Sex trafficking is happening in the Fox Valley and residents need to know about it, participants at a forum at Aurora University said.
Paul Baker, who works for the university’s communications office, said education about the problem is important.
“Certainly the No. 1 goal is awareness, as it is important students and parents are aware of this and know it is happening in our area,” Baker said. “It has been estimated that anywhere from 15,000 to 25,000 women and children are victimized by trafficking each year here in the Chicago area.”
The forum drew a packed house of more than 500 people to listen to the panelists, who included James Glasgow, Will County state’s attorney; Frank Massolini, director of Chicago’s Salvation Army PROMISE program; Tara Smith, a Chicago FBI agent; CaraLee Murphy, who works for Abolish Injustice in the 21st Century; and Greg Tosi, who was filling in for U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk.
Panelists said sex traffickers frequently use social media and that “recruiting has become so much more sophisticated.”
“The skill of the people that do this has improved tremendously over the past 10 or 15 years to the point where people don’t even know what’s happening to them,” Baker said. “We’ve also received a lot of feedback about this from our student population, and they want to know what they can do to help stem the traffic in hotels and other places.”
Aurora University Executive Vice President Theodore Parge confirmed that the topic is an important one to students.
“This is an issue and a concern raised repeatedly by students, and the idea is that trafficking is not something that is happening across the ocean somewhere — it’s right here in our communities,” Parge said.
Glasgow said “there has been trafficking as long as mankind has existed” and that “the law has been slow to react.”
“In the year 2000, federal legislation was finally enacted, and while no one in Washington supports this, not everyone agrees about how to combat it,” Glasgow said. “As soon as you touch the internet today, you get the attention of some powerful people. But there are always issues about the free flow of information on the internet as well as freedom of speech.”
Murphy said in her work with minors in the Abolish Injustice program, young people are taught that “their bodies are not commodities.”
“We teach a course where we say that a cellphone is a commodity that is updated, used and thrown away — but humans are not,” she said.
Smith said one of the targets of her division is working with those who are victims of extortion and “made to manufacture their own online pornography.”
“Predators meet kids posing as friends or someone their age, when they are maybe 50 years old and grooming these kids to make their own porn,” Smith said. “Maybe these are kids who don’t get enough attention from their parents, but they get them to post things and then threaten to show them to their parents or steal their whole address book of contacts if they don’t post more.”
Kara Fenne of Geneva said she taught in Aurora University’s College of Nursing and that sex trafficking is an important issue.
“This is something that definitely affects our community,” she said.
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News
