The response to sex/human trafficking

By Stacy Gittleman

For nearly two decades, law enforcement officials, along with policymakers, social workers and public health officials, have put their heads together in attempts to untangle the tentacles of the sex and human trafficking industry that has wound its way into every corner of Michigan.

It happens in massage parlors in Farmington and residences in Pontiac and along the cul-de-sacs in suburban communities, along the interstates and the Michigan-Canadian border. Enter a women’s restroom stall along any interstate rest stop in Michigan and Ohio, and there are warning signs on how to stop and detect sex and human trafficking with tear-off phone numbers for victims to call for help. Worldwide, the practice ensnares over 20 million people through violence, threats, deception, debt bondage and other tactics deployed by their traffickers.

In 2015, the Oakland County Board of Commissioners created the Oakland County Human Trafficking Task Force to serve as the leading resource for Oakland County in the prevention of human trafficking and in the protection and rehabilitation of victims, through education, advocacy and collaboration.

Also in 2015, the state activated the Michigan Human Trafficking Commission run within the department of the attorney general to study the situation.

According to the Michigan Attorney General’s Human Trafficking Commission’s 2024 annual report, in 2023 the National Human Trafficking Hotline reported 779 signals were received from Michigan alone. From those 779 calls, 254 cases were confirmed, and 506 victims were identified. Since the creation of the hotline in 2007, Michigan has received over 10,000 signals, confirmed almost 3,000 cases, and identified over 6,200 victims. The report also stated that, in 2023, Michigan received an F grade from Shared Hope International, a highly regarded anti-trafficking organization.

But these statistics, the report admits, are flawed since they only reflect the suspected trafficking that someone reported. It is widely accepted worldwide that only a very small fraction of human trafficking is reported or identified.

“This number is incomplete due to the fact that many incidents of trafficking go unreported and in reality, the actual numbers may be five times as high as what has been reported,” wrote attorney general Dana Nessel in the report. “Human trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery that needs to be addressed with more work, policy change, and education. We must encourage open discussions regarding human trafficking and its impact within our communities. We must also educate the population on what human trafficking is, what it will really look like, and what our citizens should do when they suspect human trafficking. Education, enhanced survivor and victim protections, and strong criminal laws will be the only way to eradicate human trafficking in Michigan.”

Finally, 2025 was the year all the task force meetings, research and focus on the plague of trafficking began to make a dent, at least in Oakland County. Now that the arrests and crackdowns are underway, the prosecutorial arm of Oakland County’s justice system needs more funding to keep up with the avalanche of uncovered cases.

Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said his office this fall established the Task Force for Human Trafficking Investigations and Enforcement Unit. This the first unit of its kind in the state to exclusively work full-time on investigating sex and human trafficking tips. The first police departments to participate in the growing unit are Southfield and Madison Heights.

“Back in 2015, when we established a bipartisan ad hoc fact-finding task force, it was a broad-spectrum group of elected officials, law enforcement, and public health officials charged with creating policy and identifying and designating resources for the prevention of human and sex trafficking,” explained Bouchard. “In 2025, the task force passed the baton to a new unit that will be fully dedicated to law enforcement and investigations of human trafficking cases.”

Another catalyst for the surge in arrests was a multi-day sex trafficking awareness seminar offered by the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office to hundreds of law enforcement and law professionals held in November 2024.

Bouchard continued: “Before this ad hoc committee was formed in 2015, we had little knowledge of what human trafficking was. The task force for the last decade has been teaching various professional and organizational groups in the public about what sex trafficking looks like. And from an investigative standpoint, it was only into late 2025 that we finally had the necessary resources to create a focused, dedicated full-time unit working on sex and human trafficking.”

Before the task force coalesced for a long-term proactive approach, arrests and cases surrounding sex trafficking came in piecemeal.

