Trafficking on the Plains

It's cast as a personal crime in the movies, and it is, and often as a web with more arms than can be imagined, which is also likely.

Human trafficking is defined by the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services as a form of modern day slavery. It is viewed in primarily one of two areas: sex trafficking and labor trafficking. The DHHS defines sex trafficking as “recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining a person for a commercial sex act that is induced by force, fraud, or coercion. When the victim is under 18, no force, fraud, or coercion is necessary.”

Labor trafficking is “recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.”

In 2021, Nebraska officials prosecuted a local person on 13 counts including sex trafficking of a minor, resulting in a two-week trial in rural south central Nebraska.  

In 2016, Nebraska Public Media released a story entitled “Sex Trafficking Happens in Nebraska's Smaller Towns.” A YouTube video was released featuring Rachel Pointer, who told her story of being bought and sold as a six-year-old. In the video, she describes a person who traffics a six-year-old as “someone who almost isn't human”

“It's really not that hard to buy a human being,” she said in the video.

In a 2020 report by the traffickinginstitute.org, the 20-year trend of trafficking in Nebraska shows most of the recorded cases of trafficking are sex trafficking with forced labor trailing behind. Two new criminal human trafficking cases were filed in federal courts in 2020; one defendant was convicted.

The Human Trafficking Institute reports that “around the world, an estimated 24.9 million people are victims of sex and labor trafficking. Although human trafficking is illegal in every country, traffickers operate with impunity in places where these laws are not enforced.”

The difficulty is stopping traffickers. It might seem daunting to stop or curb the global trafficking industry, but stopping individual traffickers is doable, The Human Trafficking Institute says.

The root cause is a choice by traffickers, The Human Trafficking Institute says.

Most of the victims, according to authorities, are female, and children, bought and sold for sex. Anna Brewer, former FBI agent, operated the Omaha Child Exploitation Task Force, from 2010 to 2015. During her tenure, she encountered 250 victims, mostly female. She credits the anonymity of the Internet for the explosion of human trafficking.

Human trafficking is not limited to Nebraska's urban centers, or the major events. Officials have tracked trafficking activities in smaller cities across the state.

A public forum will be held 6 p.m. Aug. 29 at Sidney High School's Performing Arts Center with speakers including Glen Parks, Nebraska Attorney General's Office Coordinator of the Nebraska Human Trafficking Task Force.

Parks is a graduate of University of Nebraska-Lincoln's law school. He clerked at the Nebraska Supreme Court, and worked as a civil litigator. He spent nine years in India where he worked on projects addressing human trafficking. He and his family returned to Lincoln in 2015.

He has been the task force coordinator for more than five years.

The August 29 program will also include a safety awareness and self-defense program at the beginning of the presentation.