A Victim-Centered Approach to Sex Trafficking Cases
By Larry Alvarez, M.S., and Jocelyn Cañas-Moreira
11/9/2015
A 17-year-old girl was lured by someone she thought was an older boyfriend. She ran away from
home to be with him, becoming isolated and estranged from her middle-class parents. With
meager funds and no education or work experience, the girl was told to use her body. Almost
immediately, she began dancing at a strip club and having sex for money. Her body was sold on
the Internet and in classified ads, at strip clubs and private parties, and on the streets, sometimes
as often as 20 times per day. Years of emotional, physical, sexual, and psychological abuse and
manipulation replaced her dreams of going to college and becoming a nurse. Over time, she even
forgot her name; instead, she bore tattoos of her pimp’s name so she would know that she forever
was his property. Control over her emotions, behavior, thoughts, and life disappeared as she was
trafficked from one hotel to the next, between cities, and across different states.
Cycle of Control
As this scenario illustrates, prostitutes often are victims of sex trafficking. Smuggling individuals
for
sex and forced labor is a worldwide criminal enterprise with an estimated annual revenue of $32
billion—surpassed only by the illegal drug trade.[1]
Law enforcement agencies usually combat prostitution with traditional vice enforcement focused
on the street-level sex trade. Prostitutes frequently are arrested, treated as nuisance offenders by
the criminal justice system, and returned to the streets shortly thereafter, propagating an ongoing
series of events. While they are criminalized, the true predatory offenders—pimps and
traffickers—are empowered to continue manipulating, controlling, and forcing girls into sexual
servitude.
Prosecution for pimping often is difficult due to the lack of
credibility of prostitutes. Their high-risk, transient lifestyle—
occasionally involving narcotics—as well as exposure to a cycle
of abuse and violence, renders the best efforts of police departments and prosecutors futile.
Traditional law enforcement approaches generate large arrest numbers, but typically are
unsuccessful in identifying victims or providing them with the resources necessary to break the
cycle of control.
Nonjudgmental Approach
Victims’ testimonies are crucial to law enforcement investigations and successful prosecutions.
Building trust and rapport with a traumatized victim is critical. A victim-centered approach
provides a systematic focus on the individual’s needs and concerns to ensure compassionate and
sensitive delivery of services in a nonjudgmental manner.[2]
Identifying, not criminalizing, victims is the first step in adopting a victim-centered strategy. To
achieve this goal, officers must be committed to helping victims feel safe, secure, and stable.
They should use available resources, such as social services and victim assistance programs.
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also are valuable during the recovery process.
Consistent with a growing trend in current public policy, support and protection of victims
should be provided regardless of their active cooperation with an ongoing investigation.[3]
A victim-centered approach to sex trafficking investigations is useful in breaking the cycle of
violence and control. Law enforcement officers can build relationships with potential sources to
expose and dismantle sex-trade networks. Investigators should target traffickers and pimps and
identify and rescue additional exploited victims who continue to be manipulated.
BITE Model
Undue influence—mind control, thought reform, and psychological power—often is endured by
trafficked victims.[4] The BITE (Behavior, Information, Thoughts, and Emotions) Model of
Human Trafficking centers on this process.[5] It focuses extensively on traffickers’ and pimps’
capacity to control victims by undermining their ability to think and act independently.
Figure 1 – The Human Trafficking BITE Model
Behavior
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Regulating an individual’s physical reality
Dictating where, how, and with whom a victim lives and associates
Manipulating, exploiting, and controlling a person’s sexuality
Controlling permissible types and colors of clothing and hairstyles
Regulating one’s diet—withholding food or drink as punishment
Confiscating passports or other vital documents
Depriving individuals of sleep or manipulating their sleep cycle
Introducing drugs to induce dependency (sometimes without informed consent)
Exploiting, manipulating, and causing financial dependency
Restricting leisure, entertainment, and access to schooling and jobs
Spending extensive time on grooming and indoctrination
Requiring permission for decisions
Forcing victims to report the thoughts, feelings, and activities of themselves and others
Modifying behaviors through punishment
Discouraging individualism
Imposing rigid rules and regulations
Threatening harm to a person’s family or friends
Providing little or no medical treatment or mental health support
Instilling obedience and dependency
Information
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Deceiving victims
Deliberately withholding information
Distorting information to make it acceptable
Systematically lying
Minimizing or discouraging access to competing sources of information
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Discouraging individual thought and investigation through constant tasking
Controlling a victim’s movements through texting, phone calls, and Internet tracking
Compartmentalizing information into “outsider vs. insider” doctrines
Encouraging spying on other victims to report deviant thoughts, feelings, and actions
Ensuring individual behavior is monitored by a trafficker or trafficking network
Extensively using protrafficking propaganda around victims
Using information about an individual’s past to disrupt or dissolve identity boundaries
and instigate manipulation and control
Thoughts
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Requiring internalization of a trafficker’s doctrine as truth
Deciding what is “good” or “evil” for a victim
Forcing an “us vs. them” mentality
Changing a person’s name and identity
Using loaded language to constrict knowledge, rather than expand it
Using hypnotic techniques to alter mental state
Manipulating a victim’s memories and creating false ones
Applying thought-stopping techniques
Promoting denial, rationalization, justification, and wishful thinking
Rejecting rational analysis, critical thinking, and constructive criticism
Viewing alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or not useful
Emotions
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Manipulating and narrowing a victim’s range of feelings—exploiting desire for love or
work
Numbing or stopping emotions—blocking feelings of homesickness, anger, and doubts
Making the victim feel that problems always are their own fault
Using excessive identity, social, and historical guilt
Instilling excessive fear, including fear of death
Praising the victim, then stating they are unworthy
Inculcating irrational fears about leaving or questioning the trafficker’s authority
Threatening
Coercing victims to harm themselves or others
Sharing information with an individual’s family or others to embarrass or dishonor them
Turning a victim over to law enforcement, possibly leading to their incarceration
Source: Dr. Steven A. Hassan, excerpt from “Steven Hassan’s Human Trafficking BITE
Model,” Freedom of Mind Resource Center,
https://www.freedomofmind.com/Info/Human%20Trafficking/HumanTraffickingBITEModel.php
Traffic Jam
Traffickers have capitalized on the popularity and accessibility of the Internet to advertise their
victims via classified websites. To combat this exploitation, a university computer science lab
developed Traffic Jam, a large-scale analytical system designed for law enforcement to provide
an accurate, high-level, efficient analysis of online sex ads to identify traffickers and victims.[6]
After a user enters a phone number into the search field, Traffic Jam explores Internet classified
sites to determine where and when that particular number has been used, displays trails of ad
movement, and pinpoints interstate tracks to which a victim or number can be linked. The system
recognizes that telephone numbers can be switched and applies techniques that enable
investigators to spot alternate numbers associated with an individual. Because phones often are
swapped, the system also can identify additional victims tied to a particular number. These
results provide investigators real-time information regarding potential interstate networks of sex
traffickers.
