Rescuing girls, one at a time

Sandie Morgan doesn’t want to be known as “that crazy lady,” but she knows how it goes when you take on the sex trade in America. So, when reminded that the trade has a few thousand years’ head start on her, she acknowledges it with good humor.

And when you factor in that she took her new job just 10 days ago, the odds against her seem even more overwhelming. But that prompts her to tell a story about a mental hospital in India where, when trying to decide whether patients were sane enough to be released, doctors gave them a teaspoon and asked them to empty a bucket being filled from a running faucet.

If the patient used the teaspoon to empty the bucket, they stayed in the hospital. But if the patients first turned off the faucet, then used the teaspoon, they let them go.

“My goal is to do both at the same time,” Morgan says. “I’ve got my teaspoon out, and I know it’s a teaspoon. But for every young girl I rescue, that teaspoon is important to me. But it’s not going to solve our problem. Our problem is at the other end. We have to turn off the faucet. We have to decrease the demand.”

Morgan is talking in her office at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, a private college of Pentecostal heritage where she has worked for the school’s Center for Women’s Studies. But that now will take a back seat to her appointment as the head of the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, a federally funded coalition of local and federal agencies.

In broad strokes, human trafficking refers to forced labor. It often involves people -- usually young women -- imported from abroad. But it also includes local victims who, Morgan says, can be recruited literally from the street leading from school to home.

And while trafficking extends to such things as sweatshops or day laborers, Morgan is particularly concerned about sexual commerce.

She can tell plenty of stories from the 10 years she spent in Greece, but notes that you don’t have to spin a globe to find the problem.

Would you believe Orange County? Would you believe a girl can be walking down a street and be solicited by a man with a plan? Namely, to put her into the prostitution or gang or illegal massage parlor world, where she’s told she can make a hundred bucks or so on a weekend to help her impoverished family?

While the typical Greek scam a few years ago involved telling girls in neighboring poverty-stricken nations that waitressing jobs awaited them at the Olympic Games in Athens, recruiters for America need not be so imaginative, Morgan says.

Organized crime operations can lure girls here, typically from Latin America or the Far East, with less exotic cover stories.

But they have similar endings, Morgan says. The women find that they are essentially held captive, free to work in various sex trades but not free to live as they see fit after hours.

Historically -- assuming it felt inspired -- law enforcement went after the illegal establishments and their in-house managers.

But that takes a lot of manpower and doesn’t produce much lasting effect. That’s why Morgan would like to switch the emphasis to the customers -- typically men who keep the sex trade flourishing.

That, of course, is where she butts heads with arguments about “victimless crimes” or plain-old human desire. Pornography is legal and omnipresent. The Internet world of sex is in full bloom. Massage parlors advertise, sometimes provocatively, in mainstream newspapers with no obvious fear of reprisal.

Which leads me to ask her: What new nerve do you hope to hit that will stop an age-old phenomenon?

“Personal responsibility,” she says. “People say that trafficking is terrible and they want to do something, so they sent money to Thailand or Nepal [to combat it], but I’ve been doing this long enough to know a lot of the money doesn’t get there. But they do that and then feel OK, but then they go back and read the sports sections,” where massage parlor ads can be found.

What they should do, she suggests, is pressure papers that publish such ads to stop.

“There’s not enough energy for me to be on a moral platform, a bully pulpit,” Morgan, 56, says. “I’m not going to go down to a prostitution house and campaign, and I’m not going to go out and hold up signs.”

As politely as I can, I ask if she really thinks she can purge the sex business from society. “I’m way too pragmatic to think we can eliminate it,” she says. “But we’re going to make it really hard for traffickers to survive in our community. We think the community . . . will report it, and that’s how we’ll rescue the girls.”

How that will happen is not completely formed, she says, other than a general plan to increase “awareness.” Congress has declared Friday as National Human Trafficking Awareness Day.

“Awareness” is the kind of word that often dies on the vine, but Morgan vows to soldier on.

“I couldn’t do it without my faith,” she says, “because it is very depressing, and when you sit and talk to these girls, every one is important. If you just look at how overwhelming the big picture is, yeah, you would be so depressed you’d probably stop.”

As she’s speaking, it’s the only time in the course of an hour that she chokes up a bit. “But every time a victim is rescued or girls are not put into prostitution,” she says, “I feel like we’ve made progress.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.