When people hear the words “human trafficking” they might think of stories in other countries, but it’s a real problem in the United States, even in Minnesota.
“It’s happening in every county, every night,” said Jodi Elliot, a Hutchinson resident who has become active in the fight against human trafficking.
Elliot started working against human trafficking in 2018 after attending a seminar offered by Stories Foundation through Hutchinson Area Youth.
“I was new to Crosspoint Church but I wanted to support them, so I attended with my youth group kids,” she said. “It was the most serious I’d ever seen the kids, and even I was blown away by some of the statistics.”
Elliot hopes to continue to spread the word with events like one planned later this month at two Hutchinson churches. The seminar “Stuff I Wish My Parents Knew” is planned for 1-3 p.m. Sunday, April 28, at CrossPoint Church and 6:30-8:30 p.m. Monday, April 29, at Christ the King Lutheran Church.
Human trafficking is divided into two sub-categories: labor trafficking and sex trafficking.
Labor trafficking forces someone to work against their will through force, fraud or coercion.
Sex trafficking,on the other hand, is forcing individuals to perform sex or sexual favors through the use of force, fraud or coercion.
“Human trafficking is a lot more commonplace than we’d like to admit,” Stories Foundation founder Stephanie Page said.
In 2021, the National Human Trafficking Hotline received 335 signals in Minnesota with 119 of them being from victims or survivors of human trafficking. In the same year, the NHTH identified 98 cases involving 148 victims.
Page said traffickers learn to find and take advantage of vulnerable people. They manipulate them to get what they want, and often these people are too used to being exploited to see the signs.
“Manipulation is a baseline practice in businesses and when we allow it to exist we set people up in exploitive relationships,” she said. “When being exploited is normalized for people, red flags don’t go off in their minds, which can lead to dangerous situations like sex trafficking.”
With more than 20 years of experience working with youth, Elliot understands how people, especially kids, can fall vicitim.
“They feed the person what they want or need,” Elliot said. “They take advantage of someone in a bad situation. It could be anyone, it might be a high school girl looking to be validated for her clothing choices.”
Sex and related topics are difficult subjects, Page said.
“There’s a lot of shame,” she said. “We’re not having those difficult conversations, and while it is a very personal conversation, when (human trafficking) is happening in our backyard we got to talk about it.”
Human trafficking can occur anywhere, be it in a city or a more rural area, and it occurs more often than is reported.
“These criminals aren’t caught nearly enough,” Page said. “The truth is we barely have enough support from the law to prosecute human traffickers, and buyers barely have consequences for what they are doing.”
But to Page, the lack of support through the legal system is only part of the problem.
“The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has a Human Trafficking Task Force,” she said. “And they will investigate and build cases for years, like two or three years against traffickers to be able to take them to court. And it’s hard to gather the evidence. And a lot of times, victims/survivors will go back into the life they had because there isn’t any place for them to go while their case is being built and investigated.”
Page and Elliot are dedicated in the fight against human trafficking, and said they will keep having the hard conversation as many times as it takes. One of the ways they are doing this is through a Stories Foundation project, Storyteller Cafe.
The Cafe will be a place for awareness and prevention, and also a place for survivors and most vulnerable. Survivors will receive job training, jobs and housing.
Page had the idea in 2012 after she learned about human trafficking. She started Stories Foundation with support from her parents.
“We’d always wanted to start a coffee shop,” she said. “And we knew about a nonprofit coffee shop in Washington, D.C., that did what we wanted, so we thought we could do it too. Admittedly, 11 years later, slightly naive, thinking it would be easy. Nothing good is easy, but I thought that we could use business for good — we could use business as an avenue for people to donate in a way that they were getting something in return.”
Page’s coffee shop didn’t gain ground until much later in her nonprofit career.
“We started with a food truck,” she said. “In 2016 we raised money to get the truck going and we launched it in 2017. We kept that going until 2020.”
During 2020 instead of continuing with the food truck Page looked back into setting up the cafe and found land in Ramsey, Minnesota.
“Since then we’ve been trying to raise money for the cost of the building,” she said.
The cafe will cost $1.8 million to build, and Stories Foundation has raised around $437,000. The cafe’s goal is to break ground this spring and finish construction no later than December.
“I believe we can do it,” Elliot said. “I believe we need to do it. Now is the time. So I committed to raising $20,000 in the Hutchinson area.”
