Crude Awakening: The Sex Trafficking Crisis That's Right in Our Backyard [View all]

[Algernon Moncrieff]

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In November 2013, Jordan (whose last name is withheld to protect her privacy) moved to Williston with a boyfriend who had taken a job in the oil fields. At 18, she wanted a "new start," she says, away from New York, where she had been abused as a child and lived in and out of the foster care system. "I was so in love with this boy," Jordan says. "Ready to do anything." But after a few months, their relationship crumbled: He lost his job, they started doing meth, and he started mentally and physically abusing her. Eventually, he became her first pimp, selling her to his boss when he took a new job as a mechanic. High at the time, Jordan doesn't know how much money her ex made from selling her.

After she left him, she sold herself on Backpage.com, a classified website notorious for prostitution, earning money to keep a roof over her head. "I felt like that was my only option at the time," she says. "What else was I going to do, lie on the side of the road until I die?" She also spent a month under a pimp's control, circling around oil towns with two other women, one from Milwaukee, the other from Atlanta. "[The pimp] had 10 or 11 junky flip phones and 10 or 11 ads up for the three of us," Jordan says. The going rate was $300 an hour. "It was almost fun," she says. They went to the mall, got their nails done, stayed in nice hotels, ate good food. "I guess that had to do with the fact that we were making [him] so much money."

Around that same time, law enforcement began conducting sting operations known as Operation Vigilant Guardian. Detectives posed as someone selling a 14-year-old girl on classified websites and arrested interested buyers. One weekend in Williston, police arrested three men; two weeks later, they arrested 11 in Dickinson, a town of roughly 25,000 located about two hours away. A 34-year-old named Clayton Lakey was arrested when he showed up at a hotel after making arrangements to have sex with a 13-year-old girl, for which he agreed to pay $250 for one hour. He also offered to pay $5,000 for a 10-year-old. (Lakey is now serving five years in federal prison.) Police had to shut down the sting ahead of schedule because Dickinson ran out of jail space. "When you identify that level of demand for commercial sex with underage girls, you're a fool if you don't think there's a supply out there," Purdon says.

He calls the stings the "seminal events" in galvanizing support in the area for the fight against trafficking. Fourteen arrests may not sound like an emergency to city dwellers, but to many in this rural area, it was devastating. "Dickinson is a sweet little town … not some crime-ridden place," Purdon says. "That these dudes decided the best way to spend their weekend was to go on Backpage and try and arrange commercial sex with a pimp for a 14-year-old girl—that was incredibly sobering to me. … I took a step back and said, 'Oh, my God, what am I, what is the U.S. attorney's office, going to do about this?'"