SURE, I’M WITH LINCOLN (BUT WHAT DOES THAT REALLY MEAN?)

The first time I watched the I’m With Lincoln Video, I was mostly numb.

The second time, I squinted and shed some tears.

The third, I got the chills, felt close to vomiting, and could barely watch until the end. 

The image that got to me is when the females are marched up the stairs in a line. My mind flashed to images of people chained up and marched to slave auctions during the transatlantic slave trade.

I wondered what it is like for other people to watch this video. I wondered what it is like for survivors of slavery, for non-survivors, and for anti-slavery activists. I also wondered how many times the average person watched this video.

Just another trafficking video?

For me, my first viewing was somewhat cursory. A colleague told me about the video and asked me what I thought of it. I hadn’t seen the full video so I went online to find it. I didn’t have high expectations. I assumed I was going to see a young woman beaten and raped, and maybe in chains. I wasn’t sure what to expect about how Lincoln was going to be tied into the video.

When I was done watching it, I felt no differently. I didn’t really learn or see anything new. I was worried that this was yet another video that could glorify violence, that overemphasized sex trafficking over labor trafficking, and that focused on the physical and sexual violence of slavery. 

I did however, appreciate that somebody was using the release of the Lincoln movie to say, “hey everybody, slavery still exists!”

Leveraging the Zeitgeist

Made in a Free World capitalized beautifully on a mainstream event that reached millions of people. They are using a cultural event that lots of people are talking about to shift the conversation to something many not as many people are talking about.

I think they are playing on the hope and inspiration that people can feel after seeing the Lincoln movie. They are saying, “So you feel good about how Lincoln ended slavery? and how you would stand on his side in history? Well…you can stand on his side now. Help us end slavery today and sign this petition.”  

Highlighting  Government Underfunding

I also think the petition for doubling the U.S. federal budget to end human trafficking is a bold request. Organizations usually ask for a little bit more funding, hoping for crumbs. Why not ask for what might really make a difference? The comparisons between the anti-human trafficking budget to other budgetary expenses is also a unique way of thinking about things. While I understand that the federal government has many priorities to address, seeing the comparisons helps us consider what we are saying our priorities are, compared to what actions we are taking on those priorities.

Do We “See” the Same Thing?

And this brings me to my third viewing of the I’m With Lincoln video. As I was watching, I paid attention to eyes of the females in the film.  I paid attention to their body language and how their emotions were portrayed. I thought that in fact, the violence portrayed was pretty real. It was accurate in a way that maybe the public can shy away from.

It was painful to imagine myself having gone through similar horrors. Imagining seeing resignation in my eyes – seeing hopelessness in how I carried my body. 

I wondered – does “the public” see this? Or are people so desensitized now to these videos? To violence in general? Are people numb to this, just as I was the first time around?

If not – if a viewer watched this and actually feels what I felt, if even a little bit, and then wants to make sure no one ever feels this way, then maybe the use of violence in the video was worth it?

But if a viewer watched this video and says nothing, does nothing, validates the violence, or writes it off as an everyday thing…then was the video worth it? 

Who knows? What I do know is that this video warrants conversation around what is controversial. Here are some things to consider:

- Psychological violence. Did you notice the exploitation of the female’s desire for love in the beginning? This is just as crucial as the physical and sexual violence. 

- I keep calling them females. Why? Do we know if they are girls or women or transgender people? These are important differences. Girls are often portrayed as vague in age so that people who rape them can feel less guilty because they thought she was “of age.” What does it mean to be enslaved as a child vs. an adult? Transgender youth can be exploited and discriminated in ways that straight girls and women aren’t.

- Did you notice the accomplices/perpetrators who are just sitting there while people are violated? This is why human trafficking is also considered an organized crime, not just a crime of some evil bad pimp. 

- The people in the video appear mostly brown and Latino. How does the video impact stereotypes about people without U.S citizenship papers?  How might it accurately portray that children/people of color are targeted as victims? Contrary to videos that might highlight the issue as important only because it also affects suburban white girls?

 - Did Lincoln really end slavery? Of course not. Members of the Underground Railroad, people who were enslaved, allies and abolitionists, and so many people contributed to ending slavery. What does this mean for how we eradicate slavery now?

- Can we eradicate slavery?

Join the Discussion
We’ve been talking a lot about communication, stereotypes, violence and exploitation at Don’t Sell Bodies. As our movement matures, it’s crucial we turn a critical eye on our own communications to make sure we are not subconsciously perpetuating the problems we seek to fight.

