Southern Oregon Human Trafficking Disruptors Summit draws more than 200 to Ashland Hills Hotel 

Note: This story contains disturbing information about human trafficking and suicide and is not suitable for young readers. If you or someone you know is currently experiencing thoughts of suicide, please call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org for more resources.

Part one of two parts.

By Holly Dillemuth, Ashland.news

Human trafficking has widely been portrayed as an issue involving mainly kidnappings or abductions and largely happening outside the United States or in larger U.S. cities, when in reality that represents less than 5% of all human trafficking.

Before her work helping victims and survivors of human trafficking began five years ago, Rosa Gordon might have equated human trafficking with something similar, too. She’s now head of the Jackson County Coalition Against Sex Trafficking (JCCAST) Training and Education Subcommittee and serves as the sex trafficking intervention coordinator for Community Works in Medford.

Gordon was one of a dozen speakers at the Southern Oregon Human Trafficking Disruptors Summit, held at Ashland Hills Hotel & Suites last Friday and Saturday, March 22-23. The summit also featured 16 agencies aiming to combat the human trafficking industry from every angle.

“I thought trafficking was an issue so far from our area that it only happened in big cities, internationally,” Gordon told a crowd of more than 200 people on Friday, the first day of the two-day event. “It is a public health issue that impacts individuals, it impacts families, (and) communities across generations. It is an issue that is relevant and necessary for all of us to know.”

Human trafficking is defined in the following ways:

• A crime involving the exploitation of a person, services, or commercial sex.
• A commercial sex act which is induced by force, fraud, or coercion.
• The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion.

Human trafficking can be found across various industries, including in agriculture (specifically, some hemp farms and marijuana grow operations), construction, illicit activities, massage parlors, hospitality, restaurant and food services, traveling sales crews, and at home, according to Van Gordon.

In 2021, the Polaris Project, which operates the National Human Trafficking Hotline, identified 16,554 trafficking victims in the U.S — including 485 in Oregon. 

“Our advocacy center alone is seeing one out of every four survivors of (human) trafficking in the state of Oregon,” Van Gordon said.

Community Works, the Medford domestic and sexual violence resource center, fielded calls from 163 survivors of human trafficking that year alone.

“Although these numbers seem large, we are still missing a huge portion of survivors who can’t feel empowered to pick up the phone, who aren’t able to connect with resources, and who are hidden in plain sight,” Van Gordon said.

Gordon noted that while there are two main types of trafficking, labor and sex trafficking — “both of which are occurring here in our community,” Gordon said — there is also a third type: familial human trafficking, which means the individual is trafficked by a family member.

“A lot of folks, unfortunately, go missed, they’re hidden in plain sight, because it’s happening in the home,” Van Gordon said.

Other places where human trafficking occurs include strip clubs, hotels and online pornography.

“We think that they want to be there,” she said of pornographic videos. “But we don’t know what’s happening.”

Massage parlors where trafficking occurs are common in the Rogue Valley, according to Van Gordon.

In October 2021, law enforcement in Grants Pass found evidence of human trafficking and raided a massage parlor, arresting several — including a buyer of the parlor’s services. 

A news article at the time called it prostitution, but all of the survivors of trafficking at the establishment were referred to Van Gordon at Community Works, among other community services.

“These survivors only spoke Mandarin and had to provide sexual services, sexual massages, and were being forced to be there by their (immigration) documents being seized,” Van Gordon said. “These happen a lot in Jackson County. I see them all the time, 24/7 massage parlors.

“Trafficking would not flourish the way it does without people purchasing other people, without businesses that are profiting from the exploitation of others, and without communities that just look the other way and just allow it to happen. They don’t admit that it happens in our area.”

The trafficking summit at Ashland Hills was co-produced by Jordan Pease, who operates the Rogue Valley Metaphysical Library in Ashland, and Lauren Trantham, who is on staff at the Epik Project in Vancouver, Washington, and also is executive director of the nonprofit Ride My Road. 

Trantham has traveled 10,000 miles on her motorcycle across the U.S. to photograph survivors of human trafficking. The summit brought together dozens of local agencies working to combat human trafficking in all forms.

