Anyone can become a victim of human trafficking.

“No one is exempt,” said Jennifer Zielinksi, executive director of the Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition.

But some demographics are at greater risk.

According to the Urban Indian Health Institute, in 2016, the National Crime Information Center recorded 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls. Only 116 reports were logged into the United States Department of Justice database.

Murder is the third-leading cause of death for American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Native women experience domestic and sexual violence at a much higher rate than other populations,” said Tyrel Stevenson, legislative affairs director for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe. “We see direct links between that and human trafficking.”

IDAHO LEFT OUT

On Nov. 22, 2019, U.S. Attorney General William Barr launched a national strategy to address missing and murdered Native Americans.

The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Initiative placed MMIP coordinators in U.S. Attorney’s offices in 11 states to help establish communication between federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement response to missing cases.

Idaho did not receive an MMIP coordinator.

The Idaho Council on Domestic Violence and Victim Assistance, a state agency, informally pulled a work group together with representatives from the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, the DOJ, FBI, Idaho State Police, and the five tribes within Idaho, the Coeur d’Alene, Nez Perce, Kootenai, Shoshone-Paiute, and Shoshone-Bannock.

“I’m really, really sensitive when speaking about this issue,” Stevenson said. “It’s a struggle because we want to raise awareness, but there is so much about the problem that we don’t know yet.”

The MMIP initiative also called for the FBI to deploy its most advanced response capabilities, improve data collection and analysis, and support local response efforts with training.

“Eighty-five percent of violent crimes against Native American women are committed by non-natives,” Zielenski said.

Reports have shown U.S. Attorneys have declined to prosecute a majority of violent crimes on Native American reservations. Tribes do not have the authority to prosecute non-Natives who commit violent crimes on tribal lands.

“At the Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, the way they share data is through collective storytelling,” said Nicole Fitzgerald, Executive Director of the Idaho Council on Domestic Violence and Victim Assistance. “I think there is an opportunity here to blend the ways in which we gather data.”

RAISING AWARENESS

In September, Tai Simpson, social change associate at the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, presented a primer on missing and murdered indigenous women at a conference in Clarkston, Wash. The conference explored how advocates and community partners can support awareness and prevention while contributing to healing.

“Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women is not a new epidemic,” Simpson said, addressing the conference. “I always want that to be the first piece I share with you. MMIW is a culmination of hundreds of years of colonization, hundreds of years of oppression, and it is the perpetual genocide against indigenous women. What this looked like in the beginning was of course the forced sterilization of women once they were moved onto reservations.”

On May 5, National Missing and Murdered Indegenious Women’s Awareness Day, the coalition will host another conference.

“There are quite a few people who are worried about this and are working toward solutions,” Stevenson said. “We want to raise awareness that it is an issue, but we don’t know enough about the issue to talk about the prevalence in a respectful way for the people experiencing it. We’ve got some work to do gathering information and work to do finding solutions.”

THE BIG UNKNOWN

In Idaho the numbers aren’t necessarily helpful.

“We don’t know how many people are missing and that is a big problem,” Stevenson said.

Currently, 172 people missing in the state have been entered into the Idaho State Police missing persons clearinghouse. Seven are reported Native Americans, but their tribal affiliation is not recorded.

“It is the big question mark: What is our level of engagement?” Fitzgerald said. “Because one person is too many to be missing. We don’t have solid numbers.”

“As part of this work we’re starting to see that there is no discernible pattern in how old women are when they are taken from us,” Simpson said. “In 2007, there was a case where an 87-year-old elder was removed from her family. In that same year there was a baby that was 10 months old that was removed from her family.”

On average, nationally, the mean age of an MMIP is 29.

Information about ethnicity or refugee status is not included in the clearinghouse.

In Idaho, the largest trafficked group are refugees, specifically minors from Africa, often trafficked from resettlement programs in the southern portion of the state, according to Zielinski.

“Native Americans are the number one population of organ trafficking,” Zielinksi said.

Since the sale of organs was banned in the United States under the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, only one person has been prosecuted and convicted of organ trafficking, according to the University of Utah College of Law.

Even less statistically understood, organ trafficking is not included in federal human trafficking laws...