The Face of Human Trafficking | Megan Rheinschild | TEDxSantaBarbara

[Music] victim testimony is about to begin inside a brightly lit Santa Barbara California courtroom seated at counsel table is the prosecutor the detective the defense attorney and the defendant he's dressed in an orange jail suit smugly waiting for the victim to be escorted into the courtroom she was discovered some ten days earlier in a local motel room on a Thursday morning in October of 2014 the police had found an advertisement of what appeared to be an underage girl advertised on the Internet to anyone who was willing to purchase sex so they went to this motel room on a Main Street in our city situated between two upper-middle class neighborhoods and they contacted her she was in the lobby they showed her the picture and she said yeah that's me and the pimp he's up in room 208 and the police made chase and they got him and they arrested him and here we here he was today in the courtroom as the victim advocate for the District Attorney's Office is Court the victim into the courtroom she climbs up onto the witness stand she settles in and she prepares to tell her story not just a story of how she had gotten here today but she would tell her story about how she came into the life as a human trafficking victim the prosecutor is trying to set this up for the court it's a preliminary hearing so the idea is to present enough evidence to believe that a felony was committed and he knew this was not going to be a small thing to prove to the court that this was a felony so he begins questioning her about the life miss doe can you explain to the court what it means to be in the life in the game like you explained to the police well sure well that's like when you're doing dates for money and there's rules and there's people in charge and miss doe when you say people in charge who are you referring to well like the bottom like the bottoms in charge the bottom misto can you explain to the court what the bottom is well yeah like the bottom [ __ ] she's the one that keeps the other girls in lying in the stable she sometimes posts the ads she collects the money I see and is there more than one girl usually working well sure like there's usually more than one girl working for the pimp like in the stable do you need me to break this down I'm sorry miss doe the court needs to understand this you all really should know this [ __ ] and she was right we should have known this [ __ ] but we didn't we didn't understand not only the terms and the words that describe human trafficking but the faces of the people and the girls that were the victims a sex trafficking in our own community and even working as a victim advocate in the district attorney's office for over 20 years and interacting with lots of different victims of crime I didn't know that this was happening in our own backyard on a Main Street between two upper-middle class neighborhoods next to a coffee shop that I frequented and in fact according to the US Department of Justice some 300,000 kids in the United States are being sex trafficked on any given day 300,000 kids that is the size of Pittsburgh and think for a minute what it felt like to be 12 or 13 years old how impressionable we were how much we wanted to be loved and accepted have people think we were pretty boys like us well that's the average age that a child is recruited into sex trafficking and yet still as I talk about this topic with people there's still misconceptions that teenage girls may actually choose this actually choose to sleep with multiple have sex with multiple strangers in bleak motel rooms all over our country and often very dangerous circumstances really do you really believe that people that teenagers choose this as we came to understand this topic one of the things that was a was new to us and this thinking was that the pimps actually knew exactly what they were doing they knew exactly who to recruit and under what circumstances and many of these girls actually look like and acted like your regular teenage girl in fact one day I was walking down State Street here in Santa Barbara with my son and we ran into Jane Doe it was after the criminal trial and we exchanged hugs how are you doing and we walked on and my son said mom who was that I said oh honey that's just a friend of mine from work Oh and we walked on but Jane Doe she had a story and while unique in its own ways it had variations on many many other stories we would hear after her father was in and out of custody he was a pimp as she was growing up her mother when her father was in custody prostituted herself occasionally to put food on the table at 12 years old she had her first unwanted sexual experience when a family friend raped her she tried to tell somebody but nobody really listened and no report was made and nothing was ever done at some point in time the foster care system got involved and she was in and out of group homes and so forth and so at age 13 when a pimp came along and tried to recruit her she really couldn't think of anybody that could save her she didn't her parents weren't around she couldn't think of anybody they could save her from it so she said you know at some point I just came to accept but maybe this was just as good as it was going to get that may be all I was ever going to amount to was a prostitute that the best I could hope for was to find a pimp that wouldn't hurt me who wouldn't beat me a Romeo pimp and then she started to cycle down into a negative spiral she became exhausted and a miracle happened she met a man on Facebook they started talking he said all the right things told her how pretty she was said why don't you get out of this life come live with me come stay with my mother and I my mother has cancer you can come here you can live with us it will be a family and she did she moved she moved in with him and his mother and soon enough he started trafficking her he was recruiting her to write to her vulnerabilities so here she was today in this courtroom testifying against the very person that she thought had saved her she was conflicted and the prosecutor again is still trying to paint this picture for the court misto can you explain to the court what it was like what was the worst thing was it lack of food lack of sleep strange hotel rooms what was it spirituality misto can you explain to the court what you mean when you say spirituality well sure I mean like what I was doing for money I mean all my money was going in his pocket all my energy was used up I mean I felt like [ __ ] that's what I mean I see misto and did you feel like you were a hostage like you couldn't leave well like I said all my money was in his pocket I didn't even know where I was I did not know where I was and plus I had nowhere to go I had nobody to call where was I gonna go he had all my money you know we tripped all over ourselves trying to keep her from going back into the life as a sex trafficking victim and she said an interesting thing she said you know listen I I want to get out of this work work to this life - but what am I gonna do go work at Starbucks work along other high school kids I mean I want to go to college I want to become a writer someday but people don't understand this and I could run you guys are you know making such a fuss and I could run if I had two dollars in my pocket but I want something different except as I said people don't understand how I got here and how hard it is to get out and how dangerous and as a matter of fact the average life expectancy of a sex trafficking victim in her case having been recruited at just 13 years old he's a mere 7 to 10 years 7 to 10 years so the likelihood that she'll be dead when she's 20 it's very high of homicide suicide addiction overdose or disease these girls matter they really do now I don't stand here with all of the answers but I do believe one thing very strongly that she said to us and she taught us a lot you know if just one person would have believed in me believed and how precious I was when I was that 12 or 13 year old child believed in my capacity I don't believe I'd be standing here today I don't believe I would have been a victim and definitely not in this courtroom so there are small things that we as individuals can do simply becoming a mentor to an at-risk child through a Big Brother Big Sister program listening if a child says something's wrong if they're acting out of sorts listening and empowering and can't we all just think at that age at 12 or 13 how maybe just one adult changed the whole trajectory of our lives or becoming a court-appointed special advocate these are advocates who advocate for kids in the foster care system there's an astounding 400,000 foster kids in our country whose parents can't care for them and a critical shortage of trained foster parents that will take them in so as I said I don't stand here with all of the answers but I believe firmly in the humanity of these girls our girls and that humanity is the casualty of human trafficking [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 357,589

Rating: 4.8864021 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Crime, Gender, Global issues, Mental health, Violence, Women, Youth

Id: Lh1LsxWloTU

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2017