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Dad Saves Daughter From SnapChat Sex Traffickers

A Texas teenager was lured into sex trafficking after meeting her alleged captors on Snapchat, her father says.

John Clark, a Houston-area energy executive, turned detective to rescue his 18-year-old daughter weeks after she went missing in April of this year.

“If it was up to what I want, I wouldn’t talk about this,” Clark told The Daily Beast on Monday. “It’s difficult to go through and emotionally draining. But I feel compelled to help other families and keep them from going through what we did. “I’ve got to do something,” he added.

Clark first shared his story with KHOU over the weekend, telling the TV station his daughter was “groomed” by her alleged captor starting at age 16. The trafficker was in his 20s, and the two met at a party before she disappeared.

The teen, a childhood cancer survivor, was still in high school when she went missing, Clark told The Daily Beast.

Not long after, Clark used private sources to track the student and one of her alleged captors to a Houston apartment building. The alleged pimp pleaded guilty to promoting prostitution of a minor, KHOU reported.

“It’s nothing against the police… they’re set up to slowly, methodically build an airtight case,” Clark told KHOU. “And in the time it would’ve taken to build an airtight case, I would’ve lost my daughter

 

Last month, Clark launched a petition to strengthen Texas’s anti-trafficking laws. The petition, among other things, asks the state to increase the age to work in sexually oriented businesses from 18 to 21 and to increase penalties for anyone caught promoting prostitution when the victim is under age 21.

snapchatBut in a Facebook post describing how traffickers and their recruiters groom their victims, Clark warned parents “never [to] worry about being over protective. In our case, it all started with friends from high school.”

[Tweet “Parents should never worry about being over protective”]

“It is extremely difficult to monitor effectively and it is used brilliantly by teens trying to escape detection,” Clark wrote. “The only luck we had with Snapchat was to literally grab my daughter’s phone unexpectedly… and look at recent communications, but even that had limited effectiveness.”

Clark told The Daily Beast his daughter got caught up in the wrong crowd.

“We knew some of her friends were trouble and restricted access to them… I went face-to-face with a few of them and assertively demanded they stay away from my daughter. Unfortunately, my actions only reinforced the alienation strategy that was being used against us,” Clark wrote in one Facebook post.

“We saw problems. We tried many approaches to turn things in a different direction. We never dreamed the trouble we were facing was a dangerous as it turned out to be,” he continued.

When the teen’s friends refused to answer questions about her whereabouts, Clark said, he realized how dire the situation was.

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“The fight continues. They messed with the wrong girl,” Clark added.

Word of Warning to parents? “If your kids are online, you need to be there”.

[Tweet “If your kids are online you need to be there”]

Laster said she provided guidance for Clark, and noted that human traffickers “do not discriminate in age, socioeconomic status, gender, or geographic location.” She said she once received a call from an Indiana professor whose daughter, a student at Harvard, was being tricked into the sex trade.

Predators often send messages to teens on Snapchat, Kik, and other apps, saying hello and complimenting their looks or their smile, Laster said. It eventually develops into a relationship where the trafficker is a shoulder to cry on.

In some cases, the traffickers send the teens new devices so they can communicate without parental intervention, she said. Parents don’t even know they [the traffickers] exist, but they’ve been grooming these kids online for weeks, months, or years.

Parents if your children are online you need to be there, monitor them and talk about the safety fo the internet and social media.

Source: The Daily Beast

 

 

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