Your child is worth $300,000 a year - to human traffickers

"These predators will take the time to know them, even if it takes a year. They will take the time because our children, our young adults are worth up to $300,000 a year to them," said Sheila Roemeling, co-chair of the Lowcountry Human Trafficking Task Force.

Roemeling, who hosted a Community Address on trafficking Jan. 22 at the Bluffton Library, is also founder and executive director of Fresh Start Healing Heart, a local nonprofit that works to rescue and heal human trafficking survivors.

The task force is a coalition that comes under the South Carolina Office of the Attorney General, and covers Beaufort, Jasper, Hampton, Colleton and Allendale counties.

"One of the things we are seeing is the majority of the clients of Fresh Start in the local area have been recruited through boyfriending, through friends of their own or through the internet," she said. "A lot of that has been somebody that they met online, gotten to know."

What did our parents say from the beginning?

Do not talk to strangers. Do not open the door to somebody you do not know.

"Can you imagine the feeling that we would have if we walked by a dark alley, and we saw our child talking to somebody we do not know? Yet every day they're doing that on the internet," said Duffie Stone, 14th Circuit Solicitor, at the meeting. "Nobody's breaking into our house anymore through windows. They don't need to. They can come through in our child's cell phone." CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE REST OF THE STORY AT https://www.hiltonheadsun.com/your-child-is-worth-300-000-a-year-to-human-traffickers-cms-2479?fbclid=IwAR0xeMHjVNPatr66UKMRS4pJbluxCs1jXW1E1vFYIJhqpeYsXzGAT9pPu2k