Former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detective Ray Bercini told a room of about 100 people that someone can sell an illegal gun once. A human being, he said, can be sold over and over again.  During the 10th annual Santa Clarita Valley Human Trafficking Prevention Summit on Friday morning at College of the Canyons in Valencia, Bercini and others spoke about the misconception that human trafficking is not a Santa Clarita Valley issue.  “It definitely does happen here,” Pastor Dan Broyles, co-founder of the SCV Human Trafficking Taskforce, said during his opening remarks of the summit, “and there are youth at risk.”  Bercini, who retired in 2020, was a coordinator of the Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force. He shed some light on the human trafficking situation in the area.   To begin with, he said, the majority of domestic human trafficking is not smuggling, where traffickers transport people across borders and into the area. Rather, the issue here is related to a crime against a person, which contains the element of coercion and subsequent exploitation and/or forced labor.   “Most of the cases that Los Angeles, the county, city, our police departments that we work with — this is all domestic stuff we’re working with,” Bercini said. “Probably 98% of what we do in investigations is domestic. It’s here. I had five cases out of Santa Clarita when I was an investigator.”  Bercini spoke about the basics of the crime — traffickers take someone and make them a commodity. However, finding these crimes and making a case, Bercini said, is getting more and more challenging, and he emphasized the need for community vigilance and the important role that various agencies play by working together, each one offering their expertise in their jurisdictions and in their particular areas of the law and focus.   Additionally, Bercini highlighted the vulnerabilities in the types of victims in this kind of crime, such as mental health issues and social isolation. The populations typically preyed upon, he said, include foster and runaway youth, homeless people, members of the LGBTQ community, individuals with disabilities, marginalized minority populations, undocumented immigrants and people who socialize on the internet via online games with strangers or on websites where they meet others.  Those trafficking individuals deal in forced prostitution, servile marriage (mail-order brides), forced stripping, forced pornography, child sex tourism, forced escort services, residential brothels, massage parlors, phone chat lines and more.   One of the difficulties in fighting the trafficking problem, Bercini said, has to do with victims not appearing to want help. He talked about how so many victims are typically confined. Others are silent out of fear, shame, self-blame or hopelessness, or they can’t speak due to the threat of violence upon them or upon loved ones.   Then there are those like Sandy Esparza who had become dependent on a drug that altered her sense of reality, making it impossible to reach out for help. Esparza, a victim who was trafficked out of the SCV in the early 1990s, spoke to those at the summit about her experience and how a woman had preyed upon her because of her emotional frailties at the time.   Esparza had been abused at home — verbally, physically and sexually by multiple people since the age of 5.   “I really struggled with my self-esteem and my confidence — it was crushed — and struggled to never feel good enough for a mother whose love was conditional on performance,” she said.   Esparza spoke about being a latchkey child and having to care for her siblings, and how at age 14, her mother had surrendered her to foster care.   Within 48 hours of that, she said, she ran away.  “I met a woman who seemed to have everything I needed,” Esparza said. “She was kind, she was nurturing, she promised to protect me, and she was this stunning woman, almost magnetic.”  Esparza was groomed, which, according to Broyles and Bercini, is often how predators lure in their victims. That “stunning” woman who came into young Esparza’s life would become her trafficker, pushing Esparza into drug addiction and selling the little girl to fund her own drug addictions.  Esparza was sold for sex out of a home in South Central Los Angeles. Bercini said typical sex and labor trafficking locations vary. They include residential homes, storefronts, mobile vehicles, massage parlors, storage units and motels. He showed pictures of a backyard shed that had been turned into living quarters for one trafficking victim.  Agencies have been working together to keep these crimes from occurring and to save victims. At the summit on Friday, groups like CAST (Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking), the RISE Foundation, ZOE International and others provided information to help and to inform.   Additionally, Bercini strongly encouraged people to communicate with their kids, to be more cognizant of when they’re online and know what they’re doing online. He also suggested that people with tips call the law enforcement Crime Stoppers line at 1-800-222 TIPS (8477), and to use the non-law enforcement National Hotline for connections to survivor services at 1-888-373-7888.  The post Summit experts: It’s a misconception that human trafficking isn’t an SCV issue  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.