Western Virginia law enforcement agencies have formed a Human Trafficking Task Force. The area is divided into four regions and stretches from Lee to Louisa Counties and from Frederick County to the North Carolina state line. Officials say the goal is to combine federal, state, and local resources. John Childrey is the Deputy Attorney General for Public Safety and Enforcement and says human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal enterprises in the United States.
“It doesn’t discriminate. It’s not limited to one race, one culture, one gender. There are victims of almost every socio-economic class, we’ve found. The common denominator in folks that want to prey on and make people victims is that these victims are seen as vulnerable. And the traffickers prey on that.”
He says the most common form of trafficking in Virginia is the sex trafficking of young children by pimps and gangs, and usually the victims are U. S. born runaways. Restaurants, farms, and factories sometimes hire illegal aliens who then become labor-trafficking victims.
“And then they control their movements sometimes by keeping ahold of those papers and forcing these folks to live together in deplorable conditions for little-to-no wages and there’s really no way out. These folks oftentimes don’t speak English and they are at the mercy of the people that have brought them over.”
A Northern Virginia Human Trafficking Task Force has prosecuted 50 defendants in 20 cases involving more than 375 trafficking victims. Some of the victims are girls as young as 12.
First Assistant U. S. Attorney Anthony Giorno says the Western District Task Force won’t be hiring any new officers, they’ll just make better use of the resources they have.
“We have the skill set. We have the people here who have the investigative skills. We have the people with the prosecution skills. We have the NGOs (Non Governmental Organization) that can provide services for victims. This task force just brings all that together and makes them aware of the problem and encourages them to work together.”
Giorno says right now the task force is limited to information sharing by law enforcement but that will grow to include members of the community.
“The more eyes on the street, the more ears we have on the street, the greater the chance we have that we’re going to find the problem and find a way to effectively deal with it. Good ideas for these things are not just limited to law enforcement or NGOs. The public often bring us good ideas as well.”
The creation of this Western District Task Force follows Governor McDonnell’s Executive Order last month to establish an Anti-Human Trafficking Coordinating Committee to assure the Commonwealth’s response to the issue is comprehensive and coordinated.
– Beverly Amsler
