APB EMAIL, HUMAN TRAFFICKING, AND CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT - 027

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, APB mailing list, human trafficking and Children of the Night. I'm Adam Richardson, and this the Writer's Detective Bureau. This is episode 27 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction. If you have your own author business, consider joining Patreon. It's free for you. It allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micro-payments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit writersdetective.com/patreon.

I want to thank Gold Shield patron, Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com and Coffee Club patrons, Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmil, Richard Phillips, Robin Lyons, Gene Desrochers, Craig Kingsman, and Kate Wagner. Your support definitely keeps the lights on in the Bureau. Please support all of these awesome authors by visiting their author websites and reading their books. You can find links to their websites in the show notes at writersdetective.com/27.

By the time you listen to this episode, you should have received the January APB email from me if you've joined my mailing list in the past. One major change to the APB email for 2019 is that it's now a monthly newsletter. Now that I'm producing podcast episodes every week, I'm having to budget my time a little bit differently. What's in the APB? Well, throughout the month, I squirrel away links and resources that I think your writing will benefit from, and then save them for this monthly email. Think of them as your very own curated list of resources for crime fiction writing. For the January APB, there were over 20 links to various free resources. Since this is the start of a new year, and several hundred new members have joined the mailing list over the last six months, I included some of the greatest hits from previous APBs and mixed them in with a bunch of new content.

If you would like to be included in the monthly APB email, which is full of curated links for crime fiction writers, go to writersdetective.com/mailinglist or visit any page on the Writer's Detective website, actually, and there will be a banner there for you to join.

January is or was, by the time you're listening to this, human trafficking prevention month. I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about HT from both an awareness perspective and a storytelling perspective. Now, this can be a tough topic to listen to. There's going to be some profanity, but I'll try not to be overly graphic. Now, that said, please treat this as a trigger warning, and take that into account before continuing to listen to the rest of this episode. If cozy mysteries are your thing, this may not be the episode for you.

Human trafficking or HT as we abbreviate it, obviously, takes many forms around the world. While this is an international problem, I can almost guarantee that it is happening locally right now in your community. The most common form of human trafficking that we see domestically here in the United States and in our neighborhoods is pimping. You have made the terms pimping and pandering as legal terms, which are commonly referenced with regard to prostitution investigations. Let's start with what each of these mean.

Pimping, at least under California law is when someone takes money from a prostitute for themselves. Now, in reality, pimps use money as one of several means of controlling their prostitutes. Pimps are the slave-drivers, and I mean that literally. They control the prostitutes in every way. When they can eat, sleep or even bathe. Pandering is procuring another purpose of prostitution. This procuring usually happens through the use of promises, threats or violence.

Now, let's talk about how pandering and pimping actually occur in our communities. Those at the great risk, statistically speaking, are runaway children, especially girls. Another term you may encounter as you start to learn about human trafficking is CSEC, C-S-E-C, which stands for commercially sexually exploited children. The Dallas Police Department in Texas found a strong correlation between sex trafficking and runaway status. The more times a child runs away, the greater the likelihood that he or she will be victimized. This finding by the Dallas Police Department is just one part of a PDF that I've included in the show notes, which you can find at writersdetective.com/27. The PDF is a 54-page white paper written for congress. It's called Sex Trafficking of Children in the United States: Overview and Issues for Congress. Let's get back to the runaways.

There are many paths from runaway to prostitute, but today, I'll talk about one that I've seen that goes something like this. The runaway girl, often in her young teens, is trying to survive alone on the street. She's run away from home. She meets a guy that tries to impress her. Now, he's trying to impress her with maybe a fancy car, free alcohol or drugs, backstage passes to the coolest concert in town. Maybe he's buying her clothes or saying he's going to get her on the VIP list into the coolest night club. Whatever would impress a 14-year-old girl as cool will be what this guy uses as a ruse to get her in the car and along for the ride. This will work especially well if she's escaping a bad situation at home, and she doesn't have a roof over her head yet. She's already at a disadvantage because she's starting with nothing, likely just the clothes on her back and whatever she has in a bag over her shoulder.

The guy may make an initial effort at fulfilling a promise or two like a nice dinner or a night in the club, but once they make it back to the motel, often, this is where the nightmare begins. From my own experience here in Southern California, I can tell you, these guys like to use those longer stay motels, the ones with the kitchenette, and what started as a quasi-date now becomes days upon days of the worst kinds of brutality, often while drugged to reduce her ability to fight back and to gain further control over her life. A favorite weapon of these guys is using the chord on the clothes iron as a whip. Often, what happens next is, the girl is handed off to the guy that will become her pimp. The first guy is considered a catcher. It's not uncommon to have this new pimp appear to save her from this catcher guy that was brutalizing her.

Now, I say appear because this is where the brainwashing often begins. The pimp enters the picture as her savior. He woos her. She may fall in love with him. Then, he tells her that he's in trouble, and she needs to make some quick cash to keep them both from being killed. He needs her help, and prostituting herself is their only option. At some point, she may learn that she isn't the only girl that this guy protects. There are other girls that will help look after her too though. Those other girls are also his prostitutes.

