Gov. Greg Abbott’s office has determined that many girls who are in human trafficking treatment programs coordinated by the state of Texas have been exploited and trafficked by their mothers at a young age.
“We didn't recognize it four years ago, so how can we get ahead of that?” Andrea Sparks, director of the governor’s Child Sex Trafficking Team (CSTT), said. “How can we recognize that earlier and help them stay out of this lifelong exploitation? It's kids who are coming out of a big transition like foster care or the juvenile justice system. It's kids who have specific vulnerabilities and disabilities and kids who've been abused by their parents.”
Sparks spoke at the Oct. 15 unveiling of a statewide data platform called Lighthouse, which has been under development for more than a year with the assistance of Allies Against Slavery, a 501(3)(c) that was awarded a grant by the governor’s office to invest in the portal's capabilities.
“This is our first year with Lighthouse but we are going to continuously push to add more data to this tool so that we can learn more and more,” she said. “We can't fight this problem if we don't understand it.”
After CSTT was created by the Legislature 4 1/2 years ago, Abbott appointed Sparks to direct a team of 10 staff members, including five regional statewide administrators who work to build a continuum of care for trafficking survivors.
“We are big picture people, trying to build sustainable capacity around the state," Sparks said. "Not only [to] serve survivors but also to prevent this from happening in the first place, to protect vulnerable youth and to help our criminal justice partners bring justice to traffickers, exploiters, buyers and facilitators. We realized quickly that we needed to understand what trafficking looks like in the state of Texas.”
Human trafficking is a $150 billion industry and enslaves 25 million people worldwide with 23,078 domestic victims identified in 2018 alone, according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Further, Texas has the second-highest rate of human trafficking in the United States with the number of identified cases rising annually.
“I would love to get law enforcement data on [Lighthouse] so we can overlay which investigations and prosecutions are being successful,” Sparks said.
Serving about 2,000 victims, CSTT has come a long way in the nearly five years since it was established.
"No one knew how much trafficking we had or where it was happening,” Sparks said. “We had the National Human Trafficking Hotline reports but we still didn't know. Now we're a lot closer to getting there and we've got care coordination teams actually coordinating care for identified child victims.”
What's next is cultivating more data that will help with prevention, Sparks said.
“Prevention programs that help vulnerable youths like CASA, Boys and Girls Clubs, Big Brothers and Big Sisters mentor programs," she said. "If they are making a big impact, do we see a difference in the rates of victimization and the kids coming into care coordination?"
