“I didn’t grow up planning to be a whore,” says Carolemarie, a former prostitute and porn star.

“I started working as a prostitute when I was 15,” she says now. “I spent the money on drugs and clothes.” “I made my first porn movie at

16. By the time I was 21, I’d had three abortions and attempted suicide twice. I was living with a man who beat me, and I was working as a stripper and films.”

Carolemarie, now 51, runs Born2Party, a Bedford-based group that works to get women out of strip clubs and away from “briefcase pimps.” During the years she was working in the sex trade, she never heard the words “exploitation” and “trafficking.” “It’s so hard to get out once you’re in,” she explains.

Stories like Carolemarie’s are pouring in from around the country. The U.S. State Department estimates that 800,000 people are trafficked globally while the U.S. Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) reports that 293,000 American children are commercially sexually exploited every year.

That’s nearly 37 percent of sex trafficking occurring to our own kids. Why? American children are easy targets and carry less risk for traffickers than adults and foreign citizens.

And until December of 2009, there wasn’t even funding to find and support trafficked American citizens.

Texas’s vast size and central location add to the state’s problem with trafficking.

According to a report released by the Texas Attorney General, 20 percent of all trafficked victims (which also includes forced labor victims) in the United States are found in Texas.

El Paso and Houston are major trafficking hubs, but officials know it's happening in every city across the state.

Just two years ago, the Fort Worth Police Department arrested a 33-year-old woman when she was discovered driving around asking men if they wanted to have sex with a 14-year-old girl for $50. A 32-year-old man was also arrested and charged with sexual assault of a child, which is a second-degree felony.

Special Agent Mark White, the media coordinator for the North Texas branch of the FBI, says Interstate 35 and other major roadways play a role in increasing the Metroplex’s viability as a trafficking location. This concern was validated in 2002 when Fort Worth police received anonymous letters saying that young Honduran women were being smuggled into the United States and forced to work as prostitutes in bars in Fort Worth. While police estimate more than 200 Honduran females were trafficked, only around 40, some as young as 14 years old, were rescued.

Nancy Kratzer is the deputy Special Agent in Charge of North Texas region U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“Minor trafficking victims are often smuggled into the U.S. under false or fraudulent pretenses by a relative or an organization,” she says. “Enhancements made to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) of 2008 have broadened the scope of authorities by which law enforcement and prosecutors are able to enforce the laws relative to human trafficking. The outreach, training and campaign initiatives implemented by state, local and federal law enforcement agencies continue to provide knowledge, awareness and education on current state and federal trafficking laws. ICE recently conducted an advertising campaign to increase public awareness of human trafficking called: Hidden in Plain Sight.” In its effort to combat further trafficking, “the U.S. Department of Justice has funded new efforts to monitor human trafficking activity, both nationally and regionally,” says White.

Fort Worth was the recipient of one such grant: The Department of Justice gave the police department $450,000 in the fall of 2006, and the city awarded the division an additional $150,000. However, teaching Fort Worth police officers to identify trafficking — and treat the children as the victims they are — is only part of the work that must be done.

With the majority of Fort Worth’s special unit moving to the ICE building in Irving, coordinating with the officers in the field will be even more important, which is why the City of Fort Worth sponsored a meeting on Jan. 12, and the Salvation Army is planning another meeting to coordinate awareness, prevention and investigative techniques.

All the agencies and nonprofits involved know commercial sex trafficking is a homegrown phenomenon. And it feeds on demand.

Sex Slaves

Kathleen Murray, LMSW, is the program coordinator for Fort Worth police’s Human Trafficking Unit. She believes that we will see a steady increase in the number of juvenile victims.

“Human trafficking is a new field of law and social service,” she said. “The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) is about 10 years old, and the state law is six years old. We are constantly learning new and better ways of tackling this issue and are gaining more tools in our toolbox to combat this horrific abuse. The more people are aware of this crime and what to do about it, the more complaints we will receive, the more victims we will rescue and the higher the numbers will go – to a point.” Fort Worth’s Human Trafficking Unit works in conjunction with about 30 other law enforcement groups — including ICE, the FBI and local area police departments — as part of the North Texas Anti-Trafficking Task Force (NTATT). NTATT focuses on specific at-risk groups such as runaways, throwaways and homeless children. These groups are the most at risk for commercial sexual exploitation because they are a highly vulnerable population.

