Andrew Yedinak from the Montana Department of Justice discussed the prevalence and perils of human trafficking last week in a presentation sponsored by the St. Ignatius Police Department.

Yedinak is a member of the Human Trafficking Task Force and is a supervisory agent for the DOJ Narcotics Bureau. He worked as an undercover narcotics agent for a big part of his career, and now investigates human trafficking.

“I absolutely love what I do,” he told the gathering of more than 30 people and several policeman at the First Christian Church near St. Ignatius last Wednesday.

It’s work with a purpose, since according to the website polarosproject.org, 28 million people are trafficked globally each year.

It took Yedinak a while to reshape his thinking on human trafficking. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the former policeman and his partner would go to an area in their Indiana community where prostitutes abounded. He would drive around, pick up a woman, and if she mentioned a sex act for money, he’d call his partner to arrest her.

“We thought we were solving a problem, but we weren’t,” he said. “We were targeting those who were victims.”

His goal is to change the attitudes of law enforcement toward prostitution and reframe it as trafficking of a person and ruining his or her life.

Yedinak provided some definitions. What does trafficking look like? He said it’s when a human is compelling or coercing another person’s labor or services including commercial sex acts.

He said the exchange of anything of value for a sexual act – that can be money, drugs, jewelry, a meal, a ride, some place to stay – can be considered trafficking.

He also brought up labor trafficking, the most overlooked form of human trafficking in the world, according to Yedinak. It’s defined as using coercion (the use or threat of force against, abduction of, serious harm to, or physical restraint of a person) to make another human work and give the proceeds to the trafficker.

Debt bondage is another trafficking method used to exploit people. According to Montana law, debt bondage means inducing a person to provide “commercial sexual activity toward or satisfaction of a real or purported debt.”

Trafficked people are sometimes forced to steal things or sell drugs also.

Montana’s laws were reformed in 2023 to better enable law enforcement to help trafficked people, Yeldinak said. Among the changes: a “john” patronizing a prostitute used to receive a misdemeanor charge for the first three offenses. Now the first offense is a felony.

Also under the new statute, labor trafficking now has a 15-year maximum sentence. For more on sentences for trafficking offenses, visit decriminalizesex.work/montana-prostitution-laws/.

For more information and solutions, Yedinak recommends Bark.us, a website that gives parents more control over their children’s online activities, Fight the New Drug (fightthenewdrug.org), which provides information on the toxic effects of pornography, and the Polaris Project, which aims to reshape the systems that allow for sex and labor trafficking in North America.

During a short question-and-answer period, an audience member asked if a woman in the company of a man who showed four-fingers behind her back was signaling that she was being trafficked. Yedinak responded that this was more of an urban legend, as is the myth that calling 911 and ordering a pepperoni pizza was a signal for operators to keep the line open.

Still, St. Ignatius Police Chief Jason Acheson said officers check all the call logs so this sort of call would be looked into.

He also cautioned audience members that human trafficking crimes are happening in the Mission Valley and people should keep their eyes open.

“If you see something, say something,” he added.