Human Trafficking On The Cape? It Exists.

ORLEANS – By age 13, Jasmine Grace had started partying, drinking and using drugs. She was also sexually active.

“If I wasn’t giving it away, they were taking it,” she told a room full of law enforcement personnel from across the Cape Nov. 9 at the Orleans Police Department. “So I did experience sexual violence as a teen, but I didn’t have anyone to help me process. So what do you do? Shame. You carry more shame.”

Through her struggles, Jasmine entertained dreams of something better. She finished high school and was taking college courses in journalism. One day, she thought, maybe she’d move to New York City to write for a fashion magazine.

But that all changed one night while out with friends.

At the Palace Night Club in Saugus, she met a man. On the surface, he looked like the embodiment of success: good looks, money, clothes, “bling.”

“I happen to be there with friends, and I meet a guy,” she said. “He buys me a drink, and I’m impressed. Seven bucks, that’s all it took.”

They exchanged numbers, and a few days later he picked her up in a “champagne colored Mercedes-Benz,” she said. They began dating, and she recalled being plied with gifts and given everything she wanted or needed. But while she didn’t know it at the time, she was being “groomed” for a life she didn’t want.

Jasmine at the time had her cosmetology license and was attending community college. But he had other plans. All she needed, he told her, was him.

“He’s planting these seeds of doubt in my mind the entire time, but I don’t recognize it,” she said. “He’s saying ‘Why would you want to work in a hair salon? You can own one. Why would you want to go to school for journalism? That’s stupid. I know a way we can make a lot of money. We can have a family, a business, a home.’

“You have to remember, the false promises are huge,” she said. “We don’t recognize it as false because he’s telling us what we want to hear.”

Jasmine quickly found herself entangled in the world of sex trafficking. For eight years, she worked in brothels in Connecticut and Maine, other times as far off as Nevada and Florida. The cycle of physical, mental and emotional abuse, coupled with drug addiction, proved near impossible to escape.

Her experience in sex and human trafficking fostered a sense of distrust for people in many professions, including law enforcement. In Maine, she recalled, police were paid off to turn a blind eye toward the activities in her brothel.

Asked what police could have done differently to help her, Jasmine emphasized the importance of “trauma informed care” for victims.

“I know you’re going in for one thing, and you want to arrest the bad guy,” she said. “But you just want to recognize what’s really happening for people, and to be aware that there’s probably more to the story.”

Now police departments across the Cape, with help from the Cape and Islands District Attorney's Office, the Barnstable County Sheriff's Office and federal agencies including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, are working to better understand the threat that human trafficking poses in the region.

Working Toward A Solution

Last Thursday, a meeting and training session was held for a new working group focused on identifying and prosecuting human trafficking offenses locally. The group, led by Orleans Police Chief Scott MacDonald, is composed of designated officers from police departments from Bourne out to Provincetown.

MacDonald is a member of the Cape Cod Regional Law Enforcement Council. Each member on the council is assigned “disciplines” to look into. One of MacDonald’s was domestic violence.

“As I did my research, I started looking into this human trafficking issue,” he said. “I thought this is something we might want to dig into a little deeper.”

To learn more, MacDonald reached out to Cape Cod PATH (People Against Human Trafficking). The nonprofit was formed in 2014 in response to the lack of “statistics or resources” on human trafficking locally. Since then, the group has worked to raise awareness about the issue at the local, state and federal level. It also works with the Department of Homeland Security to provide human trafficking training locally.

“From the beginning, our members have had a strong working relationship with a victim assistance specialist in the Department of Homeland Security Investigations, and we are in the process of developing partnerships with local organizations,” the organization says on its website.

The law enforcement council gave “overwhelming” support for investigating the issue further, which MacDonald said led to the formation of the working group. A kick-off meeting was held in July, where the need to commit further training and resources to human trafficking was discussed.

“Do we feel it is a problem on the Cape? Is it something that we need to look at further? And the answer to that question was ‘Yes,’” MacDonald said.

At the outset, the learning curve is steep. Most police personnel in attendance at last week’s session in Orleans attested to having little or no experience with human trafficking cases.

That lack of experience can in part be explained by the fact that in Massachusetts, human trafficking laws are relatively new. It wasn’t until the passage of “An Act Relative To The Commercial Exploitation of People” in 2011 that such laws went on the books.

“I don’t think previously it has been a focus in the DA’s office,” admitted Cape and Islands District Attorney Rob Galibois.

But the problem is one that exists on Cape Cod, said Det. Catarina Parache of the Barnstable Police Department, who has been a licensed sexual assault investgator since 2015.

Parache said part of the difficulty in identifying and investigating trafficking cases is the way in which they coexist with more common offenses, namely those involving domestic violence and drugs.

“I was seeing a lot of cases that were suspicious,” she said. “They present sometimes as being either domestic violence or drug related, but digging beneath the surface you’re seeing it wasn’t just domestic violence or just drug trafficking.”

“I think the biggest thing, which you probably heard, is there’s a lack of awareness and understanding,” said Vanessa Madge, who heads up the district attorney’s office’s child protection and human trafficking unit. “So it definitely exists here, but people don’t recognize it. They have the idea that it appears in a different form.”

And while the term trafficking often carries a sexual connotation, there is also the issue of labor trafficking, which involves bringing in workers and subjecting them to poor working conditions. As a region that depends heavily on seasonal employees, many of whom come to the Cape as visaed workers, MacDonald said the ability for local police to effectively address labor trafficking is important.

