Virginia AG Miyares holds forum in Prince William County on human trafficking

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) came to the Prince William County Police Department in Woodbridge to hear speakers testify and describe human trafficking survivors.

“It’s a crime that hides in plain sight. Too many people in Northern Virginia think that it’s not happening in our community, but it is. It is one of the most insidious crimes. It’s a multigenerational crime. It not only affects the victims, but it also affects their future partners, their children”, said a woman who identified herself as Mary.

Miyares described how issues such as drug addiction could lead to domestic trafficking, where family members could use others to fulfill their needs. The Attorney General briefly described possible moves that the Commonwealth of Virginia could make to help, such as more funding for law enforcement.

Another possibility that Miyares described was treating victims of human trafficking as witnesses and informants rather than arresting them on criminal charges.

“This is an issue that impacts vulnerable people, vulnerable children, vulnerable adults and it’s a difficult issue for law enforcement to investigate,” said Prince William County Police Chief Peter Newsham. “Oftentimes, the victims are being manipulated in a way that they don’t want to disclose what’s happening to them.”

The meeting began with introductions of individuals such as Tanya Gold, director of Anti-Human Trafficking at the Office of the Attorney General. Gold discussed her experience as a human trafficking victim.

“To be purchased is an idea or concept that you all may not be able to fully grasp what it’s like. It’s not only the control that someone has over you. That’s not the only issue. It’s the negotiation of your value. The price, the cost,” said Gold. “No human being should ever come to face such a feeling of someone negotiating over something you don’t want to sell.”

John Richmond served as the U.S. Ambassador-At-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons from 2019 to 2021. Richmond recounted his experiences not only in helping victims of human trafficking but also having encounters with actual human traffickers. According to Richmond, these people were incentivized to commit these acts not just for the massive amounts of money but for the relaxed attitude that courts took when it came to such cases, mostly only handing over suspended sentences.

According to Richmond, the revenue collected by human traffickers worldwide amounts to $15.2 billion yearly, more than the combined revenues of Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and McDonald’s.

Richmond also referenced numbers from the International Labor Organization’s global estimate of modern slavery, which estimated 27.6 million slaves today. That estimate is up from the last count in 2017, which was 24.9 million individuals.

Richmond put the efforts of law enforcement into perspective against that number, revealing that just over 90,000 victims were self-reported by governments worldwide.

“It sounds a clarion call of urgency, and what we are doing is insufficient. The problem is getting worse. It is not getting better,” said Richmond. “It doesn’t mean that the work we’ve been doing is not meaningful, but it does mean that we’ve lost ground.”

Richmond suggested many possibilities to gain more ground in the fight against human trafficking, such as not arresting survivors of trafficking who would find their lives after trafficking negatively affected with a criminal record even though they were coerced into that crime.

Other ideas that Richmond offered were focusing on efforts to disrupt businesses that use forced labor, such as illicit massage parlors, arresting sex buyers, also known as the “Nordic Model” for its prevalence in Scandinavian countries, or setting age limits for commercial sex acts so that minors would not be arrested for the crime but would be protected.

Miyares removed reporters from the room for a private question-and-answer session with panel attendees.

This meeting is the third held on the subject of human trafficking. The first two were held in Hampton Roads and Southwest Virginia.