Early cases include the 2011 breakup of the Detroit Pink Prostitution ring, where the Michigan Attorney General’s Office arrested five individuals who were each charged with multiple felonies, including human trafficking, pandering, accepting the earnings of a prostitute and racketeering. The case revealed that at least one child was trafficked in this ring, as well as drug running that stretched across the country. The primary defendant, Mustafaa Muhammad, pled guilty to minor sex and labor trafficking and was sentenced to prison for 6-20 years on September 12, 2013.

Looking ahead to 2026, Bouchard said the more aware the public is of the signs of trafficking and the better trained law enforcement is, the more sex trafficking cases in the country will be uncovered.

“We need to train more (law enforcement to become full-time specialists) on the task of sex and human trafficking,” Bouchard said. “We need dedicated units who know how to detect the signs and symptoms that indicate a person is being trafficked. This is an evolving endeavor of educating the people who work with the public. The more people we educate, the more tips that come into our dispatches to apprehend those committing the crimes of trafficking.”

One of the first law enforcement departments to sign on to the specialized unit was Madison Heights. It is a community dotted with many low-budget hotels and short-stay motels, which make it a magnet for sex trafficking. Easy highway access to Interstate 696 and I-75 adds to the appeal.

“In Madison Heights, sex trafficking was always the problem with us at our local hotels,” Madison Heights Chief of Police Brent LeMerise explained, “It was going on right in plain sight and undetected because there was a lack of training for our officers, who didn’t understand what they were seeing when they would answer a call that there was (prostitution activity) going on.”

LeMerise said for most of the duration of his 24-year career, Madison Heights had a Special Investigations Unit of plain-clothes officers assigned to investigate narcotics and sex trafficking cases. Without the proper training, LeMerise said his team had yet to learn that many of the calls they responded to, from domestic abuse, drug dealing, disturbances of the peace and narcotics overdoses, in some ways were not just one-off isolated crimes, but connected to the crime web of the sex trafficking industry.

“We targeted sex workers, the people who bought sex, and people who sold drugs,” LeMerise said. “But we never addressed the larger human trafficking problems that were going on because we did not understand that what we were encountering were victims of human and sex trafficking.”

Another problem, LeMerise pointed out, was the women being trafficked for sex did not trust law enforcement and rarely came forward to report crime.

“Cases were widely underreported for several reasons,” LeMerise explained. “Victims feared retribution by their traffickers; they thought the police would not believe them and would be perceived as a suspect and not a victim. At other times, they were afraid to come forward because they knew there was a warrant out for their arrest. They don’t trust the police or the county prosecutors.”

Gaining the trust of the victims and finding the right services to steer them away from the mentality of being under the power of their trafficker required resources beyond the reach of Madison Heights. LeMerise said it was even more difficult to gain the cooperation of underage victims or runaways, who saw their trafficker as their protector. The same could be said of the department’s road patrol units, which had less time to dedicate to an investigation of a potential sex trafficking situation during a pullover due to the fast-paced nature of highway patrolling.

A major turning point for Madison Heights came in 2019 when the department partnered and trained with the crisis nonprofit Common Ground, which advocates and provides resources for victims of sex trafficking. It was then that LeMerise said the puzzle pieces began to fit together. LeMerise said his officers learned that sex trafficking needed to be investigated as a distinct type of crime. As they worked with Common Ground, Madison Heights police gained the trust of the victims and became more efficient in investigating and apprehending the perpetrators.

“We brought victims to get help at Common Ground,” LeMerise said. “This was a softer place for them. It wasn’t a police officer interrogating them, but instead they were speaking to social workers and therapists who served as their advocates. It was the first time in a long time that these victims were spoken to like they were human. Through this process, we gained their trust and rapport. Then they began to cooperate with us and provided us with information. Some even testified in some cases. Their cooperation made it easier for us to enforce the laws and create cases that could be prosecuted.”

Eventually, LeMerise said his department began to team up with the Oakland County Prosecutors’ office.

According to law enforcement and prosecutors in the county, that’s when the caseload numbers exploded.

