Human Trafficking in Northern Arizona

Some of the stories included in this project include vivid, intimate details regarding personal accounts of sex trafficking, sexual assault, kidnapping, abuse and/or murder. If you are sensitive to this kind of material or triggered by these topics, reader discretion is advised.

When April Gibson was 17, she appeared much younger. Her youthful appearance didn’t deter men who were more than twice her age from making persistent advancements toward her online, but, rather, seemed to draw in an older crowd.

It started when Gibson was 13 years old and begged her parents for a tablet that was on sale for Black Friday. Upon setup, she started downloading several social media apps including Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and the Kik Messenger app to form group messages with her friends. Describing Kik Messenger as the ‘pinpointed area’ where older men and women were somehow searching Gibson’s profile picture and username, she ended up directly messaging complete strangers through the app that was originally downloaded to stay in contact with her teenage girlfriends.

Her online presence began as a way to get away from her rocky relationship with her parents and turned into an online community where Gibson felt supported and understood by these people she was messaging online — a sense of trust was being strategically developed but not entirely understood from both people involved in the chats.

The trust was built by strangers getting to know specific details about Gibson’s life, including her growing frustrations with her parents, and always telling her she was in the right, being on her side in times of conflict, or consistently checking in about what was new in her personal life. Over a few months, Gibson felt as though these two-dimensional adults she was getting to know via Kik Messenger were surely people that she could place her trust in, while always reminding them of how old she was.

“They’re, in a sense, turning me against my parents without me knowing it and then I’m pissed off at my parents and I don’t know why,” Gibson said. “I have this voice from my tablet of the online community of people just telling me stuff I wanted to hear so they can gain my trust and get what they wanted out of me, which were pictures.”

Conversations started with messages and then progressed to photographs. What started as seemingly innocent ‘send me a picture of what you’re wearing to school today’ turned into asking what Gibson was up to at the time, and when she responded that she was going swimming with friends, turned into ‘send a picture of you and your friends in your bathing suits.’ Within six months, messages with adults she ‘trusted’ quickly transformed into unsolicited sexual pictures of 40-year-old men followed with videos of them masturbating sent to a 13-year-old girl. Gibson immediately knew how wrong this exchange was and chose to remind those sending inappropriate pictures of her young age.

This was the foundation of Gibson’s online presence.

The next couple years of Gibson’s life as a teenager included getting her tablet taken away but making sure to remove the Kik Messenger app before her parents could see all that she had been up to and being sent to boarding school in Tennessee at 15 years old for 10 months to hit the restart button. What led up to this was being pushed so far from her family, that she would obtain secret phones just so she could continue talking with these people online in attempt to make her feel better.

“I’ve always been a Christian, but I based my faith off of my parents [growing up],” Gibson said. “When I went to boarding school, I remember telling God, ‘God, if you’re real, just make me the happiest person on Earth because I’m pissed off. I’m just angry.’”

After 10 months in Tennessee, Gibson returned home to Flagstaff, Arizona, where she was born and raised and relinquished some of the freedom that wasn’t given to her at boarding school. At 16, she was attending Coconino Community College (CCC) and by 17, she was moved out of her parents house since they weren’t giving her the freedom she desired.

“Once I moved out, it was just downhill… I went from having no freedom, to a little bit of freedom, to me being able to go do anything because my parents weren’t on my ass all the time,” Gibson said.

Cue the reintroduction to building her online presence, only this time it happened to be through SeekingArrangement.com, which was brought to her attention through a co-worker at the gym she worked at. Without a verification process to go through on the website, Gibson was able to easily lie about her age and put in her profile that she was 18, even though she appeared much younger, and was 17 at the time of creating her profile.

“I don’t look like I’m 20 now. When I was 17, I probably looked like I was 15,” Gibson said.