Strategy Implementation
Like many enterprises, escort services require regulated and monitored police department
permits to conduct business. However, these services have been suspected as fronts for
prostitution rings. Department personnel tasked with issuing permits can work with officers
assigned to vice, gangs, narcotics, and organized crime—as well as other local, state, and federal
agencies—to prevent prostitution and, thereby, sex trafficking from becoming legitimatized
within their jurisdictions.
One permit enforcement team recently conducted an escort sting operation focused on permit
violations and prostitution activity. To identify and arrest individuals engaged in pimping, the
team took a victim-centered approach to the investigation. Detectives working from a local hotel
contacted an in-call escort from an online adult classified ad. When undercover officers
encountered a prostitution violation, the escort was taken to a secondary room used for
interviewing and booking. The room was staffed by experienced detectives and advocates from a
human trafficking NGO.
Prostitutes often are trained on what to say when confronted by
police officers, sometimes resorting to a prearranged script.
Knowing this, detectives used Traffic Jam during the interview to
learn which cities the escort recently had visited, thus, identifying potential prostitution tracks
and networks. The investigators applied this information to weaken the escort’s predetermined
script and dismantle an alibi. As the woman’s story unraveled, NGO advocates provided
intervention techniques to ascertain whether she was a sex trafficking victim and begin breaking
the cycle of violence and control. The escort’s resultant confession enabled detectives to capture
statements, phone data, and digital photos and identify additional victims.
Two weeks after the interview, the victim contacted law enforcement for help. Her pimp
kidnapped her child and forced her to continue prostituting. Previously, she had no one to turn to;
however, the victim-centered approach used by police resulted in the woman’s trust. Police
mobilized resources, and within hours her pimp, a longtime gang member on probation for
pimping, was in jail. The victim and her child were recovered and placed in an emergency
shelter. The pimp’s arrest generated leads for additional investigations by the regional human
trafficking task force. Two months later, the victim wrote police a letter of appreciation
indicating she had returned to her family drug free and escaped the cycle of abuse she endured
from her traffickers.
Conclusion
Law enforcement officers can impact the lives of sex trafficking victims by adopting a victimcentered approach in their investigations. By focusing on victims’ needs and concerns and not
criminalizing their actions, officers make victims more receptive to the efforts of agencies and
NGOs and better prepare them to break from the cycle of abuse, violence, and manipulation.
Coupled with this approach, law enforcement organizations should apply available resources and
emerging technologies to think outside the box for solutions to sex trafficking networks and
rising trends in the sex trade. The results can lead vulnerable, desperate victims toward a road to
recovery and rewarding, productive lives.
Detective Alvarez is an adjunct professor of criminal justice at College of
the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California. He can be contacted at
larryjalvarez@yahoo.com.
Ms. Cañas-Moreira studies sociology and criminology at California State
University, Northridge.
Endnotes
[1] Chuck Neubauer, “Sex Trafficking in the U.S. Called ‘Epidemic,’” The Washington Times,
April 23, 2011, accessed August 4, 2015,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/23/sex-trafficking-us-calledepidemic/?page=all; and CharitySub, “Sex Trafficking in the U.S.,” July 2012, accessed August
13, 2015, https://www.charitysub.org/sex-trafficking-in-the-us.
[2] New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice, “Standards for Providing Services to Survivors of
Sexual Assault,” The State of New Jersey, Department of Law and Public Safety, August 1998,
accessed August 4, 2015, http://www.njdcj.org/standar2.htm.
[3] California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST), POST Guidelines
on Law Enforcement Response to Human Trafficking, POST2007BTB-0394 (November 2014),
accessed August 4, 2015, http://lib.post.ca.gov/Publications/human_trafficking.pdf.
[4] “Steven Hassan’s Human Trafficking BITE Model,” Freedom of Mind Resource Center,
accessed August 4, 2015, https://freedomofmind.com/Services/HumanTraffickingBITE.php.
[5] Ibid.
[6] “Traffic Jam: Addressing the Epidemic of Child Sexual Exploitation in the United States,”
Carnegie Mellon University, Auton Lab, November 6, 2012, accessed August 4, 2015,
http://www.autonlab.org/autonweb/21097.html.