Over 150 adults gathered in East Liberty Tuesday night to hear a panel of experts, including five undercover law enforcement agents, discuss sex trafficking in Western Pennsylvania.
The event was hosted by two nonprofits: Refuge for Women, a faith-based agency providing emergency housing for victims of human trafficking, and Familylinks, Inc., an organization providing youth and family services in the Pittsburgh region.
“Pittsburgh is a really good area for the sex industry,” FBI agent Leonard Piccini said. He said traffickers may stop here “as they're going across the country.”
“The last two cases have been 20-plus victim cases, which is tremendous, both from a manpower point of view and an investigative point of view.”
However, hard data regarding sex trafficking is hard to come by.
“[The work law enforcement agencies] do is really great, but what’s not so great is they can't share any information with us,” said Michele Margittai, a grant writer for Refuge for Women. “They can't share any numbers, any data, because they're all active investigations, and sometimes they take years and years and years.”
The information that they do have, Ms. Margittai said, is the number of calls to the national sex trafficking hotline. According to their data, Pennsylvania received 221 reports of human trafficking in 2020, the last year with available data.
Rebecca Mackenzie, who is now a doctoral student in biomedical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, told her story of overcoming human trafficking. She was once a homeless 14-year-old in Buffalo, N.Y.
“Eventually, a guy said he would take me in,” Ms. Mackenzie said. “Of course, there was a price for that, and that was back out on the street, hooking.”
One of the biggest hurdles facing people who have been in sex trafficking is that they often aren’t aware they are being victimized, and may not see themselves as victims at all. Traffickers may portray themselves as providers, even protectors — or as the only alternative to homelessness.
This can also make it hard for law enforcement to distinguish sex trafficking victims from people doing sex work.
The difference, the experts said during the panel, is in agency. Human traffickers create a scenario of dependency, by controlling the money their victims bring in, cutting them off from support systems, or keeping important documents like IDs to prevent victims from running.
Ms. Mackenzie said that, if offered, she would not have accepted help at that time. Following years of trauma, she found it hard to trust anyone. “It took me a long time to believe in people, especially men,” she recalled.
Ms. Mackenzie recalled running from her abuser once. He found her three days later and beat her so severely he broke her nose.
Traffickers also target highly vulnerable women and girls through a variety of mediums. In one scam highlighted by an undercover FBI agent, a boyfriend coerced his girlfriend into making a dating profile for herself, looking for other women. As soon as a victim replied, he took over communication to trap the new woman.
Experts said social media sites like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, as well as many other social media networks, can connect people to dangerous individuals.
The number of the national human trafficking hotline is 1-888-373-7888.
First Published: October 12, 2022, 3:07 a.m.