She's on a mission to end human trafficking in rural Minnesota
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In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman’s words “contribute a verse” each day. MPR News sent longtime reporter Dan Gunderson on a mission to capture those stories as part of a series called “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”
Anne LaFrinier-Ritchie grew up in northern Minnesota wanting to be a journalist, but addiction disrupted her education and derailed her plan. Life led her instead to become a social worker and then to devote herself to protecting the state’s most vulnerable children.
She can still recall sitting in on a training session on child trafficking in 2016 and realizing to her horror that many of the kids she and her fellow social workers were trying to help fit the definition of being trafficked — not by strangers but by people they trusted.
“We were able to, on the spot, name about 15 people that we were currently working with where there was interfamilial trafficking,” LaFrinier-Ritchie said. It was just like this mind-blowing moment for me."
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That was the moment she decided to dedicate herself to end trafficking.
LaFrinier-Ritchie works now for the Fergus Falls-based nonprofit Someplace Safe, helping children in 16 counties as part of the state’s Safe Harbor Regional Navigators program, an effort to keep children from being sexually exploited.
Despite the sometimes grim situations, she finds the work rewarding.
LaFrinier-Ritchie spoke recently to social work students at Concordia College in Moorhead about how to recognize trafficking. She patiently debunked the myth that most traffickers are strangers prowling neighborhoods in unmarked vans. The harsher reality, especially in rural communities, is that the trafficker is often known and trusted.
“Oftentimes it’s community members. It could be neighbors, it could be a boyfriend-girlfriend situation. It could be a parent-child situation,” she explained, noting that sexual exploitation can end up being normalized over generations.
Concordia College instructor Nicole Ness said later her students “were surprised by the information and did not know that often the victim's perpetrators are people that they know and are in a relationship with.”
Correcting misconceptions is crucial, Ness added. “Social work plays a key role in identifying, supporting and advocating for trafficking survivors.”
‘High correlation of childhood trauma’
LaFrinier-Ritchie works in counties across west-central Minnesota and says all of them regularly have human trafficking cases. Some of the highest rates of sexual exploitation are in rural areas. One county of 5,000 had three referrals for sexual exploitation of children in a single week, she said.
“We’ve seen a huge increase in online exploitation,” LaFrinier-Ritchie said. “It might be people that are forming romantic relationships online. It might be people who are just targeting random people online with private information, and they’re somehow getting exploitative, inappropriate photos or videos of people, and then are using that to take advantage of them.”
She noted a “high correlation” among children who grow up with trauma, hunger and other unmet needs and those who end up being trafficked. Native youth have the highest rates of exploitation, she added.
The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office says about 40 percent of sex trafficking cases in the state involve minors and that homeless children are especially vulnerable.
University of Minnesota researchers analyzing responses from the 2019 Minnesota Student Survey concluded that more than 5,000 young Minnesotans likely traded sex for money, food, drugs, alcohol or a place to stay.
As she talked to the Concordia students, LaFrinier-Ritchie, 39, recalled her teen years in a small town in northeastern Minnesota where she described children as being casually exploited.
“There was a saying that was really normalized, and that was if you’re going to give somebody something then they have to return the payment and it’s going to be — excuse my language — an ass, cash or grass,” she said. “You’re going to pay with sex, you’re going to pay with money or you’re going to pay with drugs.
“That is the textbook definition of sexual exploitation. But we didn’t see it as that. We just thought that nobody gets anything for free.”
In her work LaFrinier-Ritchie’s learned to listen to victims and to understand that sometimes trafficking is just part of a life of trauma.
“There have been times where I’m like, ‘Wow, that must have been a really hard experience for you. I’m so sorry you went through that,’” she said. “And they’re like, ‘That actually was the least of my worries. Like this is just a blip on the radar of all the awful stuff that's happened.’”
If you encounter a child or adult who may be trafficked, the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office says to call 911 or law enforcement if anyone is in immediate danger. Otherwise, contact the appropriate Safe Harbor regional navigator. You can also call the National Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or text “HELP” to Polaris Project’s BeFree Textline at 233733.