Conference sheds light on human trafficking – Bryan College Station Eagle

“So much of being able to assist crime victims, it doesn't matter who you are, but if you come into contact with them and during the process, we want to make sure that we all know the same information; and that we know each other and that we know how to have that trauma informed care, so they are getting across the board assistance, not just particular assistance in one discipline or the other.”

After being a part of this conference for so many years, Carter said a lot of the family violence and sexual assault investigation and prosecution in Brazos County, has come from training that their professionals receive from past conferences.

“Our goals are to give new employees or those who are seasoned different workshops where they can learn new tools, new information and they can get those advanced topics so that they are able to use that information in their day-to-day work,” she said.

The two-day conference was organized by the Brazos County Attorney and District Attorney's Office, Health District, Juvenile Services, Sherriff's Office and many other Brazos Valley agencies whose goal is to provide quality training for professionals who work with crime victims.

Twenty-three speakers were scheduled to take part in Tuesday and Wednesday sessions. Guests were able to attend either or both days to visit each session. Those in attendance sat in on talks about case studies where a speaker presented a case they may have worked on. Others sat in on educational talks that provided new training involving current trends.

The conference is named “Every Victim Every Time” because the goal is to meet each victim wherever they are within the criminal justice program, Carter said.

Additional sessions included: “Threat Assessment: Violence in the Workplace;” “Laying the Foundations for Healthy Teen Relationships;” “The Reality of Burnout and Suicide;” and “Elder and Disability Abuse: Prevention, Intervention and Harm Reduction.”

Brazos County Juvenile Crimes Chief Tonika Davis and Laurie Charles, clinical assistant professor in the Center of Excellence in Forensic Nursing at Texas A&M, gave a talk to about 40 attendees, including officers, counselors, lawyers, nurses and teachers, called: “The Truth about Human Trafficking: Trends, Realities, and the Victims.”

During their talk, Charles defined human trafficking as modern day slavery that involves the use of and obtaining a person through force, fraud or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act.

Davis went on to say that when most people think of human trafficking, they envision the movie “Taken” with Liam Neeson.

“He is a super dad who leaves the U.S. and flies across the world to go save his daughter who has been kidnapped and those bad kidnappers are trying to sell her, and he saves the day,” she told the attendees. “People see that and say ‘That is what's happening, that is human trafficking.' Well in reality that has human trafficking components, yes, but you don't have to go across state lines or into other countries for it to be human trafficking.”

Davis also noted that victims can look like any type of person, no matter the age, gender or race, and that traffickers no longer look like they did in the 1970s or 1980s.

“The unique thing about Brazos County and I would venture to say maybe the whole Brazos Valley, is that we do not have strip clubs. We also don't have what we call, in the human trafficking world, blades, strolls or tracks,” she said. “That is an area, a street normally, in larger cities where women that engage in prostitution can go to that street and they can hang out and have clients drive up, get in the car and go do their business and come back.

“That is a very easy way for our victims to make their quotas because most traffickers or pimps have daily quotas that these women have to make; so it is super easy to do that when you have a track. It is also super easy to do it when you are running low that week or your advertisements aren't being as successful, you can run to a strip club and you can make your money that way, but we don't have that here.”

Davis said a lot of what she sees in Brazos County is traffickers meeting women and men online, through the guise of dating them. They meet them through Instagram, Snapchat, or actual dating sites like Hinge or Tinder and they start messaging them as though they are going to be in a dating relationship, she said.

“They listen to all their problems … and the trafficker says they can save them from all of this,” she said.

Once the first meeting happens, Davis said the majority of the time they are so charming and once they get into the household they are told they are running low on money and they can exchange their goods and services. Charles said they often see family cases where the family members are selling their children to another family member or mothers are prostituting their children to older men in exchange for bills to be paid, etc.

Following their talk, Charles said she hoped every person who attended was able to know that they care about the Brazos Valley.

“And I would want them to know the way we present ourselves to people that we are concerned have experienced violence, allows them to tell us what is happening to them or not; and we need to educate ourselves at events like this so that we can do a better job for other people,” she said.