Behind the Facade: Sex Trafficking in Colorado

Behind+the+Facade%3A+Sex+Trafficking+in+Colorado

By Tito Limas- Villers ’14 with additional reporting by George Maguire ’16

In its April 2014 issue, the Denver Magazine 5280 investigated the issue of sex trafficking. The Urban Institute estimated that the underground sex trafficking “economy” in the United States is $975 million. In Denver, it’s worth almost $40 million. This “economy”  is made up of around 100,000 trafficked boys and girls controlled by their pimps to have sex with men or women old enough to be their parents.

Detective Keith Booton has been part of the Aurora Police Department for over 30 years. He works in the sex crimes unit working to register sex offenders, some of whom were traffickers, also known as “pimps”.

“Sex Trafficking, regardless if it’s a minor or an adult, would be the person, persons or an organization who take male or females, adults or children, against their will and force them into a sex market to perform sexual acts for money or other items of remunerations,” Booton said.

How do these children get into the industry in the first place? There are no general characteristics but a good portion of the children come from broken homes. They are abused- physically, emotionally and in some cases even sexually- and sometimes run away. According to National Network for Youth, 1.68 million children run away each year. Sometimes they meet a pimp who comes around as a person who pretends to care about them. Before they know it, they are tattooed to mark them as identified property, raped and sold for sex. The average age for children that are trafficked are around 13 years old.

A pimp could be anyone that is either physically intimidating or a smooth talker. “You can have either males or females acting in that capacity. Typically on your males, one would think they are physically imposing and they can impose their will on another individual. That’s not necessarily true. They can be 5’6 and 135 pounds and have a very good storyline and have what we call the ‘gift of gab,’” Detective Booton said.

Methods that sex trafficking rings have used include having fronts, such as massage parlors, where customers can have sex with underage kids. According to The Urban Institute, in one week a single pimp can make around a gross income of $32,000 and they can sell kids for around $400 per hour or more.

The highways also give another benefit for the pimps. Denver is a strategic location for sex trafficking. Two Interstates- I-70 and I-25- pass through Denver which makes it easy to traffick people in and out.

“It’s a prime opportunity to bring them in and to get them out because again traffickers are trying to rotate girls or children around the country to elude capture,” Sheila Alishouse, director of TraffickStop, said.

Alishouse is a full time director at TraffickStop, a faith-based organization that helps raise awareness, hosts fundraisers for shelters and advocates for legislation on the issue.

The Colorado state legislature has been working to strengthen the law against traffickers. State Representative Elizabeth McCann created House Bill 14-1273 which would tighten some loopholes particularly in conviction and in establishing a council to recommend reforms. This bill has been passed in both chambers and is going to be signed by the Governor.

We are increasing the penalties. We are making the language of the offense more usable and understandable for prosecutors and courts. We do expect that we will see more successful prosecutions,Representative McCann said.

Stronger penalties rely on limiting the amount of defense loopholes.

What the bill does is in regards to defenses. So age and consent are no longer defenses. Someone might say, ‘Well, if she’s being prostituted, then she’s consenting because we have this sexual relationship and she consented.’ It will no longer be a defense that she consented or that she’s underage and you didn’t know it,” Representative McCann said.

Despite the legislation and action taken on this issue, there is still plenty of work to do. Colorado still does not have a safe harbor law, which would provide trafficked victims better access to services and it is hard to prove that a child has been trafficked.

Local police are working hard to curb the trafficking. With the help of the FBI, the Aurora Police Department, Arapahoe Sheriff’s office and the Denver Police Department have created the Innocence Lost Task Force which is solely focusing on stopping sex trafficking. The police have been very effective in shutting down fronts, arresting pimps and freeing sex slaves.

Detective Booton has seen it work.

“In Aurora, we have detectives in our crimes against children unit that work in sex trafficking or in the internet prostitution aspects where adults are putting minors on the Internet for the purposes of another adult meeting them. They do Internet stings to get on the computer, act as if they are looking for an individual for pleasure that they know its illegal. If a person bites on it, they set up on him and they take him down,” Booton said.

“The FBI has the dollars. They have the money to run a major investigation. If something is happening in Aurora, and maybe we find that something is equally occurring in Denver and then it might be in Grand Junction, the FBI can come over and take care of all of three of those agencies, bring us all together and fund the investigation.”

The efforts are paying off as more fronts are closed and more pimps are arrested. Just this year in February, a couple was arrested for running a prostitution ring. The case is still on-going, but each are charged with five counts of human trafficking, one count of pimping, one count of keeping a place of prostitution and one count of pandering.

One of the major problems is getting the victims help. The lack of rehabilitation and the large of of victims who return to the sex trade is partially due to the delicate nature getting the victims to cooperate.

Tracy Robinson, a Guardian at Litmen Law, defends juveniles in court and in the past year has taken on more sex trafficking cases.