In January 2025, the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office, working with the Madison Heights police, arrested 61-year-old Damon Napier at the Baymont Inn for alleged human trafficking involving two different cases – one out of Southfield and another out of Warren. Napier pleaded no contest on July 21, 2025. On Monday, October 13, he was sentenced to 13-40 years in prison.

Other Madison Heights cases include sex trafficking arrests made on July 21, 2025, at the Roadway Inn and September 6, 2025, at the Travel Lodge. 

In May of 2025, the Oakland County Human Trafficking Task Force arrested Trevor Andrew Scarbrough, 33, of Pontiac, who forced his victim to perform a sexual act with an animal and prostituted her for at least a year. The man was charged with prostitution, using a computer to commit a crime, human trafficking enterprise resulting in commercial sexual activity, sodomy, delivery/manufacture of controlled substance, illegal possession of a firearm and maintaining a house of prostitution. In total, all of these felonious charges can add up to nearly 100 years in prison.

On July 29, 2025, Madison Heights police arrested Warren resident Lawrence Robert Harris Weaver, 48, and the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office charged him with human trafficking, forced labor resulting in injury/commercial sexual activity and prostitution/accepting earnings. He was turned in by a woman who was being trafficked by him and escaped. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison and/or a $15,000 fine for the human trafficking charge and up to 20 years in prison for the prostitution charge.

Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald since the beginning of her tenure in 2021 has been shuffling around resources in her department to place a greater focus on pursuing sex trafficking cases that stick.

“When I came on board as county prosecutor, I observed that crime trends were changing and therefore where we needed to put our resources had to change,” McDonald said. “Of all the cases my office handles, child and domestic abuse cases are some of the hardest to prosecute because victims are either reluctant, scared or incapable of coming forward to testify. That difficulty is multiplied 100-fold with human and sex trafficking cases because often the trafficker will shuffle their victims to multiple locations, and the way that those caught up in trafficking feel they have no other resources to turn to outside of their current situation.”

Part of this restructuring included appointing department veteran Cindy Brown, once the assistant county prosecutor, to head up the county prosecutor’s first trafficking unit.

In September 2025, McDonald also made a plea to the county for nearly half a million dollars to more efficiently prosecute a skyrocketing rate of sex trafficking cases.

Brown has worked in the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office for 25 years. In addition to working as assistant county prosecutor, she held positions in the office’s special victims and drug trafficking units before being appointed trafficking unit leader.

She said crimes related to “forced prostitution” are connected to other offenses that impact the wider community, such as armed robbery, sexual assaults, carjacking and drug dealing.

“There is much interplay between sex trafficking and other crimes, especially drug dealing,” Brown said. “Traffickers exploit and capitalize on their drug addicted victims. For years, I prosecuted cases that involved drug dealing and child sexual assault cases. It has all culminated in my new role as chief of the human trafficking unit and only in the last year did my team and I and other law enforcement personnel in the county receive specialized training in this work.”

In November 2024, the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office hosted a countywide two-day training seminar and was attended by 300 law enforcement, probation, parole, and some medical professionals. It was taught by a member of the Missouri State Police who had worked on sex trafficking cases for the length of his career.

Attendees learned the ins and outs of human and sex trafficking: what it looks like, where it happens, how to detect, investigate, and prosecute it. And Brown said it’s making the difference. Shortly afterward, the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office handled 31 trafficking cases compared to the last four years, which averaged eight such cases per 10 months.

“At the end of the training, we had attendees approaching us saying that they had been encountering the exact scenarios described (in training) the entire length of their careers,” Brown said. “It was right there in front of them, but they never recognized it as trafficking. After that training, we had an influx of cases, because (law enforcement) recognized what it was and acted upon it.”

To date, the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office between November 2024 and November 2025 secured 52 convictions in 53 cases – a 98 percent conviction rate. There are 22 cases still pending. In addition to the intensive training from November 2024, Brown said there is now a required course cadets must take at the Oakland County Police Academy so that newly minted officers already have training on how to detect trafficking.