Protecting our youth is a countywide priority: Tarrant County Homeless Coalition’s census on Jan. 29, 2009, recorded 545 homeless children, all of whom were already in shelters — a key defense to keeping them out of predators’ hands. The good news is that Fort Worth has seen a decline in homeless rates since 2007 says homeless coordinator

M. Otis Thornton. But the problems won’t stop even if kids are off the street because after drug dealing, human trafficking is tied with the illegal arms industry as the second largest criminal industry in the world. And trafficking is the fastest growing.

Both Murray and Lindsey Dula, a child forensic interviewer for Alliance for Children (AFC), agree that the first priority is to make traffickers work harder to find their victims.

“It’s frightening just how quickly runaways are solicited,” says Dula. “Within 24 hours of leaving home, a pimp or other girls are asking [the runaway] to dance at a strip club or work in a massage parlor. From there, it’s a short step into actual prostitution. Or maybe the children are pushed directly into prostitution.” Shared Hope International is an organization working to eliminate sex trafficking.

A U.S. Department of Justice grant allowed the nonprofit to research the Fort Worth area in 2007 and again in 2008. Shared Hope believes local cases of domestic youth sex trafficking are “frequently unreported and underidentified” because in the past eight years “35 juveniles have been charged with prostitution and prostitution-related offenses— an average of four per year.” The organization’s biggest concern is this lack of identification; Shared Hope notes Tarrant County has a population of more than 1.5 million, and estimates more than 1,000 children are at risk.

Deena Graves is founder of Traffick911, a nonprofit that is currently raising funds to open a long-term shelter and school for domestic traffic victims. She points out that Shared Hope focused on Dallas and Fort Worth as “hotbeds of illicit sexual activity. There are over 100 large cities in this country, and two metro areas of concern are right here.” White says societal perceptions and “the lack of an outcry from the general public” are the major limitations to investigating and prosecuting trafficking cases. “There is a lack of reporting by victims for many reasons such as shame, a distrust of law enforcement in their culture, or fear of deportation due to immigration status.” Until perceptions change and society is willing to tackle the issue, children will continue to be victimized.

Who to Trust?

Graves started Traffick911 after learning a girl was sold to a pimp for $50,000 by her father.

Before that, her dad “groomed” her for the sale. She was pimped in Fort Worth and in other states and was finally able to escape to Dallas where she prostituted herself because — at 14 — she had no other way to survive.

One evening, a man picked her and her friend up and then beat them. Her friend died.

Dula says child abuse has been around a long time; now it’s about new ways to abuse kids.

“AFC doesn’t normally get involved until minors are picked up for some criminal charge,” she said.

But by then, the children have been involved in some form of trafficking for days, weeks or even years. Dula says most of the children she interviews fall between 12 and 13, which is much younger than the Fort Worth average of 14. Because most children are not rescued until they reach 15.3 years, the children must survive more than a year of forced sex, beatings and possibly running away again.

“Think about it,” says Graves. “Ten men a night, six nights a week isn’t uncommon.

How many sex acts is that in a year?” “Yes, the kids have street smarts,” Dula acknowledges, “but they are just children.

Adults are exploiting them because they are minors.” Dula says this includes the children’s families. Because some parents look upon their children simply as goods, a mom makes an “exchange” with a boyfriend to pay the bills or get gas money, and the daughter is that “exchange.” Fort Worth, like many other cities, has struggled with how to handle this form of parental abuse. To date, hardly any buyers of prostituted children have even been identified, and few traffickers have been prosecuted — this includes family members like the father above who willingly pimped his child.

At the same time family members exploit their kids, buyers and traders of child pornography in Tarrant County have been arrested.

And parents known to beat or neglect their children are brought in as soon as Child Protective Services suspect a problem, For children not being trafficked by their families, gangs pose another imminent danger.

