DECATUR — The city of Decatur’s efforts to guard against the dangers of human trafficking were saluted at Monday evening’s council meeting.
Decatur Mayor Julie Moore Wolfe and Police Chief Brad Allen are pictured with Center for Prevention of Abuse CEO Carol Merna. The group presented the city with a Partner in Peace certification award for the its work in training staff to recognize and report human trafficking.
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British police have urged people with information to come forward about claims of human trafficking and sexual assault from the 1990s which appeared in the Epstein files. Surrey Police said the allegations, set out in a redacted report released by the US Department of Justice in December, allegedly took place in Virginia Water between 1994 and 1996.
Parlors of abuse: Our nation’s sex trafficking gauntlet
Lee Enterprises Public Service Team did a first-of-its-kind analysis of states’ efforts to protect women who are subject to sex trafficking at illicit massage parlors.
Here’s how the Lee Enterprises Public Service Team did a first-of-its-kind analysis of states’ efforts to protect women who are subject to sex…
A Lee Enterprises investigation found most states fail to protect vulnerable women and few law enforcement agencies punish the owners of the businesses, let alone go after their support networks.
Trafficking cases can be complex, leading some jurisdictions to take shortcuts by arresting or disciplining the women for prostitution, which experts say is punishing the victims without solving the problem.
Xiuwen Zhang — a Chinese immigrant and state-licensed massage therapist who owns XF Massage in Chesterfield, Virginia — discusses her arrest.
FBI data from local police departments show that only seven percent of human trafficking offenses led to arrests from 2021 to 2023 — 1,344 arrests for 19,225 reported offenses.
For years YunXi Wang felt helpless, shuffling from one illicit massage parlor to another, coerced into providing massages with so-called "happy endings."
One detective used an approach that experts now consider a model for tackling the exploitation of immigrant women trapped in the human trafficking trade.
“If you can hit them with enough regulatory and civil actions, they close up because it’s too much hassle to keep operating.”
Their aim, which mirrored their work in intelligence, was to gather data on this secret world and then convince authorities to hold the owners of the businesses accountable.
Contact Tony Reid at (217) 421-7977. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyJReid
Tony Reid
Macon County Courts Reporter
