Five runaway children on Hawaii Island were recovered as part of Operation Cross Country, a nationwide FBI-led sweep targeting sex traffickers and missing children.
The operation involved the Honolulu FBI field office working alongside local police departments and nonprofit groups.
The operation also recovered six children on Oahu and one on Maui.
The five runaways found on Hawaii Island all were confirmed by the Hawaii Police Department to be Hawaii County residents.
HPD Capt. Rio Amon-Wilkins, who commands the East Hawaii Criminal Investigation Division, said the five runaways arrested during Operation Cross Country were “absolutely not” sex slaves.
“It’s unfortunate that in situations like this, there can be an assumption that this comes under the umbrella of sex trafficking. That’s absolutely not the case with any of the five runaways who were arrested.”
Amon-Wilkins said that although the runaways were arrested, he called it a “status offense.”
“They’re not fingerprinted. Their mug shots are not taken,” he said. “This wouldn’t be an offense if they were adults.”
Lt. Robert Pauole of HPD’s Juvenile Aid Division added that the FBI provided HPD with a list of runaways based on their overall risk.
“The FBI obtained a list of who they felt were higher-risk runaways, and those are the ones we located,” Pauole said. “Hawaii County, especially Hilo and the Puna districts, we get a lot of runaways, and a lot of the numbers are based on repeats, where we pick up the same ones and they run away again.”
Pauole added that the runaways found as part of the operation were provided with assistance once they were located.
“Upon their location, they received some resources immediately through victim advocates associated with the FBI as well as local victim advocates,” Pauole said. “We located them and immediately the victim advocates would sit down with them, talk with them, and provide them with resources, clothing, hygiene products and other stuff, and then they were placed with Child Welfare Services.”
Pauole also confirmed that none of the incidents involving the runaways resulted in any sex trafficking investigations.
Steven Merrill, the FBI agent in charge for Hawaii and the Pacific, last week commented on the operation during an interview with Hawaii Public Radio.
“One of the circumstances that makes our situation in our state unique is that many of the children that are missing here are runaways and aren’t necessarily living in houses and homes with family members,” Merrill said during the interview. “A lot of them, unfortunately, are located living off the streets, so in that case, they tend to have less adults who we are going to arrest than the average case across the country.”
Merrill added that sextortion, or the practice of extorting money or sexual favors from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity, is becoming an increasingly popular crime that impacts youth.
“Sextortion does remain an increasingly big threat to children,” Merrill told HPR. “One of the real unique things about that classification of that fraud scheme of sextortion is that the victims aren’t comfortable coming forward to law enforcement, and oftentimes we’re unaware of the victimization of those kids and others because, of course, they’re embarrassed to admit not just that they were defrauded, but were in compromising situations.”
Big Island Rep. Jeanne Kapela has frequently cited education as a way to prevent sex trafficking in Hawaii.
During the last legislative session, she proposed House Bill 550, which would have required the state Department of Education to offer training for teachers, school-based behavioral health specialists and others about sex trafficking prevention and response.
“According to a 2018 report published by Arizona State University and the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women, one out of every 11 adult males living in Hawaii is an online sex shopper,” the bill stated. “The report also estimated that there were 74,362 potential sex buyers in Hawaii at the time of the study. Moreover, during the (coronavirus pandemic), a service provider for sex trafficking victims in Hawaii reported seeing a three hundred percent increase in demand for services, which included trauma‑informed care.”
The bill failed to pass, but Gov. Josh Green signed several other bills related to domestic violence and human trafficking. These include Senate Bill 894, which expands the Trauma-Informed Care Task Force; Senate Bill 933, which authorizes family courts to allow petitioners to attend Temporary Restraining Order hearings remotely; and Senate Bill 1267, which expands the jurisdiction for where domestic abuse protective orders and temporary restraining orders may be filed.
Email Grant Phillips at gphillips@hawaiitribune-herald.com
