Discovering you’re a sex trafficking victim

CREATED BY STREET SAFE NEW MEXICO

When you work with women on the street, you hear a lot of brutal stories. About addiction. About cruelty. About violence. You try not to let the stories harden you. You hold onto your humanity tightly. You watch over it as if you might lose it at any moment, because that’s the truth. It’s easy to spot the nonprofit worker who’s lost their compassion. They’re the ones who yell at the people they serve and say things to them like, “You should be grateful we’re helping you at all.”
But those toxic people probably originally got into service work to help people. Once upon a time they cared about the homeless or the addicted or the trafficked. But over the months or years, the brutal stories or things they witnessed got to them. And the horror got an opening. It proceeded to tease apart their psyche piece by piece until they were burnt out. And once that happens, there is no coming back.
So, I’ve learned to protect my humanity like the precious thing it is so I can listen to the next story with compassion and respect. And the next. And the next.
After a decade of doing this work, I think I finally figured out the trick — keep yourself in the moment. Don’t dwell on the horror of the story you’re hearing. Instead, focus on the woman telling it to you. Look at her as she is, in the now. And see her as the epic undefeated survivor that she is.
But there are certain stories that still break through my best efforts. One that can get through all the security measures I’ve put around my soul. Those are the stories about the moms who sell their kids. They woman who needs money or that next fix so bad, she gives her kids away to strangers for the hour or the night. I’ve met moms like this. Their justifications are like those of all sex abusers. The mom says it doesn’t really hurt the child. Or that youth enjoys it. Or that the teen freely went along because it meant the mom would get what she needed to stop suffering.
These types of addicted moms are rare. The vast majority of mothers with addictions would never do such a thing. In fact on the street, if there is a mother selling her child, addicted women — most of whom are mothers — are the first ones to come tell me about it. These women on the street are united in reporting abusive mothers to me knowing that I will tell police and children’s services even though they live in a community where snitching to anyone is forbidden.
Thankfully, the police now act on these cases quickly, because selling a child isn’t it just child abuse — it's human sex trafficking.
And for the children, they often never realize until decades later that what their parents did to them was trafficking.
That is the case for Jessica, who was a teenager in 1999 when her mother first sold her to a man for crack. In this podcast that Jessica learns for the first time that was her mother did was sex trafficking.