Sex trafficking targets are often teenage girls, many of them lured via the internet.
Often, these are deemed as runaway situations, even when there is something more sinister going on.
It doesn’t help that the police don’t immediately label runaway cases as urgent. They do this because most runaways eventually come back home.
Unfortunately, according to the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children, one in seven of all reported runaways are victims of sex trafficking.
Once you factor statistics of more than 400,000 missing children every year, that number can be alarming.
When the police do come around to prioritizing a runaway case, it’s usually too late.
It’s for this reason that families looking for their children often fall prey to expensive but often unqualified private investigators offering plenty of false hope but few real results.
Who can they turn to if not the police?
Who is Saved In America?
Vice News did an interesting feature on a little known organization that works with parents to rescue children from sex trafficking.
They focused specifically on a mother, Ruth, whose daughter had been missing for more than a month. Even after it was reported, the police did nothing because, legally, they couldn’t.
After seeking out the help of Saved In America, they found her daughter, Lilly, in two days. What’s even more surprising is Saved In America didn’t charge Ruth a single cent for their services.
How it started
Pastor Joseph Travers founded Saved In America after reading an article about retired military men working to fight child sex slavery in Asia and the Middle East.
The article reminded him of an incident in which a teenage girl had gone missing in New York. The girl was sexually assaulted and brutally murdered by a gang involved in sex trafficking. It bothered him that a similar rescue operation didn’t exist to battle trafficking within the United States.
After reaching out to the team working in Asia and the Middle East, he came up with a plan to start Saved In America.
Building a team
The team strictly made up of retired special military operators and retired policemen who all work on a volunteer basis. They never charge parents for their services. All their operations are funded by organizations such as the Lynch Foundation for Children.
In light of how little the police can do legally, it’s encouraging to know that out of all the 137 cases that Saved In America has taken on, all 137 victims have been rescued.
They use the skills they developed in their active years of duty to develop networks and nurture informants to keep tabs on the most notorious trafficking operations to help save these teenagers.
Some of their searches have taken them as far as Mexico.
Even the police are impressed by how effective they are at doing their jobs. In an interview with People, Travis shares some details of the numerous letters he has received from active sheriffs and policemen over the years of their existence.
Travis also noted that we all keep our eyes peeled as we live our lives. These things don’t just happen in distant lands, they happen in our neighborhoods, whether we know it or not.
Sex trafficking is a vice that not even these twenty-eight amazing men can slay on their own. But it does help us to sleep a little better knowing that there is someone to turn to when the unthinkable happens.
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