The average age of girls sold into prostitution is between 12 to 14 years old.
That's not a statistic from a far-off country where education and human rights rank at the bottom of the totem pole. It's from the book Human Trafficking Into and Within the United States: A Review of the Literature.
Florida is the third-highest ranked state in human trafficking crimes. In December 2015, 95 people between the ages of 15 to 68 were arrested in a human trafficking sting in Polk County.
The statistics hit close to home for Zora Millerleile. The longtime Plant City resident began attending the University of South Florida earlier this year, where she heard the alarming statistics. Millerleile has seven sisters. The two youngest are 11 and 13.
Now, she’s doing her part to shed a light on an issue that’s close to her heart. She wants to start the first Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit, nongovernmental human rights organization, in Florida.
Taking Back Tampa Bay
Millerleile graduated from Strawberry Crest High School in 2013 and attended Hillsborough Community College before enrolling at USF. She is dual majoring in communication and international studies, which she hopes will enable her to bring a branch of the Human Rights Watch to Tampa.
“I’ve been really excited about it,” Millerleile said. “I think there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world, but nobody is looking in their backyard and trying to fix what might be behind them. I always knew the world wasn’t where it should be.”
Like many, she used to think that human trafficking was mostly something that happened abroad.
This isn’t the first time that Millerleile has tried to make a positive change. Her resume is filled with volunteer work, including working in a children’s hospital in Morocco last May and raising money to build stoves for indigenous families in Guatemala. She is an intern for Congresswoman Kathy Castor and a member of USF’s United Nations Student Alliance, Amnesty International and United Students Against Sweatshops.
The fight against human trafficking, however, has become one of her top concerns.
Seeing A Need
Once she learned about Tampa Bay’s human trafficking problem, she decided to join a nearby Human Rights Watch, only to discover that there wasn’t one in the state of Florida.
Human Rights Watch is an international organization that is focused on the advocacy of human rights across the globe and is headquartered in New York City. In the United States, New York is ranked the fifth-highest state in crimes related to human trafficking. California, where Human Rights Watch has offices in San Fransisco and Silicon Valley, has the highest number of human-trafficking cases in the nation.
Millerleile sees Florida’s lack of a Human Rights Watch office to be a major issue.
“Human Rights Watch is international,” she said. “It’s the biggest, it’s the most effective. I think a lot of times stuff like that isn’t portrayed on television, but we need somebody watching out for our neighbors, children and sisters.”
Millerleile realizes that even if she is successful in her endeavors to bring the organization to Tampa Bay, it could take years.
“Even if we don’t get a Human Rights Watch, we need some organizations that are prominent in Tampa,” she said. “I hope the community says, ‘We are watching, and we are not going to let you abduct our children anymore.’”
Contact Emily Topper at etopper@plantcityobserver.com.