Counselors’ meeting sheds light on child trafficking
An educator and advocate from Into the Light Arkansas, a faith-based nonprofit organization, spoke of her experiences working with survivors of child sex trafficking Monday during the opening session of the Arkansas School Counselor Association’s annual conference at the Hot Springs Convention Center.
Mary Elizabeth Kratochvil has 25 years’ experience as an educator in public schools, experience as a hospital chaplain and serving as volunteer coordinator for Wild River Juvenile Detention Center.
Into the Light “exists to provide refuge and restoration for minor survivors of sexual exploitation and to bring awareness and education to the issue of human sex trafficking,” according to its website, with offices in both Springdale and Mountain Home.
“What it involves is something of value being exchanged for the sex act. That could be food, it could be higher status a gang or actual money. And when we talk about sex, we’re talking about the physical sex act, but we also could be talking about stripping or por
nography. All that falls under the category of trafficking,” Kratochvil said.
In her address to over 600 school counselors, Kratochvil broke trafficking down into four main categories: familial, which occurs in the home and “almost always meth is involved;” pimp controlled non familial, or “traditional” trafficking involving a pimp and a “stable” of five or so girls with a quota of $1,000 each night; pimp controlled familial, in which the pimp is often a boyfriend, stepfather, or other close male figure; and gang-controlled, in which the children are used to recruit other gang members and viewed as objects for gang members pleasure.
Kratochvil also shared several statistics about trafficked children, including that the average life span of a trafficked child is seven years after the initial abuse. The average age trafficking begins is 12.
Sex trafficking is the second-largest criminal activity below the selling of drugs, and the fastest-growing one. It is a $32 billion industry. Of the 27 million victims of trafficking worldwide, 13.5 million are children. Only about 2 percent of these children are rescued in the U.S. One percent are rescued worldwide.
In the U.S., one in four girls and one in six boys are sexually abused before their 18th birthday. One in seven missing children reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC, were likely victims of trafficking, and 88 percent of those children were in the care of social services when they went missing.
“If you’re selling a girl, you can sell her over and over and over again until she’s all used up. And who gets busted? The girl. And because of the trauma bond that the girls feel with the pimp, most of the time the girl won’t turn on him,” Kratochvil said.
“It’s modern-day slavery. Traffickers deal in the flesh of our children. And when we say traffickers, we’re talking about the pimps and the madams, and recruiters that are sometimes in between the victim and the pimp, and we’re talking about the consumer. All of those can be charged as traffickers.”
However, in Kratochvil’s opinion, there is another category of people who deserve just as much blame as pimps.
“If people would quit buying sex altogether, then would be no children sold for sex. Your number one predator is the consumer.”
She also said that the problem is close to home, even having helped child survivors of trafficking from Garland County.
“Pimps are deliberately targeting rural communities because so many young girls and young boys in rural communities think ‘If I could just get out of this stupid little hick town, I could make it.’ Then a pimp comes along and he lays out a dream for them. They promise them everything.”
Kratochvil also brought attention to the issue of gender when it comes to trafficking victims.
“We tend to think in terms of males being the predators and females being the victims, and that is the way it is most of the time. But certain populations, particularly populations where it’s survival sex, are about 50 percent male and 50 percent female. Among populations outside of the survival sex populations, it tends to be about 80 percent female and 20 percent male. Females are more likely to disclose than males are. Part of that is because we’ve made it a female problem. That makes it harder for males to disclose.”
She urged for all to be on the lookout for indicators that child sex trafficking is occurring, including significant changes in behavior, lying about age, giving coached answers or refusal to answer questions altogether, resisting assistance, a preoccupation with acquiring money, having no identification, sightings of multiple minors with an unrelated adult, condoms and lubricant bought in bulk, distrust of law enforcement or outsiders, youth with names or symbols tattooed or branded on their bodies and keeping large amounts of cash or prepaid credit cards on their person.
However, Kratochvil drew attention to one warning sign above all: “Having a physically abusive, controlling boyfriend with them — and they use the term ‘boyfriend’ because they really think he’s their boyfriend — or a controlling female.”
Because of the nature of what these children must do to survive and the drugs they are often forcefully addicted to, they usually feel that reaching out to law enforcement is futile, and will only end in their incarceration, said Kratochvil.
To deal with the trauma and stress, survivors often adopt coping mechanisms that can seem off-putting to many, such as drug use, aggression, over signalization and disassociative identity disorder.
Kratochvil recalled a doctor viewing the brain scans of a survivor of trafficking, saying that he saw the exact same brain abnormalities in the scans of prisoners of war.
She also discussed Arkansas legislative changes that she sees as being necessary in order to alleviate the problem and prevent further abuse to children.
Since the age of consent is currently 16 years old in Arkansas, she said that raising it to 18 would greatly help in the prosecution of child traffickers. Also, she called for an end to the charging of minors with prostitution.
“We see kids here in Arkansas all over the country that have been trafficked and sold here. One law enforcement officer told us that he sees Arkansas girls in Texas every day, many of them dead, because Arkansas is not looking at the problem like we should. We’re pretending they don’t exist, or we don’t see the humanity,” Kratochvil said.
When speaking to a survivor of child trafficking, she said that is important to be nonjudgmental, kind, let them guide the conversation, adopt the same terms they use, be transparent, and to avoid the use of the word “prostitution” when speaking to minors.
“That’s one way we provide refuge at Into the Light. We listen to them, and we believe their story. And if they want us to be their advocate and their mentor, we will walk beside them and have contact in person with them at least every two weeks and either through social media or in person weekly,” Kratochvil said.
The organization currently serves 57 victims with four full-time employees and two part-timers. Unfortunately, this is not enough.
“They just keep coming. Nearly every week there’s a new child that’s been victimized. You’ll find that these are some of the most beautiful, resilient people you’ll ever meet. And it’s none of us that go in and help that are heroes. It’s them. They have the courage to get up every morning and keep doing life when things like this are happening to them,” Kratochvil said.
“It’s happening. It’s happening right here. It’s happening here in Garland County. You need to know that for sure. It’s happening in rural America and small towns. We need you. We need your eyes, we need your heart and we need your arms reaching out.”