Carolyn Kinkoph spends her off-time fighting to end human trafficking. She lost her 29-year-old daughter, Courtney, in Cleveland on Feb. 7, 2022, after she was the victim of trafficking.
“She could survive being trafficked all over the country but couldn’t survive and she passed away seven miles from where I work,” Kinkoph said.
Courtney was forced to be a sex worker by men and women traffickers who befriended her, Kinkoph said, and to panhandle while being trafficked in Michigan by a man she called her husband, though her mother said there are no court records showing a legal marriage.
Human trafficking is the unlawful act of transporting or coercing people for profit. It’s usually by way of forced labor or sexual exploitation. According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery.
Kinkoph, an administrative secretary at Cleveland State University, is working toward a doctorate there focusing on human trafficking research. She said she didn’t know about trafficking when her daughter would disappear for days or weeks at a time.
Courtney struggled with mental illness and substance abuse, which resulted in hospital stays and living in a group home in Willoughby, where she would often go missing. Kinkoph and her husband had guardianship over her.
“Courtney’s case manager reached out to me and said, 'Your daughter is at risk of human trafficking.' And I said ‘What is that?’ So that's when it became important to me to understand it, to learn about it and to educate others,” Kinkoph said.
Kinkoph co-founded the nonprofit Alliance Against Human Trafficking last year. She wants to educate people about human trafficking in hopes of reducing the demand for it. For a second time, Kinkoph is partnering with Cleveland State University’s Police Department to host a two-day training session July 17-18 for police officers, first responders and medical professionals.
The training “talks about how to identify victims that are human trafficking victims and what traffickers look for and how they target the vulnerable,” said Beverly Pettrey, chief of the university’s police department.
Pettrey said traffickers target people who are estranged from their family, the unsheltered or those who deal with mental illness or substance abuse, like Courtney.
Training law enforcement
Human trafficking is the second-fastest growing crime in the world, according to the attorney general for the District of Columbia.
The U.S. Department of State notes there are more than 27 million victims worldwide, potentially more with many cases unreported.
“I’ve gone from feeling helpless to having hope that we can help other people who are vulnerable. We can help prevent this through prevention education and awareness, in the schools and we can provide resources for victims and survivors who are going through this.”Carolyn Kinkoph
In Northeast Ohio, there have been more than 100 victims recovered in the last three years and nearly 400 victims who were provided referral services, said Larry Henderhan, the director of the Northeast Ohio Human Trafficking Task Force.
“We have to vet it out to ensure that it is human trafficking,” he said. “So, a lot of times we come across people where they don't disclose to us that they are actually a victim of trafficking.”
Dan Nash, the instructor for the upcoming training, founded the Human Trafficking Training Center in 2021, after he retired as a state trooper in Missouri.
“Most people think that law enforcement gets human trafficking training, but they don't,” Nash said. “And if any of the law enforcement officers do get human trafficking training, they don't get skills-based training. They’re getting, basically, awareness-based training.”
Nash said he’ll teach attendees how to identify trafficking, communicate with trafficking victims and gather evidence of trafficking.
Last year, he held 49 training sessions in 28 states, teaching almost 5,000 police officers. Those trainees found 272 trafficking victims in 2023. So far this year, about 220 victims have been located by the 2,500 officers trained.
“This training is really important to understand that there are resources available,” Kinkoph said. “That everything shouldn’t fall on the police, and it often does and when things do fall on them it's super important to have a trauma informed response and to understand what resources are available.”
Courtney’s journey
Kinkoph said her daughter was bullied as a child. She was in her first abusive relationship at 18. She then began to abuse drugs. After her boyfriend physically abused her, Courtney moved on to another boyfriend, and continued to abuse drugs with him. Her parents started to notice her mental health declining.
“She had her first psychotic break when she was 23 years old,” Kinkoph said. “She was hospitalized in a local hospital, and that’s where she met her first trafficker.”
Kinkoph said Courtney became friends with her first trafficker, a man who was a patient at the hospital. He forced her to exchange sex for drugs for five years, Kinkoph said. After that, Courtney was the victim of several traffickers, details of which Kinkoph said she doesn't know. Courtney traveled out of state with her traffickers to places such as New Orleans, Los Angeles and Detroit. She was also trafficked throughout Ohio, including Cleveland, Kinkoph said.
“When things like that would happen, we would try to get the police involved to recover her, and sometimes she would return on her own,” Kinkoph said.
Courtney moved into a group home in Willoughby run by the state for people who deal with mental illness and substance abuse. Her traffickers took her from there many times, Kinkoph said.
Around this time, Kinkoph started her advocacy work in human trafficking — educating professionals and holding online meetings to help prevent it from happening to others. She was introduced to the Northeast Ohio Human Trafficking Task Force by Courtney’s case manager.
“It was the first time that I felt heard and believed that something was really happening to my daughter,” she said.
The last time Courtney went missing was November 2021. Kinkoph and her husband teamed up with the task force to search for their daughter, but they were unsuccessful. Courtney’s body was found in an abandoned apartment on the West Side of Cleveland three months later.
“There were officers who saw her while she was missing throughout the years that she had gone missing on and off and sometimes they didn’t know how to interdict,” Kinkoph said. “They didn’t know what to do with a missing endangered adult who couldn’t take care of herself.”
Her next chapter
The year Courtney died, Kinkoph was accepted to the doctoral program at Cleveland State University with a research focus on human trafficking.
“She will always be my Chapter One, she will always be my why, she will always be the reason that I started the nonprofit with my two colleagues,” she said.
Kinkoph plans to complete the program this fall and take the exams in the spring of 2025. She said she wants to continue to teach human trafficking to law enforcement and those in the community.
“I’ve gone from feeling helpless to having hope that we can help other people who are vulnerable,” she said. “We can help prevent this through prevention education and awareness, in the schools and we can provide resources for victims and survivors who are going through this.”
Law enforcement and other professionals can find information about and register for the free training here.
If you suspect human trafficking, call the 24-hour Northeast Ohio Human Trafficking Task Force tip line at (216) 443-6085.
