(bismarcktribune.com) - Since 2009, prosecutions through the office of Brendan Johnson, U.S. attorney for South Dakota, have put three traffickers in prison for life - the most of any federal district.
Johnson said the business and population growth in the Bakken oilfields doesn’t appear to have had much direct effect on trafficking in South Dakota, where the problem exists but has been more home-grown. But prosecutors have heard several victims from South Dakota say they were brought to North Dakota.
Johnson’s office has seen several dozens of victims, but most “are South Dakota kids, and they’re very vulnerable kids,” he said. “That’s how these traffickers -- they move into the community, they’re part of the community -- and that’s how they identify” and target people.
Many of the victims come from the American Indian reservations in the state, including the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which straddles North and South Dakota. In one case there, a woman would offer “johns” a trade: sex with her niece in exchange for gas and beer money.
Johnson’s first sex trafficking case -- also South Dakota’s first -- came in 2009, six months after he became the state’s U.S. attorney. Six months later, another case popped up, and investigators and prosecutors saw evidence of organized trafficking in their interviews with women caught up in the sex trade.
“There really was a network of these traffickers in Sioux Falls. These girls went from multiple traffickers and these traffickers sometimes worked together,” Johnson said.
Of the 15 people sentenced to life for sex trafficking minors since 2003, South Dakota’s three represent the most of any federal district, said Michael Osborn, chief of the FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children unit. Full Story
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