Fight against human trafficking changing in Merced County

Valley Crisis Center and the Merced County Human Services Agency are working on new methods of addressing human trafficking in the county, as the face of the approach statewide is changing.

Officials said more public and law enforcement agencies in the state are approaching the problem of prostitution by looking at the women and men selling their bodies as victims, rather than criminals.

To that end, Merced County Human Services is working to educate the public and law enforcement, while Valley Crisis Center gathers input from other advocates in the state on how to best approach the problem. Valley Crisis Center is a group that advocates locally for victims of sexual assault.

Ana Pagan, director of the Merced County Human Services Agency, said the county is making efforts to work with other Valley counties because trafficking has become an “organized business” where victims are often rotated around the state. “These are victims and not criminals,” she said.

The agency has begun what Pagan said will be an ongoing process to train law enforcement and representatives of the court system to recognize victims and their traffickers. That training includes the telltale signs of trafficking, as well as what questions to ask. She said HSA has also hired its own expert – a woman who was once a victim.

January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month – a designation set by a proclamation from President Barack Obama on New Year’s Eve. “We have launched national initiatives to help healthcare workers, airline flight crews, and other professionals better identify and provide assistance to victims of trafficking,” the proclamation states.

According to studies from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as many as 325,000 children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico are at risk each year of becoming victims of sexual exploitation. It’s estimated that 30 percent of shelter youths and 70 percent of street youths are victims of commercial sexual exploitation. Those children may be coerced into prostitution in exchange for food, shelter or drugs.

Pagan said she does not have numbers on how many people are victims of trafficking locally, because the latest approach is still new.

Meghan Kehoe, program director at Merced’s Valley Crisis Center, said educating the public on the plight of victims is an early step in solving the problem. “(We need) to boost community members’ awareness of this issue,” she said. “It’s walking down 16th Street. It’s walking into our hospital. It’s all over the place.”

Valley Crisis Center has been able to use some of the relatively new training to find victims through “pointed questioning.” Kehoe said some victims are hesitant to admit they were involved in prostitution, still seeing the act as a crime.

Kehoe is also set to record a podcast on the efforts in the area with an advocate from Fresno. The podcast will be available through the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault website, www.preventconnect.org, in coming weeks.

This story was originally published January 15, 2015 at 6:46 PM with the headline "Fight against human trafficking changing in Merced County."