Dr. A, whose name has been changed for safety reasons, has seen his fair share of head cases. So when he heard that his patient was insisting that she had GPS tracking device implanted in her, he chalked it up to be another patient with psychiatric issues.
But, according to NPR Marketplace, he quickly realized that this patient was different than other psychiatric patients he’d seen. Even crazier was that she was right.
Upon taking an X-ray, he learned that she did, in fact, have a tracking device implanted in her side. It wasn’t bigger than a grain of rice, Dr. A says, but it was there.“It was a small glass capsule with a little almost like a circuit board inside of it,” he explains. “It’s an RFID chip. It’s used to tag cats and dogs. And someone had tagged her like an animal, like she was somebody’s pet that they owned.”
Dr. A quickly learned that his patient — who appeared to be so put together — was a victim of human trafficking. She told the ER medical staff that her boyfriend had pimped her out and forced her to give him the profits.
Sadly, this young woman’s story is not unique. The National Human Trafficking Resource Center has reportedly received 14,588 reports of sex trafficking cases since 2007. Tragically, many of the girls being trafficked are teenagers, with the average age being just thirteen.
EleSondra DeRomano was one of those teenagers. She spent eighteen hellish months in hotel rooms up and down the east coast, forced to have sex with men for money. It wasn’t until a man alerted police that she was underage that she was finally able to escape.
Advocates caution healthcare professionals to be vigilant about looking for the warning signs of sex trafficking. A Loyola University report found that 88 percent of human trafficking victims find themselves in a medical facility at least once.
Some of these warning signs, according to the Polaris Project, include:
- Individual claiming to be “just visiting” the area
- Inconsistencies in story
- Someone else speaking for the patient
- Signs of physical abuse
EleSondra DeRomano adds that it is important to look at their eyes:
“The first thing I would look for is the girl’s eyes—are they downcasted?” she says. “When they’re under pimp control, you’re not supposed to look anybody in the eyes.”
After the tracking device experience, Dr. A has begun to look for these signs in his patients.
“It’s always important to simply consider the possibility that something not obvious might be going on.
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