Incredible Impact

 Trump's Efforts to Fight Sex Trafficking Made 'Incredible Impact': SHAREtogether Founder 

 

Jaco Booyens, the founder of SHAREtogether, said former President Donald Trump’s efforts to create an office dedicated to fighting sex trafficking made an “incredible impact” over the last four years. SHAREtogether is a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating child sex trafficking.

Booyens was interviewed by NTD on Friday and asked to expound on the big sex trafficking bust that occurred in California this week. Sixty-four people were arrested and two women were rescued in an anti-human trafficking sting in California’s Riverside County. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said the arrests were part of Operation Reclaim and Rebuild, an annual statewide operation. The sting “ran for four consecutive days before concluding on January 28, 2021,” the department said on Tuesday.

“It’s a big orchestration, to execute a sting or a bust, like what we’ve just seen in California, and it takes months and months of planning and funding. And that’s why it’s very important for both local and federal, local, state, and federal government to support the fight against sex trafficking, because you cannot do it on your own,” Booyens said. He noted that for these operations to succeed, they need to be able to be conducted in a way that they can have standing in court, and some connections between the judicial system and the police have to exist.

Booyens said that before Trump “we’ve never had an office in the White House designated and dedicated to fighting sex trafficking. No former president in the history of this country has used his or her platform to denounce the exploitation of children and then appropriate funding. So we’ve seen an incredible impact over the years, over the last four years, particularly towards the support for law enforcement.”

Regular police officers, he said, are not trained to investigate, profile, or conduct a sting operation. It requires special training and a lot of resources and effort.

“We’ve seen a tremendous rise in the apprehension, the arrest of perpetrators and rescue of victims under the Trump administration, no question about it,” Booyens said. “In these cases that you’re seeing now such as California, and you’ll see some others coming out now, they’ve been 9, 10 months in the making under the Trump administration—in that mechanism of funding law enforcement appropriately, having special task forces.” (The Epoch Times)