Retired certified public accountant and author John DiGirolamo knew nothing about human trafficking until a fateful conversation with a police officer in 2020. His retirement that year coincided with the defund the police movement sparked by the national outcry over the death of George Floyd—and the uproar didn’t sit well with him.

Few people in Wyoming have done more to advance victims’ rights than Cara Chambers. As the Director of the Division of Victim Services in the Wyoming Attorney General’s office, Chambers oversees victims’ services for the state and spearheads both the Human Trafficking Task Force and the Wyoming Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Task Force.

As the last state to enact laws against human trafficking in 2013, Wyoming was slow to come to the table. But in recent years, the state has stepped up efforts to assess the scope of the problem, as well as address the escalating violence against Native American women and children.

Human trafficking is on the rise in Wyoming—the last state in the nation to pass laws against it in 2013. Based on statistics gathered by National Human Trafficking Hotline, 11 cases of trafficking were reported in Wyoming in 2020 out of 47 residents who called. Sex trafficking accounted for the majority of those cases; 10 of those victims were women.