Human trafficking is considered the fastest growing underground industry, generating $32 billion a year, according to the Center for Public Policy Studies. At 79,000 cases, Texas has the second most reported number of child sex trafficking incidents in the U.S.
The Refuge in Austin is taking action to help children and teens recover from sex trafficking circumstances by offering housing to 45 girls at a ranch as part of long-term treatment that caters to their emotional, spiritual, mental, psychological, educational and physical needs.
“We hope at some point to be considered the Mayo Clinic for child sex trafficking survivors,” said Steven Phenix, director of public relations and communications at The Refuge. “We've created a model that other states are looking at around the country. The Refuge Circle of Care is where everything survivors need are on-site, which is very critical because it’s an adaptive strategy for these children to run away. They survived because they ran from a bad bio situation, a bad foster situation, a pimp or a bad buyer and it's very hard to turn that defense off.”
The Circle of Care offered at The Refuge is a seven-prong care model that includes non-invasive biometrics taking place over 18 to 24 months.
“You can do a CAT scan of kids who’ve experienced extreme abuse and see that they have a smaller brain and there's large gray areas where the neuropathways don't connect but through love, care, time, trust and a growing brain, the pathways can heal and reconnect,” Phenix told the Lone Star Standard.
The Refuge is among the facilities offering less than 600 beds nationwide for child sex trafficking survivors, compared to more than 13,000 animal shelters, according to The Refuge Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking (DMST) data.
“DMST is a culmination of many larger societal factors that we, as a society, have kicked down the road for a century,” said Phenix in an interview. “It's crime. It’s addiction. It’s poverty, a lack of education and no support services for vulnerable populations.”
One of six missing children were likely victims of sex trafficking in 2019, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), 55% reported attending school while being trafficked, 27% of trafficking cases involved a family member and some 88% of child trafficking victims emerged out of foster care or the child welfare system.
“Those are the disposable children,” Phenix said. “If you grab a blonde, blue-eyed kid from the Target parking lot with all the cameras around, here comes CNN, the Texas Rangers and it's all over the newspaper, but if it's a foster child who has runaway six, seven or eight times, no one's looking for that kid when they go missing.”
There are efforts to ramp up investigations. For example, Senate Bill 1257, which would have given the Attorney General of Texas increased authority to investigate and prosecute human trafficking cases, but it fizzled out in committee last May due to opposition from state’s district attorneys, according to media reports.
“If you suspect or are witnessing a trafficking incident, do not approach the victim because that will have some pretty bad repercussions for the child,” said Phenix. “The pimp will blame him or her and it will drive trafficking further underground.”
Instead, he advises reporting suspected cases to the 24-hour National Human Trafficking hotline, 888-373-7888, operated by the Polaris Project, which advises citizens who want to help to call or write elected representatives to support legislation that will help survivors, and to volunteer in communities to fight not only trafficking but, the societal factors leading to trafficking, such as poverty and addiction.
“They are experts in recognizing what is trafficking, what it’s not and the information goes into a national database,” Phenix said.
The Refuge will host an online tour at 12:30 p.m. CST on Wednesday, Sept. 23. Register at https://bit.ly/RefugeTour.
