Elgin concert will help in fight against sex, labor trafficking
An Elgin church will host a concert to benefit the fight against human trafficking, which experts say victimizes tens of thousands of people in the Chicago area.
People who attend the Listen With Your Heart concert Friday, Oct. 5, at First United Methodist Church can contribute donations to ATLAST, or Attorneys Targeting Labor And Sex Trafficking, a program from the nonprofit Administer Justice in Elgin that provides pro-bono legal services to victims.
An estimated 16,000 to 24,000 women and girls are sexually exploited through trafficking each year in the Chicago area, said Kim Downing, an ATLAST attorney who will speak at the church Friday. The figure comes from Refuge for Women-Chicago and does not include labor trafficking victims, she said.
ATLAST works with rescue organizations that house trafficking victims in the Fox Valley area and also screens Administer Justice clients to see if they might be victims of trafficking, Downing said.
The concert is part of the Elgin church's Concerts for a Cause series, which started last year with a benefit for a Lake Forest nonprofit that assists the people of Syria. That concert didn't raise much money, but a second concert in the spring raised $4,000 for Ecker Center for Mental Health in Elgin, said church outreach committee member Sue Broxham, who attributed that success to the local Elgin connection.
As for the concert next week, "A real hope for the success of this is that it's so Elgin-centric and also so universal at the same time," she said.
Downing said she's among 60, two-year fellows assigned nationwide by the U.S. Department of Justice to focus on sex and labor trafficking. The growing criminal industry represented an estimated $150 billion worldwide, compared with $32 billion less than a decade ago, she said. The vast majority of sex trafficking victims are women while men are about 30 percent of labor trafficking victims, she said.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline received 632 calls from Illinois last year, but that's just "the tip of the iceberg," Downing said.
"People are in situations where they are very afraid to leave," she said. "There is trauma-bonding situations, or people are being held by threats of injury or death to family, or revealing their undocumented immigration status."
A 2011 report from the U.S. Department of Justice showed 83 percent of sex trafficking victims from 2008 to 2010 were U.S. citizens; among labor trafficking victims, 67 percent were undocumented immigrants, and 28 percent were documented immigrants.
The average age of girls induced into sex trafficking is about 13. They often have a history of being in the foster care system or runways, or having experienced sexual assault or abuse, Downing said.
Sex trafficking victims tend to get moved around a lot, so they can't orient themselves and develop relationships to help them escape, she said. Interstate 90 is a human trafficking pipeline to the Chicago area, she added.
Labor trafficking can start as domestic violence, with the abuser demanding labor, often domestic, and keeping the profits. Sometimes that can turn into sex trafficking, she said.
"It's important that people know that it is happening here," Downing said. "It's not something that's happening abroad or somewhere far in another country."
Listen With Your Heart concert in Elgin
When: 7 to 9 p.m. Friday
Where: First United Methodist Church, 216 E. Highland Ave., Elgin
What: Headliner Artemisia, a vocal group from Chicago; guest performances from Elgin's Nothing But Treble women's chorus and Take 2 Teens from YWCA Elgin
Tickets: All donations go to a program from Administer Justice in Elgin that offers pro-bono legal services to human trafficking victims
Info: fumcelgin.org (click on "Concerts for a Cause")