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Fighting to open closed doors: how advocates stepped up efforts to help sex trafficking survivors in a world where hiding victims is easier than ever

By Christopher Johnston | January 14, 2021

This article is from Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism. Please join their free mailing list, as this helps provide more public service reporting. For women survivors of sex trafficking struggling to make ends meet, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated an already desperate situation. Funding programs to support them have shifted to more urgent crisis funding— to house and feed the homeless, for example. Losing financial and food security only places these already scuffling women at an even greater risk of being trafficked again to earn money just to survive. Renee Jones, president and CEO of the Renee Jones Empowerment Center (RJEC)  in Cleveland, a trafficking recovery center she founded in 2002 to help women survivors of sex trafficking, has observed a definite increase since the spring. “We’ve seen the number of women and the need for help increase in all of our street outreach locations,” she said. “A lot of the women either lost a job that paid minimum wage or had their hours cut, so there’s definitely been an impact on the population that we serve.”

Although accurate statistics for trafficking victims are difficult to track because of the underground nature of the crime, during 2019, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s office identified a total of 305 potential victims of sex trafficking in the state, 96 of them were 18 or under. According to the Polaris Project, a nonprofit dedicated to ending modern slavery and human trafficking, which has operated the national  Human Trafficking Hotline since 2007, the pandemic and subsequent quarantine has led to an escalation in trafficking activity. 

Full 2020 statistics are not yet available from Polaris, but the number of crisis trafficking cases handled by the Trafficking Hotline increased by more than 40% in April following the shelter-in-place orders compared to the prior month.