Although some individuals utilize the Seeking Arrangement website solely for sex and knowledgeably enter consensual relationships based on the transaction of sex for money, Gibson explicitly used it to make some quick cash as a 17-year-old college student living on her own. The way Gibson made $1,800 within her first five dates did not include sex, as she repeatedly made it crystal clear that sex/the performance of sexual acts were not things she was willing to do for money — instead, guys would take her out to dinner or just spend time with her before paying her in cash and sending her on her way.

Going out to dinner was exactly what she agreed to when messaging an older man through the website on her drive back to Flagstaff — he would take her on a dinner date and then pay her $300 for her time and company, nothing else. That’s what she was initially promised, at least.

“With everyone else, I didn’t get a weird feeling — I felt like they were pretty genuine and wanting to appease their loneliness,” Gibson said. “With this guy, I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but I just had a feeling that it was not going to end well.”

The man prompted Gibson to drive over to his house before dinner, as it was “right off the freeway” and easy to find. Even though Gibson couldn’t quite put her finger on why she was feeling the way she was, she made the responsible decision to share her location with one of her close friends who knew what she was doing that evening, just in case.

To greet her as if they knew one another or to come across in a way that wouldn’t be alarming if anyone were to see the two of them outside his house together, he told her to give him a kiss on the cheek and she obliged not thinking much of it.

Upon her arrival, Gibson was met by a man between the ages of 38-40 who towered over her in the height department, reaching a few inches over six feet. Immediately, she noticed candles were lit around the house, his blinds were all shut ‘but it was nighttime so it’s okay, that’s normal’ she thought to herself, and romantic music was playing in the background of the dimly lit house. Small talk ensued about things like where she was originally from and what she was going to school for before he started rubbing the inside of her thigh while sitting on the couch next to each other.

Gibson reiterated the point of her not being up for sex, what they had initially agreed upon, and that he fully knew she didn’t want to do that to which he responded ‘okay, yeah, no problem.’ This was just before he started twirling her hair in his fingers and she felt the need to persist with what her intentions were — going out to dinner. At this point, three things happened. Gibson noted that he started to get a bit frustrated with her consistently denying him, she observed that he had consumed some alcohol by the way he was acting, and he insisted on giving her a tour of the house before heading to dinner.

The tour Gibson received was off-putting since he made a comment along the lines of, “you’re lucky you came to my house — some guys cage up girls and never let them leave.”

He opened the door to one of his bedrooms during the tour, dark except for the window illuminating the outside light, and told her that she wasn’t going to leave that night.

Only flicking on the light switch to remove two arm restraints that were previously tucked under the mattress just out of sight connected to the headboard of the bed, Gibson remembers seeing a glimpse of a dog in a crate and wondering if he wanted to lock her in there. The room reeked of potent cologne and she wasn’t able to kick his huge body off of her or use her hands since they were both restrained, to defend herself against him penetrating her 17-year-old body.

“I don’t want to do this.”

”I don’t want to do this.”

”Can we stop?”

“I looked in his eyes and he looked insane. I was freaked out,” Gibson said. “It was like a horror movie. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was suffocating.”

He repeated that she wouldn’t be leaving that night. Afraid of what would happen next, Gibson told him about how she decided to share her location with one of her friends, and not only that, but if her friend didn’t hear from her by a certain time, the cops would be called and sent to her location. She said she felt the need to tell him this in hopes of him letting her go, and after he expressed how pissed he was that she shared her location and verifying that she did this by having her unlock her phone, he untied her wrists and told her to get dressed.

“He stood at the door, gave me a water bottle and $300 and said, ‘you don’t need to tell anyone what happened,’” Gibson said.

Following her assault, Gibson felt so awful and would sit in the shower to scrub her skin because she felt ’so gross’ and couldn’t get the horrible feeling off of her. Gibson said she thinks the reason he changed his mind about letting her leave was not wanting the cops to show up at his house and he thought he could just pretend nothing happened. Until the deep-set hickeys he left on her neck were noticed by an acquaintance at a bonfire days later and Gibson was called a ‘whore’ because of them.

She overdosed that same night.

