A recent nationwide sex trafficking operation led to the identification 84 victims of child sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation, and 37 missing kids.
FBI Special Agent in Charge of the St. Louis office, Jay Greenberg, joined KMOX to talk about how these operations work. He said that particular operation ran for two weeks.
"You think about those numbers in just two weeks, it helps you really understand the size of the problem that we have in America with this," Greenberg said.
He said that often, children are vulnerable to sex trafficking because their minds aren't fully developed so they can't make good decisions about their interactions with other people. And there are some things that can make kids especially vulnerable.
"It's very common that children who are having a hard time fitting in in their school or at their home, if they're dealing with an unstable home, financial instability, food insecurity, all of those factors may add up," he said. "And we can't discount that a number of the children who wind up being victimized here were previously victimized in their lives as well."
Greenberg said average citizens who want to protect children from sex trafficking need to be on the lookout for their kids.
"We say this over and over. And I frequently worry that the message gets lost, but really having a mature connection with your children — or the children entrusted to you — as they age," he said. "And making sure that they know that that parent or guardian is somebody they can come to with any problem in the world — as their bodies and brains are developing, as they're encountering new situations at school and in their personal lives."
Greenberg also touched on the recent protest of the FBI in the St. Louis area, in which people showed up to rally against the recent raid of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home. He said that while he didn't agree with their messaging, they were respectful.
"It was really executed the way that the framers of the Constitution intended when they put that protection in the constitution," Greenberg said. "We had protesters show up, they did not block traffic, they were respectful. They conducted their protest. At the end, they actually cleaned up their trash, and they left the location where they had conducted their protests in a better condition than they found it."
Listen to more from Special Agent Jay Greenberg on Total Information AM:
Copyright 2022 KMOX (Audacy). All Rights Reserved.
Follow KMOX | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Listen on the free Audacy app.
Ask your smart speaker to play K M O X.