All she wanted was a ride home. All she needed was for him to drive her to her small home in the suburbs. Instead, he took her to a small hotel room and forced her to sit and wait. He made her wait for the first of many sex clients.

According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, over 589 trafficking cases occur annually in St. Louis. St. Louis is the seventh most called city per capita (100,000 people) regarding human trafficking. John Halliday, detective of Criminal Investigations, has dealt with sex trafficking first hand.

“A lot of prostitutes who are from all over the United States end up in St. Louis at some point of time,” Halliday said. “A lot of the times pimps travel to avoid detection from the police.”

According to Halliday, there are multiple reasons people find themselves in the trafficking industry including poverty, drug addiction or forced labor. Halliday said the most common form of sex trafficking he has observed in St. Louis is forced prostitution.

“Typically, we see more prostitution cases,” Halliday said. “More often in a boyfriend/girlfriend scenario where the female is forced by the male to commit the act of prostitution to bring in money. I think a lot of people think of a pimp as somebody who has 20 prostitutes working for them, but typically it’s just one male and one female funding all aspects of their life.”

As stated by Halliday, in order to arrange meetings with clients, prostitutes utilize technology to their advantage. One website where trafficking took place was Backpage. Backpage was a website where adult advertisements were made for sex workers and their clients to correspond and arrange meetings, before being shut down by the government in April 2018.

“Recently, Backpage was taken off of the internet,” Halliday said. “It was a big step to squash the commercial sex industry, but also made it more difficult for us to investigate because that was a big source for locating prostitutes during our sting operations.”

According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, trafficking has increased in St. Louis by about 50 percent (214 to 420 cases) since 2012. One popular spot trafficking occurs is downtown.

“The St. Louis Airport has taken a downturn the past couple decades,” Halliday said. “The hotels lowering their prices due to being less profitable makes them the most dense area of prostitution.”

According to Halliday, the media hasn’t lived up to the task of covering sex trafficking. He said that trafficking deserves more educational media coverage on the topic.

“Human trafficking is a billion dollar industry,” Halliday said. “Lately it’s been covered more in the news. 6 to 10 years prior to that, you typically only heard of sex trafficking if someone of fame was arrested with a prostitute. I don’t know if the media puts out these stories to help with the problem with human trafficking or because they know it is a hot topic that can boost their ratings.”

Hallie Klopfenstein, sophomore, said she is passionate about the topic of sex trafficking. She said it is a topic that isn’t spoken about often, but is rather interesting.