Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague for the expertise and experience she has brought to this effort. As she said, in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, we spent 18 months digging deep, trying to figure out why this was happening, why we had an increase in trafficking in this country in this century, and increasingly we were told that this was because of the internet, moving from the street corner to the smartphone. Trafficking survivors and victims told us this, but so did the experts. Senator Heitkamp jumped in, and the leadership of that subcommittee included Senator McCaskill. She is no longer the ranking member. She has gone on to bigger things--to be ranking member of the full committee--but during this investigation of 18 months, she was the ranking Democrat on our subcommittee, and I appreciate working with her there. She is a former prosecutor. She knows how to dig deep for this information, and she had a good staff. She also was very helpful to us in helping to enforce the subpoenas. I will let her tell the story, but this is really incredible. We knew this one website, backpage.com, was engaged in this effort because we heard about it all over the country. In my home State of Ohio, women and girls would say they were trafficked on backpage. If I talked to a dozen victims or survivors, 10 would say backpage. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said that 75 percent were backpage. Another group said: No, it is 80 percent.…”