My Speech for the Coeur d' Alene Walk For Freedom Anti-Trafficking Event

Good morning, and thank you so much for taking the time to be here today for Coeur d’ Alene’s first annual Walk for Freedom! We’re so glad you’re here.

For those of you I haven’t met, my name is Kaeley Harms. I’m a writer and a longtime women’s rights activist with a specific passion for walking alongside the survivors of sexual and domestic violence. While my specialty is women, I do want to offer the important disclaimer that, contrary to popular belief, females are not the only victims of human trafficking, and we want to be sure to honor the stories of the men and boys whose lives have been upended by this terrible scourge, as well. 

My job here today is to do everything I can to help people understand why this matters, even here in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho. As I speak, I would like to invite you to ask yourself the important question, “What is my next step in combatting human trafficking? What can I personally do to make a difference?”

One of my personal heroes is a guy named William Wilberforce, who spent his entire life working to eradicate slavery in England. In a really powerful speech he delivered in 1791, he said, “You may choose to look away, but you may never again say you didn’t know.” And that’s really the goal here today. We want people to know that this is a problem worthy of their attention and their action.

Put simply, human trafficking is the business of stealing freedom for profit. To simplify it even further still, it’s modern day slavery. Across the globe, human beings are sold for their labor, for their organs, and, most frequently, for their sexual exploitation. 

For the sake of time, I’m not going to say a ton about the global statistics. You’ve got some of them in the literature in front of you, and we already know it’s a worldwide problem. If we didn’t we wouldn’t be here. It’s hard to fathom the scope of an industry that generates $150 BILLION in profit each year, but it’s staggering. It’s right up there with Microsoft in annual revenue.

But as I was really thinking and praying about where to put my focus today, the answer became increasingly clear to me. In all our work to promote this event online and in the community, the single most frequent response I encountered was a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders accompanied by the sentiment, “Just close the borders, and the problem will go away.”

This is a profoundly human response to evil; if we’re honest, we’ll admit that most of us have a kneejerk inclination to distance ourselves as far from it as possible. But when we respond to an invitation to combat human trafficking by assuming that the problem is only outside ourselves, then what we’re subconsciously saying is, “Not my problem, not my job to fix.”  And I think it’s really important to challenge that notion. It’s hard to get people to show up to help when they underestimate the scope of the problem.

Now I love America, but the truth is this: Human trafficking is primarily a consumer problem, an issue of supply and demand. When there’s a demand for something, the supply will always rise to meet it, and unfortunately, the demand for trafficked people is higher per capita in America than it is in most other places in the world. So while it’s well and good to talk about creating legislation that will make it harder for traffickers to bring victims across our borders, if we’re really serious about combating trafficking, we need to be willing to take a long hard look at what makes us destination number one for these victims in the first place. It doesn’t do much good to lock some of the victims out if we are going to ignore the countless predators who are already in.

The statistics are sobering. It’s estimated that 85% of the people trafficked in America are FROM America and that 300,000 American youth are in danger of trafficking every year. Data indicate that 50-60% of children trafficked are coming straight from the foster care system.

So yes, this is definitely an American problem, too.

Maybe your first step to combat human trafficking is to initiate conversations with your friends about why this isn’t just a third world problem. 

It’s in our country, but is it really in our state? The answer is an emphatic “yes!” And here’s some somber news: There’s a group out of Vancouver, WA that created a grading system to systematically assess the state legislation in place designed to protect the victims of human trafficking. Idaho received 28 out of a possible 100 points. If you haven’t been in school for awhile, that’s an “F.” Only two states ranked worse.

Now I don’t have time to spell out the nitty gritty details of why we scored so poorly, but what you should know about our state law is that it lacks a mechanism to identify and provide comprehensive services to the victims of youth sex trafficking. Under current state law, a child who is bought and sold for commercial sex is legally viewed as a prostitute, even if the act was coerced. This means the statistics will show prostitution, not trafficking. If statistics fail to properly expose the problem, we should expect to continue to see a delay in proposed solutions.

Last year, a Coeur d’ Alene man was arrested for enticing local children on the internet. He was apprehended after an agent with the FBI CHild Exploitation Human Trafficking Task Force used fake social media profiles to pose as underage girls. And just two years ago, Kacy Michelle Ross, a now 35 year old woman from the Coeur d’ Alene Tribe disappeared from Spokane. She was last seen with a man believed to be trafficking her. So far this year, 29 human trafficking cases have been reported in Idaho.

Maybe your first step to combat human trafficking is to lobby for legislation to improve the safeguards and resources for trafficking victims.

So yes it’s happening in your backyard, too. But how about your own home?

Do you know what your kids are doing on the internet? Do you know who they’re talking to, or what they’re talking about? Do you know that every year, hundreds of teens lured by internet predators and that many of them don’t even recognize their traffickers as such because they think of them as their boyfriends? What safeguards do you have in place in your home?

Maybe your first step to combat human trafficking is to talk to your kids about the danger or instate safety policies in your home.

And let’s take it one step further- beyond your home and into your pocket.

This one is tough, but we’ve got to talk about porn, an industry that fuels trafficking unlike any other. Last year, Americans spent 5,517,000,000 hours on Pornhub alone. If you copied all that data onto hard drives and stacked them, they would reach 62.137 miles high to the edge of space.More than 624,000 child porn traders have been caught in the US. and two of the most frequently searched terms on these sites are “teen” and “youth.” Again, supply and demand.

When you click on a porn site, there is no way to know whether or not the person on your screen has freely chosen to be there or whether they were trafficked, and the odds are pretty good that there’s a degree of coercion involved. The average age a trafficked young girl is coerced into her first pornographic job is 12 years old. Just think about that.

Maybe your first step to combat human trafficking is to finally stare down the demon of your porn addiction.

This is really heavy stuff, but my hope is that all this information will inspire you to act. A Senator I admire once said, “The problem isn’t the presence of darkness; it’s the absence of the light.” There’s never been a better time to rise and shine. Thank you so much for joining us.