“Most anti-human trafficking conferences across the country are set for service providers,” Trantham told attendees on Friday. “I don’t know of any other anti-trafficking conference that is for community members, so that is really innovative and it all comes from Rebecca (Bender).”

Meet Rebecca Bender

Summit keynote speaker Rebecca Bender, founder of the Rebecca Bender Initiative, grew up in Cave Junction. Her Grants Pass-base nonprofit offers an online academy for survivors of human trafficking. Bender’s story of trafficking survival and recovery has been widely featured nationwide.

To start her presentation Friday morning, Bender shared with attendees a 2006 CBS newscast about a raid of a home in a Dallas, Texas, suburb in 2006.

It’s more than a slide in a presentation for her.

Bender was among the women who were taken into custody from that house at the time. But it wasn’t for her crime or the other women with her, but for the traffickers who forced them into sex trafficking industry years prior.

“You could imagine 18 years ago some of the language that you probably heard would never be used today, and the way that they showed all the victims’ faces on TV,” Bender said. “I’m going to show you a follow-up that they did just a couple years ago so we can see the drastic difference in reporting that awareness has been able to make in how we talk about the issue, and how it shapes the way people see it, the victims that are involved, the children that are involved; it’s very different now, thankfully, but it takes a lot of work.” 

Bender’s story begins in Cave Junction, not far outside Grants Pass, where she grew up an only child. She describes a mostly pleasant childhood, growing up in a small logging community, up until her parents divorced at age 9. After that her father became an alcoholic. 

She noted the impact of the trauma of being alone a lot while her mother struggled to make ends meet, working two jobs to support them.

“I grew up feeling really unimportant, really unwanted, really literally starved … that created something in me,” Bender said.

“I needed to figure out how to do it all on my own,” she added.

In high school, she learned that saying “yes” to everything meant she wouldn’t have to be alone and/or figure it out all on her own. Yes to boys, yes to parties — whatever it took to not have to figure it out all on her own when she came back home.

Bender excelled in high school and got accepted into Oregon State University. But she became pregnant the summer after graduating high school and, instead of OSU, went to Rogue Community College in Grants Pass. 

Taking a detour to be closer to friends attending University of Oregon, she moved to Eugene with her young daughter and eventually met a man who she thought could change everything for them.

Six months into their relationship, her boyfriend asked her to move in with him and she was happy to do so. But while she was packing up her apartment, he told her his job was relocating him to Las Vegas.

From the outside, Bender appeared to be able to provide for her and her daughter. She felt like she could finally have the family she wanted, both from when she was a child, and now for her own daughter.

She noted to the audience that she “begged” to go with him. 

“I like to point that out ,because I think when we picture human trafficking, we picture kidnapping, we picture stranger danger,” Bender said.

“We definitely don’t think about what to do when our boundaries are being tested,” she added.

Van Gordon noted during her session that traffickers are more likely to target vulnerable individuals. Yes, they target people who are at homeless shelters, waiting at the bus station, those with a mental or physical concern. But traffickers can also target individuals who simply want to feel loved, or to be in a relationship.

“Trafficking is a super manipulative, calculated crime,” Van Gordon said. “Traffickers really think through how they’re going to manipulate another individual.”

Bender would come to find those tactics were a brutal reality.

‘It’s just dancing’

When Bender and her boyfriend arrived in Las Vegas with her daughter in tow, they dropped off her daughter at his brother’s house.

It seemed normal at the time, especially since Bender’s daughter had already met his family.

“He told me to get dressed up, that he was going to take me out on the town,” Bender said. 

Bender said she had borrowed a fake I.D. from a friend, since wasn’t yet 21, and she was excited to see the Vegas strip. But that’s not where he took her.

“Instead of taking me to a nightclub, we drove to a deserted street,” she said. “He parked the car and he said, I spent a lot of money to get you here.”

Bender apologized to him for putting him out in any way. To her, she thought she was naive for not knowing how much it cost to move.

He asked her to go sign up for an escort service that was located on the street where they parked.

“It’s just dancing,” he told her. “This is how it works here. You can trust me.”

