Human trafficking is on the rise across the tri-state, but the fight against it is taking shape in courtrooms, jail cells, tech labs - and even parking lots.

Laura Mullen says she was just 12 years old the first time she was trafficked - sold by her own brother.

"My mom was a sex worker, my dad was a trafficker, a pimp," she says. "I was out there for six years." She was later held in a basement by a drug dealer, who claimed she owed him for food, for drugs and for her life.

"When you feel so worthless, or you feel like there's nothing to lose, to live for, you just go with the flow," she says. "You would be at the breakfast buffet and someone would say, 'Hi, how are you doing? How was your night,' and meanwhile, you're like, 'Well, I just slept with 15 guys, and I shot 18 bags of heroin.'" She says the hotels, not just the men, shielded the crimes. "Trafficking is money. They are spending thousands of dollars weekly in these hotels and motels. Do you really think these big corporations want to lose that money? No. Absolutely no," she says.

And that's why she says the New York law to put human trafficking hotline signs up in public bathrooms in hotels and motels matters so much.

"The real-world impact is life or death," she says.

Mullen is now a senior advocate at the Empowerment Collaborative of Long Island (ECLI Vibes), to help victims learn the signs and dangers of human trafficking and to help survivors reclaim their lives.

She says the work has helped her heal and grow, too.

The Turn To Tara investigation found the number of cases identified by the National Human Trafficking Hotline exploded in just a year...

....up 38% in New York, 56% in New Jersey and in Connecticut, a spike so steep it nearly tripled at 128%.

Few have witnessed the pain behind those numbers more than Feride Castillo, the co-founder of ECLI VIBES, where Mullen works.

She spent years driving victims to shelters and courts, working out of her car to build one of the most impactful trauma centers in New York state - treating 2,500 trauma survivors a month, many of them trafficking victims. She says healing is harder when basic laws go ignored - and wasn't surprised by the Turn To Tara investigation on human trafficking.

"Sex trafficking, specifically, is happening in every hotel, every motel in Suffolk County, and I can say that with confidence," she says. "If something as simple as putting up a sticker in these hotel rooms to ensure that people know where they can seek help - if something as basic as that is not happening - it highlights a bigger issue."

A revolution is quietly underway in a small courtroom in Central Islip, New York.

The Hon. Mary Porter is a family court judge who presides over the Erin Court, the first human trafficking court for youth in New York.

"The court started a year ago, and what would happen is we would have kids come before the court in different ways - maybe they were running away, maybe they would say they were having conversations with men that were much older than they were - and of course, we understood that there was something more going on with these children," she says.

Trafficked youths, some as young as 11, are no longer treated as delinquents. They are given wraparound services, from housing to mental health, instead of a criminal record.

About 50 youth have come through the court so far. While the trauma runs deep, Porter says the early results speak for themselves.

"If we don't do the work we are doing, or if the kids don't get the message, there's only one of a three ways they are going to end up; drug addicted, unfortunately, dead or in the criminal justice system," says Porter. When they do slip through the safety net, many end up in jail, where one Long Island sheriff is trying to turn incarceration into a lifeline.

Suffolk County Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr. launched SATI, the Sheriff's Anti-Trafficking Initiative, in 2018. It's the nation's first human trafficking unit inside a jail.

After federal partners warned him that human trafficking had surpassed gangs as the county's top safety concern, it flipped the script on how law enforcement interacts with incarcerated sex workers. Since then, more than 5,000 women have been interviewed, with over 300 identified as trafficking victims. This model - built on trust, long-term support and survivor leadership - has become a national template.

"They are here days, weeks, maybe even months, so we are able to build that rapport," says Toulon.

There is a silent population of trafficked men and boys who are slipping through the cracks.

The Turn To Tara team spent months digging through years of crime data - and uncovered that male victims are almost invisible in the records.

Out of hundreds of cases, only a fraction involved male victims.

Advocates say it's not because men and boys aren't being trafficked, it's that the system isn't counting them.