Please follow us on twitter @dontsellbodies and join in on our twitter chat this upcoming Monday, April 29^th, 11amPST/2pmEST for our first Freedom Chat on Responsible Communication in the Anti-Slavery Movement.

Use the hashtag #DSBchat to join the conversation!

Freedom is today.
Freedom is precious.
Freedom knows no boundaries.
Freedom is a state of existence and a process. 
Freedom is physical, emotional, and spiritual.
Freedom is worth fighting for.
Freedom must be fought for individually and collectively.
Freedom is achieved with and beside comrades. It is not fought for alone.
Freedom is quiet.
Freedom is loud.
Freedom is just.
Freedom is love.
Freedom is not a world without pain.
Freedom is grief. Grief that is so deep that it brings relief, joy, and a sense of the world expanding.
Freedom is not taken for granted by everyone.
Freedom is poetry.
Freedom is sitting with feelings of shame while knowing you’re okay just as you are.
Freedom is growing.
Freedom is learning.
Freedom is so much more than this list.
Freedom is instinctive, natural, and fundamental.
Freedom is a basic human right!
Freedom a basic human need!

7 Years in Freedom!
Freedom and what it means to me has been on my mind a lot this week. This past Tuesday (April 16^th), I celebrated the end of my 7^th year living in freedom and the start of my 8^th year.

I thought a lot about how this was an important day for me to mark and to celebrate. This was the first year I even came up with a specific date that I call my “Freedom Day.”

Kind of like how we in the U.S. call April “Sexual Assault Awareness Month,” or we call the 4^th of July, Independence Day, a dear friend and mentor of mine suggested that I pick a date to mark my entrance into the world of freedom. She suggested this to me one day when I was on the phone with her, sobbing about how difficult life can still be, even though my life is SO much better than it once was. I mean, unbelievably better.

And yet as I have mentioned before, the impact of my trauma is something that I deal with quite regularly. And by regularly, I mean more than daily…And this is an improvement from managing my trauma symptoms from minute to minute, as it once was… 

So, my friend reminded me of the relative newness of my freedom and the fact that my days in freedom have not out-numbered my days in slavery yet. The idea of quantifying this gave me something to hold on to. It gave me a date – April 16, 2026 – when my days in freedom will finally match my days in slavery.

That means, on April 17, 2026, my brain/mind/heart/body will finally have lived more freely than ever before. The experiences of freedom will finally outweigh the experiences of enslavement.

Until then, it makes perfect sense why I might have hard or super hard days that are about healing my trauma.  In fact, it would even make sense that healing from 20 years of child abuse [via incest, neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and child sex trafficking] would take MORE than 20 years. It takes many people (rightfully so), years to heal from one traumatic event. There is not mathematical equation for how long healing takes.

However, there is one mathematical equation that my brain has calculated:

                      input of evil/trauma > input of love/freedom

Wait. What? Only 7 Years in Freedom?!?!? 
So…while I did have happy/proud feelings about my 7 years of freedom, I also celebrated by feeling really angry. Why? Because I am not 7 years old. Why is it that I am almost 29 years old and only celebrating 7 years of freedom?!?!

This is outrageous to me. I should have almost 29 years of freedom under my belt. And I should, because nature intended it to be so. Nature intends for a human being to become a separate and autonomous, though interdependent, human being.

No child is born a slave. Children are forced into slavery.

No person is born a slave. People are forced into slavery.

If we need any reason to dig deep and to continue our fight against slavery, I hope that my 7-year anniversary of freedom gives us one.

I hope that someday people don’t have to celebrate their anniversary of freedom.

I hope that everyone’s Freedom Date will forever and always be their birth date.

Photo credit: Creative Commons\Jorge

The thing about sexual assault is that it is about more than just sex.

 The thing about Sexual Assault Awareness Month is that we seem to need at least an annual reminder about sexual assault.

While some may think that designated months like these are meaningless, I think they can be meaningful if we make them so. Awareness means to bring into consciousness. To bring into the forefront of our mind something that needs our attention.  One might say, “but we all know that sexual assault happens, what is there to be aware about?”

To me, it is that exact sentiment that demonstrates a need to be more conscious, and less accepting, of the fact that rape, sexual harassment, incest, molestation, and sexual enslavement/sex trafficking happen SO regularly.