To expedite and secure convictions on these cases, the office needs to beef up its prosecutorial team. Brown currently works with three full-time prosecutors, a part-time prosecutor, a paralegal and an investigator. They are requesting from the county an additional $457,000 for two more paralegals, an assistant prosecutor, and salary funding for a chief of the team.

“In addition to training our law enforcement and prosecution professionals, I try to get out into the community as much as possible to educate the public as to what this crime looks like,” Brown said. “We must get the community involved. Law enforcement cannot be everywhere; they cannot do this alone. With raised awareness out in the community, we have been tipped off by hotel and motel clerks. Once we make people aware of what human trafficking looks like, it shocks them when they realize it has been happening in their communities all along.”

McDonald said the biggest hurdles of handling the mounting cases is to hire prosecutors who can wade through volumes of physical and digital evidence to create cases that will stick. This also entails fostering trusting relationships with victims who can hopefully testify and serve as witnesses.

“When I was assistant prosecutor 25 years ago, you would get to court, and there would be a file with maybe a 10-page police report sometimes accompanied by a few photos,” McDonald recalled. “Now, you may have to work through flash drive’s worth of digital evidence. You have footage from body cameras, metadata from phone messages and texts. These cases are very elaborate and require specially-trained prosecutors. Through the county, we got the task force up and running for law enforcement through the Sheriff’s office, but it doesn’t help if we don’t have the capacity in my office to prosecute these cases. That is where the funding is needed.”

Brown echoed McDonald’s sentiment on the difficulty of making cases stick. She told Downtown she spent part of that day interviewing a woman trafficked in marriage. In another case, she said there were at least 11 victims involved. In another case, Brown’s team must analyze data stored in 29 phones. While in jail custody awaiting trial, Brown said conversations and footage from video visits must also be monitored for evidence.

“Among trafficking victims, there is a trauma endured from their experiences unlike anything I have seen in my years of work,” Brown said. “We are seeing husbands trafficking wives. The person who was supposed to protect them, their spouse, is trafficking them. There are layers of loyalty and allegiance the victims have to their traffickers in these cases. And the traffickers tell their victims, ‘If and when you are picked up by the police (when prostituted), tell the police that you are choosing to do this (to make money) on your own free will. The police are not your friends. This is something you choose to do.’ That way, the criminal charges will fall on their victims, and not the traffickers.”

Brown continued: “In each case, there is never just one victim. There are multiple victims attacked to each trafficker. It takes time for the victims to feel comfortable enough to talk. And when they finally make up their mind to talk, our division must be available when they are ready to take that call, to be present and to listen, to answer their questions and make sure they have the services they need. Our goal is not to re-traumatize the victims. We try to find alternative ways than having to relive their trauma by testifying in person in court, but sometimes, we can’t always do that.”

Brown said her unit often comes across the same victims multiple times when prosecuting cases. She added it takes great strength and a certain frame of mind to break the cycle of being trafficked in order to get into a rehabilitative program such as the one offered at Sanctum House. “We can encounter the same person trafficked on a number of cases, and each time, we tell them we are here to help to get them resources,” Brown said. “We hope one day they will accept that help.”

While caseloads in the county may have increased, McDonald said the rate of human trafficking has not increased and has fallen off slightly.

McDonald said the reason for the caseload uptick is the fact that awareness has been raised to activity that has been going on “right under our noses” but has only been brought to light through training and better detection. The traditional way we approached this in law enforcement was an obstacle to really helping these victims. Now, we are one of the few counties that charges people for sex trafficking. “

Brown added: “We have had cases where (traffickers conduct their practices of selling their victims for sex) in neighboring other counties. Victims have literally told us that their trafficker takes them to other counties (sex trafficking) is not pursued there as rigorously by law enforcement or prosecution.”

