Tuesday, January 26, 2016
COLUMBUS (AP) — More than 200 victims of human trafficking, including a few girls younger than 13, were identified by Ohio investigators last year, according to an annual report released Monday by the attorney general’s office.
In one case, owners of several central Ohio massage parlors were accused of bringing women from China with promises of jobs and forcing them to work as prostitutes.
In another, a northeastern Ohio man was sentenced to nearly 30 years in federal prison for keeping a 17-year-old girl in a motel room in Whitehall in suburban Columbus and taking sexually explicit pictures of her to post on the Internet.
Nearly all the 203 trafficking victims were young women, most in their 20s or 30s, the report said. But nearly two dozen were 14 or 15 years old, and three were 12 or younger.
Investigators also targeted 130 suspected traffickers and nearly 200 buyers of sex. The people buying sex appear to be all men; 160 were identified as men, with the gender not listed for the remainder and no women identified, according to the report by the attorney general’s Human Trafficking Commission