“Cape Cod is ripe for that when you look at the increased seasonal labor population that comes to the Cape,” he said. “So I think that’s something we really need to dig into, and we need to learn how to better investigate that type of crime.”

Hidden In Plain Sight

Last week’s meeting of the working group came amidst news of a federal bust of a brothel ring extending from Cambridge to Washington, D.C. The ring allegedly catered to wealthy clients including politicians and business executives.

The bust showcased how sex trades can operate even in the most visible and densely populated of areas. And if it can happen in major cities, it can also occur on the Cape, local officials say, even if it might not be readily apparent to residents and visitors.

“It is here,” MacDonald said. “It might be behind closed doors. It might not be what you typically see in more urban areas out on the street.”

Instances of labor trafficking, meanwhile, can be even more problematic to identify and investigate, Madge said.

“Because if you’re doing sex work, that is illegal,” she said. “But if you’re just working, it’s kind of a harder thing to catch.”

Compounding the problem further is social media, which makes sex and labor trafficking easier to commit and harder to identify and prosecute. Jasmine said the technology poses a particular threat for children, who are among the strongest adopters of social media and can be easy targets for groomers and predators.

“Today you don’t even need a trafficker,” she said. “You don’t need a pimp. The internet does it for you.”

Cape Cod PATH lists children between the ages of 12 and 14 as being among those most vulnerable to sex trafficking, specifically “homeless or runaway youth” and “children in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.”

“These con artists, they’ll take three, four, five months…and they watch for these young kids,” said Shirley Smith, who chairs the Outer Cape Committee Against Domestic Abuse. “They read their messages and go back and forth. They come in as a friend, and they woo [them].”

For 30 years, Smith’s group has worked to raise awareness about domestic abuse and, through its partnership with the Wellfleet nonprofit Mass Appeal, provide resources to victims in need of help. Raising awareness about the issue has been a slow, steady fight, and she envisions it will be the same when it comes to raising awareness about trafficking issues locally. But Smith still recalls the advice that Artie Parker, the former chief of police in Wellfleet, gave her years ago.

“He said to me, and he was absolutely right, ‘Shirley, just keep talking about it. Abusers don’t want you talking about that. They want your silence, and don’t give them that.’”

A Renewed Focus

Galibois said one of his first priorities upon being elected district attorney last November was to create a unit dedicated to human trafficking. With help from members of the Cape’s legislative delegation, he was able to secure the additional funding needed to launch the unit through the fiscal 2024 state budget.

From there, he reached out to Madge, who at the time was prosecuting trafficking cases for the Attorney General’s office.

“I knew Vanessa from my own career being an attorney,” he said. “I contacted her. She’s really skilled. I said ‘Hey, I just got a bump up in budget. I’d love for you to come down here and launch our human trafficking unit if you’d be interested.’”

One of Madge’s first orders of business was applying for funding to boost training for local police and members of the district attorney’s office, as well as create resources for victims and survivors of trafficking. Earlier this month, Galibois’ office applied for a $97,000 grant through the state’s Office of Grant and Research.

Parache said training is pivotal given the relative inexperience officers and police personnel have in investigating and handling trafficking cases.

“As you’ve heard, there’s different levels of experience in the room,” she said. “There’s different levels of experience on the Cape. But let’s start with what Chief MacDonald has been doing, which is ‘Let’s get everyone at a base level, and let’s start from there.’”

Efforts to step up enforcement on trafficking can begin with asking simple questions during otherwise routine stops, Parache said. That includes whether someone knows the other person in the car with them and if they are free to leave.

What started as a working group could eventually evolve into a “task force” with the ability to further investigate trafficking issues, MacDonald said.

“Once we have that basis of knowledge as a group, we want these representatives to go back to their respective departments and teach their personnel,” he said.

Following last week’s meeting, MacDonald said the group could begin focusing on specific areas of interest for future training. That could include looking at social media’s role in the issue of trafficking.

“We are incredibly excited to be launching this,” Galibois said. “We’re truly building this from the ground up, and I can’t emphasize enough how grateful I am for Chief MacDonald for really leading the charge here on the Cape.”

‘You’re A Survivor’

Today, Jasmine Grace lives in New Hampshire. She is 16 years sober, married and the mother of five children. She found religion, and today runs her own nonprofit, Jasmine Grace Outreach, which works to help and empower women to overcome the trauma of sex trafficking.

In 2016, she released a book, “The Diary of Jasmine Grace,” telling her story. Most recently, she began operating a residential house, Living Hope Farms, for women and their families looking to rebuild their lives after having been exploited through trafficking.

The path out of trafficking wasn’t easy, Jasmine said. She struggled to adjust to a typical 9 to 5 lifestyle, which led to a lapse into homelessness, drugs and more sex work. At the same time, she also endured the loss of her brother, who had also struggled with drugs and prostitution.

“I knew this wasn’t supposed to be my life,” she said.

But positive changes came with a shift in focus. After years of looking at herself as a victim, a friend, after hearing her, story cast her in a different light.

“‘You’re a survivor,’” she said. “‘You’re amazing’. So then all of a sudden I didn’t look through the lens of a victim. I was a survivor, and I was empowered.”

For local officials, there’s hope that gains can be made toward combating trafficking to give others like Jasmine a chance at a better life, even if the process is gradual.

“We have a lot of work to do, but we’re off to a really good start,” MacDonald said.

Email Ryan Bray at ryan@capecodchronicle.com