Seated in a Starbucks in Fox River Grove, Sharmila Wijeyakumar sipped her coffee and casually spoke with a co-worker about her plans to bypass a pimp and liberate a young woman in the throes of sex trafficking.

"An average rescue costs about $1,000 just to get them home or to a safe place," said Wijeyakumar, who is CEO of the anti-sex trafficking group Rahab's Daughters. "They don't have any clothes. They don't have any ID. They don't have anything to eat ... so then we have to feed them, clothe them, find them shelter and then move them to a safe location, which is mostly out of state."

Human trafficking generally occurs when a person is forced or coerced into work, according to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Sex trafficking victimization specifically applies to scenarios in which a person is made to perform sex work against his or her will.

Both statewide and locally in McHenry County, police, prosecutors and volunteers have devised their own methods of identifying sex trafficking victims and “johns” – people who pays for sex work – in an effort to stave off further victimization.

“In addition to some of the prostitution stings that we’ve done involving some of the online work, we’ve also been doing things with massage parlors,” McHenry County State’s Attorney Patrick Kenneally said.

Earlier this year, the state's attorney's office partnered with local law enforcement to carry out a national "johns suppression initiative." A series of stings resulted in the arrest of 451 johns nationwide, including four men from Algonquin, Elgin and Arlington Heights.

Police stings operating as “human trafficking task forces” have been both lauded for their preventive efforts and criticized for using sex trafficking as a guise to arrest sex workers.

From a prosecutorial standpoint, stings in McHenry County tend to be focused on those who respond to sex ads, Kenneally said.

Since January, local police have arrested five people on solicitation of a sex act charges, court records show. That’s compared with four people charged last year and one person in 2018. No criminal prostitution charges have been filed in the county this year, compared with two in 2019 and none in 2018.

“So far, our initial endeavors have been sort of focusing on johns,” Kenneally said. “I don’t necessarily think that focusing on victims and sex workers is out of the question.”

Operations focusing on sex workers likely would be aimed more toward separating workers from the lifestyle and less about prosecuting them in a criminal court, Kenneally added.

Groups such as Rahab’s Daughters and Refuge for Women in McHenry County are taking their own steps to help victims of sex trafficking reintegrate into everyday life.

“Sometimes an arrest serves the purpose to get them out of the situation,” said Karen Schultz, the local director of Refuge for Women. “I think the big thing is that charges are not pressed, and they are recognized as victims.”

Refuge for Women is a nonprofit that provides long-term care for women who have escaped human trafficking or sexual exploitation. Rahab’s Daughters similarly helps sex trafficking victims safely get back on their feet.

A whirlwind rescue operation centered on the Super Bowl in Miami last month resulted in the removal of 24 sex trafficking victims and helped put two traffickers behind bars, Wijeyakumar said.

“We partnered with a not-for-profit out of Washington called Mitre, and they did all the research,” Wijeyakumar said. “They provided us with some excellent tools to scrape ads online, and we were able to scrape about 15,000 ads total.”

Efforts to intervene and prevent cases of sex trafficking have taken several forms in recent years.

In 2018, U.S. authorities successfully shut down backpage.com, one of the most well-known website that advertised sex for hire. That same year, President Donald Trump signed a controversial legislative package known as FOSTA-SESTA that aims to crack down on the posting of online sex ads.

Those ads continue to make their way online, however, and can be a useful tool in combating sex trafficking, Wijeyakumar said. Using an app that disguises volunteers’ personal phone numbers, Rahab’s Daughters responds to ads as a way to get in touch with potential victims.

"We text them or call them and leave a message that says, you know, 'Do you need help?
Give us a call.' And then, essentially, they will call or text us back and say, 'We need help.' "

As efforts to combat sex trafficking evolve, so do traffickers. Along with the advent of social media came new ways to groom a victim, Schultz said.

“People live their lives on social media,” Schultz said. “On one hand you’re kind of inviting these folks into your home, and you don’t even know it.”

When it comes to protective measures for children and teens, Wijeyakumar recommends that parents monitor their children’s location and online activity. It is just as important, however, that children learn to trust their gut instincts, she said.

“If your kid doesn’t want to have grandma Sally or Auntie Betty or Uncle Jimmy, I don’t care. They have a reason,” Wijeyakumar said. “Whatever it is, let them be in charge of their own emotion. Because forcing them to display touching that they don’t want to do is teaching them that when an adult says, ‘You have to touch me’ that they have to do it, and you’re just helping a trafficker.”

Anyone affected by human trafficking should call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 888-373-7888 or text the hotline at 233733. Call Rahab's Daughters at 224-333-0911 or reach Refuge for Women at 708-380-7419. For information about both organizations, visit www.rahabsdaughters.org or www.rfwchicago.org.