After pedaling for more than 1,200 miles, 11 women stopped in Lompoc and received several accolades from state and local leaders for their efforts to raise awareness about human trafficking by biking from Seattle to San Diego.
“We actually started [this] in 2017, myself and two friends,” said Savannah Lovelace, the co-founder of Pedal the Pacific. “We had been learning about sex trafficking—especially domestic sex trafficking—and started talking to friends and family about it, and nobody knew what it was.”
Now on year six, the organization has registered as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, sent six teams down the coast, and raised $850,000 for organizations combatting sex trafficking. In 2021, the organization connected with Santa Barbara County’s North County Rape Crisis Center, she added.
“We stop in communities like Lompoc to bring the community together, and Lompoc is a perfect example of what we are trying to do: bring in local organizations who want to become aware of sex trafficking and make a change after Pedal the Pacific is gone,” Lovelace said.
The women arrived on July 21 and received honors from Mayor Jenelle Osborne, 3rd District Supervisor Joan Hartmann’s office, Vandenberg Space Force Base, and Congressman Salud Carbajal’s office, said Ann McCarty, executive director of the North County Rape Crisis Center.
“We are really excited to have them and the fact they are taking on this charge to have conversations about a really tough issue that so many communities are facing,” McCarty said.
Santa Barbara County isn’t immune; rather, it sits in what the county’s human trafficking task force calls “the triangle,” because it’s right between San Fransisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, she explained.
“Our task force has been working tirelessly since 2014, but human trafficking is a multi-billion-dollar business. It surpassed the drug trade and [it’s] prolific in our community,” McCarty said. “It’s not just one socio-economic area of our community. It knows no boundaries, and it can happen to anyone.”
This year, 14 people were arrested in the county during a human trafficking sting operation—according to previous Sun reporting. And on July 11, a 15-year-old girl residing in Nipomo was rescued in Tijuana after being missing for 10 days, according to the SLO County Sheriff’s Office. From 2017 to 2020, there were 183 survivors identified in the county; 91 percent of them had been sex trafficked and 33 percent were between ages 18 to 24, McCarty said—referring to a report from the county District Attorney’s Office.
“Of those 183 survivors, there were 192 investigations conducted with 65 potential traffickers identified … . We provided over 6,300 units of service, which is a lot for a relatively small county,” she said.
A unit of service is equal to every 15 minutes that a rape crisis center employee helps a survivor through a phone call, or support during a hospital rape exam or during a police interview.
Having visitors like Pedal the Pacific fuels McCarty and her staff to continue this work, she said.
“I’ve been doing this for 28 years, and when we have young people who want to have conversations about this tough stuff, it lets me know that all the work we’ve done hasn’t been done in vain,” McCarty continued.
This article appears in Jul 21-28, 2022.