Is Houston A Sex Trafficking Hub?
From High School Honor Roll to Now Trafficked on Bissonnet -The Story of Angel
How Angel Entered the Underworld of Human Sex Trafficking
To protect her identity and that of her family, we are using the name Angel, her street name. Angel grew up in Katy, TX where she regularly attended church, was an honor roll student, and held a normal after school job. She lived in a nice middle-class neighborhood, had a good group of friends, and one day her life changed. Angel’s parents noticed she wasn’t hanging out with her normal friend group, didn’t talk to them as much, became withdrawn and moody, and didn’t seem interested in the things she used to enjoy, all things her parents chalked up to teenage angst. What they would later find was that Angel was being groomed for sex trafficking. Those new friends, the new boyfriend, her lack of interest in her “old life” were all subtle signs that their daughter was entering a very dark underworld that they never dreamed would ever reach their quiet suburban neighborhood.
For Angel, and many others like her, it all started with a friend from her church. This friend would introduce her to a whole new friend group and have her fall into a world that she never knew existed. Traffickers have learned that parents who take their children to church tend to be stricter when it comes to things like social media, drinking, staying out late, and overall setting rules and boundaries to protect their children. They have learned to use that kind of information to manipulate and prey on young innocent girls. They know these girls have been sheltered and they use a teen girl’s natural desire to rebel to reel them in. These things alone aren’t enough though, there is one additional element to make the girl a “good target”. She must have a vulnerability. Angel’s vulnerability started when her nephews left the family’s home with her sister. When Angel’s friend heard that she was sad and struggling with the absence of her nephews, she invited Angel to a party. At that party, Angel, who was already vulnerable, was introduced to even more new friends who were in their twenties. She was also introduced to alcohol and marijuana for the first time. We have no way to prove that Angel was sexually assaulted that night, but her mom believes very strongly that this was the case, because from this night she was never the same. From that point forward, Angel started using drugs more frequently, and soon after, started experimenting with harder drugs like ecstasy and Meth. Once the groomers were able to get her addicted, they had full control. The average age a teen enters the sex trade in the US is 12 to 14 years old. Many victims are runaway girls who were sexually abused as children.[1]
One early morning in October, her parents discovered Angel had not come home the previous night. They were concerned but thought she had stayed at a friend’s house and would just go to school from there. They got very worried when Angel, who had just turned 18, hadn’t turned up at school and didn’t have her phone–that had been taken when they found out about the drug use. Her parents turned to social media to plead for help in finding their daughter. It was through that outcry that they would learn more about what Angel’s life had become. Some of Angels old friends came forward and spoke up about the new friends and new boyfriend. They shared pictures from her Snapchat and showed that Angel was in a motel in Westchase, an area not far from Bissonnette, with a strip of cheap motels frequently used by traffickers. Angel was literally in the lion’s den.
It would be 21 days before Angel was located for the first time. She was found dumped out of a car, beaten, bruised, twenty pounds lighter, and incoherent. The police called her parents, who rushed to see her. Angel was taken to the Emergency Room for a Sexual Assault Nurse Exam (SANE). It was there, with Angel in a fog from all the drugs she had been given, that she was able to tell her parents that the boyfriend she thought she could trust, had forced her out on the streets and into a life of prostitution. It was on Bissonnet that Angel was picked up by a man who had spent the last few months raping prostitutes. He held Angel in his apartment for two days where he repeatedly sedated her with drugs, and brutally raped and beat her over and over again. From the hospital, Angel’s parents were able to get her into rehab at a local facility with amazing credentials. They thought this was the end, and that their daughter was finally free of the life she had been forced into, but they had no way of knowing what would happen next.
Ten days into treatment it was discovered that Angel’s friend from rehab was the girl from church who had made the original introduction to the man who would later become Angel’s pimp. She was getting out that day and was able to convince Angel to go back to her traffickers. As an 18-year old, Angel couldn’t be held against her will, and the facility was forced to let her leave, and so the search for Angel continued.Human trafficking earns global profits of roughly $150 billion a year for traffickers, $99 billion of which comes from commercial sexual exploitation.[2]
Angel was spotted was on Bissonnet, near the Sam Houston Tollway and Highway 59, in an area known as the “Track” or the “Strip”, which has been a well-known hotspot for prostitution in Houston for decades. Angel was spotted on the night many teens were at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Fest. Angel’s Dad was called with the information and immediately made his way down there. He found Angel in a gas station, and when she approached him, she wasn’t shocked at seeing who it was because he was always tracking her down. He was able to keep her there until the police could arrive; they put Angel in the back of the car but because she wasn’t caught breaking any laws, they too had to let her go…
This is the story for so many young girls who are groomed, lured from their homes, and introduced to the underworld of the dark web and human sex trafficking. In 2018, The National Human Trafficking Hotline received more calls from California than any other state in the US, followed by Texas and Florida, respectively. (To contact the Human Trafficking Hotline: call 1-888-373-7888, text 233733, or chat online.)
- “Human Trafficking Within and into the United States: A Review of the Literature.” Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. Accessed July 31, 2019, https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/human-trafficking-and-within-united-states-review-literature#Trafficking.
- “Human Trafficking by the Numbers.” Human Rights First. Accessed July 31, 2019. https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/human-trafficking-numbers.
- “Hotline Statistics.” The National Human Trafficking Hotline. Accessed July 31, 2019. https://humantraffickinghotline.org/states.
Read Part 2 of the sex trafficking article tiled saving grace HERE
JAMIE WINSTON