A Survivor Story

Before she was taken to *Iowa, *M.B. wasn’t all that different from a lot of other troubled teenagers. She was an eighth grader who fell in love easily and had a habit of skipping school. A girl from a single-parent home, rebelling against Mom’s rules. A runaway who considered herself wise in the ways of the world.

“I don’t know that it was anything that isn’t fairly common in a lot of adolescents,” said *John Smith, *Dubuque-based state Division of Criminal Investigation special agent in charge, who got to know the girl in his two years investigating the case as a field agent. “But she encountered and got involved with some dangerous people. People who certainly did not have her best interests at heart.

“Unfortunately I don’t think she’s the only one. I’m sure there have been many, many other young girls that have ended up in the same situation. This was just one that we know about and hear about.”

Not all those stories have happy endings, Kisner said.

Trafficking victims usually are young and poor, and the less education they have, the easier they are manipulated by traffickers, researchers say. A 2015 Croft Institute for International Studies report says traffickers isolate and disorient victims and use violence to ensure they live in constant fear. Pimps look for girls who are “gullible, vulnerable, misguided, who have low self-esteem.”

“They’re more easy to mislead,” he said.

Vulnerable 13- and 14-year-olds routinely are recruited to prostitution, said *Melissa Jones, a research psychologist who has studied prostitution for 14 years. “Thirteen-year-olds think they know a lot about the world, but they don’t,” Farley said.

Researchers say most victims of human trafficking won’t go to police, even if they get an opportunity to do so, because of the severe psychological stress and the threat of violence. And local police rarely are trained to recognize victims and bring them to safety.

M.B. was interviewed a few days after she was kidnapped, but — scared, disoriented and distrustful — she didn’t ask for help. Instead, she gave a false name and birthday. Police watched her pimp's house for weeks until they saw evidence that a girl was being held there and used in prostitution and M.B. was rescued.

Only by working together and actively seeking out victims can police successfully intervene, researchers say. In the case of M.B., that effort was spearheaded by the perseverance of local police.

* Changed to preserve identity