Sex-trafficked — and jailed
(from the Washington Post - hosted Martine Powers)

Hey, it's Martine. A heads up that this episode deals with child sex trafficking and may be difficult to hear.

Today's guilty verdict forever brands R. Kelly as a predator who used his fame and fortune to prey on the young, the vulnerable, and the voiceless for his own sexual gratification.

R&B singer R. Kelly was found guilty on federal charges of racketeering and sex trafficking. Here's the prosecution speaking after the verdict on Monday.

Their voices were heard and justice was finally served. This conviction would not have been possible without the bravery and resilience of R. Kelly's victims. I applaud their courage in revealing in open court the painful, intimate, and horrific details of their lives with him.

During the trial, one woman testified that she was forced into sexual encounters with other women, that she was unable to leave rooms without Kelly's permission, that he forced her to have an abortion. Another woman said that R. Kelly assaulted her and knowingly gave her herpes. In total, 11 accusers testified, and their accounts painted a picture of girls who were vulnerable in the face of power and how, for so long, adults didn't do enough to help them. From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is "Post Reports." I am Martine Powers. It's Tuesday, September 28th. R. Kelly is now facing 10 years to life in prison. He's expected to be sentenced in May of next year, and he's also facing additional federal charges of sexual assault and abuse in Illinois. But there were public allegations against him for more than two decades before he finally faced legal consequences.

The reasons why this took so long, there are some reoccurring themes that I think are really important to think about. The first being power dynamics, right? When we talk about sex trafficking, we talk about sexual abuse, it's so important to examine how this happens and how so often it's a person who has power exploiting vulnerable people.

That's Jess Contrera. She is an enterprise reporter for The Post, and we spoke to her about R. Kelly's trial because of the reporting that she's done on child sex trafficking all around the country.

So often, these are particularly people of color and particularly Black women who are in vulnerable positions. They might be a child, they might be in the foster care system. These are people who are already vulnerable, and traffickers seek out those vulnerabilities and exploit them. So when we look at the R. Kelly case, yes, it's playing out in the music industry, but it's not really all that different than what might play out in an apartment complex in any city in America

Jess says that the circumstances of R. Kelly's crimes are actually pretty common. But the way that this trial has ended, with clear consequences for the perpetrator, is actually not common at all.

What prosecutors will tell you about that is that they want to see consequences for traffickers. They want to put them behind bars or give them punishment somehow, and so that's why they often reduce charges down to something lesser. So for R. Kelly to actually be found guilty, and specifically of sex-trafficking related charges, is incredibly significant. Another thing that really struck me about this case is the way that people were finally praising and recognizing these Black girls who came forward again and again and went through the grueling process of what it takes to testify in a case like this and thanking them for coming forward and for their bravery, which is really incredible. It's important to remember the context that Black girls who are sex trafficking victims are also the most likely to be treated as criminals for being sex trafficked.

This is a dynamic that plays out again and again in trafficking cases all over the country, and that's something that Jess has done a lot of reporting on, cases where it's not the perpetrator who ends up in jail, but it's the victim.

When children are being sold for sex, that's a crime. That's an adult abusing a child. The person who's buying them is committing a crime. The person who is potentially selling them is committing a crime. But what a lot of people don't realize is that the child themselves can also be charged with a crime, and that that happens in our country hundreds of times a year. In 2019, there were 290 minors, that means kids were 17 or younger, who are arrested for solicitation or prostitution. And I find that really startling because we know, like, our federal laws say that if children are being sold for sex, they're they're victims, they're not criminals. But that's not the reality across the country.

The state of Nevada arrests more child sex trafficking victims than anywhere else in the country, and that's where we go next. Jess and photographer Bonnie Jo Mount spent some time last summer following the Las Vegas Police Department's Vice unit, which handles the arrest of sex traffickers and sex trafficking victims.

So, you know, Las Vegas is a place where it has a certain kind of reputation, and that a lot of tourists go to thinking that it is legal there to buy sex, which it isn't, and that creates a demand. And when there is a demand, traffickers fill that demand. So there are lots of teenagers who are brought to Las Vegas or are from Las Vegas and are sold there to adults who buy them and abuse them. And often, the people who are finding them are Las Vegas police officers

[Police radio chatter]

Las Vegas police, they still, unlike many places across the country, do stings in a kind of old-fashioned way. So you have an undercover detective who goes out and pretends to be a sex buyer

Just run on one of them, whichever one that looks the youngest, and then take her to Hotel Galaxy and I'll wait for you there.

