School Boards learn about trafficking
LANCASTER — “We are going to talk about a difficult subject,” guest speaker Opal Singleton cautioned members of the Antelope Valley School Boards Association at Tuesday night’s dinner meeting.
The difficult subject was child sex trafficking.
Singleton serves as the training and outreach coordinator for the Riverside County
Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force. She trains law enforcement agencies around the nation.
Singleton is also president and CEO of Million Kids, a nonprofit organization that combats human trafficking and exploitation including child pornography, social media grooming & recruitment, and sextortion.
The organization got its name because more than one million kids are trafficked each year throughout the world.
“You will never have enough money to fight this,” Singleton said.
There are many kinds of human trafficking, the fastest-growing crime in the United States. California is the No. 1 state, with twice as many victims as Texas and Florida, Singleton said.
Trafficking, Singleton said, is a crime of psychology.
“I have never met a kid yet that understood what was about to happen to them,” Singleton said.
Singleton wrote “Seduced, the Grooming of America’s Teenagers,” based on real cases.
“If it’s a crime of psychology we can educate against it,” Singleton said.
Victims often participate in their own trafficking. Suspects get teenage girls to leave thinking they are go
ing to meet the boy of their dreams, when in reality it’s a 20-something man who is a sexual predator.
“What’s driving it is gangs and social media and gangs using social media,” Singleton said. “Gangs are making more money selling people than they are selling drugs.”
Singleton recalled one case involving a 16-year-old girl from Madera who frequented online dating sites. Her parents gave her everything.
“They could see all the signs of that fantasy relationship, that grooming process,” Singleton said. “They did everything that you need to do, but she snuck out, and one of these guys came from Moreno Valley and picked her up. He took her down to Moreno Valley and put her in the gangs there.”
The 16-year-old was traded from one gang to another to another and then another because she was sent back to the original gang.
“She will never be OK. … That young lady needs a lot of help,” Singleton said.
Approximately 60% of girls are recruited by other girls in school. Gangs use 17-year-old girls to recruit younger girls who are often about 14 years old.
Boys can also be victims, Singleton said.
Singleton’s latest book,
“Societal Shift: A World Without Borders and A Home Without Walls,” uses real-life cases to explain how predators use new technologies to exploit children.
“We put more warning on a bottle of penicillin than we put on an app like Tik Tok, Singleton said. “What is going to happen here is if we don’t train our parents and we don’t train our kids on how all this works? Then we are playing roulette with our kids.”
Singleton added, “This generation of kids, by the end of this year, will be the generation that has more autonomy and more privacy, than any generation before.”
Singleton urged the educators to educate themselves and their parents, and then their kids on how it all works.
“I believe that what you guys do every day is the key to stopping this, and that is create programs that are family-oriented,” Singleton said. “Put the family back in family, that is absolutely important.”
Singleton suggested families take at least one day a week where they put the cellphones away and spend it with each other.
“Let’s make leaders out of our kids to use technology with respect and responsibility,” Singleton said.