How have we become a culture that just “knows” that sexual assault happens and just leave it up to others to deal with it, hope that we aren’t victims of it, and even defend people who are perpetrators of it?

Now, Henry Rollins recently wrote a blog post on the Steubenville Rape Case that I thought was beautiful and thought provoking where he addresses the issue of holding perpetrators accountable. You can read that post here. 

He writes: “Many people are angry that more time was not given to the offenders. This seems to be the prevailing sentiment. I understand the anger but don’t know if adding a decade onto their sentences would be of any benefit.

To me, the problem that needs to be addressed is where in the information chain were the two offenders made to understand that what they did was not wrong on every possible level? You can execute them both tomorrow but still, there is a problem that needs to be dealt with.”

This is why Sexual Assault Awareness Month is important. The “information chain” that Henry Rollins refers to is the information we communicate as a culture, about what is acceptable in terms of violence against another human being.

If an adult rapes a child, like my father did when I was three years old, what was I learn about what sex was for? What was my brother to learn? Then, as I got older and heard about rape cases in the news and how people talked about the victim as “deserving it” – what would I learn then? What information would I take in?

Unfortunately, these aren’t hypothetical questions. I can tell you exactly what I learned. I learned that I didn’t own my body. That it was okay for someone to exploit me. In fact, I even believed that I deserved and wanted to be sexually violated.

I didn’t think that anyone else deserved or wanted to be raped. Just me. 

So imagine that….we have a world where some people think it’s okay to rape and some believe they are rape-worthy. What the #*$&?!?!?

Let’s talk about some even harder stuff to consider…let’s talk about male victims of sexual assault. Despite the fact that Sexual Assault Awareness Month often focuses on male assault on females, let’s be real – how did those male perpetrators become perpetrators? What about female assault on males?

Dr. Bruce Perry, Founder of Child Trauma Academy has written some amazing stuff that links childhood experiences of violence with the development of future perpetrator behavior. In other words, he talks about how perpetrators of violence where once victims of violence. He writes:

“Any child exposed to chronic intrafamilial violence will develop a persisting fear response. Because there are marked gender differences in this [fear] response, with females more likely to dissociate and males more likely to be violent” (Perry, 1997).

Let me be clear – this is NOT a statement about males being more violent than females at a biological level. This is about patterns of how people respond to trauma. Wouldn’t it seem quite natural for someone who is being assaulted to become aggressive and violent in self-defense? Also, when working at a middle school, I saw plenty of young females who were aggressive. Both genders can be prone to violence, and that violence can be expressed in different ways.

Female violence against males can be through emotional manipulation and through rape. Imagine a mother who rapes her son. (Yes, this does happen and it happens more than we want to think.) What does this boy learn about rape/sex? What might he want to do in order to get revenge? He was once powerless to someone else raping him – would he not want the chance to feel powerful over someone and rape them? Isn’t it better to be the dominator rater than the dominated? 

This brings us back to a point Henry Rollins makes: “It is obvious that the two offenders saw the victim as some one that could be treated as a thing. This is not about sex, it is about power and control.” 

For at least this month, let’s think about our need for power and control. What is healthy power? Perhaps, what is empowerment? 

What is healthy control? What is domination or manipulation?

Power, control, and the need to dehumanize another person are at the root of sexual assault and human trafficking. There are certainly additional factors to consider. 

However, during a month that is going to seem like advocates are focusing on the sexual part and not the assault part, I wanted to highlight this fact:

Violence is about domination and exploitation. “Sex” is one weapon that is commonly used. 

And it is a potent weapon because not only is it a physical violation, it is a psychological, emotional, and relational violation. It affects a person’s identity and their experience of sexuality and vitality. 

And to many survivors’ dismay, it deeply wounds a person’s ability to interact with and trust other people.

One last thing: I put “sex” in quotes above because it is really rape. I am often reminded that if I call what happened to me “sex,” then I will never want to have healthy sex and sex will always be associated with rape. That does not have to be the case.

So maybe Sexual Assault Awareness Month can also be called Assault on Humanity using Rape. Not so catchy, but maybe to the point. 

Last week was Spring Break for me and I spent a lot of time with my self. I just moved into a new studio cottage and I am living on my own for the very first time.