In the Emergency Room (ER), Gibson told doctors that she had been raped, but because she was overcome with shame and embarrassment about escorting through Seeking Arrangement and didn’t want anyone around her to know, she told them it happened in Downtown Flagstaff with someone she didn’t know. This story didn’t last long, since detectives were starting to comb through surveillance cameras downtown and Gibson knew it wouldn’t result in any evidence to back up her story.

Since she attempted to take her own life by overdosing on medication, Gibson was placed in the Behavioral Health Unit, where she came clean to one of the therapists about what really happened to her.

When she came clean, Gibson was met with an immediate change in attitude toward her from a detective who initially wanted to make sure she was okay, but threatened to charge her with prostitution upon learning about the true nature of what took place.

This terrified Gibson.

As time passed, Gibson was released from the hospital after nurses who were kind and gentle with her took pictures of the marks on her neck to keep in evidence and treated her for the overdose. She became more educated in what had happened to her and went over the specifics of her situation which reassured her that she could not be charged with prostitution since she never consented to having sex with him in exchange for money in the first place.

Gibson ultimately made the decision of not taking her assailant to court, against the advice of people close to her, since the prostitution charge was always lingering in the back of her mind from the detective at the hospital and she didn’t want to keep reliving this scarring event.

April Gibson was sexually trafficked at 17 years old. She made an agreement through an escorting website that had nothing to do with her having sex or performing any kind of sexual acts with someone over twice her age. What she was initially promised, which was going out to dinner, did not happen and she was exploited for sex against her will.

It has been a few years since April Gibson endured the unthinkable but she is using her experience to educate, inform, and advocate around Flagstaff. She is a mom to her 20-month-old daughter, Everleigh, and became a wife in September of 2019, when she married her husband, Austin.

Gibson’s bubbly personality and welcoming home that has bits and pieces of who she is now scattered throughout the house, are proof of her perseverance and willingness to move on after being sexually trafficked online. She doesn’t want what happened to her in 2017 to control her life anymore.

Gibson found out she was pregnant with her daughter, Everleigh, shortly after being released from the hospital and had her when she was 18. Everleigh was not a result of what happened to Gibson the night she was trafficked, but a relationship that took place right after she got out of the hospital. She thinks of her daughter as the “biggest blessing and the purpose of why she’s here.”

Trafficking, whether it is human or sex trafficking, is a speculative subject of conversation amongst college students and local, long-time residents where there aren’t definitive ideas of the prominence in Flagstaff.

“Human trafficking is the exploitation of a person, and that can either be for sex or for labor,” , who founded the Flagstaff Initiative Against Trafficking (FIAT) in August of 2017, said. “It is very complex in that for labor trafficking, working is not illegal. All these people have jobs that are working and are in these industries but aren’t necessarily getting the things that they were promised that they were going to get.”

Wyatt has firsthand experience in dealing with victims of trafficking and knowledge of the prevalence in Arizona, specifically Flagstaff and Phoenix.  

Kate Wyatt started as an intern at Northland Family Help Center in 2012 while studying for her bachelor degree. The help center provides shelter and trauma-informed care to families in the Flagstaff area and is the home to FIAT.

After working as an intern, she was hired on as a domestic violence shelter advocate. With this position came one-on-one interactions with victims of violence – both domestic and sexual.

“In my time working with all these individuals and pretty diverse populations, and having conversations with them, I started to recognize something else was happening with these people,” Wyatt said. “They’re talking about these situations where they’re being exploited.”

Wyatt studied and completed extensive amounts of research on both human trafficking and the pornography industry during her undergraduate schooling as a social worker – this is when things started to click for her. The convincing research prompted Wyatt to bring the issue of trafficking up to her shelter manager as well as the executive director of the help center.

Funding was nonexistent at this time. While Super Bowl XLIX was being hosted in 2015, Wyatt chose to spend a year and a half reaching out to individuals in Phoenix who had acquired resources and training in trafficking. Super Bowls are often a huge target for traffickers because there are thousands of people in the vicinity, making it easy to kidnap and traffick a victim. She brought all this information back to the shelter manager and executive director, which resulted in a training based around trafficking for all the staff at Northland in the summer of 2017.