McDonald also pointed out that sex and labor trafficking often go hand in hand. The county has cracked open cases at several massage parlors where operators bring women in from China via New York and then take away their passports and keep them as modern day slaves.

“This is prevalent throughout the state,” said McDonald. “We have just allowed massage parlors to operate, thinking that these are just victimless crimes. We recently prosecuted a case involving the trafficking of Chinese women. The massage parlors take away their passports, their money and no place else to live but inside the massage parlor. There are so many cases of a similar nature, and that is why we are dedicating prosecutor resources and have asked for additional funding to handle an increased caseload. The more educated people are about the trafficking going on right under their noses, the more we can do to prevent it.”

To bring more offenders of sex trafficking to justice, Lansing needs to pass laws with sharper teeth.

In September 2025, state Representatives Tom Kunse (R-100) and Kelly Breen (D-21) co-sponsored and introduced House Bill 5012 with over a dozen other policymakers, which aims to penalize traffickers of minors more harshly and stop criminalizing minors who were swept into the industry.

The bill presumes that anyone under the age of 18 participating in illicit sexual activity was coerced into sexually abusive activity or the commercial sexual activity or was otherwise forced or coerced into committing an offense by another person engaged in human trafficking. Any person found in such a situation should be immediately handed over to the department of Health and Human Services, and an investigation should begin no later than 24 hours after the report is made to the department of Health and Human Services.

“It's embarrassing that Michigan is towards the bottom of the list when it comes to the protection, prevention, and penalization of those who have been coerced into sex and human trafficking,” said Rep. Kunse. “This is legislation that has bipartisan support and was reintroduced into the legislative floor by my associate (Breen) and me. The bill has two goals: the first is to bring the perpetrators of the horrible crimes of sex trafficking minors to justice. The second is to protect the victims. If a minor enters a police station and confesses (to performing crimes under coercion), they should not be the ones who are punished. If they think they will be the ones who will be penalized, they are less likely to report a crime.”

Speaking with Kunse in mid-November with just a few days left to go in the legislative session, Kunse told Downtown it would be unlikely that the bill would gain any traction until early in 2026. Noting on just how polarized the state government is these days, Kunse said cracking down on human trafficking and placing the penal code where it belongs – on the traffickers and off those being trafficked – is something legislators on both sides of the aisle can support.

“We have to ask ourselves, where do our priorities and values align and overlap,” Kunse mused. “No one is going to say this legislation is not important. Human trafficking is an issue that impacts every part of our state, from the quietest small town to the upscale suburbs of Oakland County, and into our cities. It is everywhere.”

A big hurdle in tackling the problem of human and sex trafficking is to gain the trust of those who have been trafficked, rescue them from the mindset that keeps them in this cycle of modern-day slavery, and guide them to a path of self-worth and self-reliance.

Jennifer Fopma is chair of the board of the all-volunteer Michigan Human Trafficking Task Force, an organization she has been involved with since its founding in 2006.

The organization was founded by law enforcement expert Jane White, who died in 2023. Since her death, Fopma said she and her associates of law enforcement, social workers, faith-based and healthcare professionals have been working tirelessly to fill her shoes and perpetuate her legacy.

“Jane had a long history in law enforcement, which made her the perfect, credible person to lead this task force,” Fopma said. “She also understood the importance of victim services and of trauma-informed care. She brought everybody to the table and did this work until the day she died.”

Fopma said there were some contentious meetings in the early years. All parties – including social workers and law enforcement officials – wanted the same goals in preventing and stopping sex and labor trafficking but were “speaking different languages” in how to get it done.

“Law enforcement would want to make arrests and insisted that they had access to the victims to talk to them and convince them to press charges,” Fopma recalled. “We were telling law enforcement that the victims didn’t trust them, and we had to protect their confidentiality. The victims were terrified and felt like they had to protect their traffickers. So, the first few years of the task force was learning how to work together. We all wanted to put the needs of the victims first.”

