Child sex trafficking and abuse ring uncovered in Bibb County, Ala., leaves community stunned

Bibb County, Ala.
(Wikipedia map)

 

After their county sheriff, Jody Wade, announced his office had uncovered an alleged child sex trafficking ring that included at least 10 children ages 3 to 15 years old, residents of Bibb County, Alabama, were at a loss for what to think or do, so they met at a small Presbyterian church and prayed.

"There were Baptists and Methodists and some who claimed no denomination at all, heads bowed and eyes closed in a rare show of interfaith unity amid criminal allegations considered so evil that some openly wondered if Satan himself had taken up residence here," reports Holly Bailey of The Washington Post.

“We can’t assume that just because we’re in small towns that everything operates like it did in the days of ‘The Andy Griffith Show,’” Robert Turner Jr., the district attorney for Alabama’s 4th Judicial Circuit, which includes Bibb County, told WAKA-TV.

The closely-knit rural county was shocked to hear a child sex trafficking ring 
was operating on the outskirts of town. (Ala. Conservation photo)

At the center of the finding was an isolated, underground storm shelter on the "dusty outskirts of Brent, an adjacent town of about 3,000 people located an hour south of Birmingham," Bailey explains. For at least the last three years, children were taken into the bunker and "allegedly drugged and abused in an operation that included sex trafficking [and] torture."

After the bunker was discovered and one of the defendants agreed to cooperate, "seven people were arrested and charged with a laundry list of crimes, including numerous charges of rape, sexual abuse, trafficking and kidnapping," Bailey reports. "The defendants include the parents of at least four victims."

Wade warned the community that the initial "revelations are probably only 'scratching the surface,' with additional victims and more arrests expected," Bailey writes. He told her, “I know God’s forgiveness is boundless, but if there was a limit to it, I think we reached it.

Homeland Security takes a deeper look at possible human trafficking of under-age workers to slaughterhouses

A child cleans a slaughterhouse for PSSI; the subject
was blurred by the source. (Department of Labor photo)

"Last month, the Labor Department found that Packers Sanitation Services Inc. . . . employed 102 children at 13 slaughterhouses across eight states," reports Julia Ainsley and Laura Strickler of NBC News. Now, "The Department of Homeland Security has widened its investigation into migrant children found cleaning slaughterhouses and is now working with the Justice Department to examine whether a human smuggling scheme brought migrant children to work in multiple slaughterhouses for multiple companies across multiple states, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the investigation."

The investigation is looking into "how Central American children, some as young as 13, wound up working dangerous jobs that are legal only for American adults by presenting identification stolen from U.S. citizens," NBC reports. "So far the investigation is focused on smugglers who may have provided the children with false identities and possibly led them to dangerous jobs. The companies themselves are not targets of the investigation, the officials said."

A former Packers Sanitation Services manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told NBC, "In this industry you have a lot of people who are undocumented workers. A lot of times it’s because they’re not going to pay well enough to hire people in America who want to do it." NBC reports, "The former manager confirmed that the company uses the federal government’s E-Verify program, but said that while some employees presenting false documents were turned away, it was common for workers who presented obviously false IDs to get hired as long as the documents stated they were legal and of age."

Packers Sanitation spokesperson Gina Swenson disputed the former manager, saying, "This is categorically false — period. We have been crystal clear that we do not want a single person under the age of 18 working for the company. We have trained and retrained our hiring employees on how to actively spot identity theft — as part of our extensive efforts to enforce this absolute prohibition against employing anyone under the age of 18."

Human trafficking is on the rise, and rural health-care providers are uniquely positioned to identify victims

Human trafficking may sound like a faraway problem to many, but it happens in rural areas, and rural health-care providers must be alert to it. That's because up to 88 percent of trafficking survivors said they interacted with health-care providers while they were trafficked, Jenn Lukens reports for the Rural Health Information Hub's Rural Monitor.

Human trafficking involves force, fraud or coercion to obtain labor or commercial sex acts, and it's on the rise. According to the federally funded nonprofit Polaris, which maintains a hotline and one of the largest data sets on human trafficking in the U.S., "Human trafficking has continued to rise, from 7,748 confirmed cases reported to the hotline in 2016 to 10,949 in 2018. Polaris’s demographic breakdown shows that nearly half of survivors are minors, there are five times more females trafficked than males, and minorities are more likely to be trafficked," Lukens reports. "It has been identified as a public-health concern by researchers, federal agents, and healthcare professionals alike."