These working girls are referred to as bitches or hoes, which is short for whore. The senior girl, the one that is most trusted and has been with the pimp the longest is called the bottom bitch. The bottom bitch keeps all the other girls in line and is making sure the mack, which is another term for pimp gets his money, because that's what this entire situation is about, making money on the backs of these girls. The girls are not allowed to keep their money. They have to give everything back to the pimp. Only after he gets all of the money does he decide whether she gets any of it.

This world of prostitution is known as the game. The street where these girls work looking for johns is called the track. If you're going to be working vice cases, you have to use the street lingo to be taken seriously when you're talking to these people, to show that you know what's going on and that you understand the world that you're working in. If I'm talking to a prostitute trying to figure out if she works the street or if she works the hotel bars, and if I want to know who her first pimp was, I can't phrase it like I just did. I have to ask her in her language. I'm going to have to ask her, "Are you track hoe or a carpet hoe? Who turned you out?" See, there's an entire language to this subculture, and you won't even communicate if you don't speak their language.

To see what I'm talking about, when you get the chance, Google the lyrics to 50 Cent's song, PIMP. See if you recognize any of the slang you just learned from this podcast like track, bread or bottom bitch, and pay particular attention to the violent attitude towards women, especially as it relates to money being more important than the girls. There's a common saying in the game. It's so common that you may even see it as an abbreviation in a tattoo that's popular with pimps. The tattoo are the letters MOB, and that's an abbreviation for the motto, money over bitches. They're telling you their priority. How about those long pinky nails? You know, what was referred to as a coke nail back in the 1980s. Well, these guys will have long nails on both of their pinky fingers. If you watched some of the rap videos, they're throwing those pinkies up in the air, so you can see that they have those long pinky nails.

Why are they doing that? Because it shows that they don't work normal jobs. The long nails are their way of saying, "These hands only touch two things: money and bitches." Nice, huh? Girls will get transferred or traded around from pimp to pimp, but often, these pimps will get these girls pregnant only to take their baby away and use that as leverage against them leaving. They'll pretend to have a quasi-caring relationship with them, telling them things like, "You and me against the world, baby," only to push them back out the door and onto the street or into the casino to sell their bodies. It's disgusting. The best way to describe the relationship between a pimp and his girls after that initial indoctrination to the game is nothing short of Stockholm Syndrome.

When someone finally, from outside of the game, tries to intervene, the girls will often protect the person abusing them or minimize the abuse that they're suffering. Many don't want to leave. The psychological trauma inflicted can be so severe that some girls will act out violently against anyone trying to take them away or out of this horrible life. The typical resources and means we use to comfort survivors of rape often don't work in this situation. It's natural to want to try to comfort and console someone who's been through something so horrible, but it's often like trying to pet a feral cat.

The reason I mention this is because it's at the heart of the issue of how we, in law enforcement, treat these girls. Are they treated as victims or as suspects? Are they victims of sexual exploitation or suspects in the crime of prostitution? The current trend for combating human trafficking is to treat them as victims of sexual exploitation, not as suspects. The effort of the prosecution needs to be on the perpetrators, the pimps. To quote the congressional white paper I mentioned earlier, "The study found a strong and significant association between how the case came to the police's attention and how the juvenile was treated by law enforcement."

Cases that began through a police report like a report by the juvenile, a family member, a social service provider or others were almost eight times more likely to result in the juvenile being treated as a victim than most cases that began through action-taking by the police such as surveillance or undercover operations. Juveniles were also more likely to be treated as victims if they were younger, female, frightened or were dirty or had body odor at the time of the initial encounter with police. The Mann Act, M-A-N-N, which was signed into law in 1910 is the name of the US code section that makes it a federal crime to transport children across state lines for sexual exploitation. Each violation will land the offender in federal prison for up to 10 years. Working in California, this law is really important as many of our CSEC cases, those commercially sexually exploited children cases are transported to Las Vegas for prostitution. This is incredibly common.

Through state laws against pimping and pandering and the federal Mann Act, modern human trafficking investigations are centered on prosecuting the pimps and removing those commercially sexually exploited children from that life, but what happens to those children? This is a significant problem. If the child has a loving and supportive home, that's always a preferable option, but given the circumstances that led to the child's exploitation, odds are, the loving and supportive home isn't in the picture. They're usually fleeing from abuse and life with the pimp was better than life at home. That brings us back to the question, what happens to them?

Allow me to introduce you to an amazing organization called Children of the Night, which is a privately funded nonprofit organization dedicated to rescuing children and young people from prostitution worldwide. Dr. Lois Lee founded Children of the Night as a home for child sex trafficking victims in Los Angeles 40 years ago. Children of the Night was a place where these kids could get an education, psychological care and a chance to be a kid again. Children of the Night now also helps other organizations around the world set up similar shelter homes. Children of the Night continues this mission here in the United States and has expanded its efforts into creating a worldwide educational program via the internet aimed at poverty level kids especially in developing countries to create an opportunity for employment and escape a life of sexual exploitation, pornography and prostitution.

You can learn more about Children of the Night or even donate to this worthwhile charity, which, by the way, is rated at 94.69 out of a hundred on Charity Navigator by visiting childrenofthenight.org. They are an amazing organization and do incredible work.

Thank you so much for listening this week. We have already surpassed 6, 000 downloads on this little podcast. 10, 000 is not too far away, so thank you for your support. Thank you for sharing this podcast with your writing friends. I will talk to you next week. Thanks again for listening. Write well.