Melissa Holland

This opinion piece was written by Melissa Holland, who is the co-founder and executive director of Awaken, a local organization providing services to women and children affected by the sex trade.

For the past two years, Reno City Council has evaluated the location and lack of regulations within strip clubs that put our community in harm's way. This Wednesday at 10:00 a.m., the Reno City Council will be voting on regulations and the zoning ordinance.

Reno’s downtown is home to many sexually oriented businesses (SOBs) such as strip clubs. SOBs have a higher concentration of prostitution and are a top venue for human trafficking. In other words, strip clubs are where traffickers and sex buyers spend a lot of time looking for vulnerable girls to exploit.

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Reno’s downtown also is where many of our vulnerable youth hang out. Research tells that vulnerabilities for youth to get picked up by traffickers are: poverty, foster care, running away, prior history of abuse, and having a close proximity to prostitution or a sex industry such as strip clubs. By allowing strip clubs in the same neighborhoods as these vulnerable children, Reno is exposing our kids to the same locations as traffickers and sex buyers. Downtown should be safe for our kids offering them access to social protection systems and public services, not sexually oriented businesses housing traffickers and sex buyers.

Recognizing the pathways into prostitution and sex trafficking, it is even more important to understand the vulnerability of our state and community. Nevada already ranks 47th in overall child well-being. Washoe County has 16,554 children living below the poverty line. More than 3,000 students in Washoe County experienced homelessness in 2018, and 493 cases of child abuse and neglect were substantiated last year in Washoe County alone.

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In 2017, the Violence Policy Center ranked Nevada second across the nation in the rate of women murdered by men, and Nevada ranked sixth in the nation for forcible rape. Nevada ranks in the top 10 among states in the country in terms of trafficked youth and No. 1 in the nation for rates of an illegal sex trade.

The clubs are currently noncompliant in their physical location. We urge the City Council to increase regulations within the clubs, hold the clubs accountable for causing harm to women and children, and relocate them out of our downtown to make our community safe for our children.

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