<figure>
 <img src="https://media.eaglewebservices.com/public/2020/3/1583504471879.png" alt=" The new children's shelter in Finney County has 14 beds for teens. The shleter is inside, but separated from the Southwest Kansas Regional Juvenile Detention Center. Corinne Boyer / Kansas News Service" />
 <figcaption> The new children's shelter in Finney County has 14 beds for teens. The shleter is inside, but separated from the Southwest Kansas Regional Juvenile Detention Center. Corinne Boyer / Kansas News Service</figcaption>
 </figure>By CORINNE BOYER <a href="https://www.hppr.org/post/western-kansas-jail-becomes-refuge-teens-crisis">Kansas News Service</a>GARDEN CITY, Kansas — All of Western Kansas has just
 one shelter for children who are in protective custody or are victims 
of sex trafficking. The new shelter isn’t taking kids yet, because it’s 
waiting on its license, but local officials say those 14 beds are 
needed.The Southwest Kansas Regional Juvenile Detention Center 
in Finney County retrofitted jail cells into shelter spaces, using 
$500,000 in state grant funding, after a 2017 <a href="https://www.kcur.org/post/two-year-old-kansas-law-kept-kids-out-jail-may-have-pushed-them-foster-care" target="_blank">law</a> kept more kids out of detention centers.“The
 side effect of it was it made our juvenile detention centers not have 
as many kids ’cause it made it very difficult to get into juvenile 
detention,” said Katrina Pollet, the executive director for the Finney 
County Department of Corrections.She said police were having to 
drive kids to Wichita to find shelter space, which kept the kids from 
“spending a lot of time in school or just working on whatever issues 
that they have that got them into the system in the first place.”&nbsp;She added that the new beds will help kids who don’t have safe home environments.&nbsp;“They
 go to court and the judge says, you know, home just is not a viable 
option for you right now,” she said. “So instead of sending them back to
 juvenile detention, the judge can send him right here to the shelter.”But the shelter beds also can help victims of sex trafficking. <a href="https://humantraffickinghotline.org/state/kansas" target="_blank">Kansas</a>
 had 43 reports of cases during the first half of 2019, which was fewer 
than 30 other states. (Nationally during the time period, 4,585 cases 
were reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline.)Nearly a
 third of Kansas cases last year involved minors. The juvenile justice 
center hasn’t seen any victims of sex trafficking in a few years, Pollet
 said, but the shelter will have a new social worker who is trained to 
recognize human trafficking.“Maybe we can be looking and finding
 out a little bit more about those youth who’ve been human trafficked, 
so that we identify them earlier on and that we're not putting them back
 out into a placement where they would be human traffic again,” she 
said.Human trafficking statistics are only available at the 
state level, and aren’t broken down by counties or towns. And experts 
say detecting human trafficking cases in rural areas can be much more 
difficult, especially in places like Garden City.<figure>
 <img src="https://media.eaglewebservices.com/public/2020/3/1583504532540.png" alt=" William Sanchez, shelter coordinator for the Department of Corrections in Finney County, speaks with people attending the shelter's open house in February. Credit Corinne Boyer / Kansas News Service" />
 <figcaption> William Sanchez, shelter coordinator for the Department of Corrections in Finney County, speaks with people attending the shelter's open house in February. Credit Corinne Boyer / Kansas News Service</figcaption>
 </figure>“Finney County has a lot of abandoned homes, abandoned shops, 
abandoned farm farm ground shops,” said Hailey Knoll, executive director
 of Family Crisis Services. “Any abandoned property is a really easy 
place to hide victims.”Knoll was a detective with the Garden 
City Police Department for four years and said human trafficking in 
Garden City doesn’t look like trafficking in Topeka or Kansas City“I
 learned that human trafficking in our area isn't about the runways and 
the tracks,” Knoll said. “It was about the selling of children from 
overseas.”Megan Cutter, associate director of the National Human Trafficking Hotline, said it’s challenging to find shelters for victims.“Resources
 for shelter are often very scarce,” Cutter said. “The more, the better,
 as long as they’re places where people are receiving victim centered 
trauma-informed care.”Like other crimes, Cutter said human trafficking is underreported, and teens can be particularly vulnerable to traffickers.“We
 see this a lot online where people start chatting on various apps or 
dating sites and the person, this potential trafficker … makes a lot of 
promises,” she said. “And then … the victim is enticed by that and 
thinks that this person is their boyfriend or their girlfriend and they 
feel very in love.”&nbsp;The juvenile shelter is not yet taking kids, as the license was approved early this year but hasn’t yet arrived.If you need help, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at (888) 373-7888.Corinne Boyer covers western Kansas for High Plains Public Radio and the Kansas News Service. You can follow her on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/Corinne_Boyer" target="_blank">@Corinne_boyer</a> or email cboyer@hppr.org.

Western Kan. jail becomes refuge for teens in crisis