Dallas Escorts: At City Hall, Politicians Gather to Raise Awareness About Human …
At a press conference at Dallas City Hall this morning, Dr. Bob Sanborn, president and CEO of the Houston-based Children at Risk, ticked off the tragic statistics: Of the reported cases of human trafficking in the U.S., 25 percent of victims were from Texas. During the final few months 2007 alone, Texas had 30 percent of all National Human Trafficking Hotline calls — and 15 percent of those came from Dallas and Fort Worth. (A 149-page study by Shared Hope International last September provided further details concerning children being trafficked as sex slaves in Dallas over the last decade.)
Sanborn estimates that in many cases, false friendships and romances lure these children into human trafficking within 48 hours. And the availability of young runaways and powerless immigrants provides a steady stream of workers in a clandestine and horrendous business; pimps and traffickers can quickly find a replacement as soon as police pick up a child for prostitution. Then, that child is viewed as a criminal, not a victim. Dallas, he said, might want to consider establishing residential shelters for runaways, such as Covenant House for homeless youth in Houston.