In a video interview about Sunflower Home, a program that helps victims of sex trafficking, a young woman with long blond hair and blue eyes is smiling and soft-spoken, possessed of a gentle bearing that belies the horrors of what she’s endured in her short life.
The 18-year-old — I’m withholding her identity because she’s currently involved in the criminal prosecution of her pimp — is a resident of Sunflower Home and a survivor of commercial sexual exploitation of youth, or CSEY.
Another term for that is child or youth sex trafficking, a societal scourge that is horrible enough on its own but has also in recent times been turned into a politicized weapon in our polarized country.
To wit: Child sex trafficking is surrounded by a host of myths and misconceptions, none more scurrilous than one that grew out of an online rumor in 2016 that then reemerged via the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, which twisted and warped the nature of this crime.
In case you’ve been living in a cave somewhere, QAnon and its delusional adherents promulgated the ludicrous idea that a secret cabal of Democrats and other liberal global elites were running a massive ring devoted to the abduction, trafficking, torture, sexual abuse and cannibalization of children.
According to the conspiracy theory, only President Donald Trump could bring down this confederacy of child rapists. (Why he didn’t do so during his four years in office is never quite explained.)
The #SaveTheChildren delusion had as its forerunner the 2016 Pizzagate insanity, which posited that high-ranking officials in the Democratic party were running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.
At the conspiracy’s wild apogee, one crazed believer from North Carolina showed up with his rifle and fired it in the pizza restaurant, trying to smoke out the evil-doers. (Needless to say, there weren’t any.)
Advocates who seek to help the victims of child sex trafficking say such fevered fabulations only serve to detract attention and much needed resources away from the real problem of the sexual exploitation of youth.
There are other misconceptions as well.
“The biggest one is that people think sex trafficking victims are foreign nationals, not U.S. citizens,” said Adriana McKinnon, president and CEO of the nonprofit Youth Center of Texas, which runs Sunflower Home, an eight-bed transitional housing program for female survivors of youth sex trafficking.
“They’ll refer to children being sexually exploited in Thailand or children and women brought over the border from Mexico or from Central and South America,” said McKinnon, a board-certified professional counselor who has advocated for survivors of interpersonal violence for over 16 years.
But here’s the reality, she said: Youth sex trafficking is happening right under our own noses, in our own communities, schools and neighborhoods.
And the nature of that trafficking is downright stomach-churning, far more shocking than any trumped-up conspiracy theory.
As in: Did you know that the growing trend in child sex trafficking doesn’t involve pimps or drug cartel members or smuggling coyotes but a child’s own family members? And those family members who facilitate the assaults on these youths or directly traffic them to customers do so not usually for cash money but for drugs or alcohol or shelter or gas or rent?
Here’s the most revolting statistic: Most of the time the relative doing the trafficking — in 67% of cases — is the child’s mother, often addicted to drugs and using her child’s body to get high.
McKinnon said the pandemic exacerbated this trend, as children became isolated at home and families lost access to income.
More reality: Oftentimes the non-family pimp-predator is not some stranger but someone who is well known to the family.
“This is not about kids being taken in the dark in some alley by a random stranger,” said McKinnon. “That does happen, but it’s rare.”
Child sex trafficking often starts out on social media. Pimps have a sixth sense when it comes to identifying kids who are vulnerable, said McKinnon — children or teens who’ve experienced abuse or neglect at home or have witnessed domestic violence or other pain and who are easy to lure and manipulate.
“That’s how they recruit,” she said. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, I saw the post of your picture, you’re so pretty.’ Then they start to groom.”
Assuming the fake role of boyfriend, they’ll buy the victim jewelry, take her out to eat, to the movies. Shower her with love and attention, maybe alcohol or drugs. Gain her trust.
“Then pretty soon, it’s ‘Hey, I lost my job and need rent money,’” said McKinnon. “I want you to have sex with my friend, I owe him money. If you loved me, you’d do it. Here, take this pill, it will relax you and make it easier.’”
McKinnon said youth who’ve spent time in foster care and the child welfare system are particularly vulnerable; many of those who end up in sex trafficking have aged out of foster care.
(Indeed, in Texas, predators have begun trafficking youth while they’re still in Child Protective Services custody, luring them away from residential treatment facilities or hotels where they staying because CPS can find no other placements.)
Children who are chronic runaways or who lack permanent caregivers are like catnip to pimps.
“They want to recruit kids who they know no one will be looking for,” she said.
An estimated 100,000 children are trafficked in the U.S. a year; around 60% are foster youth. Texas is a hot spot of all kinds of human trafficking.
Around 60% of all runaways are approached by a trafficker within the first 48 hours from the time they were reported missing, studies show.
It’s not just girls or young women who are trafficked; boys and young men, especially those who are LGBTQ, are also particularly vulnerable.
McKinnon said 90% of clients at Sunflower Home, which serves females ages 18-22 and provides an array of services like counseling and case management, have some sort of mental health diagnosis, usually depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress syndrome.
“It could be from the trauma and abuse of their childhoods or from the trauma they experienced being trafficked,” she said.
McKinnon added that Sunflower Home is the only place of its kind in San Antonio. Off-site support services can continue until clients turn 24.
On the video interview, which was provided by McKinnon, the young woman says that, like many people, she thought sex trafficking was limited to addicts who willingly prostituted themselves for drugs — after all, that’s how it’s depicted in movies.
It wasn’t until it happened to her that she realized many young people are vulnerable — especially ones who, like her, spent time in foster care or the child welfare system.
She thought the man who ended up trafficking her “just liked me and wanted to be my friend.”
Her desire to be accepted had made her a target, she realizes now. She fruitlessly searched for help while living in residential treatment centers run by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.
It wasn’t until she finally landed at Sunflower Home that she began to trust her counselors and have faith that her life could be different.
“Honestly, I don’t know where I’d be today if I hadn’t found this place,” she said. “I wouldn’t have made as much progress as I have.”
The young woman has finished her high school degree online and is now enrolled in college. She said she’s finally brave enough to ride the bus by herself now.
What a small victory. What a huge accomplishment.
The Sunflower Home’s sex trafficking program began with a $500,000 grant from the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation and another $150,000 grant from Victims of Crime Assistance.
In 2022, McKinnon’s program served 113 survivors. It’s the only program, she said, that accepts clients who are on probation or parole and who are pregnant or parenting.
Her mission is to open three more homes — one specifically for mothers with babies, one for male survivors and one for survivors who are LGBTQ.
What can you do to help the young survivors of sex trafficking?
Support local programs, said McKinnon. Don’t send your donations to Thailand or other countries. After all, there’s plenty of suffering happening right here.
And consider donating to programs like Sunflower Home, which has an older clientele than many local programs.
“There are a greater number of programs that serve children and minors and very few that serve young adults,” McKinnon said. “It’s hard for me to fundraise because most people want to donate to children’s charities. Children are cute and little, while my client population tends to get stigmatized. It’s difficult for people to make the connection that when my clients were sex-trafficked, they were minors. They were kids who didn’t get the help they needed.”
Here’s one way to look at it: Many of her clients will have children, and part of her program involves mandatory parenting classes. So there are babies involved after all.
“We’re aiming to make generational change here,” she said.
