‘Familial’ human trafficking on the rise across region

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares joined Prince William County police leadership and others Sept. 13 in hopes of raising awareness of and increasing urgency around the issue of human trafficking locally. 

It was the third of Miyares’ roundtables on the issue: He previously held similar events in southwest Virginia and Hampton Roads. But he said the problem of human trafficking is increasing statewide, hand-in-hand with an increase in addiction since the COVID-19 pandemic that has led some to enter trafficking. 

“Too many people that live up here in Northern Virginia think that, ‘Well, it’s not happening in our community.’ It is,” Miyares told reporters before the event. “It is one of the most insidious crimes.”

Both Prince William County Police Chief Peter Newsham and Miyares had little in the way of specific data to describe the scale of the problem in the Northern Virginia area, but Miyares said familial trafficking – in which a family member, often deeply addicted, will traffic a young woman in their family – has become more frequent.

“We’ve seen an explosion of familial trafficking, family members that are struggling with addiction that then traffic their own children, their own daughters,” Miyares told reporters.

At last week’s event, most of which was closed to the media, Miyares was joined by Newsham, John Richmond, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for trafficking, Prince William Department of Social Services Director Courtney Tierney, Prince William School Board Chair Babur Lateef and others. 

Tanya Gould, a survivor of human trafficking and Miyares’ director for anti-human trafficking, also spoke about the need to make combating trafficking a priority in schools, police departments and elsewhere. 

Richmond told the assembled group that the country – and the world – is failing victims of human trafficking, too often arresting and prosecuting sex workers rather than those who frequently traffic them. If the county eventually wants to decriminalize sex work as other jurisdictions have done, Richmond said, that would be OK, but while the laws are on the books, why don’t police go after the buyers or sex workers to get closer to the people running networks of sexually trafficked women?

Newsham and Richmond both said more needs to be done to simply identify victims of trafficking from those who go missing in the area. 

“Those are the young people that are vulnerable. They don’t have adult supervision, and those are the type of folks that these predators will prey on,” Newsham said. “So what we do here is if we get a report from a missing person, we put all our efforts into locating them. If it’s a young person that needs services, we try to direct them to services. There’s a lot of non-governmental organizations that help us with that and … that’s one of the key ways to do it.”