They, you know, go in casinos, they go on the streets, they go to strip clubs. They try to make it so they don't look like police officers.

Hello. How are you, beautiful? Where are you going? Hi, beautiful. You look very beautiful. I love the way you look.

Oh, thank you.

He says his name's Do -- Do Ma. Do Ma.

He's purposely speaking, like, with a accent.

Yeah. "You're beautiful. You want to come hang out with me?"

They have beards, they have tattoos, and they meet people who are selling sex. The vast majority are women that they encounter, and when they get those women to agree to a price, they arrest them and they charge them with solicitation or prostitution. And often, the people who are they're encountering, once they start talking to them, are under the age of 18.

So the police that you've talked to who conduct these kinds of stings and sometimes end up arresting children in the process, like, why do they think that this is the right way to go about identifying victims of sex trafficking?

So they do it for a couple of reasons. When it comes to the adults, which mind you, sometimes these adults are just 18 by a couple of weeks, they believe that they are discouraging prostitution and discouraging traffickers from selling people by arresting them.

We have advocates that get pissed when we arrest the girls.

Uh-huh.

But they don't understand that sometimes we have to 'cause this is a tool to use to keep them in our pocket. It's the tough love thing, you know?

When it comes to children, though, a lot of other places in the country, what they will do is they then take those children back home or they take them to a child welfare facility. But what the police in Las Vegas and in also many other parts of the country say is that's the wrong way of doing things because you're basically setting that kid up to go right back to the person who is trafficking them, who they are often very attached to, think that they are in love with, and so they want a secure place to put the kids so that they can then get the kid connected to an advocate, get them an exam, a medical exam, just give them a few days away from this person who is abusing them. But there have been years and years of efforts to create a place that's specifically for these sex trafficked kids, and none of those efforts have worked in Las Vegas. And so where do the kids go? They go to the place where kids who commit crimes go, they go to the juvenile jail and they are held there for days and occasionally weeks.

Can you just talk through what it looks like when one of these kids is arrested?

There was one night where they drove by a Motel 6, and there were three girls on the corner who were clearly soliciting, and they just looked so young.

Is the Motel 6 a common spot?

Is the Motel 6 what?

A common spot?

For them to stay at? Yes, because it's cheap, it's right near the track.

Mm-hmm.

So that Motel 6, yes.

Mm-Hmm.

So you had an undercover officer go up, pretend to buy one of them, and then another officer pops out, yells, "Police," and they put this girl in handcuffs. And I don't know how else to say it besides she just looks terrified, and was standing there with her hands cuffed behind her back, telling them, "I'm 18." But then when they asked her, you know, "Well, what year were you born," she miscalculated and she said, you know, a year that didn't make any sense for her to be 18. And so they push her a little, push her a little, and she says, "I'm 16." And the first thing that she wants to know is whether she can call her mom.

What was your reaction when you saw that?

It's a really difficult situation as a reporter because you're there as an observer. I wanted to write about this, but there's nothing that I could have done to prepare myself for watching this little Black girl be surrounded by police officers and be put in handcuffs and put in a car and taken to jail because an adult man was selling her to other adult men.

If there are these larger concerns about whether this is the right way to prevent girls from being trafficked, who are the people who are saying no, that these things are clearly doing more harm than they are good?

The debate around this issue is this -- what is safety for these girls? Because when they put them away from their trafficker, the police are arguing, the prosecutors are arguing, "We're giving them physical safety." And what advocates, what survivors talk about is what about their mental safety? What about their traffickers telling them, "Nobody cares about you. I'm the only one who's going to protect you. Just watch. If the police find you, all they're going to do is put you in jail like you're a criminal, because that's what you are to them. They think you're nothing." And so here this kid gets this chance to maybe tell an adult, "This is what's happening to me." What advocates say is that the message that you are reinforcing to these children is nobody cares about you and you're not going to get help. And so what both sides have been saying for well over a decade now is we need a third option, right? We need something that isn't juvenile justice and putting them in detention. It isn't child welfare and putting them in a place that is for kids who are going through a whole bunch of other things, that this population of sex trafficked children deserves their own solution. And so what they want is to build what they call, like, a receiving center, which would be a specialized safehouse specifically for these kids. And there's a lot of debate around what the specifics of that would look like. But the people on the ground who work with these kids every day have been begging for this. And in Las Vegas, it still hasn't happened.