Fopma said the most significant obstacle to understanding patterns in sex and human trafficking is the lack of a consistent nationwide system to track human trafficking incidents.

“Any time you hear about a state or city being ranked in terms of trafficking, the truth is it is all highly inaccurate,” Fopma said. “We don’t know on any given day what the numbers are. The National Hotline, or data from local law enforcement only capture a fraction of the problem.”

She continued: “As a social worker who has advocated for victims, I know many have not been counted. Instead, they are charged as criminals. Therefore, I do hope that any new legislation proposed in Lansing will come into law to prohibit penalizing minors who have been trafficked for sex.”

Fopma said stopping sex trafficking is most effective when law enforcement and community healthcare, social workers and advocates coalesce at the local level. She said The Michigan Human Trafficking Task Force is most effective when it builds education and advocacy networks at the local level among local service providers and law enforcement.

“We need local task forces because this is about people doing the right thing for other people,” Fopma said. “This is about building relationships. This is not about your authority or your title. People do things for people. It’s about relationships, not authority. It’s not your title. Everything we do is survivor-driven.”

Undocumented migrants, especially those who are minors, fall into an especially vulnerable category of the trafficking industry.

At the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC), senior managing attorney Ana Raquel Devereaux supervises MIRC's unaccompanied children's legal team whose clients are in federal foster care and/or released to private families. It is their job to provide legal counsel for undocumented and unaccompanied minor migrants who have been sex and labor trafficked and are eligible to attain either a T (trafficking) or U (unaccompanied minor) visa to remain in the United States.

“The intent of these visas is to provide protection for victims and also to encourage individuals to report (trafficking) to law enforcement so that they and others can be safe,” Devereaux explained. “Sometimes, the trafficking of victims began outside the United States, but even if this is the case, they are eligible for this visa status.”

Devereaux said the vulnerabilities of an undocumented, unaccompanied minor migrant can manifest in three main categories.

“Smugglers of undocumented minors can sometimes also be feeding into the sex and labor trafficking pipeline,” Devereaux said. “There is a high vulnerability of becoming trafficked when young unaccompanied people are being smuggled into the United States. One of our clients was on her way to Michigan to live with family, and she was exploited along the way.”

Devereaux said this client was introduced to sex trafficking along the Michigan/Canadian border and was referred to MIRC after being freed. It was then that MIRC secured her a T visa.

In other instances, MIRC has worked with clients first experienced trafficking in their home country and tried to escape it by fleeing to the United States.

“Unfortunately, many of our clients meet the same harsh reality when they arrive here, or others are lured to the United States under the promise that they will get good jobs.

Devereaux said at times, minors are lured to the United States by a trafficker with intent to use that child for sex work. Sometimes, through a screening process, the Office of Refugee Resettlement can detect when a sponsor of a migrant is really a sex trafficker, and then the minor will not be released into that person’s custody.

When survivors of sex trafficking finally channel the strength and self-worth to want to reclaim their lives, if they are lucky, they find their way to Michigan’s Sanctum House.

It is the state’s only long-term rehabilitation and training center for survivors of sex trafficking, who now refer to themselves as lived experience survivors.

Irene Faziani, 43, grew up in a home in Carleton, Michigan, where she didn’t know and never learned how girls and women should be properly treated.  She said it was normal to watch her father verbally and physically abuse her mother and live in a house where food was scarce.  She recalled how her brother, who lived in the same home, grew up seemingly unscathed. He now lives his life as a successful academic. But Faziani said her childhood left her without the skills of self-esteem or self-love to carry into her adulthood.

Eventually, her father left her and her brother with their mother, who had to work long hours. The child support her father sent was not enough to pay all the bills or the mortgage. She and her brother were left alone much of the time. It was in her early adolescence that she began smoking, drinking, and taking drugs.

It made her a vulnerable target. That’s when the trafficking began.