“During that [the training], they got human trafficking one-on-one information, but also got to speak with a survivor,” Wyatt said. “That was really impactful for them to hear – she [the survivor of trafficking] had been involved in systems and nobody ever really spoke to her about human trafficking.”

Wyatt became the Human Trafficking Program & Mobile Advocate Coordinator at Northland Family Help Center in August of 2017, shortly after the training took place, when the agency decided to address the issue of trafficking as a community.

Detective , who works within the Flagstaff Police Department (FPD) in People’s Crimes, is someone local who has worked with Wyatt in trafficking cases.  

“I love working with Kate. Kate’s awesome. But [McCarthy of Homeland Security Investigations] and I [also] work together on some trafficking cases,” Seay said. “It’s [trafficking] not as prevalent here as it is down in the valley… but it does happen here.”

, the community relations officer for the FPD, is also well-versed in trafficking and has worked closely alongside Wyatt for the past few years.

Sgt. Hernandez recognized that local law enforcement needed partnerships with the social services community, because they are more likely to be involved in the daily lives of community members. People feel more comfortable reporting instances of trafficking or other illegal activity to members of FIAT, as opposed to law enforcement, because of the possibility of being criminalized.

What starts as consensual prostitution, sex for money, has the possibility of turning into , because the components of the agreement change or one party isn’t interested anymore. Survivors of these kind of situations often fear involving law enforcement because of the initial agreement to sell themselves for sex or because of the negative scrutiny they’ll face as a result of coming clean.

“We try and recognize and partner with the social service community to make sure that we address the victim’s needs,” Sgt. Hernandez said. “The victim is always our number one priority.”

Locally, Mayor Coral Evans signed the Mayor’s Proclamation in January 2018 — this is a one-page proclamation outlining why Arizona is a hub for trafficking, the biggest misconception about the topic, what kind of financial profit is connected to trafficking and what the local initiative’s goals are “to determine the true impact of human trafficking in Flagstaff.” It was fitting that this was signed in January, as it is ‘Human Trafficking Awareness and Prevention Month.’

“It’s [trafficking] happening right next to you,” , Flagstaff City Council member, said. “It’s happening right next to me and that’s the thing, most people wouldn’t even know what it would look like.”

On a national level, the President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump, is “committed to the eradication of human trafficking.” He has signed four bills, linked below, and dedicated resources like the ‘The President’s Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons,’ as a part of a government-wide effort working to end trafficking.

“This is an urgent humanitarian issue,” Trump said. “My administration is committed to leveraging every resource we have to confront this threat, to support the victims and survivors, and to hold traffickers accountable for their heinous crimes.”

*Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (S. 1862)

*Abolish Human Trafficking Act

*Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act

*Trafficking Victims Protection Act (S. 1312)

A local instance of human trafficking happened in 2011 at the I Do! I Do! wedding boutique located on Milton Road and Route 66.  

“What they [owners of the business] were doing was promising these Vietnamese women that they could come here and have these wonderful American lives and marry their sons and daughters,” Wyatt said. “It turned out that they were having to live at the I Do! I Do! parlor. They weren’t getting the money that they were promised. They were in awful living conditions.”

The four owners, , 58; James Hartful McReynolds, 60; Joseph Minh McReynolds, 36; and Vincent Minh McReynolds, 32 were arrested and were put on probation. The boutique is still in business today.

Wyatt speculated the convictions were a result of an individual coming forward and making it known that these Vietnamese women appeared like they weren’t being taken care of. The person coming forward prompted the federal government to take action in the form of what is referred to as a ‘sting operation.’

“Not one day my tear didn’t run.”

During this operation, McReynolds explained how the FBI tore up this piece of flooring to search for “hidden drugs and money” they ultimately did not find.

“They don’t want to catch real crook, you know why, because real crook would kill them.”