Since my emancipation from slavery, I have lived with other people. In the early stages of my recovery, I was in no state to live on my own or even spend much of my time alone. I was finally thawing out my hardened self, which had developed protective walls. I was removing my “everything’s okay” disguise and facing 20 years of trauma. Memories upon memories flooded my system and I relied on others to help me function, to hold my story, to reflect back to me what I was feeling, and to show me love that I could not find within myself.

Much of the last 7 years, I have also lived with a partner.   My first partner ever. I relied on that relationship in both unhealthy and healthy ways. The unhealthy ways became too much of a pattern that I needed to break away from. I found that I, in my insecurities, self-doubt, shame, and unmet childhood needs to be taken care of, I wanted my partner to complete me. I wanted him to make me feel good about myself and tell me who I am. And mostly, I wanted him to convince me that I am loveable. Really, I wanted him to be the mom and dad I never had.

At the same time in that relationship, I wanted to love someone. I wanted to let someone love me. I wanted to imagine building a life next to someone. Celebrating who I am next to who he is. I wanted to learn and grow and heal together.

All of those things happened – the lovely and the not so lovely. What I came to understand for myself, however, is that there is something that I need to do for myself, and that is to spend some alone time with myself. I want to embrace my separateness. My oneness. My true aloneness in this world. That I belong to me and only me. I am not an appendage of another, and I don’t want someone else to define me.

I own me.

It’s odd….because now that I am a free woman, technically, even if I am living with a partner, I am still alone. My body, my space, my goals, my fears, and my time are still mine. I just might decide to share them. But given my history of complete enslavement throughout my childhood, I haven’t truly experienced my life as mine. That everything in my life now is under my governance.

I own me. No one owns me anymore. 

So simple, and yet so profound. Because even though my partner did not own me, I often acted as if he did. Or even if he acted in ways to try to own me, I would agree with it. Permit it. In fact, I even acted as if I wanted him to own me. Asking my partner to tell me who I am, was just one way that I would give him ownership, or rather, authorship, of who I am. 

And why would I want that? Haven’t I had enough enslavement? Aren’t I all about freedom? Well…yes…but I am learning about how deeply the psychology of enslavement becomes in our minds and brains.

I was enslaved by the people who were meant to shepherd my freedom. 

I was enslaved from my earliest days on this planet, and I am still learning what it means to be free. That being free is actually more preferable to enslavement.

Content with Discontentment

There were several days this last week where I woke up with a feeling of discontent. Even a bit depressed. I remembered feeling that same way in my childhood and having to convince myself that my life wasn’t so bad when it sucked. 

In college, I remember how I felt close to freedom but that there was still this ache from my heart. The ache was always the same – this hopelessness – that I would never have what I wanted. That I would never have a sense of internal freedom, even if I were able to get external freedom. 

The thing about slavery is that it clouds your soul.

Even when you know there is beauty out there, you can’t see it or feel it. 

Looking back, I think that my depression was actually a sign of hope. That underneath, I actually felt mad and sad that things weren’t better. But I still had a concept of better. I think that when we feel depressed, we know that better/freedom/happiness exists –but don’t think it exists for us and we don’t think we can do anything to make it happen. We feel helpless. We believe that we are controlled by others and by our life circumstances. 

Kevin Bales, in his book Disposable People, writes about how girls enslaved in Thai brothels become resigned. They “accept” their enslavement as fate and no longer resist or rebel. 

I know what it’s like to feel like you have no fight in you. To be so far from your sense of discontentment, injustice, and outrage. Because if you could feel how discontent you were with the life you have, and yet you see no way out, you would feel overwhelmed and hopeless.

 People who are enslaved resign for good reason. It protects the mind and the heart. Why hope for something that you see no possible way of achieving? Why hope for something when your life is constantly threatened by violence and you are focused merely on survival?

For survivors of slavery who are now free, developing a life where you don’t have to focus on survival is a major task in and of itself. Then, believing and acting like your life is no longer about survival is another. For me, after about seven years of intensive therapy, I am finally beginning to believe that my life is more than just surviving. My life is about living and loving. My life is one where I can have real hopes and real dreams that are attainable. 

So maybe waking up and feeling discontent isn’t so bad. Maybe I can read it as a sign of my hope. I can feel content that I feel discontent rather than resignation.

Photo Credit: Paul Hudson/creative commons

I spoke at the Vietnamese Interacting As One conference in Iowa City, Iowa this weekend.

This was an event of many firsts. It was my first time at a Vietnamese Student Association  (VSA) event, my first speaking engagement to a room full of primarily Vietnamese people, and my first time in Iowa.

