Crowdfunder: Stopping the sex trafficking of Native youth in Montana's 'frack camps' | Latina Lista

26.9.15

Crowdfunder: Stopping the sex trafficking of Native youth in Montana's 'frack camps' | Latina Lista: Fort Peck is as remote as any inhabited region of the United States. The landscape stretches out endlessly under the bright glare of open and unrelenting skies, with small dusty homesteads and trailers dotting the landscape.

While beautiful, especially amid the sacred badlands at sunset, or along the wild and unpopulated Missouri River Breaks, this is a very difficult place in which to exist.

The Fort Peck Tribal community endures crippling poverty; 75% live below the poverty line, and access to all human services is acutely limited. Young people on the Reservation experience all of the accepted "vulnerability factors" for trafficking, including a greater than 50% rate of child welfare system involvement and extraordinary rates of substance abuse, mental illness, and PTSD.