McReynolds has a philosophy that only good people can make plants grow. She brought plants from Vietnam that she has cultivated for over 30 years, her favorites being marigolds.

Sting operations are vital to arresting human traffickers and sex traffickers. These operations include the work of multiple law enforcement agencies and have taken place multiple times in Flagstaff.  

The Flagstaff Police Department partners with local organizations to help decrease the occurrence of trafficking in town.

“It’s a huge, not only local issue, but national and global issue for law enforcement,” Sgt. Hernandez said. “At this point, what we’re trying to do is partner with other entities [like FIAT] who are aiming to address and mitigate the impacts and effects on society when it comes to the sex trafficking or human trafficking for forced labor.”

“Our agency, [Flagstaff Police Department] we partner with other agencies like Homeland Security, Prescott Valley PD, the FBI, and it’s a joint operation,” Seay said.

There is a component of deception lining these operations, because the information presented isn’t entirely factual or honest.

Wyatt explained there’s a lot to be gained from these sting operations, including the arrest of multiple traffickers or people committing crimes, in a best-case scenario. In March of 2018, Wyatt posted an online advertisement selling sex with a minor. Within a week of posting, there were approximately 350 calls. This ultimately led to a sting operation where eight men were arrested, for attempting to purchase sex with a minor.

, who is a school resource officer that performs regular surveillance around Flagstaff, spoke of how he hasn’t necessarily been involved in a lot of these operations, but is knowledgeable about what they entail.  

“It’s [sting operation] a culmination of facts that led into something that might turn into what they call probable cause,” Cordero said. “Initially, you want to find a reason that you have reasonable suspicion, which is just under probable cause… probable cause leads to arrests.”

Cordero spends his evenings patrolling through Flagstaff, keeping tabs on suspicious activity that happens when the sky goes dark. With ears cauliflowered from years of jiu jitsu, Cordero’s tough exterior is eluded by his soft-spoken mentality. Stopping in at a local coffee shop, he fuels up on an eggnog latte and tips the barista one hundred percent. He heads out to his surveillance vehicle and rolls the windows down in below freezing temperatures. “I drive with the heater on but I keep my windows down, I want to be able to listen to things,” he says. He has a laptop on his center console, with information about suspects in various ongoing cases. His folders and notebooks are chock-full with diagrams, notes, and screen grabs from social media. He remembers the addresses and countless first and last names filed in seven-year-old cases. Driving somewhere between four and five hundred miles a week, Cordero surveys and reports incidents to law enforcement but spends much of the warmer months walking the streets, since he’s more inconspicuous that way. He calls motels that hold secrets no-tell motels, because these locations have become frequent locations of trafficking and prostitution. Driving through neighborhoods, he keeps a close watch on the Cedar Crest apartments in the Southside. They are a, “hotbed for bad things,” laden with multiple cases of past trafficking and sexual abuse. Often he’ll sit in the back of parking lots and just watch. What drives him to spend five or more hours of his nights patrolling the seedy underbelly of Flagstaff? Although “it sucks” at times, and he may not know the outcome of his reports, Cordero’s work matters and gets criminals off the streets.

McCarthy noted how the east-west Interstate Highway 40, which travels directly through Flagstaff, has become prominent in the trafficking world.  

“The I-40 is the newest trending interstate for trafficking, as opposed to the I-10, because of all the checkpoints on the 10,” McCarthy said. “People can just travel at the 40, we don’t have any Border Patrol checkpoints coming up here.”

“They didn’t realize that this [Flagstaff] is actually poverty with the view. It is what it is,” Cordero said. “Go look at Sunnyside and the oldest part of Flagstaff – how many duplexes there are in there, how many families are just put into a small amount of space, you know, it’s hard to make a living here…”

Cordero said this unfortunately results in young women who have come out of the juvenile courts not having life skills and resorting to prostitution.  

This mural is located within walking distance from a local high school – it is also walking distance from one of the highly-trafficked neighborhoods of Flagstaff.

“We have high school students that are being trafficked, you have college students that are being trafficked right there,” Whelan said.