When she refused to go, he slapped her across the face.

“He said, you’re gonna to go in that room and you’re going to get my money back,” Bender said.

“I remember literally thinking, well, we’re adults now, because my parents’ fights were real violent,” she added. “You’ve been desensitized to violence in the home, you tend to minimize it.

“And then I remember thinking, I don’t know where my baby is,” she added. “I pushed every red flag aside and I thought, things will be better tomorrow. 

“Unfortunately, tomorrow did not come, and over the next six years, I ended up getting bought and sold between three different traffickers, two of which tattooed their names on my back. I was hospitalized for dehydration and overexhaustion. Some nights I was only given an hour to sleep.”

She was beaten almost weekly, her face broken in five places, and has been to jail multiple times.

Bender’s mom showed up to Las Vegas, worried that something was wrong.

“‘Something’s wrong with Becky,’ that’s what my family would say,” Bender said.

“Nobody from a small town, especially that long ago, thinks ‘human trafficking,’” she added. “It’s not even a concept. Trafficking is kidnapped kids overseas.”

Bender’s mom eventually took her daughter back with her.

By age 21, Bender had twice tried to end her life by suicide.

“I just felt really hopeless,” Bender told the audience.

At one point, she tried to drive into an oncoming semi trailer.

“Thankfully it didn’t work,” Bender said.

She still felt very trapped.

“I had multiple attempted escapes,” she said, “and I learned what to do each time one didn’t work out. I learned where to hide clothes better next time, I learned that, post-9/11, you can’t buy a plane ticket with cash, because I got all the way to the airport and no one would sell me a ticket. 

“I needed to start burning receipts, cause if he found it in my car, like I did last time, I’d be beaten unrecognizably,” she added. “And I learned that even when I did get out, all the way here to Grants Pass, that my trafficker flew in to Medford airport, stayed at the Country Inn & Suites, and came and found me. And I thought, ‘I can’t get out of this.’”

It took six years for her to successfully escape human trafficking, but she had to flee to London with a “buyer,” a tactic she admits was an unorthodox one, but seemingly the only way out of a vicious cycle.  

Just the beginning

But in many ways, her escape from trafficking was only the beginning, especially in rebuilding her life.

Because Bender had been trafficked the previous three years in Dallas, she wasn’t filing a tax return during that time, either. She was charged with Failure to File and given a $80,000 fine but no prison time.  

“I was able to run from my trafficker with $80,000 debt to the IRS,” Bender said. 

This meant her wages would be garnished even as she attempted to start over.

“Garnishing your paychecks and never getting tax returns … as a single mom, those are pretty problematic to try to start over with a criminal record,” Bender said.  

Once back in Grants Pass, she began to rebuild her life, but it took time. She eventually earned a master’s degree online, and decided to develop an online school for trafficked survivors, too. 

Bender founded Elevate Academy in 2014. Now, more than 1,600 survivors have graduated from the online school. Graduates have come from 600 U.S. cities and more than 22 countries.

“One of the things I like to remind myself is, 30 years ago, our nation thought about smoking in a very different light than it does today,” Bender said. “And it took everybody doing a lot of something to shift the way a nation saw a health crisis, and I think we have an ability to do something similar today when it comes to ending human trafficking, we can look at this topic really differently.

“I think we’re a part of doing that today,” she added.

Community Works facilitates JCCAST, which contains a steering committee and three subcommittees: Victims Services, Training and Education, and Criminal Justice.

The Oregon Department of Justice has a goal that all 36 counties in Oregon would establish anti-trafficking task forces. Currently, there are 19, including one in Jackson County.

Van Gordon invited community members to join the Training and Education subcommittee.

“It is here where we plan trainings for the community, we do outreach events, we provide education,” she said.

Van Gordon emphasized how best to address those who have experienced human trafficking.

“This issue is so complex that the best thing that we as advocates or people can say to a survivor is, ‘I see you, I believe you, there are resources available for when/if you choose to leave,’” Van Gordon said.

Reach Ashland.news reporter Holly Dillemuth at [email protected].

Part two, about the second day of the summit: Human trafficking going on in many forms in Southern Oregon, summit speakers say