And what about the arrest or prosecution of the people who are trafficking these girls? Do police focus equally on trying to get them into jail?

So, the vast majority of the arrests that are made by this Vice section are of potential victims. But that's not to say they don't have the resources and they don't spend the time going after traffickers, too. Think about the situation with the 16-year-old girl. They put her in detention, and within an hour, there was an undercover detective there asking her, "What's been going on with you?" They want to go after her trafficker. They actually used her motel card to go figure out who had paid for her motel, and they waited outside the motel room and they tried to get this guy. And when they did the stakeout outside of the motel where he was staying, he got away. And so what happened was he's out there doing his thing, and she's in juvenile jail for nine days, and nothing ever came from it.

After the break, we talk about the laws that allow child trafficking victims to be charged as criminals. We'll be right back.

So, when it comes to how children are treated in these situations, that sometimes they are considered criminals for participating in the sex trade, how do you see that tension play out in the actual law?

It used to be that Nevada would charge these kids with solicitation. Then sometimes they didn't want to charge them with solicitation because they came to understand that they are victims, that they would charge them with another crime like minor in a gaming establishment so that they could then put them on probation to put an ankle monitor on them and keep tabs on them, at the very least. Now what happens is their charges are dropped after six months. And the idea being we're still putting them through this process so that we can have this opportunity to intervene in their lives. But again, advocates say they shouldn't be a part of this process at all because they're not even a little bit criminals. And this also plays out the day that they turn 18. I think it's important to remember that, you know, as soon as that happens, then their charges stick. Then they are looking at fines up to $1,000, up to six months in jail, but that charge of solicitation sticks on their record, unless they get it expunged, for the rest of their lives. Every time they get background checked for an apartment or a job or to chaperone their kid's school trip, and there is a lot of debate around, you know, whether that is the right thing to do when we know that many people who are in the sex trade are there out of desperation, difficult circumstances, or have been pushed there, forced to be there by a human trafficker.

And how do other cities deal with this? What are other ways that police departments have approached trafficking like this?

So there's a really wide variety all across the country. So, there are 10 states that have gone so far as to say not only can you not put child sex trafficking victims in detention, and not only can you not prosecute them, but you can't even arrest them. Some places are finding that that has made huge progress. Other places are finding that that has hindered their ability to get the kids to safety because they don't have legal means to pick the kid up off the street. What people keep telling me is nobody knows exactly what the right answer is. But for the first time in many years, this is an issue that people are paying attention to. It's an issue that the Department of Justice is giving tons of grant money to. But I'll put it this way. When I called back the police department in Las Vegas and talked them through, you know, our story and what we had seen and how things were working, the lieutenant there was the first to recognize and say, "We have a lot of work to do."

And is there an effort to try to ensure that children who are victims of sex trafficking are treated equally by the legal system, regardless of where they are in the country?

There are many pushes for federal legislation that would ensure that sex trafficking victims, both children and adults, are not being treated as criminals in our legal system. And what advocates are really pushing for is just for people to understand what sex trafficking looks like. There are so many misconceptions out there about, you know, that the trafficking is kidnapping and bringing people here from other countries. And while that can happen, the vast majority of people who are sex trafficked here in the United States are just people who were going through a hard time. They were vulnerable in some way because of their situation or their economic status or that they were kids in the foster care system looking for someone to pay attention to them. And then traffickers exploit those vulnerabilities. They find those children and say how beautiful they are and DM them about "we could get rich together. Don't you want to be independent?" And they woo them and they groom them to believe that when they are being sold for sexual abuse, it's their choice.

Jessica Contrera is an enterprise reporter for The Post. That's it for "Post Reports." Today's show was mixed by Linah Mohammad and produced by Ariel Plotnick and Emma Talkoff. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from The Washington Post.