On Nov. 6, Motivating, Inspiring, Supporting and Serving Sexually Exploited Youth, or MISSSEY, held its first event at the Layover Lounge in order to raise funds to send a young group of survivors to Peru as part of the Advocacy delegation on Human Trafficking in June.

Nola Brantley, the executive director of MISSSEY, spoke with Oakland Local about the success of their first fundraising event.

An 11-year-old girl from Berkeley who was cajoled by relatives to sell her body on the streets for money is one rescued victim. An abducted 15-year old from Oakland is another. A 16-year-old from Colorado who befriended a pimp and wound up trapped in an Oakland hotel by day and forced to work the streets by night – until police rescued her – is another.

These young girls and others have been rescued from human traffickers and life on the streets through a collaborative effort by the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, the Oakland Police Department, a half-a-dozen nonprofit agencies, the county’s Family Justice Center and law enforcement in nearby cities.  So crucial has collaboration been at catching traffickers and bringing safety to their victims that the county D.A.’s office launched a campaign, H.E.A.T. Watch - HEAT stands for human exploitation and trafficking - to widen the collaboration to include businesses, neighborhood groups and law enforcement across multiple jurisdictions. 

This is the index to Oakland Local's complete May 2010 series on youth trafficking, a growing problem in Oakland, Calif.

by Barabara Grady and Sarah Terry-Cobo

This is Part 5 of an eight-part, four-day Oakland Local investigative series on youth sex trafficking.

In Alameda County, Deputy District Attorney Sharmin Eshraghi Bock has been on a hard-fought campaign to change California law.

Together with state Assemblyman Sandre Swanson (D-Oakland), Bock has crafted laws that switch the criminalization in prostitution to the pimps and johns and away from girls. They successfully drafted and pushed through law AB 499, which recognizes that youth who are traded are victims in this crime who deserve services. They also drafted, introduced and ushered into law AB 17, which toughened the sentencing of and restitution required from convicted pimps.

However, the biggest challenge is convicting the pimps. It's difficult for police even to have grounds to arrest them...