Produced by:
KBOO
Program::
Air date:
Wed, 05/20/2009 - 5:00pm
Multnomah county has become one of the top spots in the nation for human trafficking.
County sheriff Keith Bickford reports that in Oregon, police are encountering three to five people per week who are victims of trafficking.
Eighty percent of the victims of this slave trade are women and half are children.
Washington State Crime Victims Advocacy names Portland as one of the main hubs in human trafficking between Seattle and California, because of the city’s ports and location.
Human trafficking brings in 32 billion dollars annually, and in Portland girls as young as 12 years old have been used as sex slaves.
KBOO’s Beth Crawford spoke with one of the organizers of a conference on Child sex trafficking:
According to the Oregon Human Trafficking Task Force, most human trafficking involves child prostitution.
The FBI says 300,000 children are trafficked each year in the United States.