By KALEY CONNER
Hays Area Children’s Center
Karen Countryman-Roswurm’s black T-shirt carried a powerful message: “One is too many.”
The slogan refers to the number of victims exploited by human traffickers. And during Countryman-Roswurm’s presentation at Hays Medical Center on Tuesday, she portrayed a harsh reality – sex trafficking hits closer to home than many might think.

“I think that locally we don’t realize that this is happening on our own doorstep,” said Jessica Albers, a sexual assault nurse examiner at HaysMed. “We sometimes think that it happens in big cities or in another country. But it’s happening right here in the United States – in Kansas, and in rural Kansas.”
Human trafficking was the subject discussed at length during this year’s multi-disciplinary summit, hosted by a variety of local agencies, such as HaysMed, Options, Jana’s Campaign, Hays Police, Hays Area Children’s Center, LINK, SKIL and the Area Agency on Aging.
Organizers hoped the two-day event would shed some light on an often misunderstood and misidentified crime.
When the class began Tuesday morning, Countryman-Roswurm asked the 75 attendees how many of them had worked a sex trafficking case or helped a victim. No one raised their hand, said Countryman-Roswurm, executive director of Wichita State University’s Center for Combating Human Trafficking.
As she began explaining how human trafficking really falls under a wide spectrum of abuse and exploitation, several local professionals began to reconsider.
“I’ve had people come to me and say, ‘Actually, now that I think about this, this was a trafficking case,’ ” she said. “Sometimes it’s broadening our minds a bit and being able to receive information that we didn’t know before.”
Trafficking crimes can include a range of abuse, such as making or distributing child pornography, or even parents selling their children for sex in order to fund drug habits. Those kinds of crimes are more common than people might think, said Christie Brungardt, co-founder of Jana’s Campaign.

“I think a lot of people have this idea that human trafficking is over the ocean and in Third World countries,” Brungardt said. “Certainly, if you think about it in the United States, they don’t think it’s in Kansas. It is in Kansas.”
And while many might picture human trafficking as terrified children being snatched up by strangers in windowless vans, the crime often is perpetrated domestically by people victims know and trust. Many victims don’t self-identify or readily accept outside intervention because the perpetrators often are expert manipulators, Countryman-Roswurm said.
In fact, a recent study suggests only 1 to 2 percent of human trafficking survivors ever are identified.
“It’s a very unidentified form of abuse and exploitation,” she said.
“It implies to us as practitioners that we need to be selling our services. We need to be connecting to people relationally and we need to be helping to create an environment that promotes that person to be all that they can be.”
The summit will continue today at Hays Medical Center with brainstorming for a community prevention and action plan to help human trafficking victims, and a forensics summit pertaining to victim identification and advocacy.