January marks national anti-human trafficking month. Lawmen say even small-town Alabama isn’t free of this crime, which is a billion dollar industry worldwide. The National Human Trafficking Hotline says it received over two hundred calls for help in 2023. The group says thirty-three of those callers were victims in this crime involving sex for money.
Clay Hammoc is Deputy Chief at Shelby County Sheriff's Department. He says people forced into this industry often show specific signs.
“Someone who is not allowed to stray very far away from a handler, someone that looks like they are physically in distress, someone who looks like they haven't slept in a couple days, and someone who has clear signs of physical abuse.”
The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office launched a campaign this month to encourage the public to keep its eyes open. Hammoc said one example is Alabama’s interstates. I-20 around Birmingham is considered a trafficking superhighway which funnels sex workers from Atlanta to Alabama and onto Mississippi.
“Whenever you stop off at a gas station or a rest area or even a large retail box store that's nearby one of these on ramps or off ramps, of these major arteries that is where you are most likely to encounter a victim right under your nose and you don't even know it.”
While Shelby County law enforcement works with the community to report suspicions of trafficking, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are taking a more high tech approach. They’re building on efforts to use the internet to track traffickers and their sex workers.
Libby Hill is a master’s student at UAB. She and a group of researchers did a study that was released last year. It focuses on how traffickers use the internet in Alabama to advertise their illegal business and arrange deals.
“Traffickers are business people. It's a really, really horrible and ethical business, but they're business people like anybody else”
APR investigated this problem in 2019. Data from 2017 showed that there were six hundred and forty thousand online ads advertising sex for sale just in Alabama. Hill’s research focuses on hidden internet messages from traffickers and buyers. She says criminals don’t openly discuss their industry on the web.
“So, in the in the paper, we have a list of terms like Lolita or petite or tiny that don't explicitly say what it is. But sort of, if you know, you know, and the sort of people who are looking for minors on the internet know to use those terms.”
Hill and her colleagues hope to build a system that recognizes keywords and phrases. Another goal is to find sex workers writing online messages to illegal buyers through a similar process. Hill says traffickers can influence how their victims communicate with illegal buyers.
“You're looking at things like, is a person making a post that seems like it's authentically coming from them, but has sort of like the same syntax, the same phrasing used by another account that's on the face of it seems separate but might both be controlled by the same person.”
While all this work is going on, a statewide effort in Alabama has been at it since 2010. Pat McCay serves as the chairman of the Alabama Human Trafficking task force.
“I was leading a domestic violence sexual assault task force through crisis services at the time, and I went to the director and said, Look, we need to add human trafficking.”
McCay says back in 2010, there was a federal law against the crime, but nothing on the books in Alabama. That left her and members of the task force to spread the word on their own and support law enforcement in a creative way. They started making survivor bags for officers to keep in their cars.
“Once a survivor is in custody of the police, so that she's safe, she or he is safe, they provide this bag to them that has clothing in it, toiletry items, some kind of shoes, usually flip flops, something like that, because a lot of times, and a blanket, because you don't know what time of year they're going to be recovered”
Alabama lawmakers joined the fight last year with what’s known as the Sound of Freedom Act. It went into effect back in October and supporters call it the toughest anti trafficking law in the nation. People convicted of this crime against underaged minors now face life in prison. Shelby County is still working to get the public to help.
“We don't need to turn the other cheek and say, it's not our problem. I'm going to mind my own business.”
Deputy Chief Clay Hammoc says the public needs to report suspicious activity to help stop human trafficking. He says all it takes is to notify authorities if something seems off about a situation.
“Call 911 and let us know. Allow us to do the heavy lifting. Allow us to do the investigating. You don't have to be part of the case but allow us to determine whether it's nothing or not.”
Hammoc says that a simple phone call could save someone’s life.
