Prosecutors, church members take hard look at human trafficking in Myrtle Beach area and beyond

Around the time South Carolina’s top prosecutor announced a plan to combat human trafficking, local authorities rescued a female victim.

Solicitor Jimmy Richardson said the 2014 case seemed clear cut. It would have been the first time his office prosecuted someone using the state’s relatively new laws against buying and selling human beings. But because the victim had been moved across state lines, he turned the investigation over to federal officials.

Unearthing that case, however, drove home a point: Human trafficking isn’t somewhere else’s problem

“It’s here,” Richardson said Saturday, shortly before speaking to more than 275 people at Belin Memorial United Methodist Church’s Family Life Center.

Called “Red Light – An Effort to STOP Human Trafficking,” the Murrells Inlet church’s symposium aimed to shed light on the problems of human trafficking both abroad and in the community’s backyard.

“We’re simply trying to make people aware,” said the Rev. Scott Johnson, an associate pastor at the church. “Aware of the situation, aware of the possibilities, aware of the resources, aware of the law enforcement and the code in South Carolina state law … and how we as a community can be knowledgeable and be people of action.”

Johnson said the idea for the event came from a women’s group at the church. They wanted to draw attention to the issue and other church members agreed.

“It kind of hit a nerve with some of us,” Johnson said. “We said, ‘As a church, we need to tackle this together.’ … We know that this is a big issue. This is a topic people want to address. They want to understand more.”

Because human trafficking is such an underground crime, there is little data about its prevalence, according to a 2014 report from the S.C. Human Trafficking Task Force.

In 2012, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center received 20,652 calls about possible human trafficking. Of those, 233 were from South Carolina.

Myrtle Beach led all Palmetto State cities with 52 reports.

“The Grand Strand is a very transitional area,” Richardson said. “And it’s easy to get lost. That’s why you see so much of the stuff in back pages and the different escort services. Those sort of things make Myrtle Beach a more likely area … than somewhere inland.”

Richardson said some coastal law enforcement agencies are being trained to better identify trafficking victims.

“Another big problem is a lot of times the victims don’t even see themselves as victims of human trafficking,” he said. “Nobody really knows that they are playing a part of this bigger thing.”

Throughout Saturday’s event, the audience heard from prosecutors as well as those who help trafficking victims.

One of the speakers was Marie Sazehn, a state prosecutor and the human trafficking program coordinator for the S.C. Attorney General’s Office.

“It is a big problem in our state,” she said.

In recent years, Sazehn said, state officials have battled the crime of people being sold for sex or labor.

State lawmakers overhauled South Carolina’s weak anti-human-trafficking policies in 2012. A task force was formed and last year authorities unveiled a plan that called for specialized police training and an educational campaign.

In October, prosecutors are scheduled to go to court for the first trial involving the state’s anti-human-trafficking statutes.

Despite the recent efforts, Sazehn said many people don’t realize that human trafficking is a local concern.

“A lot of people initially think it’s like the movie ‘Taken,’” she said, referring to the film where Liam Neeson plays a father searching for his abducted daughter. “They think that it’s happening overseas and people are taken abroad. But I think that’s one of the more grandiose perceptions of human trafficking. And it’s absolutely not the most true perception of human trafficking and what we’re seeing here on the state level.”

Locally, she said, the most vulnerable people are foster children and runaways. The average age of a girl pulled into trafficking is 12-14. For a boy, it’s 11-13.

“It’s very young when the children are being trafficked,” she said. “But there’s really no face that you can put on a trafficking victim because we’re seeing all kinds.”

So what else can be done?

Sazehn said educational events like Saturday’s are important. She also said people should call their local police if they have concerns.

“It is something that is very real and it’s not something that just happens in the movies,” she said. “But I also hope that they (the Belin audience) leave feeling empowered to take action and know that they can be a part of preventing this horrible crime.”

Diana Query got the message.

A member of Belin and the president of St. James Elementary School’s PTA, she wants to see more informational programs about the subject in schools.

Although there are agencies dedicated to helping victims, Query wants to address the challenge on the front end.

“I have a fifth grader and I know here in Myrtle Beach there’s a lot of human trafficking going on,” she said. “We need to look at ways to start educating our children. … I feel like I need to focus on preventing it.”

Johnson, the minister, hopes other attendees are also motivated to help.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do next,” he said of the church. “We just know this was the first step.”

This story was originally published August 29, 2015 at 8:15 PM with the headline "Prosecutors, church members take hard look at human trafficking in Myrtle Beach area and beyond."