To give you some context, Vietnamese Student Associations (VSAs) exist on college campuses (and probably even in high schools) across the United States. Like most groups, VSA is there to build community around a shared identity. For ethnic minorities, groups like these are crucial for so many reasons. To name a few: to look out for each other, to provide shared resources, to build camaraderie and understanding about shared experiences and histories. Just like survivors of human trafficking find comfort in gathering, Vietnamese people find the same comfort. 

Okay, so I may not need to justify to you, the reader, the existence of VSAs; however, I think I’m making the argument to myself.

Without saying this directly in college, I refused to attend VSA meetings. For someone who grew up in the Bay Area of CA, I rarely experienced myself as truly an ethnic minority. To me, VSA was the “social/party group” and all they cared about was having fun. And that whole thing where they assign you to a new ”family” of other Vietnamese students? That was stupid to me at the time.

I held so much contempt for that because I did not hold the concept of a Vietnamese family as something to willingly join. Nor did I believe that you could just make a family up like that and assume people would like each other. [One important fact I may not have mentioned is that my parents, my primary abusers, are Vietnamese.]  

In my position of contempt, I told myself that the activist and Pan-Asian Pacific Islander groups that I was involved in were the real groups doing real and important work. Goes to show you what I learned – having fun is bad, working and doing something “meaningful” is good.

In fact, when I was four years old I complained about sitting indoors practicing the keyboard. From my keyboard, I saw kids running around outside, and my mom said: “Those kids are out there because they don’t have good homes to go.” Moral of her story? You are not like them. What they are doing is not fun. You have a good home to go to. You should feel privileged to be here. Stop complaining. 

So…my mom’s lesson stayed with me for many years and that kept me away from VSA. Of course there are some groups who might party too much, or who might work too much. But who is to say? Too much for whom?

If my mother hadn’t isolated me, I still may not have gone to a VSA meeting. However, I doubt that I would have held contempt for it, and at least I would have seen it as an option, rather than something that I had to refuse.

And like I said, I thought I needed to actively separate myself from the Vietnamese community. That’s exactly what my parents did in order to isolate me. 

So when the United Vietnamese Student Association of the Midwest (UVSA-Midwest) invited me to keynote at their conference this year, I had mixed feelings about it. Can I go address a community that I have held so much contempt for? What do I do with my guilt about those feelings of contempt?

I decided to accept the invitation and I decided to accept it as more than a speaking engagement. I accepted the invitation as an opportunity to “rejoin” the Vietnamese community.  To reclaim a part of my identity that comes with such mixed feelings. To reclaim a part of my identity that was shaped by primarily two people – rather than the larger Vietnamese community. Granted, I was also abused, ignored, neglected by other members of the Vietnamese community so it wasn’t just two people. However, my parents were the ones who showed me the dark and wounded sides of the Vietnamese community. They did not introduce me to the loving, social justice and diversity-oriented people. 

This weekend, I got to experience something new about being Vietnamese…and in Iowa nonetheless. For those of you who don’t know, the city of San Jose, CA where I grew up, has the largest Vietnamese population outside of Viet Nam. And in spite of that fact, I did not truly have a Vietnamese friend until I went to college. So to see a group of hundreds of Vietnamese college students in one room trying to get to know each other and support each other, I was in awe.

I imagined the community experience I could have had.

I imagined that maybe one person in the room might have gone through what I went through.

I imagined that maybe this part of my identity, the Vietnamese part, doesn’t have to be diminished nor exaggerated. It is one piece of my identity.

As I work to become an integrated, whole person, every piece counts. 

Photo Credit: Jean-Marie Hullot/creative commons

I’ve got DIALOGUE on my mind.

I’m preparing for a conference this week hosted by the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking (LCHT) where the expressed purpose is dialogue.

LCHT will bring together national leaders in the anti-trafficking movement to move beyond presentation of facts, cases, and models and to dive deep into the challenges and questions that abolitionists face.

I am both excited and nervous.

In my personal life, I am exploring what it means to dialogue with friends. I have regularly found it difficult to truly share what I’m feeling and thinking – to be unedited, messy, and in the moment, yet to also state my beliefs, perspectives, truths. 

In my professional life, I am venturing more than ever, to speak to people who might who hold different perspectives than I do. I am practicing sharing my thoughts, even if they are in disagreement with another person. I’m learning to question others, while maintaining respect for them.