“Flagstaff is kind of like the ticket stop point,” McCarthy said. “And since it’s so touristy, they can use sex trafficking or sex tourism as a stop for them.”

McCarthy went on to explain that Interstate 40 is a hub for trafficking because there are not as many security and border checkpoints as other interstates such as the I-10. The I-40 travels from California to North Carolina so it covers a lot of ground without much in the way of patrol in the northern Arizona sector.

“It’s hard to even do a stop on something where there could be trafficking because it’s hard to get probable cause to do a stop on people,” McCarthy said. “We don’t have the Border Patrol around here that stops work for trafficking.”

Although McCarthy said that trafficking happens more in major cities, he also thinks there’s something to be said about small towns where trafficking is largely prevalent.

“I still think it happens more in major cities, but they bring the girls from the major cities to the small towns to make additional money,” McCarthy said. “Most of the stuff that we’ve seen is just always along high trafficked highways. And Flagstaff kind of falls perfectly in that realm.”

With Flagstaff being such a tourist town, with visitors from all over the world, McCarthy said to be careful on dating apps, in Ubers, and social media.

“They can make a lot of money in touristy town like this,” McCarthy said. “So a lot of visitors, you know, there’s not a lot of locals doing it and that’s where they make most of their money, from vacationing people.”

Cordero, Hernandez, and Seay all made note of the fact that the trafficking that takes place in Flagstaff isn’t targeted toward a specific demographic as one might have assumed; however, they all agreed this is a crime that thrives in the age of social media.

Trafficking became prevalent within apps like Craigslist, and naturally progressed to more popular apps in today’s day and age. These include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and various dating sites/apps.

“They [traffickers] target young girls that are on social media and that are just vulnerable and are putting themselves out there or willing to start off by communicating and sending pictures,” Seay said. “Then, that goes from one thing to the next… but not a specific demographic.”

Cordero has created multiple fake profiles across social media platforms in an attempt to acquire leads on traffickers in the Flagstaff area. He witnesses firsthand the lengths they are willing to go to.

“We are in a college town and I just think social media has made it really easy to do a lot of things,” Cordero said. “People have a false persona for social media and then they have to live up to it… I think the victims are much younger.”

Dr. Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs,’ a motivational theory, is a five-tiered model in psychology based on human needs. Within this model, needs lower down must be met or satisfied before the needs higher up can be addressed.

Wyatt explained how the ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ correlates back to the topic of human trafficking. These traffickers are trying to fulfill the basic needs of those they are trafficking, whether it be for employment or sexual acts, Wyatt said.  

“They need something — they need a place to stay, they need food, they might need drugs or alcohol,” Wyatt said. “Traffickers are going to see that and they’re going to offer that to them and say, ‘Hey, I’ll take you in. I’ve got a safe place for you to stay. I’ll put a roof over your head, I’ll feed you.’”

Unfortunately, this seemingly innocent situation can turn into the trafficker expecting something in return — whether that be returning rent/food money, returning the favor with sex, or some other form of exploitation.

“If there’s something that you need, you shouldn’t have to have sex or be exploited for those needs,” Wyatt said.

In another attempt to connect this specific theory to human trafficking, The Ohio State University Pressbooks or PB Pressbooks, published multiple online chapters detailing what the common thread between the two is.

In ‘Chapter 3: Theories and Human Trafficking – The Cause and Consequence of Human Trafficking’ states that “a lack of housing, food, clothing, safety, and financial security cover most of the two rungs of basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy.”

The PB Pressbooks website also states that “once basic needs have been met, psychological needs can be addressed through group settings, therapeutic interventions, trauma therapy, and a sense of accomplishment in healing. Then survivors, following Maslow’s hierarchy, will be on track to reach self-actualization.

Wooden boats pull up on an unknown rocky shore, with men filing out to start settling a new nation in what they’ll soon call, “Jamestown.” From a distance, a curious indigenous woman peers out from behind a tree and is intrigued by these new people visiting her land. After watching from afar and seeing that some of these men are good, she falls for one of the blonde, handsome, European men. Later, this man convinces the beautiful native woman to experience all that Europe has to offer and brings her from the “New World” to London where she has new encounters as a civilized lady.

