T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY — From left to right, Marshalltown Police Department Detective Jonna Tuttle, Garden Gate Ranch Founder/Executive Director Brenda Long and LAST Watch members Lynne Carroll, Doris Kinnick and Terrie Gibson pose for a photo after Long gave a presentation on human trafficking at the Marshalltown Public Library Saturday afternoon.

It was like having breakfast with the Lord and dinner with the devil.

That’s the way Garden Gate Ranch Founder and Executive Director Brenda Long, a native of Jasper County, described the experience of a victim of human trafficking during a presentation she gave at the Marshalltown Public Library Saturday afternoon with about 40 community members in attendance. After Lynne Carroll of Labor and Sex Trafficking (LAST) Watch offered opening remarks and fellow LAST Watch member Doris Kinnick formally introduced her, Long detailed her own journey and how she came to launch the ranch, which is located in the Des Moines area and allows women who have been victims of trafficking and their children to find shelter and get their lives back on track, in 2015.

“The light has been turned on to the dark reality that sex trafficking is actually happening right here in your city and in our state and in our nation, and we at Garden Gate Ranch have come to realize that many sexually violated victims are actually falling through the cracks in our community. And they’re stepping into the hands of predators, and sometimes, many times, right in front of our eyes and we don’t even recognize it,” she said. “So I believe we have a solution to the harsh reality and a way to help close that gap, and one of the things is education is very big.”

She then began to share the story of a woman named Heather who, as a college student, was dating a man she thought would become her husband until she realized she was involved in something much more sinister.

“I would wake up in my dorm, spend my day with my friends in class or at work, and then I was sold all night,” Long said, reading from Heather’s story. “In 2012, I was working at a local grocery store in Omaha. I woke up one morning and decided I was done, and I didn’t care if it took my life.”

She escaped to her home in Iowa for a few months before her trafficker arrived at her door and forced her back into sex slavery, but she eventually struck up a friendship with someone who would help her find her freedom. Long asked everyone in the audience to be “a light in this dark world” for someone around them and commit to educating themselves and helping to stop the practice.

Long admitted that when she first heard of the concept of sex trafficking, she had a mindset that it was simply prostitution and those involved in it had chosen that path in life, but the more she learned, the more she realized how many had been forced into it. Globally, 28 million people are estimated to be victims of human trafficking, and the industry is valued at around $40 billion annually.

“That’s 28 million children, young women and young men being raped every single day for someone else’s profit,” she said.

She added that she at first believed trafficking was “someone else’s problem” and happening in faraway places like Thailand, Cambodia and Mexico, but she has since learned there are 3.5 million buyers in the U.S. at any given time — many of them highly successful and in positions of power and trust.

“We have the largest number of slaves in the United States that we’ve ever had in history, and in 1865, slaves were freed. The underground freed them, and today the underground is enslaving them. And underground is the internet,” she said.

The dark web and smartphone apps are the places where predators primarily find their victims, and according to Long, even the numbers that are presented are probably lower than the true number because of how often the cases go unreported. She said human trafficking has surpassed drug trafficking in global volume because of the low risk and high potential profit and the fact that victims can be sold repeatedly, and the people who participate in the heinous trade cut across all professions and walks of life. On average, victims are first sold between the ages of 12 and 14, and children from disadvantaged backgrounds without steady home situations are often the most vulnerable, with family members sometimes selling victims themselves.

It can happen anywhere from strip clubs and massage parlors to more seemingly innocuous places like churches, truckstops, warehouses and family gatherings. Large sporting events and other mass gatherings are seen as hotbeds for trafficking activity.

“It is so hidden in plain sight, it’s absolutely crazy,” she said.

As it turned out, one of Long’s first contacts before she had even opened the ranch was a survivor in Marshall County. She then shared another story of a woman who escaped one abusive situation only to fall into another involving a female church leader who became her madame.

Long eventually asked an important question: with increased awareness and knowledge of sex trafficking, why does it persist? The answer, of course, is the buyers and the demand they create for the “product.”

“There’s types where we want to think it’s the inner city, and we kind of, again, want to put it in someone else’s bucket and not in your own neighborhood, but in all honesty, here in the United States and all over the world, it’s white men, mostly, with money. And I love white people and white men, so I’m not one of those, but that’s who it is,” Long said. “It’s people that have jobs, people that have money, and mostly, it’s men.”

The average lifespan for those sold into trafficking is seven years, with many either overdosing, committing suicide or being murdered. Long also read headlines from the Des Moines Register about sex trafficking activity in the metro area to hammer home the point that it is happening right here in Iowa, especially at the intersection of two of the most well-traveled interstate highways in the United States.

Long described the pain she felt hearing victims’ stories and how it inspired her to do something. It culminated in the launch of Garden Gate Ranch, a Christian faith-based restorative facility, and a former “beautiful man’s garage” transformed into the education center and office.

“I realized that this was my mission and these women were my mission. Evil is so real, but I want you to know courage is real too because it takes courage to want to live beyond sexual trauma,” she said. “It takes courage to fight and do the hard work and get your life back. Every day is a struggle.”

She ended on a quote often attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a commandment of her own added.

“Our lives begin and end the day we become silent about things that matter,” she said. “Let’s not be silent because every life matters.”

The Garden Gate Ranch is funded entirely on private donations, and women and their children can stay up to 24 months free of charge. To learn more about the ranch, visit https://www.gardengateranch.com/.

After the presentation wrapped up, both Long and Marshalltown Police Department Detective Jonna Tuttle answered questions for over a half hour from a curious audience on everything from the signs of trafficking situations to how often it happens locally (“less than a handful” in her three years on the force, Tuttle said) to how predators use “ghost” phone apps to lure and groom potential victims.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.