ROCKINGHAM — Patti Crawford and Stacy Phillips plan to pass through on Thursday as they walk “220 miles from Gastonia to Wilmington in an effort to raise awareness and resources to fight human trafficking.”

“We’re doing this as both an awareness campaign and a way to raise funds,” Crawford said. “A Safe Place is a house in Wilmington that is seeing to the needs of people who escape the trafficking life. We also support the Oasis of Hope in Troy, Pennsylvania and On Eagles’ Wings Ministries in Charlotte.”

Crawford said all of these homes serve victims and survivors of sex trafficking from across the United States.

The women began their walk Sunday in Gastonia and estimate they will arrive in Rockingham on Thursday afternoon or evening. Among their supporters in Rockingham are Comfort Inn and Suites.

“They donated a room for the night,” Phillips said. “And Pat’s Kitchen will be donating as well as providing dinner for us that evening. We thank all who support us.”

But how bad is the sex trafficking problem in the Tar Heel State?

“Stacie and I are actually just very new to this,” Crawford said. “There’s a lot that we don’t know, but what we do know is that the statistics that come in show Charlotte is sixth in the nation for this. And as a state, North Carolina has the 10th-highest rate of sex trafficking.”

Phillips said it isn’t quite like what most people expect, or what they might view on television. At least not all of the time.

“Some girls are brought here from other states,” she said. “This is a pipeline. It’s not just happening in small towns in North Carolina. It’s happening in big cities all across the state. Pattie and I were doing a fundraiser here in Lincolnton and a counselor said that a girl right here in Lincolnton was trafficked by a trucker.”

Both women said people often don’t realize how this happens.

“There’s a lot of different ways,” Phillips said. “One in three runaways are trafficked within 48 hours of leaving home. They get out there and maybe they’ve grown up in abusive homes. They know they need money, somewhere to stay. Sometimes it is a friend who introduces him or her to the one who begins grooming the victim for the role.”

That role, she said, is sexual slavery.

Phillips said runaways are not only young girls and boys. Some are adult men and women who are drawn into the life of unwilling servitude.

“Because now we have social media,” Phillips said. “These predators on social media pretend to be someone their age. Gradually that person starts friending one or two or so of their friends, so the victim thinks that person must be OK and finally accepts a friend request. Eventually they convince their target victims to meet them, and then they are kidnapped. They are drugged. And life as they knew it comes to an end.”

Crawford agreed social media has made it easier for traffickers to target victims.

“Young people share so much personal information,” she said. “And that’s how perpetrators get to know them, through their Facebook pages. Then they’ll just pretend they are a friend. They know where they are going and what they are doing. Some traffickers even make the victims believe they are in love with them.”

Even more terrible is the prospect that many victims are being trafficked while still living at home, Phillips said.

“The negligent or abusive parents may have no idea where their children are during the day,” she said. “Going to strip clubs or engaging in sexual activity for these pimps or owners.”

Crawford added that good kids from good homes are also susceptible.

“Some are just young teenagers, they don’t always think and they do things that aren’t the smartest,” Crawford said. “They might have done something like taken an inappropriate picture, and they don’t want their parents to find out, it’s like blackmail. There are kids who want to earn money, and they are invited to model and it turns into something very different.”

Phillips put things into perspective with a brief description of how she remembers her life as a younger teen.

“I was 14 and living in a very small town,” she said. “I was in a two-parent home, but they didn’t always care what I was doing. I didn’t like my parents’ rules. And there was some abuse going on in the home — not sexual, but abandonment and physical abuse. In North Carolina, they couldn’t do anything to make me return home if I left back then. In today’s time, I could have gotten into trafficking and my parents wouldn’t have a clue this was going on.

“I was fortunate enough that I wasn’t in an environment that was that bad. I was lucky because I was in a small town, because we didn’t have the Internet, because I probably would have been posting these things and just ranting about my life. My parents would have had no clue.”

She said trouble is like bait for these predators online.

“An older guy pretending to be your age says, ‘Oh, I’ll take care of you and I’ll be your savior,’” Phillips said. “And that’s what every runaway wants, someone to care for them. But then you get into a very different environment. You’re drugged, and before you know it it’s too far gone.”

Crawford said a lot of people mistake trafficking and sexual slavery for a choice these girls and boys are making to sell their bodies.

“It’s called prostitution,” she said. “But when entry ages are between 11-14, that is not an age of consent. Those people are wrong. That is not prostitution. These pimps tear these victims down until they think they’re nothing. They use drugs, coercion, manipulation and anything they can to keep them where they are at.”

Phillips and Crawford said the definition of trafficking is “the illegal practice of buying or selling people for forced labor or for sexual exploitation.”

“Some of the victims are trafficked for 48-hour days,” Crawford said. That’s another way of saying they are sold back to back for that many hours with no escape, no rest and depending on the mood of the client, little or no food or care.

Phillips said when you see the young adults living that life, they got into it in their early teens and by they time they grew up, they could not remember another way of life.

When people hear the term “trafficking,” they tend to think of people being physically apprehended and taken far out of their home states, possibly overseas.

“They do get picked up at one location and taken to other locations to be used,” Crawford said. “That word trafficking is slavery. It’s modern-day-type slavery. These people often are literally chained down between jobs, during the time spent with the client, and there is no escape.”

Phillips said despite the desperation of people who are lost in a systematic crime pipeline authorities seem to be unable to crack, there’s still hope that this slavery can be ended, or at least curtailed.

“Actually the homes we are working with and the awareness campaign is to help educate police on what to watch for,” she said. “The police have not been educated enough, and it’s new — but it’s not new. If you look in New York and Los Angeles papers you will see trafficking everywhere, but in small towns they just aren’t aware of it.”

Phillips and Crawford both emphasized that police have always thought of the victims as the perpetrators rather than the slaves they really are.

“Trafficking is the fastest-growing illegal enterprise in the country today,” Crawford said. “The most horrifying thing to me is not that they’re selling these human beings. It’s that there is a market for it, that people are buying them.”

To find out more about putting an end to human trafficking, visit the website www.walkingforfreedom.org. To show your support through social media, use the hashtag #giveherfreedom.

To learn more about future fundraiser and awareness events, email [email protected]. Reach Patti Crawford at 704-763-7556 or Stacie Phillips at 808-358-8789 for more information.

Reach reporter Melonie McLaurin at 910-817-2673 and follow her on Twitter @melonieflomer.

Mike Hensdill | The Gaston Gazette Stacie Phillips, left, is prayed over by campus pastor Ken Hester and other members of Elevation Church Sunday prior to the start of Walking for Freedom in Gastonia.
https://www.yourdailyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/web1_gg-TRAFICKING-WALK-A-0906.jpgMike Hensdill | The Gaston Gazette Stacie Phillips, left, is prayed over by campus pastor Ken Hester and other members of Elevation Church Sunday prior to the start of Walking for Freedom in Gastonia.

Mike Hensdill | The Gaston Gazette Patti Crawford and Stacie Phillips are joined by Andrea Schwarz and Crystal Byers as they begin their journey from Gastonia to Wilmington on Saturday.
https://www.yourdailyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/web1_gg-TRAFICKING-WALK-D-0906.jpgMike Hensdill | The Gaston Gazette Patti Crawford and Stacie Phillips are joined by Andrea Schwarz and Crystal Byers as they begin their journey from Gastonia to Wilmington on Saturday.
220-mile march targets human trafficking

By Melonie McLaurin

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