At a recent Rotary Club of Ville Platte meeting, Laura Balthazar with the St. Landry-Evangeline Sexual Assault Center stated no sexual assault cases have been reported in the emergency room here in Ville Platte.
“That leads me to believe they are not detecting or not reporting,” Balthazar said.
Monica Taylor with the state’s Attorney General Office said measures are being put into place to make it easier for detecting and reporting sexual abuse.
“Throughout the state we have sexual assault nurse examiners who are trained in collecting forensic evidence,” Taylor said. “There is also the Sexual Assault Oversight Commission which has come up with a single kit. Everyone in the state is going to be using the same exam, and, by the end of the year, the state will be paying for it.”
Of all sexual assaults in the state, Taylor explained the most common is human trafficking and gave statistics to illustrate her point.
“In 2018,” she said, “there were 744 confirmed cases of human trafficking in Louisiana. Of those, 70 were sex trafficking, seven were labor trafficking, 18 were both, 428 were juveniles, 42 were under the age of 12, 678 were female, 44 were male, 13 were transgender, and nine were non-identified.”
Taylor then said human trafficking is not always what people think it is.
“When we think about human trafficking,” she said, “unfortunately we think about movies like Taken where somebody has someone locked in a room, tied down, and forced to do all these things.”
Taylor went on to explain the two most common kinds of human trafficking. The first is where a young girl begins dating an older boyfriend. He then takes her to eat, takes her to do her hair and nails, and to go shopping for new clothes.
“After a while,” Taylor said, “he’s going to start telling her, ‘this costs money, and you’re going to help me earn some money.’ And, the whole time, they are having an inappropriate sexual relationship. He’s pushing the boundaries and making her do more and more dangerous things sexually. Then, he will start selling her online and get her to recruit friends.”
She continued, “The other kind we see a lot of is when family members sell someone in their family. Maybe there is a mother who it happened to. She can no longer get any money from doing this, and she takes her daughter and does that with her because they have to pay the bills and put food on the table.”
However, according to Taylor, females are not the only ones who fall victim to this crime. “We’re starting to see it happen more and more to males,” she said.
This is partly through video games like Fortnite. Taylor said, “You go online and play against people you don’t know. You are playing against them, and you have headphones on so you can talk to them. You have no idea who is on the other end. Social media is the number one way people get them and sell them.”
One thing that can be done to help bring the number of cases down, as Taylor explained, is for people to become more aware “of the reality and the truth of what is going on out there.” She added, “This is not about physical bondage and transporting people across state lines or into the country. This isn’t about foreign nationals. This is about people who live in our communities everyday. This is all done by fear and manipulation.”
Taylor also said about awareness, “We’re calling it what it actually is. We used to call it prostitution, but we don’t call it prostitution anymore. We call it human trafficking.”
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TONY MARKS Editor