As they drove home on I-40 Eva heard a high-pitched noise, like someone yelling, in her head. The only sound her grandmother remembers hearing was the buzz of Eva’s phone.

A nurse gave Heidi brochures, while Eva was presented with new clothes and stuffed animals and referred to tribal social services for counseling. No follow-up was ever made. No one at the center asked any of the questions developed to help identify human trafficking victims. Questions like: Sometimes people are hurt or threatened, forced to do things by someone else who is getting something in exchange. Are you in a situation where you think this could happen? Indeed, according to Searchlight’s research, no major healthcare center in the state mandates trafficking screenings for minors presenting signs of sexual violence.

Her grandmother reported Eva missing that night when she failed to return her texts and calls. When Eva returned the following morning looking “totally out of it,” a police dispatcher urged Heidi to take her to Para los Niños, an abuse crisis center for children and adolescents in Albuquerque. After an examination that lasted several hours, clinicians concluded that Eva showed signs of rape, “petechial bruising” and “penetrative trauma,” according to medical records.

As the months went by, D took more photos and recorded videos — usually of Eva performing oral sex and having intercourse with him. His affectionate ways were soon supplanted by forceful sex, violence and threats. He promised to share her photos and videos on Facebook and hurt her little sister if she were to say anything. Then, he invited other men — he said they were his brother and cousin — to the house, where they molested and raped Eva. She remembers initially resisting, punching one of them, and hearing the words “Just do it,” before feeling a weight fall on her.

D, as she came to call him, enthused about her large brown eyes, her dimples, and the way she wore her hair in French braids. He asked for photos and she sent him intimate selfies, soon followed by more explicit pictures. She drove to his house in her mother’s car — still propped up on blankets and often hitting trash bins along the way — where he shared beer and marijuana with her. She thought he looked older than he did in his pictures on Facebook, but told herself that he was probably in high school when she was still in middle school. They drove to a Conoco gas station near the waterless Red Lake north of Gallup, where D — so confident, so approachable — told her he loved her. Eva felt needed and exultant, unmoored from the problems at home.

On Dec. 8, 2015, Eva looked at her phone and saw a Facebook message from a young man with a thick brow, chalky brown hair, and a round jawline. I remember you from middle school, he wrote. Eva, then 13, didn’t recognize him, but she assumed she knew him. “Everyone on the reservation knows everyone. Or they pretend they do,” she says.

Sex trafficking is defined (federally and by the state) as the exploitation of individuals through threat or use of force, coercion, and/or fraud to induce a “commercial sex act” — a technical definition that blunts the trauma and spectrum of exploitation. It is a growing crime that’s estimated to generate $99 billion in illegal profits a year globally, and in the U.S., people of color — mostly black and indigenous women — are victimized at the highest rates.

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But the widely cited mainstream definitions need to be expanded and reshaped when considering the ways indigenous women and minors are victimized, says Maureen Lomahaptewa, a Hopi woman and caseworker at The Life Link, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that shelters and serves trafficking victims and other vulnerable populations. Caseworkers there say there’s a lack of understanding about the ways indigenous women, especially those from rural areas, are trafficked — and how the police, legal and medical systems fail them. These women are, according to experts, the most underserved of the underserved.

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The Navajo Department of Family Services, which operates in Arizona and New Mexico, says that sex trafficking is often overlooked or misidentified among child abuse, sexual abuse, and domestic violence cases. Domestic violence accounts for one-third of the nearly 300,000 calls made to Navajo police every year, and the NDFS reported a 23 percent increase in child sexual abuse cases over the past two years, with 442 intakes in 2018.

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The agency is currently reviewing formerly closed cases and has in the past year opened three new trafficking investigations. Its efforts have been spurred in part by Navajo Nation Council Delegate Amber Kanazbah Crotty, who spearheaded an as yet unpublished white paper on trafficking in the Navajo Nation. The paper functions as a warning to policymakers and those who deny the prevalence of the issue. It compiles the few existing research studies and data sets on trafficking of indigenous peoples, and calls for extensive research and assessments that go beyond simple statistics — such as the 2016 National Institute of Justice finding that four in five indigenous women will experience violence in their lifetimes. A landmark national needs assessment was slated to begin in 2018, but the Department of Justice eliminated its funding.

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Not all tribal leaders regard the issue with the same urgency. Navajo Nation Police Chief Phillip Francisco, for one, says he does not see sex trafficking as a problem in his jurisdiction. “It’s more of a border issue,” he says.

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Of course, trafficking and exploitation are hardly a new phenomenon in indigenous communities. For centuries, sexual violence has been a cornerstone of the treatment of indigenous populations, integral to colonization and displacement, which to this day reverberates generational trauma. Sex trafficking of contemporary indigenous women is “almost indistinguishable from the colonial tactics of enslavement, exploitation, exportation, and relocation,” writes Sarah Deer, professor of law at Kansas University and author of The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

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Today, high rates of chemical dependency, abuse, involvement in the foster care system and a lack of resources exacerbate vulnerability to predators, the vast majority of whom are non-Native. As noted in Crotty’s white paper (produced in partnership with Casey Family Programs and the University of Colorado’s American Indian Law Clinic), female minors, homeless youth and transgender or two-spirit/LGBTQ people are most vulnerable to trafficking. Trafficking cases uncovered by NDFS show that the criminal activity is not solely conducted through organized crime. Individual exploiters from metropolitan areas often target rural communities. And, as tribal leaders have found in NDFS cases, family members have been known to exchange younger children for money, drugs or basic needs.

“We’ve seen our children trafficked by their own family, and most don’t even know they were trafficked. … Ultimately addressing this is about going back to the stories of these individuals who have been trafficked in each way. We need to stop erasing the experience of survivors,” says Crotty.

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In August 2017, Crotty and Council Delegate Nathaniel Brown co-sponsored a law designating human trafficking as a criminal offense in the Navajo Nation. “Our Navajo children are being picked up through social media and trafficked at truck stops or other areas across the United States,” Brown says. “And for a long time we didn’t have a word to describe sex trafficking in our communities.” The new law grants tribal courts jurisdiction over Native and non-Native victims in cases that fall outside federal jurisdiction or that federal authorities decline to pursue. The law calls for coordination among government and civil institutions to fight illegal “transporting, trading or dealing” of people. Should a case arise, it would challenge the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, in which tribes lost the authority to prosecute non-Natives in Indian Country.