You think you know how simple it is to make a choice. You pick the chocolate chip cookie over the oatmeal cookie or you choose to watch one television show over another. Life is full of choices and it seems so simple. However, what appears as “choice” may actually be a form of force or coercion and now you know this article is not about your favorite cookie or TV show.
“Chicagoland (O’Hare International Airport) is a hub for human sex trafficking,” McHenry County State’s Attorney Pat Kenneally addressing about 200 people inside the Community Center of St. Mary Church in Huntley.
Kenneally was part of a presentation on Human Trafficking.
“One of the most horrific aspects of human trafficking is the physical reality of it, the spiritual reality…reducing a human being in their infinite complexity and importance to a commodity,” Kenneally said.
The McHenry County State’s Attorney was joined in the presentation by Karen Schultz, city director for Refuge for Women, Chicago. Schultz is in charge of the Refuge home in McHenry County, one of five Refuge homes in the U.S.
“Research by The Urban Institute shows that in the Chicago area, a pimp or trafficker can make between $4,000 and $33,000 a week per woman. It is high profit, low risk,” she said.
Human trafficking presentations like the one at St. Mary Church are meant to help people understand the gravity of this human rights issue and that victims who’ve suffered sexual harm finally have a choice.
“Many of us think that in suburban America, it’s a pretty safe place, but a lot of things are going on underneath our nose. The more education we have the better advocates and protectors of those vulnerable,” Schultz explained.
Sex trafficking doesn’t just happen in faraway places, it happens in the Fox Valley and throughout the United States.
“It is estimated that from all forms of human trafficking, including labor trafficking, the profit is $32 billion dollars worldwide, more than Nike, Google, The NFL, and Starbucks combined,” Schultz said.
For safety’s sake, Refuge for Women will not reveal the names of the women that came through Refuge’s program. Schultz brought to the attention of the audience a few situations that victims of sex trafficking found themselves in as examples of how the victims did not believe they had a choice.
“We had a single mom come through Refuge for Women who met a man through a dating website. They got married. He promised her a fairytale future. They moved away to another state and he separated her from her family. He took her to a strip club every night and told her to dance. She refused, but he used food and sleep deprivation and over time, he broke her will. He also began threatening harm to her daughter. It may have looked like she was choosing to go into the strip club and dance, but the backstory is that she was forced,” Schultz said.
Schultz and Kenneally told of other cases of force, threats, coercion, or fraud and were clear in that “this cuts across every socio-economic demographic,” Schultz said. She told of a young woman in pre-med from a wonderful family. In high school, she did some modeling to make money. She wanted to be responsible and help out toward college…so she connected with a modeling agency in the college town and worked six months for the agency. She got to know the boss and there’d been no red flags. Until one day, he called her and told her about a modeling job and suggested he swing by and pick her up and drop her off because it was right on his way. She thought that was weird, he’d never before driven her to a modeling job. During the six months of legitimacy he was just being nice and had gotten to know her whole family. He brought her to this apartment building and pulled out a gun and said to her, ‘you are going to go upstairs and do whatever they tell you to do or I will hurt your sister.’ The young woman was stuck in a situation. She ended up trafficked, sold online for two years because of force, coercion, and fraud. He’d been grooming her with a personal relationship. If I were looking at those online ads, this is a woman who has chosen to sell herself online to make money, but the story behind the story is that someone was forced to do it.”
The woman had feared for the safety of her family. She felt she could carry the burden despite her mother recognizing something was wrong and asking her what was wrong. But the “good daughter” carried the pain inside until she finally broke two years later and spoke the truth of what was happening to her. This is when people like Kenneally become involved in McHenry County prosecuting those behind sex trafficking and prostitution. “Generally people are brought in from places like Rockford, Milwaukee, Waukegan, and Chicago, engaging in services and they are leaving. There is a mama-san who runs the whole place and there’s all of these illegal immigrants from Korea, Japan, and China, none of whom speak English, and they are all being exploited.”
Kenneally told of several Crystal Lake area massage parlors shut down. In McHenry County most municipalities like Huntley have zoned massage parlors with very onerous conditions making it very difficult to operate, but they still do exist.”
Gaining control is not necessarily from force that leaves bruises and keeps people in indentured servitude or any type of sex trade as Kenneally pointed out. What makes people vulnerable include homelessness, poverty, and substance abuse. Schultz said 80 percent of the women they see at Refuge for Women, Chicago have a substance abuse issue.
“Sometimes they get pulled into the life and then drugs become a part of their life because it’s the only way they can survive what has happened to them. Sometimes a woman will have 894 different ‘buyers’ in a year. You can’t survive without something…and so many of our women turn to drugs.” Schultz told those attending the Human Trafficking presentation at St. Mary Church in Huntley of a situational vulnerability that pulled a female marine and helicopter pilot into the sex trade. “A strong woman, she served from a long line of military family. She got injured serving and needed surgery and got addicted to opioids in the process. She was dishonorably discharged and divorced. But being addicted, she could no longer fill her prescription meds and turned to heroin. Now she is on the street selling herself to get heroin, and a trafficker picks her up and she is trafficked for two more years until she is arrested. She said her arrest was her salvation since it got her off the street, away from the trafficker, and allowed her to make her way to Refuge for Women and graduated from the program.
Since the McHenry County home of Refuge for Women, Chicago opened in late 2016, 24 women have come through to start the healing process. Eight women graduated the full program. “Sometimes if the woman has children, she may just seek a measure of healing and then want to be with her children. Sometimes she’s very young and wants a measure of healing and then wants to get on with her life. We help to find a good transitional placement for her. The average length of stay is seven months; the entire program is nine months (up to 12 months),” Schultz said. “The program gives survivors of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation safe housing, counseling, life and work skills development,” according to Refuge for Women, Chicago.
Refuge for Women, a national faith-based organization, has five homes across the country and two more opening this year and an emergency home opening in Kentucky on April 1.
Contact: Karen.Schultz@refuseforwomen.org. The website is www.rfwchicago.org
