What 'sex trafficking' really means

Carolyn Jones stepped up to the microphone to a round of applause to once again tell the story of selling her body on the streets of Phoenix.

Behind her sat an array of top law-enforcement officials: the state attorney general, the county attorney, the head of the state's homeland security division, an FBI agent. Over her head, a billboard flashed messages to commuters on Seventh Street about human trafficking — the issue and attention-getting device this January news conference was called to address.

From the temporary stage, Jones could see the downtown Phoenix skyline. She was in a parking lot just south of Chase Field, the city's major league baseball park. A memory struck her. About a mile north, just across the overpass above a series of railroad tracks, Jones had hit rock bottom.

She told this to the crowd. She was at the bus stop on Van Buren and Seventh Streets. It was 2003 or 2004. She was homeless and broke. Alcohol could no longer get her drunk. Drugs could no longer get her high. Customers were scarce. She screamed out in pain, asking God to rescue her.

"I was a human being who was thrown away," she said. "I'm hungry, I'm broken, I'm dirty, I'm nasty, I'm damaged goods. I feel like life is over. There's no reason to keep going on.

"Today, I stand here and say that I crossed that bridge."

When she finished her remarks, Jones received hugs from the law-enforcement officials on stage and Cindy McCain, the wife of U.S. Sen. John McCain, who has made halting sex trafficking her signature issue, particularly in Arizona during the past year.

Jones' story is not just one of a former prostitute turned survivor and advocate. It is also the story of an issue itself, and how changing messages on that issue have altered the way police, politicians and the public think about the ideas that today fall under the large umbrella labeled "sex trafficking."

A dozen years ago, working along Van Buren Street, Jones was a prostitute. Police were apt to arrest her. No politicians stopped to help her.

On this day, she was a survivor of domestic sex trafficking. She was worthy of praise, applause and embraces.

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The shift to a trafficking-based vocabulary reflects a changing mindset about the issue. Prostitution was a nuisance and a misdemeanor, not much of a societal scourge. Child prostitution was rarely discussed.

But the fight against what activists often present as domestic minor sex trafficking has reached the highest offices in Arizona.

In 2014, both the governor and the attorney general pushed for long-stalled legislation meant to stem the problem. High-profile sports figures have filmed public service announcements aimed at persuading men not to solicit teenage girls. Police departments, even in places without a perceived prostitution problem, have set up stings aimed at curbing what is seen as a growing demand for underage girls.

And in meetings at churches and colleges, the public is hearing about what advocates call a hidden issue. Citizens hear statistics and stories from survivors of trafficking and vow to do what they can to end the scourge.

Such efforts have increased as the Phoenix area prepares to host the Super Bowl, which for years has been dogged by claims that it brings along with it a rise in underage girls for sale in any host city — an idea that even anti-trafficking activists now say isn't grounded in fact.

But tackling the problem started with redefining it. And that started with the terminology.

"It just has been a grammar change," said Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, a professor at Arizona State University who runs a center that studies the trafficking issue.

Roe-Sepowitz has spent her career working with abused women. She has studied prostitutes in state prison, figuring out what led them to "the life," as it is known on the street.

But, she said, society wasn't interested in those answers. People just didn't want prostitution near their homes or businesses and asked police to control the problem, she said.

"None of us said, 'Gosh, I wonder why that young woman is out there?' " Roe-Sepowitz said. "No one identified that this is a human being with children, or a drug addiction, or trauma history, or mental-health challenges. We didn't go into that depth."

But the shift to seeing the women as victims has brought more support from politicians, police, charitable foundations and private donors. "It really is about who becomes involved and how much investment we have from the community," she said.

Much of that involvement came from Peggy Bilsten, who was on the Phoenix City Council. The former kindergarten teacher had long been concerned about social issues involving women. She helped lead the city's efforts to tackle domestic violence.

Getting involved in that issue, she said, led her to examine the lives of prostitutes on the streets of the city. She said she was hearing from a vice detective who was finding teenagers on the streets. But she was not finding much political will to address the problem.

Then, in 2005, came a story that horrified Bilsten and the rest of the city, one that set her on a path toward changing everything. The story started with a 15-year-old girl.

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According to court documents, the girl was angry with her parents for grounding her. She wanted to sneak out of the house for the night and stay with a friend.

The female friend drove up to get the 15-year-old, along with two other men, records say.