I am learning more and more about how difficult dialogue really is!

How do I listen to other people, know that their thoughts are theirs, share my own thoughts, know that my thoughts are my own, let myself be impacted by another person’s thoughts and experiences, and have my own thoughts about their thoughts?

Dialogue can actually be really complex….especially for someone who was not allowed to own her own mind or body. In my childhood, my parents did not converse with me. “Con” in conversations implies that you are speaking WITH someone. My parents spoke AT me and not with me.

Unfortunately, I find myself often taking on my parents’ perspective of my self, of others, and of the world. My activism, healing work, scholarship, and relationships are ways in which I create an army to challenge what my parents taught me.

They taught me, or more accurately, made me, take on other people’s perspectives and experiences, without question. They taught me how to reject another person, without even listening to them. They taught me that people are dangerous and they are out to criticize you and bring you down. They taught me that no one would believe me, no one would listen to me, and that I was not like other people.

What does this mean for me, in terms of my capacity to truly dialogue with another human being? What does this mean for everyone else, who was also taught the same lessons I listed above? 

A few root word meanings for the word dialogue that I found useful

Dia – passing through, across
Logue – one who is immersed in or driven by
Legein- speak

So…if dialogue means to go across speech, speak across, or to pass through someone who is immersed in something, there is an exchange happening.

How do people exchange respectfully and fairly? How does someone who has been exploited, know what equal exchange really looks like?

A dear service-learning colleague and friend of mine, Mike Bishop, often reminded me and the college students we worked with, of the differences between dialogue and debate. In short, debate is more focused on making an argument and proving your point. There is an emphasis on winning and establishing whose view is correct.

I often find myself debating, rather than dialoguing.

In debate, I think that I must battle whomever I am speaking to. I assume that they are out to get me (sound familiar?), and that I must defend myself. I need to attack their position, and constantly assess my position in relation to the other person. I’ve got weaponry and shields. 

From that place, I am not open or generous. I don’t really listen, except to find better ways to tear down the other person. I don’t invite the other person to listen to me either, because I’m too busy trying to shove my perspective down their throat.

 Sounds kinda vicious, huh? Well, unfortunately, that’s a part of my experience and I know I’m not alone.

In our movement, how do we move from debate to dialogue? And yet, in dialogue, how do we not get stuck in relativism, where every perspective is accepted no matter what? Does true democracy mean we allow every perspective, even if some are harmful? 

These are the questions on my mind. I hope you will reflect on them and discuss them with others.  

Carrisa Phelps, in her book Runaway Girl, eloquently describes her experiences of running. She literally ran away from home, from group homes to friends’ houses, and into the hands of a trafficker who sold her on the streets. As it states on her website, “But even when she escaped him [her trafficker], she could not outrun the crushing inner pain of abuse, neglect, and abandonment.” 

Recently, I met with a graduate student who is writing a paper about commercially sexually exploited children (CSEC) and she asked me what I thought about this pattern observed in CSEC – that they will sometimes run back to their perpetrator, even after they’ve escaped their trafficking situation. 

The question is…why on earth would anyone who is in a safe place, want to go back to a dangerous place? Why would anyone want to go back to, or even stay with, the people who abused them? This question came up (or maybe still does) in the movement to end domestic violence.

This question can carry judgment and criticism of a person – it implies that a rational person would not stay with an abuser, so someone who does must be out of their mind, and they deserve our disdain. On the other hand, the question can represent a real inquiry – curiosity into why people DO stay with or run back to their abusers. This approach engenders empathy.

It was clear to me that the graduate student I was talking to was clearly empathizing with CSEC and wanted to understand how she could help service providers in addressing this pattern of running.

I shared with her Carissa’s answer, which I have heard repeated many times by other survivors – it is often too much to deal with the “crushing inner pain of abuse, neglect, and abandonment.” CSEC are children. They are designed to be taken care of by adults. In our society nowadays, we care for children at least until the age of 18, if not 25 or 26 (which research shows is closer to when the brain finishes developing).

So…if children need adult care, but they are instead enslaved by adults who sell them for sex, who neglect their basic needs, disregard their humanity, and abandon their emotional worlds, how could they possibly deal with the emotional pain and gravity of what they are enduring? How can they take care of their needs AND protect themselves from violence…when this is the job of an adult to begin with? 

