Social injustice: ending human trafficking | News

PART 1:

Human trafficking is the theft of freedom for profit. In some cases, traffickers deceive, defraud, or physically force victims into selling sexual services. In others, victims are lied to, assaulted, threatened or manipulated into working in inhumane, illegal or otherwise unacceptable conditions. It is a multi-billion dollar criminal industry that deprives 24.9 million people of their freedom worldwide.

And if you think rural America – Gothenburg, Nebraska – is safe from human trafficking… you're wrong.

Nebraska State Trooper Tim Flick is passionate about fighting human trafficking, so much so that educating the public on the realities of the problem is now his full-time job as a community resource officer . Flick delivered his presentation in Gothenburg on Monday, June 10, as a guest of Gothenburg Rotary, and the Senior Center was filled with community members eager to know more and learn what they can do to help.

“In the state of Nebraska, we like to bury our heads in the sand. We call normality biased,” Flick began. “We pretend these things don’t happen here.”

Flick then asked the large crowd in attendance if they could guess the top three cities in Nebraska reporting human trafficking. Almost everyone guessed that Omaha and Lincoln were numbers one and two, but the surprise came with community number three. Scottsbluff.

While many of us tend to imagine human trafficking as a scary white van that men jump into and grab someone off the street, Flick pointed out that, more often than not, it's not the case. He explained how a person can find themselves in a situation they can't get out of, a case where perhaps they “owe” another person who decides to collect their debt, and the downward spiral begins.

In the state of Nebraska, between 2007 and 2019, law enforcement made contact with 1,329 individuals regarding human trafficking in 348 separate cases. The act of human trafficking, in its simplest form, involves exploiting people for money. This can be done in several different ways; sex trafficking and labor trafficking being the two main ones.

Next week, we'll continue our series with an in-depth look at what human trafficking is, what to look for, and what you can do.