But once she was in the car, the girl's hands were bound with duct tape. Her eyes and mouth were taped shut. One of the men threatened to shoot her if she screamed. Later threats would involve hurting her family.

Forty-three days later, police would find the 15-year-old hidden in the hollowed-out frame of a box spring. Her captor had sold her as an adult prostitute through an online classified ad. She would have sex with as many as five men each day. At times in the first days of her abduction, she would be kept in a dog crate for hours at a time. The kennel was big enough for her to fit in only if her knees were held to her chest. Even then, records say, her legs would be pressed against the top of the cage.

The man who abducted the girl, Matthew Gray, was convicted of kidnapping, aggravated assault and sexual assault. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Bilsten was there when the girl was rescued from the second-story apartment off Interstate 17. She used the case to rally support for stricter laws — first at the city, where she pushed an ordinance that required customers caught soliciting prostitutes to have their vehicles impounded for 30 days, and then at the state Legislature, where she pushed for tougher sentences for those convicted of soliciting underage prostitutes.

Both ideas faced initial resistance, particularly from state lawmakers. So Bilsten began waging a one-woman public awareness campaign, visiting churches to discuss sex trafficking.

At these talks, she would bring along a prop: a dog crate.

She would then project on a screen the phone numbers of council members and state representatives who needed to be convinced this was a problem. Bit by bit, she said, opposition fell away. One lawmaker, she said, called her and asked what he could do to make the phone calls stop. Sponsor a bill, she told him.

Bilsten kept up the pace of her talks, sometimes hitting multiple churches in a week, motivated by thoughts of the girl rescued from the apartment. "I kept thinking of that young girl in the dog crate," she said. "It almost possessed me."

A city ordinance and a state law both passed in 2007. In 2010, Bilsten pushed for a tougher state law, closing what she saw was a loophole that provided an easy defense for those accused of soliciting a child. It finally passed in 2014, aided by pushes from Cindy McCain and Gov. Jan Brewer.

"It wasn't going to happen, the politics of it would not happen, without the outcry from the citizens," Bilsten said.

Bilsten's outreach to the faith community led to the establishment of the first residential shelter specifically designed to house victims of sex trafficking, StreetLightUSA, which began as the project of Christ's Church of the Valley. A second residential program for trafficking victims, Phoenix Dream Center, is also rooted in Christian faith.

Bilsten said most people saw the "dog crate" story as a kidnapping and series of rapes. She was able to get people, particularly in the faith-based community, to see what was happening with prostitutes on the street as the same thing.

Much of the growth of the anti-trafficking movement stems from the same shift in perception.

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The official definition of a trafficking victim was codified in federal law under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

It said a trafficked person was someone who did a commercial sex act or labor under terms of "force, fraud or coercion." It also said that a person younger than 18 working in the commercial sex industry was automatically certified as a trafficking victim.

That certification gives the victim access to federal funds and programs. Immigrant trafficking victims are given temporary legal status.

The law was intended to target international victims of trafficking brought into the United States under false pretenses or force. "Traffickers primarily target women and girls, who are disproportionately affected by poverty, the lack of access to education, chronic unemployment, discrimination, and the lack of economic opportunities in countries of origin," the 2000 language of the law reads.

In 2013, a re-authorization of the act included funding for domestic victims of sex trafficking. It said those would include minors and people younger than 20 who were initially trafficked as minors. It would not include an adult prostitute, 20 or older, who became trafficked as a minor.

But Roe-Sepowitz, said she would hope to expand that definition. Women should be seen as trafficking victims even if they are not actively controlled by a pimp, she said.

"We have to re-program our brain to say she was a victim of trafficking," Roe-Sepowitz said.

Roe-Sepowitz said her belief, widely shared by other activists, is that most women enter the trade at a young age, and that adult prostitutes could still be considered victims of that initial abuse.

"I believe every adult (prostitute), I believe almost every single one of them was trafficked," Roe-Sepowitz said. "Someone coached them into that life."

A victim should also be considered trafficked even if she is no longer actively controlled by someone, she said.

Instead, she said, women can be being forced into prostitution by their life situation. She referred to it as "trafficked by circumstances."

She acknowledged that the public perception of the problem is different from reality.

She said she once joked to a roomful of social scientists that people need to stop referencing the movie "Taken." In it, actor Liam Neeson plays a father who rescues his kidnapped daughter minutes before she is drugged and taken to the bed of a rich sheik.