Both sex trafficking and labor trafficking have been identified as problems in rural America, though sex trafficking is nearly eight times more common. There are no definitive statistics on the incidence of human trafficking in rural areas, but the secluded nature of many rural areas makes them attractive to traffickers, Lukens reports.

"While cinematic portrayals of human trafficking may resemble reality in some parts of the world, research has found that what is true in rural America can look much different," Lukens reports. "Those trafficked commonly have vulnerabilities, such as recent migration or relocation, single motherhood, recent contact with the child-welfare system, a substance dependency, homelessness, or mental-health conditions. Often, the victim already has a relationship with the perpetrator who has taken advantage of their trust and targeted their vulnerabilities to create dependency."

Rural health-care providers are uniquely positioned to identify human trafficking victims since health-care facilities are one of the few places trafficked people may be allowed to visit. Some states, hospital systems, and federal agencies have released guides or begun programs meant to help providers identify victims, like this one from the Nebraska Hospital Association. Lukens' article has a list of resources.

Competing weeklies welcome county's new health director, who says human trafficking is a problem in rural areas

Grayson County Public Health Director Joshua Embry
(Photo by Matt Lasley, Grayson County News-Gazette)

By Al Cross
Director, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues

LEITCHFIELD, Ky. – Local health departments usually operate in the background, or under the radar of local news organizations, unless a health issue arises. But their work is important, so they deserve more regular attention, and both weekly newspapers in a west-central Kentucky county did that when it got a new public health director.

Some residents may have been startled when they read a headline in the Grayson County News-Gazette saying that Joshua Embry was going to "address human trafficking." He told reporter Matt Lasley, "Based on our clinic services, we know for a fact it is happening in our community. . . It's definitely happening in small, rural towns."

"According to Embry, human trafficking is not solely related to sex, it also includes human labor, and can be drug-related as well," Lasley reports. "In many instances, people are brought into the country and forced to provide unpaid labor to work off a debt to the person who brought them here."

Also, "Underage children can be victims of human trafficking without ever leaving their homes, by being deceived into sharing explicit images of themselves with people online. These images are then widespread, which falls under the umbrella of human trafficking, health department officials say."

January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month, and Embry "is beginning an awareness campaign aimed at educating the community on the issue and how to address it and report it," Lasley writes.

The front-page story in the county's other weekly, The Record, briefly mentioned human trafficking and was more general, reminding readers of the health department's wide range of services and responsibilities, which include "grief counseling services for families who've lost a child."

"People hear 'health department' and they automatically think STD tests" for sexually transmitted diseases, Embry told The Record's Rebecca Morris. "I want to be able to educate the community on all the programs we have. A lot of people just don't understand the great resource the health department is."

Embry, 32, began work last month after almost seven years at Breckinridge Health, which operates Breckinridge Memorial Hospital in nearby Hardinsburg. After a brief teaching career, he started as an emergency-room clerk and ended as coordinator of compliance, emergency preparedness and safety. He told Morris that health care is a "field you definitely have to be called to."

One could say that about the weekly newspaper business, too. I was editor of the News-Gazette (and general manager of a predecessor, The Leitchfield Gazette) before the Louisville Courier Journal hired me away in 1978. One of my successors as editor, Jenny Searcy, started The Record a few years later.

Grayson may be the only county in the U.S. with weekly newspapers operated by competing chains, which usually don't buy papers with less than $1 million in annual revenue, and certainly not in competitive markets. But Landmark Community Newspapers of Shelbyville bought The Record to give advertisers in its Elizabethtown daily, The News-Enterprise, an opportunity to buy combination ads. It ran a circulation campaign, managed by Searcy, that won it the local circulation lead and thus the public-notice ads. The News-Gazette went through several owners and is now owned by Paxton Media Group of Paducah, which bought in a 2017 package deal with two other nearby papers and moved it from twice-weekly to weekly publication. The county of 27,000 also has an AM-FM radio station with an active news department, WMTL-WKHG in Leitchfield, a town of about 7,000.