Local human trafficking survivors share stories, guidance for how to protect youth

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Jasmine Myers' trafficker was a family member, who repeatedly sold her to adult men for sex from the time she was 5 until she was removed from her home at age 17.

Taylor Venezuela met her trafficker through a false modeling job, where he lured her into pornography when she was 19.

Other former victims, who work with the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking and recently participated in a survivor's panel, said they were trafficked openly in the street or out of the back of a local business. A male survivor was labor trafficked by his boss. Venezuela was trafficked online. Myers was trafficked out of her home.

Human trafficking has many forms, making it hard to track, recognize or escape.

Sometimes it involves sexual abuse, and other times labor abuse. Sometimes it's carried out through coercion or fraud, and other times threats and force. Sometimes it's perpetrated by someone the victim knows well, and other times it's a stranger.

It's happening overseas. It's happening over the internet. And it's happening every day at home, in Cleveland.

Over the past six years, the Northeast Ohio Human Trafficking Task Force, which is headed by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department, has rescued 241 victims and helped convict 57 traffickers, stats provided by the office show.

Most local survivors, across all ages, are victims of sex trafficking, the taskforce's Chief Inspector Larry Henderhan said. Each of them is groomed and their vulnerabilities exploited.

Some have been sexually abused growing up. Some are homeless, impoverished or addicted to drugs. Some feel unwanted and unloved. Most have never been educated about consent.

For centuries, law enforcement has been chasing arrest after arrest, trying to find an end to the human trafficking crisis. Survivors want to flip the focus to how to prevent it.

“I could have been rescued much sooner,” Myers, now 28, said.

Jasmine Myers

Bruises, nosebleeds, migraines and other signs of physical abuse and neglect were the first indicators of trouble in Myers' life, she said in a recent interview with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. Sometimes the pain was so bad she couldn't sit at her desk at school.

Protective services were called to her home dozens of times in North Carolina, where she was living at the time with her four younger siblings, but even when she reported some of the physical abuse, help never came. She learned to stop reporting.

“When they did have proof of things, they weren't doing anything about it, so why would we tell them about the more serious stuff if they weren't going to believe us on the stuff we had actual physical proof of?” Myers said. “That's how my mind thought, as a child: ‘I can't dare tell them that I'm being raped nonstop, all the time, every day of my life. They're not going to believe me.'”

She was finally removed from the home at age 17, but leaving didn't stop the abuse. Unstable foster care, homelessness after she aged out and untreated trauma trapped her in the cycle of abuse into adulthood.

Myers said she didn't know the term human trafficking then, let alone consider herself a victim. But now she works with the Collaborative and survivor-lead Women Revived Ministries to help educate others on the signs and symptoms.

She also gave recommendations for how to prevent trafficking like hers:

• Wrapping services and resources around vulnerable children and families, especially those heavily involved in children services, to include counseling, money management and childcare
• “You have to believe kids,” she said. “Not believing silences us even further and makes us in great danger for worse to happen.”
• Keep reporting suspected abuse
• Educate youth about safe and unsafe touch, along with consent
• Creating safe spaces where youth can go to confide in trusted adults

“If I had someone loving me and actually caring about me, I would have realized it a lot sooner,” Myers said of her abuse. “Now I try to pour back into people and kids and be that safe adult for someone else, because I didn't have that.”

Taylor Venezuela

Venezuela was attending college in Northeast Ohio when she came across an online ad for a modeling agency. The agent was kind and took time to learn everything about her, details which he later used to manipulate and coerce her into posing nude.

He later posted the images on a porn site without her consent, allowing them to be downloaded and reuploaded to a hundred other sites. Images were also downloaded and shared among her peers, revictimizing her, in addition to victim blaming and shaming.

She has been fighting ever since to bring her trafficker to justice and have the images scrubbed from the internet, but she worries her exploitation may never truly end.

“That's the unfortunate reality,” she said. “Online exploitation almost feels like forever because of the deep dark web and how difficult it is to get things removed.”

She feels the experience could have been prevented if she was taught about consent and online predators, or if others around her had been trained to recognize warning signs of human trafficking. Children engaging in risky behavior, becoming secretive or defensive about their online habits, withdrawing, watching pornography or receiving calls from unknown numbers are all actions for concern, she said.

To help prevent trafficking, she recommended:

• Encouraging parents to establish trust with their children, taking care to avoid labeling any topics as taboo
• Setting boundaries for online behavior
• Educating youth about internet safety and what information they should not be posting online
• Staying educated about the different apps and games that are popular, and how they work
• Being a trusted friend youth can turn to to discuss their experiences and seek help

“People always ask how could (my) trafficking have been prevented, and the first thing or person I blame is our culture and our society,” Venezuela said. “That plays the biggest role in what happened to me because of how much sex is normalized…”

Resources

Other former victims gave recommendations of their own during the Collaborative's survivor panel. The organization works to educate, advocate and connect services on behalf of those who are trafficked, but members say they can't do it alone.

They called for more training for foster families, child protection specialists, law enforcement and schoolteachers to recognize signs of potential trafficking and know how to intervene. They also pushed for more affordable housing options and other resources, like job training, to help meet an individual's basic needs and prevent them from having to seek support elsewhere.

Some of those resources are available now:

• The Greater Cleveland Salvation Army provides housing to victims. In 2021, it helped 45 survivors with 2,434 nights of shelter, respite and direct support, its website says
• The Collaborative to End Human Trafficking hosts various free training events every month. See their calendar of events for details
• Advocates, survivors and allies will gather for the Thriving Youth: Survivors and Systems Coming Together to End Youth Trafficking working summit to identify strategies for making Cuyahoga County a place where all children are nurtured, safe, supported and flourishing. The free event is Feb. 17-18 at Case Western Reserve University
• The Northeast Ohio Human Trafficking Taskforce maintains a 24-hour hotline – 216-443-6085 – where individuals can report suspected trafficking or where victims can seek help. Information can also be called in to Crime Stoppers at 216-252-7463.

When calling in tips, Henderhan said it's important to not only describe the situation but provide details that can help law enforcement identify perpetrators. License plate numbers, vehicle descriptions and even clothing descriptions of a person at a certain place and time can help them narrow their search.

However, the best defense against human trafficking, advocates, survivors and experts all agree, is teaching youth love and self-worth from the outset. In that, everyone can play a role, they say, in being a good friend for those who might not have support at home.

“All of us yearn to be accepted and loved,” Henderhan said. “Just be careful who you're looking to get that acceptance and love from, because not everybody out there has your best interest at heart.”