Are Children Truly Being Taken From Our Own Back Yards?
Like most law enforcement officers, I initially resisted hunting for juvenile runaways and never considered the reality that these children were feeding the human trafficking market, especially the local market. I scoffed at the idea that such heinous offenders would even dare establish operations within our jurisdiction, and since the FBI UCR report excluded human trafficking at that time, I chose to ignore the reality as well. I knew of no other officer near my jurisdiction that considered human trafficking a local crime. It allegedly offered too minimal a threat in Parker County to be worthy of an officer's commitment away from the more pressing crimes of domestic violence, homicide, child abuse, burglaries, and other significant crimes that required our full attention.
Around 0200 on one cold February morning in the 1990s, as a sergeant for the Parker County Sheriff's Office, I was patrolling an area north-west of Weatherford, Texas. As I drove past the beautiful city park known as Cartwright Park, a strong compulsion urged me to alter my path and conduct a brief patrol of the park's winding roads that ran along a small lake known as Sunshine Lake. The ambient temperature was hovering just above freezing. I resisted the compulsion be-cause it was a city park, outside of county juris-diction. Offenders were victimizing churches on the west side of the county with midnight burglaries, which created motivation to follow the main highways to defeat their purpose. About a mile farther, I felt a powerful urge to return to that park, as if someone was screaming at me to return and patrol the park.
This time, I complied. My experiences in combat offered assurance that somehow, something always warned of an impending wrong. I returned to the park, following the winding road that trailed alongside Sunshine Lake. There was not even a breeze; the lake offered not even a ripple. Suddenly the car headlights danced across something glistening under a nearby bush. All the leaves had long fallen to the ground around the base of the bush. I could not tell what created the glistening reflection from a distance, so I drove off the road, heading straight to the bush. Abruptly, the headlights revealed a small body huddled up under the bush, partially covered by the dead leaves.
I jumped from the patrol car. The flashlight beam confirmed that the body was that of a young girl about 10-12 years old. She was clad only in a satin nightgown and undergarments, already succumbing to telltale signs of hypothermia as I scooped her into my arms. A large butcher knife dropped to the ground. Ignoring the knife and rushing back to the car, I placed her on the passenger side and turned the car heater up to maximum heat. Grabbing the mike, I advised dispatch that I had discovered a child victim of hypothermia in Cartwright Park and that I would be rushing her to the County Hospital, which was only about two miles away. I retrieved a blanket and a new teddy bear I kept in my trunk for encounters with injured children and covered the child with the blanket, gently placing the stuffed animal be-tween her arms.
The hospital’s ER staff saved her life during those early morning hours. Returning after the end of the shift to identify the girl, I hoped to gain any information that would identify who was harming her. She refused to admit she lived in fear, although the butcher knife and the nightgown she wore assured me that she was protecting someone. I picked her up one more time and warned her that she was tempting fate to only runaway without asking for help from me or another law enforcement officer, but to no avail. That was the last time I saw her.
Ten years later, a young woman with a baby in her arms and a toddler holding onto her skirt stepped into my office. I had been promoted to CID as a juvenile investigator. The woman asked if I remembered her and then tossed the idea aside as she said, "How could you. That was over ten years ago." She had my attention. She told me that she was that young girl I found in the park that night. She had indeed fallen prey to a human trafficking operative driving a van through Weatherford at night looking for runaways. They dragged her into the van and returned to Dallas, where they immediately forced her into prostitution. Ten years later, she managed to slip away just long enough to stop by my office to ask me never to give up fighting human trafficking.
Even though I could share the fact that most prostitutes today start as 10-12-year-old victims enticed from their home either from a chat room on the Internet or from attempting to run away as they hoped to flee from one evil but encountered yet another. These children never turn to any authority for help for varying reasons. We offer them no help with programs that prepare them with the facts that assure them that worse evils await them on the streets of America. Once we see them on the streets with a human trafficking offender watching their every move, as patrol officers, we view them as whores— young prostitutes who have turned to a sinful life for easy money. We never consider the fact that offenders force these children to comply with the wishes of “Clients” at least 20 times a day. To us, they are just more trash on the street, committing a victimless crime. Today, they might be 20 years old, but they were forced into the trade when they were only young children, taken from their homes.
by Barry Goodson