Where is Relisha Rudd?
A heartbreaking question about a missing eight-year-old child, who was living at the city’s family homeless shelter until she disappeared under troubling and confusing circumstances, with no answer at the moment.
One possibility, according to the group Black and Missing, is the little girl was sold into sex trafficking. Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier addressed the possibility during a WTOP interview: “We are exploring all those avenues. We have experts on our team that have been leading our investigation from our child exploitation task force that are working with the FBI.”
While we hold out hope that Relisha will be found while knowing we may never get an answer, it is clear that many “other Relishas” — children and teens from vulnerable situations — have met that fate. Indeed, sex trafficking in the District is a major issue, yet one that’s not very visible until you look at a site like Backpage.com. An Urban Institute report valued D.C.’s sex trade at $103 million in 2007, with child sex trafficking on the rise. The Protected Innocence Challenge gave D.C. a “D” on a report card that looks at sex trafficking laws applied to minors.
“The reason why we have such an epidemic problem here is really the juxtaposition of very, very poor population, children living in horrible poverty, and on the other side you have individuals who have considerable wealth and opportunity,” says Andrea Powell, the executive director and founder of the D.C. anti-trafficking organization Fair Girls. “So you have this parallel universe going on, and that’s what traffickers can prey upon. They prey upon the vulnerability of their victim and then capitalize on the demand for commercial sex.”
According to the Polaris Project, a national organization that fights trafficking and modern slavery, pimps and traffickers target runaways and at-risk youth. In a move to protect this population, advocates have drafted a bill that would change reporting methods for missing minors under custodial care, provide immunity and referrals to trafficking victims, and mandate training for police and Child and Family Services Agency employees. Still a work-in-progress, with agency input still being submitted, the bill is expected to be moved on this summer.
Led by the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates, the idea for the bill came from one of their member organizations, the Homeless Children’s Playtime Project. (The group runs a playroom out of D.C. General and served Relisha before her disappearance.) Founder and executive director Jamila Larson, a social worker, had a firsthand experience with a young teen who disappeared and was later found across the country, trafficked.
“Any city that has a huge problem with homelessness, it’s going to have a huge problem with trafficking,” Katie Dunn, a policy analyst at DCAYA, said. “If it has a problem with social injustice, it will have a problem with trafficking.”
The bill introduced last month by Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) would grant immunity to “minors suspected of engaging in or offering to engage in a sexual act or contact in return for receiving a fee” and refer them to an organization that treats them as a victim of trafficking. (Organizations like Fair Girls and Courtney’s House, which provide intensive help to victims in D.C.) Similar “safe harbor” laws have been passed in several states, including Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Vermont, and Washington.
“One of the most important aspects of the bill is that we will no longer treat individuals who have been trafficked who are underage as criminals,” Devin Barrington-Ward, Cheh’s Communications Director, said. “Instructing MPD to take them to service providers that can better assist them, rather than take them to a juvenile detention facility, is a much better approach.”
But Powell says bills like “safe harbor” often aren’t going to capture the majority of the victims “and really speak to the scope of the problem.”
“Because they’re not being identified,” she said of the victims. “It’s only those who are identified who might benefit from these types of policies and procedures.”
Part of correcting this comes from training government agencies and law enforcement in how to identify victims and properly treat them. “We want to make sure that everyone … is ready to look for red flags,” Dunn said. “There’s a lot of gray and nuances we think employees should be trained on.”
“Last year, Fair Girls served 112 cases of sex trafficking or … exploitation,” Powell said. “A majority of those cases, however, aren’t investigated by law enforcement or not actively looked at as trafficking cases for a variety of reasons.” This includes a victim’s decision not to report or if a case is being looked at in court for another reason, like truancy or abscondence (meaning a youth under custodial care is not where they are supposed to be as agreed to in a Community Release Agreement.)
“The majority of our clients who are minors are arrested on charges that are not related to trafficking,” Powell said. “But the trafficking is what put them in a position to be arrested for those charges.”
This bill proposes requiring new law enforcement officials and social workers to undergo at least 20 hours of human trafficking training and current law enforcement officials to take an 8-hour course.
Another step is providing for the resources to serve identified victims. Fair Girls, for example, is staffed by four-full time employees, while it provides free crisis support, education and therapeutic programs and, in the near future, a transitional home for trafficked women. “We’re really looking to bolster the capacity of other agencies and increase the number of resources, so when a child is identified either at-risk or having already experience trafficking, they can get the long-term coordinated care they need,” Powell said.
Integral to this is providing one individual to an at-risk youth who can follow them through the years to make sure they don’t fall through the cracks, she said.
The bill also proposes to change how some children are reported missing. Currently, if a minor under the care of a custodial agency, like Child and Family Services, is found to be missing or absconded, a police report must be filed within an hour, according to guidelines revised by CFSA in March and released this week. The agency also advises that “if the child is missing or has absconded for over a month, or s/he is believed to be outside of the Metropolitan area, the absconder worker may recommend that the social worker contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678 for assistance.”
The groups behind the bill would like to see mandated reporting by MPD to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Currently, there are five names of D.C. children on NCMEC’s website. One is Relisha Rudd, while three are from older cases where the victim is presumed deceased. Indeed, having the face of every D.C. child who is missing, no matter the circumstances, on NCMEC is key to Larson.
“There are so many missing teens in our community, many of whom are runaway and homeless youth who are at disproportionate risk of becoming victims of sex trafficking,” she said. “Mandating that missing children be reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is a critically important step to ensure that youth who go missing are actually being looked for and the community can help.”
One of the goals of the bill is to accurately reflect how many children go missing every year, as well as to provide more resources and a better foundation for “the people, the public servants out there who are working hard on this issue,” Dunn says. Mandated reporters — like teachers, medical professionals, public housing resident managers, and social workers — would be able to file a missing persons report under the proposed bill. People who, as CFSA’s website states, “are often the first adults to see signs of child abuse or neglect.”
“If we really start reporting anytime a child is missing and really start making a fuss when the child is falling through the system, we send a really strong message to pimps that these children in our city aren’t for sale. We’re going to notice when they’re missing,” Powell said.
Next week, a look at what happens after a minor is reported missing.
