The Legislature’s ongoing fight against human trafficking will move back to a familiar venue Monday afternoon: the Senate Law and Justice Committee, where a work session will focus on the challenge of identifying those who have been pressed into sexual slavery, and how they may be rescued.
“Most people probably don’t connect the Super Bowl or high-end health spas with the modern-day slavery that goes with human trafficking. As our committee will hear Monday, there is a link,” said Sen. Mike Padden, R-Spokane Valley, who chairs the panel.
“It’s by understanding how the sex-trafficking industry operates, especially in places the average person wouldn’t suspect, that we can best figure out how to go after those who treat young women as a commodity – the pimps who do the selling and the johns who do the buying.”
Those expected to address Padden’s committee include:
- Nita Belles, Central Oregon regional director for Oregonians Against Trafficking Humans, an extension of the Oregon Human Trafficking Task Force, who directs a team that has done anti-trafficking work at the past five Super Bowls;
- Khurshida Begum, who had been victimized for 10 years in a small community near Olympia and now is active in ending modern-day slavery;
- Sheila Houston, a former teenage prostitute who, as director of outreach services for Seattle-based New Horizons Ministry, counsels young women in the sex industry; and
- Dr. Debbie Rodriguez, Tacoma pediatrician.
Padden figures Monday’s work session will begin at around 2 p.m., after public hearings on a pair of trafficking-related bills approved by the House of Representatives. He expects other sex-trafficking victims will speak to the panel, along with several others who have experience in spotting and rescuing victims.
“In the same way that we expect people in certain positions to alert others when they suspect that a child is being abused at home, there are people in certain walks of life who need to report when they see signs that a child has been enslaved. That’s one of the directions we need to take this fight in the coming years,” he said.
Since Padden became chairman of the Senate Law and Justice Committee in 2013, Washington’s efforts have received the highest possible marks from two organizations involved in eradicating sex trafficking: Vancouver, Wash.-based Shared Hope International and Washington, D.C.-based Polaris Project.
—30—