The Turn To Tara team spent months analyzing five years of crime data across the tri-state, including pulling prosecution records for the five most common sex trafficking-related offenses.

One pattern stood out: cases involving males are almost nowhere to be found. In most counties, the number of prosecutions is zero - year after year. This includes The Bronx, which has some of the highest case numbers, but male victims barely break double digits.

Data shows that boys and men make up 40% of all identified trafficking victims worldwide - and the number is rising.

Since 2004, boys flagged as victims have more than quintupled - a sharper rise than for women and girls - making them the fastest growing segment of survivors.

In the U.S., nearly 1 in 5 calls to the National Human Trafficking hotline come from males. Yet in the tri-state, court records say they are almost invisible.

In Nassau and Rockland counties, the data showed only females. In Orange, Dutchess and Westchester counties, there were zero prosecutions - only investigations that often ended with lesser charges.

It's not because it isn't happening. Advocates say male victims are often overlooked or mistaken for offenders.

"I think that there is an assumption that men can't be victims, so we are not even asking the questions to begin with. So if we are not asking the questions, how are we identifying them? And we are not," says Castillo.

There are similar trends in New Jersey and Connecticut.

"You have people who have suffered unimaginable harm and their stories are gut-wrenching," says New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin.

The Turn To Tara team pulled five years of records from six New Jersey counties. In all of that time, the team found just two male victims, compared to 70 females.

Even when cases are prosecuted, News 12's investigation found that they are rare, inconsistent and often plead down - leaving a gap between the reality of trafficking and what's officially recorded.

Prosecutors are still fighting with the Turn To Tara team's request to break down cases by gender in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn - three of the nation's most populated counties. In Suffolk, there have been 10 prosecutions this year, but authorities wouldn't say how many involved men or boys.

Cristian Eduardo now lives in Brooklyn. He says his trafficking nightmare began in Mexico.

"Someone approached me with this offer of me getting a job outside of Mexico," he says.

That promise turned into a debt he couldn't repay, including sexual slavery in restaurants across New Jersey and New York. He also says he worked 12-hour shifts behind a bar with no pay.

"The labor trafficking was happening to exhaust me and not being able to say, 'No,' when the sex trafficking part was happening," he says.

Eventually, he found the courage to walk away - but on the streets, he could not find a single safe house for trafficked men anywhere in New York state.

"I had taken eighth at the junior Olympics, and then I was trafficked by the people who were sponsoring me," says trafficking victim John-Michael Lander.

Lander says he was groomed by men who promised to advance his Olympic dreams but instead abused him at hotels and sporting events.

Years later, he broke his silence with a TED Talk. He speaks at conferences worldwide.

"I think one of the biggest problems males face when trying to go public is that no one will believe them. And that's the hardest thing. We just want to be heard and believed," he says.

Human traffickers often use social media to prey on their victims - but tech is catching up.

"AI can be used to have an interactive conversation with an online predator," says Darren Hayes, Pace University's director of cybersecurity. "AI will help you find the evidence faster."

Hayes says the technology is replacing hours of training, while creating new tactics for digital stings.

He says AI is also changing how investigators locate victims, by reading clues hidden in mountain ranges, shadow angles and even in tree species to pinpoint where victims are being held.

Rosenblum put Hayes to the test with a picture posted on social media. Within seconds, he found her personal details and delivered a warning - the email had been compromised in 13 different data breaches.

"What a criminal will often do is to take this information to log into your account and contact somebody you know - and this happens with a lot of young children," he says.

Hayes says a problem is that the U.S. isn't moving fast enough to keep up with technology.

"The United States has 18,000 different police departments. Other countries don't have that number, so that creates an issue because all of these police departments have different training, different protocols," he says.

But at Pace University, students are being trained through a federal initiative called the Blue Campaign, designed to teach warning signs, digital safety and how to spot trafficking in their own communities.

MORE: Trafficking in the Tri-State: Rooms Without Rescue