23 Profile Essay

Profile Essay Prompt Based on Questionnaire: Write a profile essay on the responses you received from someone who took the questionnaire you created for your community change topic/issue. This should not be a career profile or personality profile but rather a profile on their thoughts, perspectives, and ideas on the issue at hand. Each profile essay should be at least 2 pages long. Write in third person but include first person as part of your direct quotes or as part of your observation as an interviewer. Your essay should not read as a question and answer, and the information does not have to follow the same order of the questions/ answers in the questionnaire.

The Perpetuating Problem
By Tesslynn Beeson

In 2023 the Homeland Security Investigations had a few success stories. One of them started in Houston, Texas, when a sex trafficker was contacting a 13-year-old via Snapchat. This social media platform was the start of the horrors. She was used for commercial sex, was supplied with drugs, and was even branded with a tattoo of her sex traffickers initials. She passed away at age 18, and he was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. The statistics for encountering human trafficking in 2023 were almost 1,300 investigations, more than 2,600 arrests, 1,000 indictments, and 500 convictions, according to HSI Criminal Investigations Statistics (2021). To get a local expert’s opinion on human trafficking, I interviewed my social work professor, Marti Reese, via Zoom. Marti’s perspective is that social media is playing a more powerful role in human trafficking than ever, and that people need to be more aware about the realities of these crimes.

First, Marti mentions that trafficking has grown with the help of social media and not with a positive impact. She mentioned the ease in communication using social media as well as the glamorization:
Social media in some ways can expose the problem at hand and the risks in a particular area because of the communication factor. Although some influencers online promote the actions by glorifying the lifestyle to think it is all that when the reality is it’s not. (Reese, 2024)
That said, social media can play a positive impact in trafficking because of the fast influence of particular platforms that information can be spread.

Secondly, Marti points out that human trafficking isn’t just sex workers; it is exploitation on all fronts. Typically, local-level officials are the first to recognize the rise in trafficking but when this becomes a state problem, the legislature tends to blow off any information that passes their way because the problem isn’t too big of a deal. In our local area, Lewiston, this problem has arisen, and law enforcement has a harder time cracking down with charges for these traffickers. Most often the charges that these traffickers get off with is rape, assault and kidnapping. A “slap on the wrist for their actions” states Marti. One of the things I found more interesting was when Marti Reece said that “a lot of people that are partaking with trafficked individuals, the pedophiles are often people that are high up in the community, like doctors, lawyers, wealthy people that are perpetuating the problem.”

Finally, Marti thinks that it is vitally important to be informed and aware of the situation of human trafficking. “You can reduce the risk in particular areas because they can look for signs.” She then says that human trafficking is happening right here in Lewiston and most people tend to look over that because our minds go to think it is happening in the bigger states, California, for example:
In fact, in the Lewiston area some investigators took down a trafficking operation and they had a pregnant woman and a buyer for both the baby and the mother separately. Once she gave birth to the child they were to be sold off for profit and then sell the women. Although some complications happened, and someone decided to take the women to the hospital, and it was quickly figured out something was going on.
(Reese, 2024)

Some solutions that could partake in the future are hard because “vulnerable people tend to believe that there isn’t outside help, and they feel that the short list of options going into this lifestyle is the best option.” When I asked the question of how you would deal with a human trafficking situation if one came your way she said, “I would find someone to refer to the case, a trusted individual.”

Marti Reece’s interview highlights that while social media can have a negative impact on human trafficking, it can also have a positive impact because information can get around faster. She believes that everyone should advocate for human trafficking that way more people are aware of the impact it can have on a community. My overall takeaways from this interview were how unaware most people are, how these events happen right under our noses, and how big of a role that social media plays in the topic at hand.

References

Reece, Marti. (2021). Personal interview.