Lindsay Kus FOX 17 News Reporter

November 16, 2009
fox-17-child-sex-trafficking-michigan

WEST MICHIGAN —
The world of sex trafficking is dark and very much underground. It's hard for many people to comprehend but it's happening right in Michigan.

Children are being 'rented out' for sex in exchange for drugs or money. "Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. These are things happening behind closed doors,"said Grand Rapids FBI victim's specialist Carmen Kucinich.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Michigan ranks 13th in the country for the number of sex traffic victims. The average age for a victim is just 12-years old. Trafficking cases are a combination of runaways, kidnappings, and even parents prostituting out their own children from home.

Many victims are so traumatized they never want to tell their story. Melinda Jennings was trafficked at the age of 13 out of her rural neighborhood in Hesperia, Michigan. She says a family member prostituted her out for sex in exchange for drugs.

"The coke dealer down the road would show up at the house and just force me to have sex with him so they could pay off their debts or whatever they had to do; they would have friends come over in the middle of the night and do that stuff and it was just for a bag of dope," said Jennings.

She describes what happened to her as a little girl as disgusting and painful. For traffic victims, the physical and emotional scars run deep and sometimes they can never recover.

Many children never come forward about their abuse until years later and they're left dealing with a lifetime of emotional and physical scars.

"They don't want to talk about it relive it they just assume go away they don't want people in there life today to know it ever happened to them,"said Jeff Martineau, Executive Director of The Hope Project.

The Muskegon-based non-profit group tries to reach out to victims. "The goal is to rehabilitate kids we wanted to do that earlier when we started this journey 4 years ago, but we couldn't get anybody to hear about human trafficking so we ended up being an organization of awareness,"said Martineau.

In February, the project is expected to go a step further and open a home for teenage victims The safe haven is located in a remote location where 6 girls assigned by the Michigan courts will live, be counseled, and home schooled.

"What we hope to do is make them into successful young ladies who can go out in the world and live in a peaceful happy life,"he adds.

That goal is shared. Project Liberty which is based out of Lansing is another group dedicated to the cause. They help police track down victims by finding traffickers on sites like Craigslist.

"They are able to go through the internet and we are contacted to track down perpetrators on the internet we were successful in doing that a couple months ago,"said President Saundra Lawson.

Collectively, these groups are part of The Michigan Human Trafficking Task Force formed 3 years ago and growing. They meet monthly in Lansing to come up with ways to fight sexual exploitation of children in our state.

For rehabilitated victims like Melinda, she hopes their efforts will work and more children will be saved from something she will never fully heal from.

"It's not about saying my life is perfect because its not it's about what my life would have been like if somebody would have stepped in and took that life and said you know what you have value and you don't deserve to go through this anymore,"said Jennings.