One Elusive Fact

This morning I sit across from Corie in her office looking out over East Portland and, in the distance, Mount Hood shrouded in morning clouds. Corie Wiren is a young, energetic … bureaucrat. Pure and simple. As a citizen proud to be paying his taxes to support Corie and others like her, I tell her I salute her for the the work she is doing as a bureaucrat. Officially, she is chief of staff for Multnomah County Commissioner Diane McKeel. She is there to serve.

I am in Corie’s office in search of one elusive fact. Stephanie Mathis, executive director of the Oregon Center for Christian Values, and I are presenting at the International Justice Mission’s advocacy training day on Saturday. In this conference focused on international human trafficking, we’ve been offered a few minutes to talk about the local problem, right in our own back yard.

There are few hard facts about human trafficking anywhere in the world. Just endless anecdotal evidence and far too many occasional victims to prove the problem is real and that it is big.

Somehow the victims “over there” are easier to see as victims. Corie talks about the perception people often have of Portland’s sex trafficked girls – that somehow they got themselves into it, that they just don’t fit the nice poster child photo we like to have of people we want to rescue. Fact is, these girls don’t even act like they want to be rescued sometimes – angry and fighting off their rescuers. I remember what my lifesaving instructor said years ago, that the drowning victim will often attack the lifeguard come to the rescue.

I think of this when Buddy stops by for his monthly home visit this afternoon. Buddy is our supervisor in the Morrison respite foster care program. A gentle guy with an unblemished Boston accent, he’s talking with us about a very angry little boy who has been in nearly 30 foster homes already, a sad child that those who look after him in the program fear has little hope of making it in life – so much damage from unspeakable abuse when he was younger still overwhelms him and all those who come to his aid.

In the morning appointment, I ask Corie what the key problems are that we need to tackle to solve the local human trafficking crisis. Rescuing the girls today is important, but by tomorrow even more will take their place. It is a demand-driven market. We talk about some ideas and how OCCV can partner with the Commissioner’s office to affect change. But what strikes me is how much our broken system of foster care and messed up homes is churning out tomorrow’s prostitutes and pimps.

As Buddy brings up the same thought this afternoon, Kim and I immediately think of our sweet respite kids. 7-year-old Y___ comes to mind and our hearts weep for her future.

It’s five till 10 am and my time with Corie is almost over. I bring up my biggest question of the day – what hard facts can she give me on the size of the sex traffic problem in Portland? No one really knows those numbers yet, she tells me. The girls aren’t lining up for a census. Actually, the girls don’t stay put very long in any one place. Their pimps move them around on a well-known West Coast circuit – Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and then back to Seattle and around again.

The Portland Mercury reported in February that in a major multi-city sting operation, the FBI netted seven underaged girls in four hours in Portland, making our fair city number two after Seattle in number of “incidents” in this operation. No one questions the problem is here and that it is serious, but no one really knows how big a problem it is.

Then Corie throws a very chilling statistic at me: there has never been a human trafficking case prosecuted in the state of Oregon. There have been cases prosecuted for sex crimes in general, but none for forced prostitution. You can’t convict without a witness and getting a victim to testify against her pimp is nearly impossible, especially when the victim is a kid for whom the world has shown only injustice and brutality from date of birth.