We've never liked the term human trafficking. It's too cleansed. It sounds like a different version of civil engineering or something. It seems like the bad guys came up with that term to hide how awful.

They are.

We're talking about slavery rapes slavery often sex slavery exploitation of children.

Yeah,

Opal singleton is the president and CEO of million kids. It's a 501c 3 nonprofit dedicated to keeping kids safe from predators.

Opal's experience in in this world is long too long to mention, but she has worked with and for law enforcement dealing with the sexual exploitation of kids and adults for a very long time.

Locally nationally, internationally.

Is really one of the leading lights in this field reading from the information you sent a human trafficking is the fastest growing crime in America three out of four cases are US citizens.

Mostly are young people who have been lowered, tricked or forced into prostitution or sex torsion, which is a term I hadn't heard before, but how are young people being lowered, tricked or forced into this?

Well, it's partly gangs, but it's mostly social media because gangs also use social media and it happens in many ways. I've written a book on it called seduce the grooming of America's teenagers.

I've been working with this for about 10 years and usually what happens is it begins with a fantasy relationship, whether it is it through social media, someone they've never met that they begin to build up or someone they meet in school that maybe is a gang member that they begin to fantasize and the relationship becomes unrealistic and they become totally dedicated and most of this is happening through social media.

Mostly the girls I'm thinking.

Well, actually there is a new study out about sex torsion, which is usually where we'll often start and let me clarify that word.

It means sex and extortion combined.

And so the new study says that it's happening to more guys than girls, which is my experience since I work with long sports and I work with rural cases.

And I have followed that for a long time and a lot of people are saying it was more girls. It is really often more guys through video gaming and I'll get to that in a minute.

But basically if it happens to sex torsion, they'll either have a boyfriend, girlfriend, relationship and real person where they give a naked photo and then the relationship breaks up and they start getting blackmailed.

More often than not, what happens is they meet someone on the internet and they develop this kind of fantasy relationship.

They're thinking that it's like Justin Bieber.

And the predator will only give our kids three or four pieces of information and our kids make up the rest.

And so what is happening is they start fighting with their parents as they become more loyal to this person and their fantasy.

And the parents don't realize that what's happening is they're not arguing with the boyfriend. They're not arguing with the child.

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