Margie Quin recalls the breakthrough with a bit of wonder lingering as she shared the memory: A handful of special agents listening intently to a newly rescued sex trafficking survivor who had just turned 18.

She was laying out the details of the murky world of code words and nuance that veil the encounter of a trafficking victim and a customer intent on having sex with a girl barely out of childhood.

“Every operation we ran was code-named ‘Someone Like Me’ and the reason is that a survivor really helped us, really helped us understand how this all worked,” Quin says of the 12 sting operations she led before retiring from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in 2018. “Had we not known that it would have taken us a long time to figure it all out.”

Someone like me. That was how the young girl referred to herself while thanking the agents for being willing to help “someone like me.”

“It was an epiphany; it was a turning point. It was like that moment everybody’s mind shifted and went,” Quin made a whooshing sound. “Omigosh, if we’re not out there for someone like her, who are we out there for? It was a game changer.”

Tennessee’s battle against human sex trafficking has been unfolding over the last decade. State leaders, law enforcement agencies and nonprofits serving victims have been trying to understand just what sex trafficking entails, how they can collaborate to help more victims and cut deeply into the demand.

Shared Hope International, which issues an annual report card on each state for its legal infrastructure to protect and help victims, says Tennessee raised its score from a 73 “C” in 2011, when it began issuing grades, to a 98 “A” in 2019. This year, Shared Hope is raising the bar for all states, noting Tennessee’s “lack of a specialized service response leaves survivors disconnected from resources that are necessary to address trauma and promote healing.”

“Last year, they retooled the entire system and said … let’s set new goals for states and much of those were around victim services,” Quin explains. “It’s easy to want to put somebody in jail who is trying to buy an 8-year-old, that’s not hard, that’s not a difficult lift.

“What is difficult is coming up with funds to really address victim services. It’s a complicated issue.”

The funds will be there for some of the services this year. Gov. Bill Lee announced in mid-May that the state’s fiscal 2021-22 budget includes more than $5 million for four groups fighting human trafficking and providing victim support.

End Slavery Tennessee, where Quin has been chief executive since 2019, will receive $3.5 million of that, the state reports. Her Song, a ministry of the Florida-based Tim Tebow Foundation, will get $1.2 million with its plans for a Tennessee location in the future. The Tennessee Anti-Slavery Alliance, composed of four nonprofits covering the state that serve as the first contact for rescued survivors, will get $600,000.

Thistle Farms in Nashville, a sanctuary for survivors of prostitution, trafficking and addiction, led by Becca Stevens, will get $100,000.

End Slavery Tennessee is a member of the Tennessee Anti-Slavery Alliance, which came about a couple of years after then-Gov. Bill Haslam in 2013 called for the creation of a statewide plan to deliver help to trafficking survivors. Four nonprofits were tapped by the TBI to serve in a regional “single-point-of-contact” partnership to provide the services.

Margie Quin, CEO of End Slavery Tennessee, spent 18 years with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation before retiring and moving to the nonprofit in 2018.

-- Photo By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger

End Slavery serves Middle Tennessee, while Grow Free serves upper East Tennessee and Restore Corps serves West Tennessee. The Lower East Tennessee spot has been vacant for a couple of years. Quin is hopeful Tebow’s Her Song ministry will choose Chattanooga for its new location and fill the geographical gap.

The young girl who had laid out the coded methodology of sex trafficking for Quin and her TBI agents had given them another critical key that day: “It also told us where she was in her head and where these survivors are going to be when we meet them,” she adds.

Quin started including groups such as End Slavery Tennessee and Restore Corps on-site, in the hotel, during stings so young trafficking victims could go straight to the nonprofit agency serving them.

“And even if they refused services they didn’t go to jail,” she says. “This is about forging a new path … a way that is trauma-informed, that treats these people … as survivors, not as criminals.”

Tennessee started to study sex trafficking in earnest around 2010. The General Assembly called for an assessment of sex trafficking in the state’s 95 counties and the impact on children and youth. That report, the first of its kind in the nation, Quin says, emerged in 2011 through a project by the TBI and Vanderbilt University’s Center for Community Studies, which helped quantify the problem at the county level.

The follow-up report came in 2013. It sought to create demographic, social and economic profiles of the 21 counties identified in the 2011 study as having the highest rates if human sex trafficking. The top four, with more than 100 cases reported, were Coffee, Davidson, Knox and Shelby.

Hamilton County was No. 9 with 26-100 cases reported. The report also sought to examine underlying factors contributing to child sex trafficking and the effects of the internet.

Mark Gwyn, TBI director at the time, in his letter introducing the study, said the findings of the two reports enabled authorities to see that sex trafficking is not just an urban problem. He noted that as of July 2013, Tennessee had passed 12 new laws to address human sex trafficking. One of them, in 2011, decriminalized prostitution for minors.