One gang recruits girls while another gang forces girls through a two-week “boot camp” on how to perform sex acts and what to say to law enforcement if they are apprehended.

Other girls may band together in an effort to survive on the streets, but the result is often the same.

Dula remembers one group of girls, ages 13, 14 and 10, who had run away a few times, eventually ending up at a motel. Their pimp took a room down the hall and scheduled day visits where the girls were forced to prostitute their bodies. The police eventually picked up the pimp, and the girls moved in with another man who owned a house. He let each child have her own room; the girls told Dula how much they enjoyed the space to decorate in their style. Yet within days, the man took the three children to a truck stop to solicit men for sex. By this time, the girls had been missing for about three months.

Supply and Demand

“The stark reality is that the supply is never-ending. … I mean, that little girl who Started as a runaway on the streets in Washington State and ended up on the streets of Miami Beach as a prostitute is way too typical.

… There is an endless supply — and it is almost surreal to have these words leave my mouth — endless supply of victims. But that’s the stark reality,” says Andrew Oosterbaan, chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Carolemarie adds, “The only thing these girls have of any value is their bodies. And it’s the only thing many people want.” The documentary “Sex Slaves, the Teen Trade” says craigslist.com has become nothing more than an online pimp, an easy place for predators to troll for their next victim.

Carolemarie and SAC White agree that craigslist does offer a place to solicit sex.

“Internet social networking sites are a problem,” says White. “Any venue that provides anonymous exposure to the public is a potential meeting site for traffickers or any other criminal activity. Criminals feel safe using those venues, but they can be monitored by law enforcement, private organizations and individuals. A lot of predators have pages on these Web sites and use these sites to recruit. These predators also use girls, who they trust and they allow to have Internet accounts, to use their own Internet accounts as a recruiting tool.” But it’s not just online sites. Pimps know the spots that lend themselves to runaway children: bus stations, malls, juvenile hall, schools, online chat rooms, anywhere they can get to one or two kids at a time — away from a group.

“Traffickers will use any means available,” says White. “Their imagination is the only limitation. This is probably the most important thing to know.” Because trafficking routes often change and the activity is so underground that it is difficult to monitor, the FBI and Fort Worth police rely on tips as well as their investigative techniques. Murray says the reason traffickers are successful is “they are supplying a product to meet a demand, and people do not know what trafficking or commercial sexual exploitation is, where it exists, what to do about it, or how to report it.” “The key to a trafficker lies in exploiting the vulnerabilities of a potential victim to make a profit off of that person,” says White.

“The victim’s ethnicity, race or background plays a very small role.”

Slowing the Tide

If a child runs away or is missing, fill out a report immediately with the local police department and call the local runaway shelter for further assistance.

“Many times children run away because things are not right at home, “ says Murray.

“Parents should talk to their children about being comfortable talking when someone mistreats them, abuses them or interacts with them inappropriately — even if it's family.” One option for Fort Worth is to form an outreach team to contact families as soon as a child runs away, which will address needs — for both the youth who sees running away as her only option and for the entire family — while problems are still manageable.

Monitoring children’s Internet use such as myspace.com and other social networking sites is a must. “Talk to the parents or caretakers of [your] children’s friends to make an agreement that all [parents] will monitor this activity to keep the children safe,” Murray suggests.

Start communication when children are young; explain stranger danger awareness and safety techniques (or if you don’t feel comfortable with that, check out The Safe Side Combo: Stranger Safety and Internet Safety DVDs).

Make sure children never offer personal information or take gifts from someone they do not know well — this includes people they “meet” and consider friends online.

“The Crimes Against Children Web site does have tips on recognizing problems, especially Internet issues, and how these can be monitored and corrected,” says White. Both White and Murray recommend the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (missingkids.com) for additional information parents may find helpful.

If you want to help current trafficking victims, Murray suggests volunteering with agencies that work with abused and neglected children such as Traffick911, Alliance for Children or Born2Party, mentoring a child, or starting a neighborhood watch group, phone tree or other community connection system. Become more involved in your community and know what is happening around you and your family.” Murray’s rule of thumb is to “report what does not seem right to you and let the authorities handle the rest.”