Representatives from key players working to thwart labor and sex trafficking met in Colorado Springs Thursday — recognized as National Human Trafficking Awareness Day — to identify insufficiencies in efforts to stop the illegal activity.

About 25 people signed up to attend the closed-door roundtable discussion, which included national, state and local anti-trafficking industry leaders, as well as staff from the offices of Colorado U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper.

“We must do all we can to end human trafficking in Colorado and across the United States,” Bennet said in a statement issued to The Gazette. “I’m grateful for the law enforcement officers, prosecutors and local leaders who are working together to raise awareness of this issue and protect people from this unimaginable horror.” 

Several attendees spoke to the media before and after the event, the first of its kind in Colorado Springs, according to organizers.

“People don’t realize it’s as big of an issue as it is,” said Jo-Ann O’Neil, chair of the 15-year-old Human Trafficking Task Force of Southern Colorado. 

The organization is hosting a webinar about trafficking and youth at 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 22 from the “Set Me Free Project.” Signup is at https://www.ht-colorado.org/.

O’Neil said she’d like to hear fewer parents say, “I had no idea,” when their child is identified as a victim of sex or labor trafficking — when someone coerces, pressures, bribes or deceives a minor or an adult into performing sex acts along the lines of prostitution, or slave labor, often in agriculture or domestic positions.

In either case, the perpetrator gains something, usually money, from selling the person’s services, which constitutes commercial exploitation of another human being.

“It’s definitely an issue here,” said Lt. Mark Chacon, who oversees the Colorado Springs Police Department metro division’s vice unit, which investigates cases of human trafficking.

Colorado Springs police Lt. Mark Chacon heads the metro division’s vice unit, which works on apprehending sex and labor traffickers.

Courtesy of The Exodus Road

An all-too-common scenario, he said, is for a teen runaway lacking the skills to survive on the streets to become prey to traffickers, who target vulnerable populations.

In Colorado, at-risk people include homeless youth, homeless adult women, addicts, the mentally ill, members of the LGBTQ+ community, undocumented workers and migrants, said Laura Parker, co-founder of The Exodus Road, which sponsored Thursday’s discussion and will produce a report on its findings.

Parker and her husband, Matt, who had lived in Woodland Park, started The Exodus Road after helping police assist a 15-year-old Burmese girl trapped in sex trafficking.

They founded the nonprofit organization in 2012, which last year supported law enforcement globally with identifying and removing 513 victims of labor and sex trafficking.

Unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S.’ southern border also are vulnerable, said Bill Woolf, founder of Anti-Trafficking International and former acting director for the office of the United States Victims of Crime. “They are being placed into various locations without proper supports,” he said.

One of the event’s goals was to “get different members attacking this complex issue from different perspectives and expertise to listen to each other and start identifying gaps and create some positive opportunities to learn alongside each other,” Parker said.

Colorado received a “C” grade in the 2023 Child and Youth Sex Trafficking report by Shared Hope International, which since 2011 has rated states on the status of policies, practices and cultural changes related to human trafficking.

Deficiencies in Colorado include substandard victim identification, lacking enough safe places for rescued victims and inadequate preventive training for workers in schools, child welfare, juvenile justice agencies, law enforcement and the legal system, the report shows.

A growing trend is online exploitation, experts said. The game your child might be playing virtually against unknown opponents could include an adult perpetrator posing as a child, said Chacon, the police investigator.

Of the nearly 400 victims The Exodus Road helped free from trafficking in 2022, social media was a mechanism for recruitment, coercion or sale of a victim in 76% of the cases, Parker said.

More instances of family members trafficking other family members, as well as peer-to-peer trafficking of youths, are other trends, Woolf said.

Progress at the national level started in 2000 with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the first piece of legislation to fund and work toward eliminating domestic and international forms of trafficking. A national action plan came into being 20 years later.

Today, more funding and staff are needed, Woolf said, as is a coordinated response with local, regional and statewide action plans.

Parker’s organization is calling on congressional lawmakers to pass the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act of 2023. The bill would extend funding for current Health and Human Service grants for anti-trafficking programs, provide more training for school personnel and other community leaders to recognize signs and identify victims, bolster survivor support and strengthen global partnerships against trafficking.

An estimated 1.1 million children and adults in the United States currently are victims of human sex and labor trafficking, according to the U.S. State Department, and some 27 million people worldwide, according to the Global Slavery Index.