State Attorney General Michelle Henry announced Tuesday that the AG office received a multi-million dollar grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation for Operation PA STRIKE — an initiative to both educate the public about the crime and investigate traffickers.
It’s excellent news. “I am proud of the progress we already made,” Henry said. “Human trafficking is extremely cruel and can impact all races, religions and demographics.”
All well and good, but there is no better way to get the horror of human trafficking into the public’s attention than to hear from the victims.
In 2020, Tammi Burke — then the manager of community services at the Victim’s Resource center — spoke at a King’s College Human Trafficking Awareness Month event, offering stark statistics: Human trafficking is a $150 billion a year industry; Pennsylvania ranked ninth among the 50 states in trafficking. There are some 40 million victims worldwide, and about 13 million are children.
She also recounted the story of one victim.
“There was a girl, 14, who was abused by her stepfather. She went on the streets just to get away from him. She met a Prince Charming, a 21-year-old man.” He offered help, called her beautiful, convinced her to stay with him, got her hooked on drugs and sold her to his friends. He coaxed her into recruiting other young woman to work for him “so she wouldn’t have to.”
In 2019, Cameroon native Evelyn Chumbow told her story to a crowd at Misericordia University. With an alcoholic father and a mother who couldn’t afford to feed six children, she was given to the care of an uncle, who sold her into slavery at age 9 for $2,000. He sent her to America, claiming she would get an education. Believing she had arrived legally, she learned she had been brought into the country with five other children on a single visa.
Catering to a wealthy Maryland family, she experienced rape, nights on a cold floor and endless work. She was denied any education or medical treatment, and did not hear from her family. She choked back tears, recounting an exposed bone from a knee broken during a beating with a steel broomstick. After escaping, she talked to an FBI agent who called her a liar. She was placed in foster care in a very seedy section of Washington, D.C.
Chumbow eventually found her way to a better life, but go back to that statistic: 40 million victims — and that number is probably a low estimate. Imagine a story like hers (or worse) told 40 million times.
Human trafficking remains an abomination. The new infusion of money for the Attorney General should help, but let’s be clear: As long as there is a market, there will be those who feed it. Ironically, the people willing to traffic in human lives — providers and users — are showing how little humanity they have.