Increasing trafficking awareness

In many cases, victims are regularly transported across city and state lines to further exploit them or keep law enforcement off of their trail.

The State Department notes that one of the major problems with trafficking is that no official statistics exist about the crime as a whole—the only statistics that exist are from cases that have been discovered or prosecuted.

The Spruces host several Safe Transitions courses each year as part of their nonprofit organization, Disrupt Human Trafficking, a volunteer group that provides law enforcement training, community awareness programs and targeted classes to the general public.

"In a recent Transitions class a mom disclosed to everyone that she suffered everything in a previous relationship that the Safe Transitions course had covered," Rita Spruce said. "She spoke to us about her perilous journey to break free from her abusive relationship and all that it entailed to her family.

"The revelation took me by surprise," she said. "This mother was exposed to the elements when she was younger and was able to escape. She felt so strongly about it that she revealed this information to her daughter for the first time in front of everyone."

State Rep. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, filed four bills March 4 to combat human trafficking in his district and throughout the state. The bills are intended to be a multifaceted effort to fight trafficking in the name of child safety.

"We are going to attack this problem at both ends," Parker said. "First we are going to crack down on those who take advantage of children, and then we are going to pave the way to get victims the help they need to recover, rebound and move on to productive lives."

Children are not excluded from trafficking. According to Dixie Hairstrom with the advocacy organization Children At Risk, there are about 10,000 child runaways in Texas each year—and one-third of those will be lured into the sex trade within 48 hours of leaving home. The average age for a child to enter the trafficking world is 13.

As filed, House Bill 2391 aims to decrease demand for sexual traffickers by increasing penalties for those who solicit prostitutes. HB 2291 would increase the penalties for individuals with multiple convictions of possessing child pornography. HB 2286 would provide a way for individuals convicted of prostitution to possibly overturn their convictions, and HB 2290 would designate the month of January as Human Trafficking Prevention Month to increase public awareness.

"Virtually everyone in Texas is touched in some way by this crime," Parker said. "We live in a state that accounts for 14 percent of all calls received by the National Human Trafficking Resource Center."

On a local level, The Fort Worth Regional Transportation Authority announced in January that it was partnering with DART for a new public awareness campaign on how to recognize and report potential trafficking.

The Denton County Transportation Authority, Megabus, Amtrak and Greyhound have also partnered with DART for the campaign.

The campaign has two major components: training and advertisements. Posters on agency vehicles draw attention to trafficking, and employees are also being trained on how to spot indicators of trafficking.

"Trafficking is lucrative because of how easy and cheap it is to start," Bill Spruce said. "Traffickers are opportunistic criminals who look for people that are in a very bad situation and offer them something slightly better than what they have."

A feature film

The details of human trafficking caught the attention of Dallas-based movie director Jaco Booyens in 2014, which led him to write and direct a movie that folds true stories together to show that human trafficking is a real occurrence that can be found in nearly every facet of society.

In preparation for the movie, titled "8 Days," Booyens, along with the cast and crew of the movie, worked with the Department of Homeland Security and state law enforcement agencies in order to learn about trafficking patterns and sting operations. The research also led Booyens to talk directly to survivors of trafficking.

"For the most part the American population does not know what trafficking looks like. It's a [hidden] epidemic: it's in our private schools. It's in the malls. It's in the communities. So for us making this movie was a no-brainer.

"[People] don't know that trafficking is in our neighborhoods," Booyens said. "We shot some of the movie in Highland Park for a reason. Every part of the film is inspired by actual events."

"This is not just in the red-light district ... it has literally infiltrated suburban America," Booyens said.