Prosecutor Ben Gauen recognized all the signs. He knew that the teenager who’d been screaming for help in the middle of a spring day on Aurora Avenue North — the “epicenter of sex trafficking in Seattle,” according to Gauen — was a victim of sex trafficking. Witnesses, still “physically shaking” from what they saw that day in June, told police that a man had punched the teenager in the face and shoved her inside an SUV, court records say. When police found her in the SUV, with mascara running down her face and bruises on her skin, she insisted she wanted no help.
It wasn’t the first time law enforcement found the woman in danger. Court records show King County sheriff’s deputies removed her from the area, known to local sex workers as “the Track,” four separate times when she was a minor. Prosecutors knew that her attacker, Christopher Jamison, had a history of rape and domestic violence charges. Social media posts by Jamison and the woman indicated he identifies as a “pimp” and profited from her prostitution, according to court documents.
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In a court filing days after the incident, Gauen made the argument that Jamison should be held in jail on $100,000 bail — not just because of the alleged assault, but because it was clear to prosecutors that it was about sex trafficking. “Given the known history of the defendant and the victim, investigative leads, and the context of this assault, it is more probable than not that this assault stemmed from a sex trafficking relationship,” Gauen wrote in the court filing.
But Jamison was not charged with trafficking. The teenager hadn’t come forward as a trafficking victim, making it difficult for prosecutors to prove that trafficking had occurred. Instead, he was charged with unlawful imprisonment, a felony, and fourth-degree assault, a gross misdemeanor, using a bystander’s video of the incident as key evidence. He pleaded guilty to the assault charge in October and was released without supervision a few days later. (Jamison declined to comment for this story through his attorney. InvestigateWest was unable to reach the victim.)
Gauen, a King County senior deputy prosecuting attorney, has seen situations like this before. “Sex trafficking victims are groomed, gaslighted, manipulated, and threatened not to report their victimization,” he wrote in the request for bail. Prosecutors like Gauen, along with law enforcement, service providers and survivors, say they are increasingly desperate to hold traffickers accountable and protect victims from further abuse. Kids are openly trafficked online and on city streets in Portland and Seattle, they say, and some end up selling sex into adulthood.
Located along the Interstate 5 corridor, a major highway running from Mexico to Canada that links many West Coast cities, Washington and Oregon are recognized as hubs within a national and global sex trafficking circuit. State legislators across the region have tried to crack down on trafficking in recent years, and Washington has some of the toughest laws against sex trafficking in the country.
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Despite these efforts, the percentage of nationwide human trafficking cases that occur in Washington and Oregon has risen since 2017, according to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, a 24/7 phone line that maintains one of the nation’s most extensive human trafficking data sets. In contrast, neighboring California — which holds the largest share of trafficking cases of any state — has seen improvements in this area. While 15.5% of trafficking cases identified by the hotline in 2017 occurred in California, that number fell to 12.9% in 2021.
Meanwhile, sex trafficking of minors in King County has become more visible within the last three years following a dip at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Debra Boyer, a cultural anthropologist who has conducted studies on commercial sexual exploitation of youth in Washington. “All you have to do is go up Aurora Avenue a few times, and you will see that the level of activity has really increased,” Boyer said.
Yet trafficking convictions in Washington and Oregon have remained low. From 2014 to 2022, the number of people convicted of sex trafficking crimes across both states fell 21%, dropping from 66 people to 52, InvestigateWest found in an analysis of state and federal court data.
“We’re getting reports frequently, weekly, that there are children out there walking ‘the Blade,’” said Portland Police Bureau Sgt. Kristi Butcher, using a term for an area in Northeast Portland with high rates of sex trafficking, similar to Seattle’s Track. “We need to get serious about our conversations of what this really is, and start listening to survivors and coming up with real solutions. Because the way that it’s working right now — it’s not working.”
Police and prosecutors say getting justice for trafficking victims is challenging because many victims aren’t willing or able to participate in investigations. But survivors say law enforcement and policymakers can make more investments that would allow police to be proactive in investigating traffickers while providing increased funding for social services, like housing and specialized treatment for trafficking victims, to enable survivors to safely participate in the prosecution of their traffickers if they choose to do so.
Mercy Dizon, a survivor of child sex trafficking in Washington’s Kitsap County in the early 2000s, said that although she has seen movement in how law enforcement addresses trafficking, she wouldn’t necessarily call it progress. “I think it is progressive for law enforcement to make policy changes. But is there a reduction in trafficking in our communities? No,” Dizon said. “I think it’s gotten worse.”
Law enforcement’s approach to sex trafficking wasn’t always so hands off. Historically, police departments across the nation — including in Washington and Oregon — used arrests for prostitution and other related crimes as a mechanism to temporarily remove adults and children from the sex trade and compel them to cooperate with trafficking investigations. Within the last two decades, police departments throughout the region have shifted to approaching kids involved in prostitution as victims, not criminals, striving to connect them with services instead of throwing them in jail.
The victim-centered approach aligns with what advocates call the “Equality Model,” in which those selling sex are not criminally charged while traffickers and buyers continue to be criminalized. Though the model is heavily criticized by survivors who argue that protecting sex workers’ safety requires full decriminalization of both buying and selling of consensual sex, advocates on both sides of the debate agree that children cannot consent to sex work.
In 2000, Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the first comprehensive federal law to address human trafficking. The act added new criminal provisions that strengthened the ability of federal prosecutors to pursue cases against traffickers. Since then, all states have adopted policies to prosecute trafficking cases and protect survivors within state courts as well. Washington became the first state to enact a law making human trafficking a crime in 2003. Oregon followed suit in 2007.
Yet many states are struggling to put these laws into practice. A 2021 study sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, found that while a majority of investigations into sex trafficking cases led to prosecution (77%), only a third of those cases were prosecuted under human trafficking laws. The remaining cases were prosecuted under other charges, like sexual or physical violence, drug possession and drug trafficking.
JR Ujifusa, a senior deputy district attorney in Multnomah County, says the victim-centered approach is a “double-edged sword” — although fewer victims are going to jail, traffickers are also using this to their advantage, as police officers have few alternative places to send victims. Many young victims deny they are being trafficked at all, making it difficult for police to convince them to seek help and to report information about their traffickers, a crucial piece of many criminal investigations.
Though law enforcement, prosecutors and survivors agree that the solution is not to criminalize victims, many recognize that — if the end goal is to reduce trafficking — the current system is not working.