Robninson says, “Part of the problem is what to do with the girls when they’re stocked in a hotel. You’ve got a John, and you’ve got a girl, but no pimp. Do you arrest the girl, and punish her for being a victim? Arrest the John? Get the girl to come talk to you? What do you do? That’s been part of the headache.”

Robinson says is difficult to see a quick resolution.

“Before they were arresting the girls and charging them with prostitution just to hold them and get more information. But that’s not fair to them, because they sit in jail while they’re pimp is still out on the streets. One girl I had was saying ‘This is crap. I got removed from my family. I had to go live in a house and he’s still out on the street.’ They ended up charging the pimp, but his trial still won’t come up for another year,” Robinson said.

Angelika Carnes is a Human Trafficking Program Manager at Colorado Organization for Victim Assistance (COVA) an organization that works to provide relief for victims of trafficking.

Carnes works with victims on a case-by-case basis.

“What we offer from victim services  is we do housing referrals. We make sure our clients have phones, that they have access to mental health, to medical health referrals and dentists, vision, legal services- if they want job skills, we connect them to services so they can acquire some job skills,” Carnes said.

“A lot of our clients don’t speak english so we connect them with english as a second language classes. If they want them to go to college, we make referrals there and help them through that. Really basic direct human services so they can  move forward,” she said.

Private citizens are also working to do their part to fight sex trafficking.

Evan Batten, Regis Jesuit alumnus from the class of 2012, is an ambassador for Shared Hope International. He is working to spread awareness on sex trafficking.

“What we’ve seen in recent articles and research most of them are sex trafficking rings that are part of a large range criminal network. What that means is the pimp is working for a higher group so it’s not just a guy that wants to make $5,000 a week,” Batten said.

A student of Metro State University, Batten is also a member of the Defenders, an organization dedicated to not participate in sex trafficking.

“What’s scary about this is that this could be so much larger  than any of us realize. We’re just getting reports and data on who really is kidnapping women, who is organizing it all and its scary that this is much larger than any of us thought,” Batten said.

When Evan Batten became aware of sex trafficking in Denver, he joined Shared Hope International to fight to end sex trafficking after learning about the issue from the Super Bowl. After doing research, he saw that Colorado is one of the worst areas of sex trafficking.

“I go to school in Denver and I live in Denver. The fact that this is going on in Denver kind of broke my heart and really just ignited this passion to fight this,” Batten said.

Sex trafficking has been steadily getting attention by the media, but one question is left unanswered: what makes people buy sex from children old enough to be their child?

Patrick Stoll, a local business owner and a chapter leader of the Defenders, says it is linked to pornography.

“[Pornography] is an addiction. What happens is again it comes out as okay especially as men our sex drive is turned on and we want more of it but you can’t touch it,” Stoll said.

“When you start looking at pornography things such as child pornography become okay, things like the really dirty stuff starts to be okay and your tolerance levels goes up and up. All of a sudden, you’re purchasing sex over a phone which is generally the next step and all of a sudden a woman shows up at your house,” Stoll said.

Pornography also offers a mode of advertising for pimps. Pimps normally take photos of their victims and post them on the Internet identifying them as 18 years old.

Shelia Alishouse says another reason could be rooted in the desensitizing of society.

“I think that one reason is that culturally and from a societal standpoint, we have come to this place where we don’t care about our community. We don’t care that we are a piece of the community and we have responsibility in the community,” Alishouse said.

“Some things like pornography become very prevalent and even becomes accepted so I think all these factors work together to create this space where, ‘Oh well. It happens in India but it is not so bad over here.’”

As much work that the police and these organizations commit, the law currently has various loopholes that encourage sex trafficking. A report published by the Polaris Project placed Colorado in tier three (out of four tiers) regarding sex trafficking legislation.

The reason being is that the laws have many loopholes that the pimps and their criminal networks can use.

For example, a trafficker convicted of trafficking would face 24 years in prison and /or $5,000-1 million dollars. Soliciting child prostitution, pandering a child, keeping a child prostitute, inducement of child prostitution or creating/distributing child pornography, that is a felony for up to 4-12 years in prison and fines of $3,000- 750,000.

“There’s millions and millions of dollars invested in this so when someone else gets arrested and pays $3,000, that is not even debt or a scratch for them,” Batten said.

“There’s laws that already exist that help law enforcement, help the courts, catch and convict these people. Every once and awhile you do find in those laws flaws where people get lawyers and figure out that something isn’t done right. Those are when legislation comes in and tightens those statutes. There are plenty of laws in the books that are there to help but by all means, we would never turn away an idea,” Detective Booton said.

But awareness advocates are hopeful that with increased awareness of this issue and better legislation, then this issue can be mitigated.

“This has gone on forever and I think it’s a blessing that society as a whole is starting to become aware of it because we can easily become desensitized. If its not happening in your neighborhood, you are not paying any attention to it. Its in every neighborhood. People need to wake up. Take care of their kids,” Booton said.