Captain Heidi Jackson, representing Richland County Sheriff’s School Resource Officer Division, spoke February 14 to the Optimist Club of St. Andrews-Irmo.
Jackson has spent 26 years in law enforcement, 24 of them as an investigator. Her topic was the prevalence of sex trafficking, Richland County ranking first in South Carolina in number of incidents.
Jackson described investigating sex trafficking as being laborious. First, she stated the evidence is very difficult to gather and to document, partly because victims are under such mental control they fear for their safety when coming forward.
There are legal criteria that must be met for the offense to be considered trafficking. If the victim is under age 18, once evidence is nailed down, the age automatically qualifies her or him as a victim, under the law. Trafficking law uses very specific language establishing trafficking as follows: “…knowingly gives, agrees to give, or offers to give anything of value so that any person may engage in commercial sexual activity with another person when he knows that the other person is a victim of trafficking in persons.”
It is also assumed that force, fraud, or coercion are being used. The second element of those investigations is that they consume so much time, start to finish.
Jackson indicated traffickers have three main sources of potential victims: habitual runaways, undocumented immigrants, and subjects addicted to drugs and/or alcohol.
The speaker profiled a notorious trafficker from Blythewood who, along with trafficking, also was guilty of armed robbery, check fraud, selling drugs, forgery, credit card fraud, manufacturing drugs, and several vehicle offenses. The trafficker used a method that an informant revealed in a deposition. The trafficker introduced – or reintroduced – the victim to a heavy regimen of heroin. The process lasted long enough to ensure the victim was hopelessly addicted. The trafficker then locked the victim, usually a female, in a room where customers engaged in sex acts. The victim was first forced to pay the trafficker half the revenue from her sex activity. Then the trafficker forced the victim to pay the other half for her drug use. That process would repeat itself with seemingly no end to it.
Because of this type of scenario, a precedent has been established linking addictive drug use to provable coercion.
Pictured are School Resource Officer Russ Rabon, Captain Jackson, and Optimist Club President Gary Boyd, who presented the speaker with a copy of the Optimist Creed.
