Sedona Police Department Detective Justin White and Ashlynn Rooney and Stacy Sutherland, of the Arizona Anti-Trafficking Network, attended the Tuesday, Jan. 9 meeting of the Sedona Lodging Council to deliver a presentation on the unreliability of human trafficking statistics and their own personal experiences related to trafficking for Human Trafficking Awareness Month.

“Eighty percent of sex trafficking victims report being trafficked through a hotel or motel,” Rooney said. “That doesn’t count commercial sex.”

“Smaller communities, we know, sometimes have big problems,” Sutherland said. “They will use that perceived ignorance to commit their crime.”

White said that in 2021, Arizona reported 217 cases of sex trafficking involving 337 victims, putting it at No. 13 in the nation for number of cases.

“I’ll tell you right now, I don’t believe those numbers,” White said. “The reason I don’t is because when I did work in Phoenix, 217 cases in 2021 — I was there in 2018 — I probably would have written 25%, 30% of those as one officer … I guarantee you that they are very much higher than what they are when you look at contacts, you only look at reports.”

“We talk about numbers, here’s why I don’t necessarily trust the numbers,” White continued. “The personal experiences that I have had since I’ve been a detective, I can tell you of at least three cases I’ve personally worked that will not come up in those numbers.” One of these, he claimed, was a “young lady [who] was being trafficked at our hotels.”

“It is happening in Sedona,” White said. “I’ve heard of one possibility over in Prescott Valley.”

“What Justin is telling you is absolutely fact,” Sutherland said. “Anyone who wants to stand in front of a board of people and tell you that they have great statistics on human trafficking is lying to you … We know there’s so many cases out there we never touch.”

When asked for a breakdown of the number of cases that involved coerced trafficking versus consensual sex work, White and Sutherland were not able to provide an estimate.

“If someone is engaging in commercial sex, they could potentially be a victim,” Sutherland said. “Under the law, Arizona state law, anyone under age 18 can’t consent to commercial sex, so they’re automatically the victims of trafficking.”

A 2016 study by Arizona State University found that 32% of individuals classified as sex trafficking victims were under the age of 18. A 2005 report from the U.S. Department of Justice similarly estimated that 25% of incidents classified as rape were statutory rapes, or “sexual relations between individuals that would be legal if not for their ages.”

White and Sutherland were also unable to provide an estimate of the number of cases of sex trafficking resulting from undercover police operations.

“We don’t have stats on that,” Sutherland said.

The presenters did not address sex trafficking cases resulting from sting operations in which “law enforcement creates or poses as fictitious victims, and the defendant is subsequently arrested and charged after soliciting or attempting to engage in commercial sex with the fictitious victim,” as the 2022 Federal Human Trafficking Report explained it. A research report from the McCain Institute found that police entrapment operations accounted for 20.8% of all studied sex trafficking cases. The federal report also noted that 78% of all police sting operations relating to sex trafficking involved adult police officers posing as potential victims.

Consensual Sex Work

The team also discussed consensual sex work in Sedona.

“Just in Sedona, we have several illicit businesses already,” White said. “There are now a dozen different back-page websites where these girls are posting commercial sex ad posts … dozens or hundreds of posts that ‘We’ll be in the Sedona area,’ or Flagstaff, Cottonwood.”

When asked for examples of these websites, White replied, “That’s not something we necessarily talk about because we don’t want to give people ideas … but they are very common and fairly easy to find.”

Rooney said that AATN is working on lobbying for a change in state law to have prostitution upgraded from a misdemeanor, “because we know that’s crazy, right?” and also claimed that there are two erotic massage businesses currently operating in Sedona.

“These are typically Asian-run,” Rooney said. “They will not service women. They only service males … these are connected to larger crime networks.”

“Prostitution in this area is very, very rampant,” Rooney said of the Verde Valley in general.

Rooney did not identify the two massage parlors she stated were operating in Sedona or the organized crime networks with which they are associated.

“I don’t see what good it does for the community,” Rooney said, adding that making that information available would attract people to those businesses in Sedona.

Foster Care

At a Jan. 9 meeting of the Sedona City Council, Sedona Area Homeless Alliances director Laurie Moore said that a number of local homeless families are no longer enrolling their children in school to prevent those children from being sent to foster care by state officials.

The National Foster Youth Institute estimates that up to 60% of child sex trafficking victims come out of the foster care system.

A 2022 review by Brigham Young University found that up to 40% of children in foster care experience abuse.

Of those foster children who experience abuse, between 10% and 49% experience sexual abuse by their foster parents, according to a meta-review of studies on abuse in foster care conducted by the University of Illinois, while a 2009 study in the American Journal of Maternal Child Nursing found that 81% of girls in foster care were sexually abused.

There are currently about 18,000 children in foster care in Arizona.