If such cases happen, she said, they would be exceedingly rare. But, just like the myth of increased sex trafficking around the Super Bowl, Roe-Sepowitz said even distorted focus on the issue is worthy. "Most of us say, any attention is good attention," she said.

Studies have been critical of the federal law, saying that few sex trafficking victims have been helped. There are heavily-footnoted academic debates as to why: The law is too narrow, the requirements that trafficking victims aid prosecution are too strict. Some say the simple reality is that few true victims exist.

Whatever the proof of the problem, and whatever age the ultimate victims, the idea of stopping sex trafficking — especially of children — has been an undeniably powerful political message.

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Before Jones spoke at the Phoenix news conference, she was preceded by stern-sounding remarks from law-enforcement and political leaders on hand.

Attorney General Mark Brnovich: "We cannot tolerate this in our community. ... The time for talk is over and now is the time to be tough. And for those that mean to do our children harm, here is our message: We will find you and we will prosecute you. We will prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law."

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton: "We know these large sporting events bring hundreds of thousands of people to our community. Unfortunately, they bring some people who want to do harm in our community. ... (The) people on this stage, the people in this community, we are not going anywhere until we end sex trafficking and human trafficking in the state of Arizona."

Cindy McCain: "These bad guys who are selling children do not belong here. ... We're not going to let you sell any more children."

With just more than three weeks to go before the Super Bowl, the billboard company Clear Channel announced it would donate 60 billboards around the Phoenix area to scroll anti-trafficking messages. The donation would be worth about $200,000 in advertising value.

The messages on the billboard were created by the Polaris Project, the Washington, D.C.-based organization that runs the federally funded national trafficking hotline. The group's CEO, Bradley Myles, was in Phoenix for the news conference and billboard unveiling.

But while he was glad for the attention to the issue, Myles said the notion of the Super Bowl bringing a rise in sex trafficking is overblown. Myles, in an interview after the press conference, said there was no evidence that attendees of the Super Bowl look to purchase sex with underage girls.

"I don't think you'll see sex buyers specifically request a minor," Myles said.

Indeed, he said, the issue of sex trafficking gets a disproportionate amount of media attention compared with the other major trafficking issue: labor.

And even in sex trafficking, he said, attention gets focused on prostitution sold on the streets or through the Internet.

There are other worlds of sexual slavery, he said: rings of Asian women brought into massage parlors, residential brothels populated by Mexican immigrants, sex rings controlled by gangs. "There's all these different venues of prostitution," he said.

Because of the recent focus on child sex trafficking, local law enforcement often goes after traditional prostitution in an effort to find cases that fit the trafficking model, he said.

"They only go out and look for the street-prostitution case and try to find a woman who has a violent pimp or a woman who has been in the life since she was a child," Myles said. "What they're doing is only looking at a sliver of it."

And, Myles said, going after street prostitution doesn't necessarily get an investigation closer to a trafficking ring.

Myles understood why police don't typically go after the other types of sex trafficking cases. "It's kind of harder to find," he said.

As Myles spoke, the billboard behind him flashed anti-trafficking messages with the hotline number. Myles pointed out that the Polaris Project split the messages equally between preventing both labor and human trafficking.

In one billboard, a sullen woman talks about needing to leave "the life." In another, a mustachioed man talks about being forced to work.

Still, at the news conference, no one mentioned labor, which Myles said is the larger problem globally.

"Sex trafficking just dwarfs media coverage of labor trafficking," he said, "and law-enforcement attention on sex trafficking dwarfs law-enforcement attention on labor trafficking."

Some of the activism has focused on prostitutes, who often don't see themselves as victims, but can't be helped under anti-trafficking laws unless they can testify that they were trafficked.

Jones, during a recent walk along Van Buren, the street where she worked as a prostitute, said that when she reflects on that time, she sees that she and other women were, indeed, imprisoned. "We had our dog crates, too," she said. "You're in a cage in your mind. You're kind of locked up inside your self."

Roe-Sepowitz said that even those who have been involved in aiding street prostitutes for many years see that they have been affected by the contemporary focus on the terminology of "trafficking victims."

She recalled a research paper as recently as 2004 that used the term "underage prostitute."

"Now we call it commercial exploitation of children," she said.

When a reporter used the term in an interview, she stopped short.

"You're going to get killed if you call them underage prostitutes," she said. "I just want to warn you now. You'll be hatcheted to death by some of the people in our community.

"So: domestic minor sex trafficking victim. Go along with me."