The story, Disney’s Pocahontas, depicts this indigenous woman who falls in love with John Smith and John Rolfe and encounters a new way of life. But for many people, especially in the indigenous community, Pocahontas is considered the first sexually trafficked native woman.

“If you look at the Disney version, you know, it’s this glorified, beautiful, curvy, adult woman,” , a teacher at the STAR School said. “But if you look at it, you know, she was a child, and she was taken, she was raped and she was outcasted.”

It is said that Pocahontas was 11 years old when she met Smith and was later sexually assaulted and trafficked.

“She was the first one to to have been kidnapped and taken across and it was just very, very whitewashed and romanticized,” said , another teacher at the STAR School. “They made her seem like this adult, native woman who made up her own mind to do all this, but when, in reality, you know, she wasn’t.”

By the late 15th century, Native American men, women and children were being brought to Europe en mass. The enterprise spread all over the continent and there became a desire in Navajo women and children as slaves to make rugs and other commodities. Many indigenous peoples would be stolen and raped.

“So that’s when we started to see more abduction of Navajo women,” Nells said.

This issue of abduction and abuse is still continuing over 500 years later. The Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women states, “four out of five of our Native women are affected by violence today.”

Their website shares that the U.S. Department of Justice has found that American Indian women face murder rates that are more than 10 times the national average.

“To put those numbers into a broad spectrum over the entirety of our country of millions and millions of people, there’s such a small percentage of the population still being such a massive demographic in those specific categories,” , an said.

“It’s disproportionate, it’s insanity comparatively to how much of the population we take up.”

For indigenous women, these statistics are a haunting reality. Arizona ranks third in line for the highest number of missing and murdered indigenous women cases.

“Beautiful, indigenous women are going and disappearing and nobody notices,” Whelan said.

Many people believe that there are issues in local police forces turning a blind eye to cases involving missing and murdered indigenous women.

“There is an issue within the police state of not taking these cases seriously and the percentages that are laid out in front of you are only the ones that are now being researched into,” Valintine said. “They’re still upon the grassroots level.”

Along with jurisdiction issues, there is also a lack of respect for women in these communities from both native and non-native men that affects how women view themselves.

“A lot of Native women that I know express how little they feel valued in society,” , a documentary filmmaker, said. “Multiple times I’ve heard that they just feel like the world hates them.”

As an educator, Nells is working to change some of that mentality in her students.

“I try to show the kids that we are capable of breaking those cycles and that power,” Nells said. “It’s just up to them whether they do or not.”

There are hundreds of stories about missing and murdered indigenous women that go untold. Here are just a few from the Flagstaff community:

Ray Valintine’s story

In Valintine’s immediate family, five out of the seven women have been sexually assaulted and other women in their community have faced the same abuse.

“With my family, with a lot of other families, it’s absurdly normal.”

Valintine believes that as a transgender person, they are able to provide strong advocacy for all genders.

“Even though I’m not a biological female, I am an indigenous two-spirit and so within that space of spiritual context, I am a female and a male,” Valintine said. “I’m here to speak on that for my sisters and also my brothers.”

“I try to be open about my assault as a whole,” Valintine said. “I think that is a part of healing and also giving power back to other victims and giving power back to myself, it’s empowering.”

Alberta Nells’ story

A few months ago, Nells was scrolling through social media and saw that a childhood best friend went missing. Even though their paths hadn’t crossed since high school, she became emotional at the idea of her friend being disappearing.

“I was worried and it was really hard not knowing, you know, what could’ve happened to her,” Nells said.

“It was really hard to know that someone that was so close to me growing up, that it happened to,” Nells said. “It became a stronger reality that it could happen and it’s scary.”

Many native women have been victims of sexual abuse. Nells shared a story of her experience with an assailant in high school.