At age 34, she was arrested and jailed in Calhoun County. She befriended one of her cellmates when they realized that their families were not responding to their calls from jail. Upon Faziani’s release, law enforcement issued her a Greyhound bus ticket to Detroit. But that just left her at the station with nowhere else to go.

“Before my jail release, my cellmate said she had a contact who had a brother who would pick me up from the station and take care of me and I had no idea what that meant,” Faziani recalled. “At first, he treated me well, and I thought he loved me. I was then sold to my trafficker’s cousin.”

She suffered regular beatings, physical and mental illnesses. Faziani said her traffickers were involved with all kinds of crimes, from retail fraud to drug dealing. Often, in these situations, it is the women who are being trafficked who take the fall for drug possession or other crimes.

“I wasn’t eating, and I was getting repeatedly raped,” Faziani recalled of the three years she was trafficked. “At that point, tons of bad things were happening to me. But law enforcement had been watching my traffickers for years. One day, their house was raided, and my trafficker and his father went to prison. I ended up turning myself into law enforcement. I went to jail because I knew that was the first step I needed to take, because I wanted help. I was sent to another rehabilitation program, and then I was referred to Sanctum House for long-term rehabilitation. By then, I was 37.”

Now, Faziani is among the lived experience survivors. She is a graduate of an 18-month rehabilitation program run by Sanctum House. Sanctum House professionals work regularly with Nessel’s Trafficking Task Force, the FBI and the Michigan State Police and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Moore said much-needed federal and state grant funding will go to expand Sanctum House’s reach. Presently, the organization runs several long-term housing accommodations in undisclosed areas in metro Detroit. Their beds are always full, and there is always a waiting list of other women looking to enroll in their long-term program to regain control of their lives.

Employed at Sanctum House as a residential advisor, Faziani has her own apartment, pays her bills, including rent, car payments and auto insurance, and is a highly sought-out speaker on the issue of sex trafficking.

Faziani has testified in Lansing for better legislation to prevent and apprehend the practice of human trafficking and speaks in many community events to explain the warning signs of someone who is either looking to traffic a person or victims of human trafficking. She said she is in a healthy, loving relationship, has repaired her relationships with her parents, and lives with her cat, who is a comfort and a constant companion. Her journey to wellness and self-sufficiency continues.

“I still regularly see a therapist, and there are good days and bad days,” Faziani said. “There is still a lot of work I have to do. But I know I am blessed to be living and to be able to do the work and speak out on behalf of others and be respected for the things that I went through.” 

Sanctum House Executive Director Karen Moore said it is not uncommon to have women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s coming through their doors, emphasizing that sex trafficking can occur to women of all ages. Faziani arrived at Sanctum House at 37.

Sanctum House staff and lived experience survivors speak at hundreds of events each year. “We've trained so many groups to understand what the indicators and signs are of human trafficking evidence. Often, the victims themselves do not even know that they are being trafficked.”

“That was me,” Faziani said. “I thought (my trafficker) really loved me, because that is what he told me and that is how he acted. Like many women, I was vulnerable. My guard was down. And that is what the traffickers are looking for.”

Moore said trafficking victims encompass every racial, religious and socioeconomic background. The common thread is their vulnerability, and young girls are most susceptible.

“We speak at high schools because that is where young girls may not be getting the attention they need at home,” Moore said. “If mom and dad are not around because they are working, or separated, or traveling and not providing the nurturing presence or guidance at home, there is going to be a trafficker who will appear to meet those needs. And though many women finally come to us at an older age, they were preyed upon because they came from families with insecurities such as homelessness, divorce, abuse, or food insecurity.”

Moore said the reality is that there will always be human trafficking and sex trafficking. The best way to combat it is through education.

“Abating the rates of sex and human trafficking is easier said than done,” Moore said. “The only way to do it is through community education. We want to educate as many people as we can as to what signs to look out for, what to do if they suspect trafficking activity is going on, and how to best alert authorities to get those affected to safety.”