“We did not make prostitution legal, that’s not what that means,” Quin explains. “What we said was these women, these young children, cannot be both criminals and victims of the same crime.”

The TBI this month released its 2020 Crime in Tennessee report, noting in its news release that the data for that year “was undeniably impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic as workplaces, schools, and other community venues were closed.” Thus, the data “illustrates a sharp decline in reported crime.”

Quin maintains the pandemic did not slow trafficking down but did create a barrier for victims to access support services because many of the nonprofit’s partners had to shut down. Solicitation ads on the internet, which dipped briefly in March, have essentially maintained a regular presence, she notes.

Recent TBI news releases show that demand continues to thrive. A sting by law enforcement agencies June 24-25, sparked by an undercover advertisement on the internet, drew 17 men to a hotel in the Donelson Pike area. The men each came into a hotel room and paid money, expecting to have sex with a 16-year-old.

Photo by Michelle Morrow |The Ledger
Quin says prostitution arrests are down 65% in Tennessee because law enforcement better understands trafficking versus prostitution.

-- Photo By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger

In Spring Hill, authorities teamed in early July for two days, placing decoy ads online at sites catering to prostitution and commercial sex. Eighteen men were arrested, the TBI reports.

Quin offered an observation based on the Tennessee Incident Based Reporting System, which is used to compile the annual TBI crime reports. “If you look at the TIBRS data, prostitution arrests are down in our state 65% from 2014 to 2020 – 65% – which means law enforcement now understands and recognizes the difference between prostitution and trafficking, and their efforts are probably better spent on demand, trying to decrease demand, than they are arresting the same woman 70 times.

“This is not a supply problem. It is a demand problem.”

Housing supply has always been a problem in providing services to survivors and the number of available beds. End Slavery Tennessee currently has a safe house with eight beds, and the women tend to stay for about six months. Quin says she believes longer-term housing of about two years is needed that will allow the women to heal and gain skills in their new life in a supportive environment.

The $3.5 million in state funding will come in handy. End Slavery is hoping to acquire 25 acres in Davidson County this fall to create transitional housing for survivors.

“We’re going to be able to serve more intensely and intentionally over a longer period of time,” she says. “It’s daunting but exciting.”

Waiting for a location in Maury County, south of Spring Hill, is a fledgling nonprofit called Pearl Haven Tennessee, led by founder Jill Boes and Lisa Holzapfel. Both are nurses who worked together for many years and felt called through their Christian faith to open the shelter.

They want to offer a short-term, emergency shelter with about 20 beds for sex trafficking victims who would be taken to their remote location immediately upon rescue. They also hope to serve pregnant survivors and their babies.

Their plans and resources are ready, Boes says, but the scarcity of available property that fits their needs has been the challenge.

“Because it’s an emergency shelter, we want it to be someplace remote where they feel safe, they’re able to start to look at themselves and not necessarily the environment,” Boes points out. “It’s hard not to be open because I know there are women and girls” who need the care, “but I just have to trust the timing and patiently wait.”

Derri Smith, the founder End Slavery Tennessee, worked closely with Quin over the years and passed on the reins of the nonprofit to her when she retired in 2019. Quin calls her a visionary and credits Smith with doing all the hard work in building the foundation upon which she now labors.

“We were such a great team for so long. I was on the enforcement side, she the nonprofit victim-service side,” Quin recalls. “I feel very lucky to be in the position I’m in and to be able to serve in this way, to be able to make use of all the experience I gained at the TBI in that decade working with trafficking from that side of it,” she says. “It’s given me a real singular, unique perspective of trafficking in our state.”

Smith, who spent much of her life in anti-human trafficking activities, continued to stay involved with End Slavery until earlier this year due to health issues. Until then, one of her activities was serving as executive producer for season one of the nonprofit’s podcast “Someone Like Me.’’

In Episode 7 of that season, Smith introduced listeners to the story of the young woman from whom Quin and the TBI officers had learned so much of the local sex trafficking trade. She tells of how the young girl thanked the agents: “you have no idea how much it means that you would do all this for someone like me.”

Smith adds, “I think this girl was still in the place where she believed what her trafficker taught her, that she has lots of shame, that this was her fault, that she was insignificant, that she was a piece of property, just something to be bought and sold.

“And so, Someone Like Me, that meant ‘someone worthless.’ And yet, after healing and restorations, after these girls and women and boys and men have been with us for a while you see this complete change where they will recognize their worth and their importance and how much they deserve respect and what their special skills and abilities are.

“And it becomes, “Someone Like Me!”