In an effort to break up human sex trafficking rings, Anchorage police arrested seven men in a recent prostitution sting in Spenard, but these kind of busts are just one part of the solution.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTVA-CBS 11 News) Created: 08/03/2010 11:23:24 PM PDT
Officials say getting to the root of the problem means reaching out to women who are also victims themselves.
“Our women are one trick away from dead. It’s serious, very serious,” said Nancy Cole, the executive director, of the Mary Magdalene Home, a resource to transition women out of prostitution.
Whether it’s on the streets or the internet, human trafficking is a real problem in Anchorage.
“We go after the johns, we go after the prostitutes and we go after the people we call pimps, the people who are actually forcing, enslaving others into prostitution,” said Anchorage police spokesperson Lt. Dave Parker.
“They’re sex workers. There’s a commercial sex industry that preys on children and young women” and “gets them into where it’s hard to get out,” said Cole.
By taking advantage of victims who have experienced some type of sexual, physical, psychological, or drug abuse, the pimps use force and control to keep the women in the life of prostitution.
“We’ve had people actually come from out of state to ply their trade as prostitutes…pimps will bring people from out of state,” said Parker.
“Most of them, being out on the street, having no place to live, they hook up with somebody…teenagers, kids from the
“They’ve got no money, they’ve got no job skills, they have nowhere to live,” said Cole.
“Everybody asks ‘why don’t battered women just leave?’ and the same thing with people that are in the sex industry. They are sexually exploited, prostituted women. They stay because they don’t think they have a choice.”
“When they age out or they are injured [or] battered, they are no longer valuable; they are discarded and after you have burned your bridges, broken all of your relationships, you don’t have any dreams or hopes anymore [and] you just want to survive,” continued Cole.
And while some progress has been made to stop human sex trafficking, Anchorage’s abused women must realize there is a way out.
“They are women that deserve dignity that haven’t got a chance unless people reach out and we stop and start prosecuting the people that exploit them and they learn not to let themselves be exploited,” said Cole.
The average starting age for prostitution is 13 years old.
The Mary Magdalene Home says that in Anchorage alone 70 percent of all chronic runaway juveniles have been prostituted at some point.