Human trafficking victim talks about her experience at Miami forum
MIAMI - Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle held an annual trafficking forum on Wednesday and this year's focus was on missing children from human trafficking.
CBS4 talked with a young survivor who's trying to fight the stigma of reporting the abuse.
"The entire time you feel really guilty about how things happened," Seanna Martinez said.
It was very difficult for Martinez to about what happened, but with her mom's permission wanted to be a voice for victims too afraid to come forward.
"I was actually trafficked at 14, it was from my middle school, I think I was groomed, honestly online for a long time from 11 to 14," she recalled.
Martinez told us, young people don't have the life experiences to understand they're being manipulated, and that's how perpetrators get them.
"It was like online chat rooms, people pretending to be anime characters, people just pretending to be random people and you wouldn't know who it is but these people at the end of the day would show you so much affection, so much love," she explained.
Her incident happened during the pandemic, and she realized after it happened something wasn't right, so she went to the police. And she says if it wasn't for detectives who created an open environment, it would have been hard to catch her perpetrator, who was caught and later sentenced to 25 years.
"We know as a destination city we're already going to be a magnet, for the bad guys and for them bringing the victims, and looking for victims here in our community," Katherine Fernandez Rundle said.
Rundle told CBS4 her office and the human trafficking task force have been working to develop new strategies of intervention and training.
"During Superbowl alone, we made over 20 arrests of perpetrators," she said.
Law enforcement also has new tools to catch predators, but it still happens every day.
"I know we're doing a better job of finding them, rescuing them, arresting the perpetrators and prosecuting them," Rundle said.
She shared, 1 in 3 runaway teens are recruited for sex within 48 hours of leaving.
"Let's not blame the victims of the situation because yes they are children, and let's make a more comforting environment for those so that they can speak out.," Martinez said.
She looks back now realizing how hard it is for young people to explain what happened to them, and to let victims know things will get better with help.