Anti-Trafficking Committee working on awareness
Dec. 6—CLINTON — The Sisters of St. Francis Clinton Area Anti-Trafficking Committee has asked the City Council to declare January 2024 as an awareness month of human trafficking in our community.
The proclamation would precede an educational event organized by the committee to tentatively be held in Clinton Community College's auditorium.
Committee facilitator and Franciscan Peace Center director of programming Marsha Thrall says that, for many, human trafficking is an uncomfortable subject.
"As long as there's more than me in the room," she said during the committee's meeting held Monday, "then we've reached somebody else."
Statistics show that Illinois ranks in the top 10 nationwide in human trafficking cases. In 2021, the National Human Trafficking Hotline identified 243 cases in the state, with 355 victims reported.
In 2022, the Iowa Network Against Human Trafficking and Slavery reported the estimated number of Iowa victims at any given time to be 320.
The International Air Transport Association, the trade association for the world's airlines, calls human trafficking the fastest-growing and second-largest criminal industry in the world.
Its victims, as defined under U.S. federal law, include adults coerced or deceived into commercial sex acts, children involved in the sex trade in any way, and anyone forced into labor or service against their will, such as domestic workers held in a home, farm workers forced to labor without the freedom to leave, or any form of debt bondage.
The Clinton Area Anti-Trafficking Committee meets at 6:30 p.m. on the first Monday of each month either by attending in-person in the Activity Room of The Canticle on 13th Avenue North or via Zoom.
Its members, according to ClintonFranciscans.com, work to prevent potential victims from becoming vulnerable in the first place by providing education and advocating for job training, housing, and mental health support to create a society in which it's never acceptable to exploit any human being for any reason.
They discuss lesser-known aspects of human trafficking, such as males as victims and the prevalence of the trafficking of male college sports athletes.
The committee also talks about what to do about human trafficking, then takes action.
In 2021, then-mayor of Fulton, Illinois, Mike Ottens signed a proclamation to designate the city a "Trafficking Free Zone."
Around the same time, Clinton mayor Scott Maddasion signed the same proclamation, making the City of Clinton the first city in Iowa to publicly and officially declare that human trafficking would not be tolerated within the community.
The Trafficking Free Zone program was created by the U.S. Institute Against Human Trafficking (USIAHT) and was promoted locally by the Sisters of St. Francis Franciscan Peace Center to help communities arrest and prosecute buyers of sex.
Human trafficking is combated locally, as well, by the Blackhawk Area Task Force, a partnership formed between law enforcement agencies in Iowa and Illinois that focuses on targeting the systemic issues that cause human trafficking, including providing victim services while focusing on cracking down on traffickers.
Clinton Police Department's Cpl. Joshua Winter of the Criminal Investigation Division, who has worked with the Task Force, was one of the speakers at the committee's educational program held last Jan., along with Clinton Deputy Chief of Police Jim Ballauer and "Braking Traffik" survivor advocate Ellie Lindmark.
The committee's eight members have struggled to gain visibility for the program, causing uncertainty to be expressed among them during Monday's meeting regarding the group's future following the next event. It is the hope that a City Council proclamation will alleviate this.
The Clinton Area Anti-Trafficking Committee meets again on Jan. 8. For more information, contact Thrall at mthrall@clintonfranciscans.com.
If you are a victim of human trafficking and need help, call (888) 377-7888 or text the word "help" to 233733 (BeFree).
