentially hubs.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Josh Louwerse, a youth engagement program coordinator, stands outside of Covenant House in downtown Anchorage. Photograph: Ash Adams/The Guardian

Jolene Goeden, an FBI agent who handles trafficking investigations, said her agency monitors sex ads online and sees an uptick during tourist season. People pay more for sex in Alaska than other places, she said, and she has seen cases where traffickers have brought women into the state for this reason. Alaska Native women can be attractive to traffickers because they can be marketed as several different races.



The cost of sex in Alaska is between $200 and $300 an hour, she said. Out-of-state traffickers might send several women there at a time. If each of them saw three clients in a day – a low estimate – it wouldn’t take long to cover hotel costs and airfare.



“Every day thereafter is all profit,” she said.

If you’ve never had somebody take notice of you, say you’re beautiful, you’re smart, you’ll do a lot to hold on to that Heidi Ross, sex trafficker

The high cost of housing in Alaska is also implicated in trafficking, she added. A person making minimum wage would have to work 75 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom apartment at market rent, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “One of our biggest factors to overcome with the majority of victims, I would say, is stable housing and affordable housing,” she said. “I would say there is no such thing.”

In the years before she left home, Ross said, she was caring for her mother who suffered from schizophrenia. She worked late every night at the local movie theater and a Wendy’s to help pay bills. One day at school, she threw a book at a teacher and walked out. Not long after, she was in a stranger’s car headed for Anchorage.

“I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “I broke.”

She says that as the years passed, she took on administrative duties in sex businesses and had relationships with the pimps who ran them. She’s never had a boyfriend outside of the sex trade. Her longest-term relationship was with a violent pimp named Troy Williams.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Heidi Ross walks down the stairs at the transitional housing facility in Anchorage, Alaska. Photograph: Ash Adams/The Guardian

Young people, Ross found, came to her from rough childhoods with nowhere to live, substance abuse problems and lots of emotional needs. She knew they weren’t afraid of getting physically hurt as much as they were afraid of being cut off, she said. They wanted love more than money. This was something she found she could take advantage of.

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“If you’ve never had somebody take notice of who you are and say you’re beautiful, say you’re smart, say you’re kind,” she said. “You’ll do a lot to hold on to that.”



Eventually she became a “lieutenant” in a trafficking business. In 2015, the state charged Ross and Williams with multiple counts related to sex trafficking. She is completing a brief sentence after pleading guilty to running an operation in exchange for fewer charges.

Williams, meanwhile, went to trial, where women testified about beatings, and about being denied food and forced into ice baths when they wouldn’t work. Ross says she never saw such treatment. Williams, who is also the father of her only child, was convicted on several counts and is awaiting sentencing.

Now 37 and using a new name she did not want to disclose, Ross is holding down a fast food job, hoping to regain custody of her son. She plans to move to Arizona and find employment in the restaurant business. Sex work is lucrative compared to the other kinds of work she’s qualified for, but she said she won’t go back.

“Because of what I would lose,” she said. “I want my son, I want out.”