A Conversation With Beth Holger About Sex Trafficking

I have been involved with youth experiencing homelessness and trafficking since 1999, right out of college. We’ve made so much progress since then. 

When I first started with youth homelessness, people didn’t really even talk about it. The idea was they were simply bad kids who ran away from home because they didn’t want to follow rules. There was not much awareness at all about why youth were actually homeless. There were only one or two emergency shelters for youth around the state. Many believed that it didn’t happen in suburban and rural areas. 

It took many years to get traction with the state legislature. Some people believed Child Protection Services took care of the kids. Brave young people came forward to share their stories about homelessness, to change the narrative, leading to passage of the Homeless Youth Act. We now have the funds to build shelters, housing, and services. Wilder research data indicates the numbers of homeless youth have gone down 17 percent between 2018 and 2023; I believe this is due to the awareness and advocacy work that led to the additional resources. 

We have more to do in order to get to functional zero youth homelessness, but suburban counties like Dakota, Scott, Carver, Washington, and Anoka now have nonprofits running programs. We also have more rural and tribal programming, more in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and more for LGBTQ+, Black, pregnant, and parenting youth.

I tell the younger youth workers this, because they don’t always see the progress that’s been made, which can give us hope for advancing the work. You have to be very persistent.

There also has been tremendous progress on youth trafficking. In the late 1990s, everyone was referring to young children as teen prostitutes — they were considered criminals even if they were 14 years old. It was horrifying. One youth got picked up, arrested, charged, placed in the juvenile detention center at Hennepin County, and then was re-released to a trafficker, who acted like they were a family member. 

These kids weren’t seen as children in need of protective services. They were seen as juvenile delinquents. A lot of us worked hard to get the Safe Harbor Law passed in 2011, which decriminalized prostitution offenses for youth under 16; now it is up to age 18. 

What tipped the narrative was having Marilyn Carlson Nelson and her daughter Wendy — who were leaders in the hotel industry. People listened to them more than me and trafficking survivors. The Carlsons didn’t want to be making money off of trafficking, so they started training their staff on warning signs, and started investing in us. That made the legislators listen. 

What We Can Do To Minimize Youth Trafficking

Traffickers are often recruiting youth who are vulnerable, that they think nobody cares about. That tends to be runaways or homeless youth or youth bouncing out of foster care. If we end youth homelessness, we will absolutely reduce trafficking. 

Traffickers are women or men, but most of the buyers are men. So, on the demand side, we need to figure out better ways of raising our sons — really changing how we raise our male children, teaching them it’s not okay to buy and sell women and young men. 

We have gone to the legislature to get anti-trafficking curriculum in schools, but it’s tough because it involves the word “sex.” Getting into schools as early as third grade would be helpful to teach the warning signs of grooming behavior, because traffickers recruit youth that are very young. It is controversial, but traffickers can be quite charming and manipulative, and are getting to children when they are young. So my opinion is that we have to get to those children first. 

 

The Work of Advocates

We believe that the youth themselves, the survivors, are the only people that have the power to save themselves. We’re more about helping to empower them. We have specialized shelters designed by survivors.

After we have a trusting relationship with the youth, and learn more about the family dynamics — and take information from law enforcement and child protection — we have a Family Support Specialist to help do family reunification counseling. If there are safe family members, the young person can move in with them eventually. 

Minnesotans have a hard time acknowledging that there is a significant number of youth that have been born into trafficking. It’s might be a family business, to put it the easiest way, perhaps with a mother, grandmother, aunts, fathers, stepdads, older brothers, uncles. That’s what they’ve grown up with. Or there are family members that will sell their children because they’re struggling to pay rent or to buy drugs.

I’m thankful that we have ongoing support for youth after they leave shelter and housing. After you start healing and you’re in a safe environment, that’s great, but when you go back into the community, it’s tough. You might be around the same triggers, or your trafficker starts reaching out to you again. Just last night, I took a call from a young person who went through our program and needed to reach out. 

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