WellHouse Founder Tajuan McCarty urges residents to to be aware and offer assistance to local sex trafficking victims

Not too long ago, WellHouse founder Tajuan McCarty stood at a local phone booth with a woman while four pimps watched them. When they called the police, they left. 

“A while ago, I caused an uproar,” McCarty said, “when I said every girl [in sex trafficking] in the Southeast knew what Oxmoor Road was.”

The WellHouse, a faith-based nonprofit organization that is a rescue and recovery center for girls and women who have been victims of sexual trafficking, hosted a Q&A community event open to the public at the Homewood Library from 6:30-8 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 20. People in attendance asked McCarty questions and discussed the ways Homewood residents could bring about awareness, as well as help victims stuck in the cycle of sex trafficking.

McCarty began the event by telling her personal story of how she was sexually exploited beginning at the age of 15, where she eventually wound up being trafficked into the Birmingham area along Oxmoor Road.

McCarty said that at the time of her trafficking, she remembers telling people that she was a “prostitute” or “whore.” At one point, she remembers looking her concerned friend in the eye, explaining that she was consenting.

“‘I am not a victim,’ I said. I’ve always been a policy nerd, so I remember reading some of the policy and when I read it this particular time, Jesus removed the veils for me. I had my first pimp when I was 15, so based on that, I was a victim,” she said.

The U.S. Government defines human traffic legally as “a commercial sex act induced by force, fraud or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not obtained the 18 years of age” and “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services.”

She thought being a victim meant she was weak, unable to recover from it, so she convinced herself otherwise. She wasn’t ready to deal with it at first, she said, but she knew she had to.

“She is not there by choice, let me tell you that. She’s in denial, and it’s still rape, even if she doesn’t know it. The words ‘it’s not your fault,’ those are the words that heal,” McCarty said.

Now she dedicates her time to help provide a safe place for children and women who are still trapped in the cycle of sex trafficking.

According to a recent study “Invisibility,” by The Freedom to Thrive Youth Service Provision Work Group, 40 percent of human trafficking occurs in major hubs within the Southeast circuit, which classifies the region as a “key area” for human trafficking. The study was about commercial sexual exploitation of children in Jefferson County, Alabama. McCarty added that this includes major cities like Birmingham, Huntsville, Atlanta, Nashville and Chattanooga, and along I-20.

McCarty said that even though she was not born in the Southeast, because of trafficking it has become “home” to her. She said the typical reported demographic for purchasing sex trafficking victims is 18 to 60-year-old men with expendable income.

People in the audience asked several times how this could still be happening in the Homewood community in 2017.

“I’m not sure it’s changed here, people still recognize Oxmoor Road as being known as a common place for trafficking,” she said, and then held her hands out on either side of her face, blocking her peripheral vision on either side. “This is how people live. You don’t pay attention to the girl at the gas station. But once you’re open to opening your eyes, you begin to see it.”

McCarty said that if something looks “funny” or “off” about a situation or child seen in the Birmingham area, there probably is something wrong. She urged people to not ignore those initial gut reactions about the situation.

When asked how an individual in the community could help someone they see or meet that might be part of sex trafficking, McCarty said to calmly ask them the question, “Are you safe?”  

“It sounds like a yes or no question, but it’s really not. Get her to define what safe is, and then if the answer is ‘no,’ you can direct her and tell her that you know a place that is safe,” she said.

Tell her or him to meet you in a safe, public place, if you aren’t already in one, she said. The next step is to call the police, she said, and to stay with her until they get there. She warned that sometimes there could be someone watching, so make safety a priority. She also specified that usually pimps are scared to get caught so they aren’t as immediate of a threat as some people perceive. 

When an audience member pointed to the pimps as the problem in the cycle, McCarty disagreed.

“The men who purchase sex are the true criminals. I don’t care if she’s 15 or 50, she did not choose to be prostituted,” she said. “If all she has known is abuse, then how does she know any better? How will she be different when she is 18?”

Some of the major red flags McCarty suggested for residents to look for included a younger person with an older man, an intense sense of nervousness about the child and she said to take notice if someone drives by a child waiting with a big bag and then is quickly gone or picked up by someone. She clarified that even though societal norms and movie scenes point to clothing of the child as an indictor, that is not a judgement that should lead to think someone is being trafficked. She mentioned drug abuse as an occasional indictor, since that is a way for trafficked victims to cope as well as a way for pimps to keep victims in the trafficking cycle. She specified “drugs as a symptom of another problem” and that trafficking is not like the movie “Taken.”

“It happens in a variety of ways, whether it’s the worst hotel in town or the best, it still happens. It’s not specific to one area of town,” she said.

McCarty talked about a common scenario in pimping and trafficking is a relationship with family members. Sometimes, she said, a mother was previously pimped out by her family, so she pimps out her daughter, and the pimping becomes a generational problem or survival technique in order to obtain money for rent, food or drugs. 

Another key way of combatting the problem is to teach children the difference between “good touch” and “bad touch.” It doesn’t have to be in the “bathing suit area” to be considered inappropriate, she said.

“You have to talk to children honestly, openly and appropriately about sex,” she said, answering two grandparents' question about what they can do to help keep their granddaughters safe. “You have to teach them how to talk about this. In the liberal states, they had a comprehensive sex education. They accepted it as a part of being human. In the South, sex is taboo, and our sex trafficking rates are higher.”

When a member of the Homewood school system PTA asked what she could do to help schools eliminate the problem, McCarty said “to raise your voice.”

“We all know the girls in high school that got picked on. That’s who they [pimps] prey on,” she said. “Schools say it’s the parent’s job to teach sex education, since they only teach two days of reproductive health in school, but then the parents turn around and say it’s the school’s job.”

McCarty went on to say that she feels things have gotten better since the Human Trafficking Safe Harbor Act was passed on May 4, 2016, in Alabama, which ensures prostituted minors are treated as victims, thus providing a “safe harbor” for child human trafficking victims. The Safe Harbor Act permits a defendant to raise affirmative defense only in cases where “force, fraud and coercion,” has occurred. It also enacts that the juvenile court can provide counseling for victims and makes it a crime to publish pictures of victims or specify that it is public record.

McCarty said that Alabama is the fifteenth in the nation to have a safe harbor law. 

“When laws get passed, it takes a while to get to the local level,” she said.

This was the WellHouse’s third meeting addressing human trafficking in Homewood. No law enforcement or council members were present. About two dozen people attended the event, including a few families and teachers. They hope to hold another meeting in the future.

The National Trafficking Hotline reports that 26,727 calls were made about trafficking in the U.S. in 2016. Call the 24/7 WellHouse Hotline at 800-991-0948 or call the National Human Trackiffing Hotline at 888-373-7888. For more information about getting involved with the WellHouse organization, go to the-wellhouse.org.