American-Indian girls vulnerable to sex trade

Abuse, poverty, isolation are factors that lead to trafficking

For years, Native American girls and women have been kidnapped or lured off South Dakota reservations and forced into an interstate sex trade of prostitution, pornography and stripping, victims' advocates say.

But the federal law enforcement officials tasked with prosecuting major crimes committed on reservations say human sex trafficking isn't being reported.

It's a scourge that has been known for years on South Dakota reservations, said Charon Asetoyer, executive director of the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center in Lake Andes "It's a huge issue, and it's really been overlooked by the authorities and by the media," she said. "They think it happens everywhere but South Dakota."

Isolation, poverty, unstable government and high rates of drug and alcohol abuse create an environment on reservations that makes young women and girls particularly vulnerable to trafficking, said Danette Buskovick, director of the Statistical Analysis Center Office of Justice Programs for the Minnesota Department of Justice. For the past three years, Minnesota has studied human trafficking in the state.

Minnesota has noted victims from S. Dakota

Buskovick's 2008 legislative report on trafficking in Minnesota states: "This, on top of the jurisdictional intricacies that make reporting, investigating and prosecuting sexual assaults against Native American women and girls so difficult, makes it important to specifically assess the level of sexual trafficking occurring against Native American women and girls in Minnesota."

Minnesota still struggles with identifying where many Native American and other trafficking victims come from, but they have seen victims from South Dakota, Buskovick said.

Some Native American women and girls, along with women and children from other states, end up at the seaport in Duluth, Minn., she said.

But Christopher Grant, U.S. Department of Justice field program specialist for North and South Dakota, said he has not heard of those crimes originating here.

"I am aware that there are Native American prostitutes along with every other race and ethnicity represented in that activity," Grant said in an e-mail. "But I simply have not heard of trafficking in South Dakota within the region."

Shelters take some girls, women, turn some away

Trafficked South Dakota Native American women and girls are showing up at shelters and other agencies in Minnesota, said Suzanne Koepplinger, executive director of the Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center in Minneapolis. But some trafficking victims are turned away from shelters that are at capacity or agencies that consider them too high risk to help, she said.

"I've heard the stories of women being trafficked from the reservations to places like Rapid City, but they are also coming here, too," Koepplinger said.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that adult women are persuaded to work as prostitutes, while girls are kept in homes or hidden brothels and raped by customers, she said.