She hopes that telling some of her middle school girls about the reality that they live in can make a difference and said that she’s scared for the future of women in her community.

“I worry about my students,” Nells said. “I worry about my sister. I worry about my nieces. I worry about the women in my family because we’re targeted so much that we don’t know when it’s going to happen again.”

Pauline Butler’s story

Women are a stronghold in Navajo culture and when an abduction happens, especially when it leads to murder, native women are left pondering their place in society.

“It makes me feel like as a native woman, we’re still not as important to the world as our culture thinks we are,” Butler said.

The Navajo Nation is considered a matriarchal society. They emphasize a large importance on females in their community.

“We are sacred beings, it’s what we’re called,” Butler said. “A woman’s role in our whole life is to be the nurturers, to take care of the family, to take care of things that are important to the family.”

Many tribal decisions are made by the women in the family, with the help of a male counterpart that helps to make decisions in conjunction.

“It’s a balance, it’s a huge balance,” Butler said.

And when she teaches the four R’s, respect, responsibility, relationships and reasoning, she hopes to nurture a sense of love and respect for women into her students.

There has recently been a glimmer of hope for missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in Arizona, with Arizona Governor, Doug Ducey, enacting a bill, to establish a “study committee on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.”

The crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls must be addressed. Proud to sign #HB2570 to provide better data and information that will help inform our actions going forward #MMNWG #MMIW

— Doug Ducey (@dougducey) May 14, 2019

The hope is that this bill will bring more jurisdiction and support for finding additional information related to missing and murdered indigenous women.

From a wider perspective, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee recently voted on two bills, Savanna’s Act and the Not Invisible Act, which both passed the committee with no opposition.

Savanna’s Act is named for Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a 22-year-old Native woman who lived in North Dakota, who disappeared in August 2017 and was eight months pregnant. A neighbor eventually confessed to killing her, cutting the baby from her womb and dumping her body into a river.

Savanna’s Act would help with date collection and coordination between tribal, local, state and federal law enforcement in cases involving the missing and murdered indigenous women.

The Not Invisible Act would help create a federal strategy to address these women going missing, being murdered, or being trafficked for sex.

Other acts such as the PROTECT Act of 2003 and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 have sought to better integrate government institutions and protect children from forms of abuse and exploitation.

For more information about the laws in place, visit the U.S. Department of Homeland Security website.

Behind the beautiful mountain scenery, picturesque old-town shops and students rushing to classes on campus, lies a dark side to Flagstaff. People, especially women, are being trafficked from local businesses, motels, parking lots, and neighborhoods, amongst other locations around town. It is more common than one might initially assume.

Women from the indigenous population are going missing and being murdered and up until recently, there have not been many laws to protect their community from this.

The rise of social media has played a huge role in the accessibility traffickers have toward their next victim — what can start as something consensual or transactional online can become trafficking when one is being exploited for money or sex.

There are qualified people working behind the scenes to decrease the occurrence of trafficking in town. Cordero, Hernandez, McCarthy, Seay, and Wyatt are just a few of the names that have been reported on over the course of the semester to bring about a sense of hope in terms of what’s being done to help.

Trafficking can happen to anyone and it can happen anywhere. Being more aware of situations involving suspicious activity in public can save someones life. It happens here. Be aware and use this project as a way to educate yourself and become more observant about what is going on around you.

If you feel as though you’ve been a victim of sexual assault, rape, abuse, or trafficking, please reach out to these hotlines for help:

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE)/ www.ndvh.org

Northland Family Help Center Domestic Violence Shelter 24-Hour Crisis Line: 928-527-1900 / http://northlandfamily.org/

Rape Abuse Incest National Network: 1-800-656-4673 (HOPE)/ www.rainn.org

Strong Hearts Native Helpline: 1-844-762-8483 / www.strongheartshelpline.org

If you’d like to talk to someone locally about human trafficking or have any questions, please reach out to Kate Wyatt, Human Trafficking Program Coordinator at (928) 233-4319.