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.
This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism in partnership with the Buckeye Flame. Please join our free mailing list or the mailing list for the Flame as this helps us provide more public service reporting.
House Majority Floor Leader Bill Seitz called the law at the heart of an alleged corruption case “the best energy bill we ever passed.”
This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism in partnership with the nonprofit Energy News Network. Please join our free mailing list or the mailing list for the Energy New Network as this helps us provide more public service reporting.
The order comes as newly released documents point to a larger role on legislative matters for the former utilities commission chair. This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism in partnership with the nonprofit Energy News Network.
The order comes as newly released documents point to a larger role on legislative matters for the former utilities commission chair. This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism in partnership with the nonprofit Energy News Network.