Vestavia Hills becomes 1st ‘Human TraffickingFree Zone’ in state

In 2015, Jordan Giddens was in downtown Birmingham when he was kidnapped by a human trafficker who pulled up in a U-Haul carrying other victims with duct tape over their mouths.

Giddens said he was assaulted and taken to a home and was only able to convince his kidnapper to return him to his car after telling him he was currently working for the Alabama Senate majority leader and that people would be looking for him.

Four years later, Giddens’ case is closed. His kidnapper is not in prison, despite Giddens telling law enforcement his name, address and other identifying factors, and despite the man having a litany of local citations confirming his crimes. Giddens said he has not received justice for his case.

Now, Giddens works for the Children’s Policy Council of Jefferson County, in addition to helping create anti-trafficking legislation in the state of Alabama. The council in 2016 launched the “Child Trafficking Solutions Project,” formed in response to the passage of the state’s Safe Harbor Act, created by former state Rep. Jack Williams from Vestavia Hills. The project brings together numerous stakeholders across the state and nation who are seeking to put an end to human trafficking.

The project’s latest effort is to help cities across the state become “Human TraffickingFree Zones,” and Vestavia Hills is now the first city in the state to do so, under the leadership of Mayor Ashley Curry.

The city passed the proclamation declaring Vestavia to be a Human TraffickingFree Zone at the Nov. 25 City Council meeting.

“It’s not just to say, ‘Hey, look at us,’” Curry said. “I hope it tells the people doing this not to come here.”

The program is managed at the local level by the project, but is an initiative of the U.S. Institute Against Human Trafficking.

In order to be designated as such a zone, there are three steps the city must take: passing a proclamation declaring the city to be a Human TraffickingFree Zone, undergoing training for city personnel, in particular first responders, as well as businesses in the city, and lastly, a zero tolerance policy for city employees caught purchasing sex at work. City Manager Jeff Downes previously said that policy is already in place, and any city employee found to have done such a thing would be fired.

“It’s incredibly important to have a grassroots effort to make that successful,” Giddens said. “A lot of people like to think child and sex trafficking doesn’t happen in their community, but it does.”

Giddens said the project also plans to start training those in the medical community in January 2020, with the hope that all cities in Jefferson County are declared as Human TraffickingFree Zones by January 2021, ahead of Birmingham hosting The World Games later that year.

“Trafficking will dramatically increase during those two weeks,” Giddens said.

The state of Alabama, he said, has had nothing on the scale of The World Games. Large events like The World Games, the Super Bowl and others are hotspots for human trafficking, leading law enforcement to initiate several operations to crack down on it at those events in recent years.

Giddens said he wants to ensure no one falls through the cracks when it comes to human trafficking. LGBTQ males are often forgotten in the South, he said.

Curry said his experience in dealing with trafficking dates back to his days as an FBI agent. In one case, he helped bust a mom and dad who were dealing drugs, and, as part of their drug deals, were prostituting their 14-year-old daughter.

Vestavia Hills police Capt. Johnny Evans said he has found that more and more gangs are leaving the drug business and getting into human trafficking.

“You have to get more drugs,” Evans said. “You don’t have to get more girls.”

Evans said traffickers will lie to women and young girls, making them believe they will provide a better life for them while planning to rotate them around to different abusers. In some cases, traffickers will kidnap undocumented immigrants, threatening them with deportation if they do not comply with their demands. The Department of Homeland Security does not deport victims of human trafficking.

Evans said human trafficking can also take the form of what is essentially slave labor. In one case in Tuscaloosa, Evans said a guy was using 10 employees, who were “paying off a debt they would never pay off,” forcing them to work and then rotating them with more “employees” who were falsely promised freedom if they kept working.

The victims sometimes do not understand they are victims, Evans said. Many believe the lie that they aren’t worth anything after being abused, and some fear jail as well, he said.

“I don’t want to put them in jail; I want to get them help,” Evans said.

Drugs are involved in just about every case he sees, Evans said. One victim told him she uses cocaine before she is forced to have sex in order to “get up” for the act and then does heroin after the act to “get down.” In order to deal with the pain as a result of being raped, she uses painkillers as well, Evans said.

Evans said police are trained on how to spot potential cases of human trafficking.