Human trafficking program attracts 75 to Cine' -

“Around the world, 27-million people are held in bondage,” according to a speaker Monday night at the Magnolia Civic Center in New Albany.

About 75 people heard Kathy Brummett, a speaker from DeSoto County, give a presentation about the alarming extent of human trafficking in the world and in the United States. Brummett told the group, which met under the auspices of the Union County Republican Women’s Club, “Human trafficking is human slavery.” She said human trafficking takes the form both of forced labor and of forcing its victims to become sex workers..

“Sex trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise, a $32-billion business worldwide,” Brummett said.

Some children as young as three years of age are forced into sexual slavery, and gang members engage in sex trafficking, viewing it as a less risky to the perpetrators than other criminal money-making activities.

She said. “There are 100,000 new sex trafficking cases in the United States every year.”

Brummett said young girls with low self esteem are the most likely victims but that people of all ages and all income and social levels are in danger of being lured into sex slavery. Some victims are simply kidnapped, while others are recruited into the illicit trade by a more gradual and deliberate entrapment in schemes by men posing as boyfriends or by criminals who tell girls and young women that they can find them work as “models.”

“We haven’t come across any cases [of human trafficking crimes] since I’ve been chief,” said New Albany Chief of Police Christ Robertson. Robertson said that such crimes are more generally handled by federal law enforcement.

Union County Circuit Clerk Phyllis Stanford, whose office handles all circuit court felony cases, said she was not aware of any indictments for human trafficking thus far in Union County. Like the police chief, she said that such crimes are more likely to be handled in the federal court system.