SALISBURY, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — Rowan County deputies say two 25-year-old arrested this month were connected to two unrelated 13-and 17-year-old runaway girls at a home on 11 Street in Salisbury.
The investigation revealed at least one of the girls had been taken to a Kannapolis hotel for prostitution.
“They’re not visiting a prostitute. These are 13-year-olds and 17-year-old girls,” said Niki Miller, the director of operations for Shield North Carolina, a human trafficking prevention organization. “They are children. They cannot give consent. So they are paying for the opportunity to rape a child. And those people are out in our community and that’s bothersome.”
“We do a lot of training and outreach. We advocate for smart human trafficking policies on the local, state, and federal levels,” she continued. “And then as far as the prevention part, we really go out into the community and try to build some collaboration and build stronger communities.”
The organization also co-founded the North Carolina Demand Reduction Task Force.
“When you’re looking at human trafficking, unfortunately, traffickers look at it as a business,” Miller said. “So you have the supply, which are the services offered by the victim, whether that be labor or sex trafficking. And then you have demand the traffickers do not create the demand. The buyer creates the demand. Research is showing, if you can reduce that demand, then you reduce you can actually prevent human trafficking.”
Efforts to reduce the demand for sex trafficking proved effective after the passage of N.C. House Bill 971. It makes a first offense of soliciting a prostitute into a felony crime.
“We were the second state in the nation to pass that. The judge can say, okay, you have to get some treatment, or you have to go to a higher education program and you can reduce the demand that way,” Miller said.
Surveys suggest that around 37 million teenagers in the USA alone are on social media.
Nate Lewis, Founder and CEO of The Innocent, says his team provides law enforcement equipment and specialized training to conduct online investigations.
He says right now, they’re seeing an increase in sextortion cases.
“Most of this world that we live in is digital. You know, these criminals think they can hide themselves on the internet. And there are different sites and arenas where paying for sex occurs. And so how do we infiltrate those going undercover online?” Lewis said. “That’s where these predators are going to go. And they also feel safe because they can hide their identity. It’s not so much what we used to see… like be careful at the park, but who’s that guy standing over there? What’s the situation? These guys don’t go out in plain sight anymore and they build trust. And sometimes these relationships can be built over weeks or months even before they meet up in person.”
Lewis is urging lawmakers to set restrictions on social media for children and teenagers. He says it’s too easy for traffickers to befriend them and their friends on social media.
“We need to probably take a deep dove and look into some of these things,” Lewis said. “And how do we protect, again, to go back to our mission statement, protect and preserve the innocence of our children?”
He believes people would be shocked to see how many teenagers, especially young girls, have public social media accounts.
“How these predators are trolling accounts, getting into your network of people, and then also just into your direct messages and they slowly start the grooming process through social media,” Lewis said. “So we’ve seen that very prevalent through all sorts of different medias and apps.”