A child staying with their abuser or running back to a perpetrator, might be their best attempt and taking care of themselves. They may see no other option OR they may not be able to tolerate another option.

The experiences of trafficked children are filled with extreme physical and psychological violence. And let’s be clear – their choices and wants do not exist in a world completely full of opportunity. Children’s choices are limited – they do not have the same liberties as adults do.

As Julian Sher, author of Somebody’s Daughter, highlighted at one of his book screenings, “it’s not like children are choosing between staying with their perpetrator and going to Disneyland.” Their choices are bound and restricted. Their choices may be about physical survival, as well emotional survival.

Over the last two weeks, I have come face to face with all the things I do in my ADULT life, to avoid the “crushing inner pain of abuse, neglect, and abandonment.” It seems to be the case that because my life is completely safe, all of my feelings related to the LACK of safety in my childhood finally arise. Now that I am in the company of safe people and friends…and what have I been “wanting”?

To run away!!!

I am noticing that the desire to jump ship, stop my healing process, give up on relationships, and to refuse to let in the love that is available is strong! While I do not desire to actually run back to my perpetrators, I have felt myself desire to psychologically run back to them….to take on their perspective of who I am as a person, to think what they think about the world, and to believe what they believe. 

In my mind…I can feel myself running away from my SELF….because there are parts of my self that I have not accepted, forgiven or even listened to….these are the parts that I thought were disgusting and vile, and that made my parents abuse me.

So…what does this all mean for runaway youth or CSEC?

Well…I think that what I’m learning is to embrace the parts of myself that want to run away. To acknowledge my runaway desires and yet not act on it. To stay put with my self and my feelings, because as the saying goes…. “Wherever you go, there you are.”

How do we help CSEC, survivors of slavery, embrace all the parts of themselves, including the parts that feel shameful and disgusting? How do we help survivors understand that just because they might have felt disgusting doesn’t mean that they actually are disgusting? 

How do we create spaces for survivors to touch, express, and heal that crushing inner pain? 

In so many different ways this past week, I keep hearing “Less is more.” I heard it from my academic advisor who reminded me that I have a lot on my plate, from friends who haven’t seen me in awhile, and from colleagues at DSB who are helping me focus my energy. I also heard it from my body, through beginning symptoms of a cold or sickness of some sort, telling me to slow down, rest more, and to do fewer things in a day. 

So I took a couple days off, rested, reflected, and thought about what it means to do less and yield more. What exactly do I yield more of when I do less?

Well, these past few days I have yielded more peace and calmness, as well as more anxiety and loneliness. How can that be so? While I yearn for more peace and a slower paced life, I noticed that I have a low tolerance for it. My history of living in nearly 21 years of slavery, and pretty much constant violence, has conditioned me for a constant war inside of my heart and mind. When that war isn’t there, unfortunately, I feel lonely and empty. I feel the true loneliness and emptiness that I felt every single day as a child because my parents did not love me. 

Though my trauma was horrible, surviving it and fighting it became something that occupied my mind and time. What does it mean for me now that I don’t need to be occupied with the same battle? It seems as if I have often substituted the old battle for new ones. And that’s how I will often deal with the loneliness and emptiness that comes up. I try to fill it…and to no avail. 

The emptiness that is left by the trauma I endured is not one that can be filled. So…no matter how much I do now and how full I fill my days, more does not make up for the less, the lack, the loss. Nothing can make up the losses from my childhood. 

Slowing down these last few days has shown me how much I want to make up for lost time. Because I missed so much in my childhood, I am often living from a place of scarcity - scrambling to “get” as much out of life as a I can. When I’m trying to “get”, however, I’m not really being in my life or enjoying it much. Days come and go and I don’t feel fulfilled. 

Daily, I wrestle with the fact that it is literally impossible to make up for lost time. Never will I have gotten enough hugs from my parents, enough time with them where they related with me and cared about me, never will I get to pursue the national soccer team like I wanted to, or join my high school’s Main Street Singers choir group. And yet…never again will I get back today. So…how do I make the most of TODAY, given that most of my previous days were deeply lacking? 

I am learning that grieving is a cornerstone of my path to peace. Grieving my losses, will help me pursue goals that ARE possible, rather than goals that are impossible (like making up lost time). Grieving frees me of the pain and burden I’ve carried alone for so many years, and opens up space for new adventures and joys. 

As a mentor of mine says, go have joy in your sorrows. Grieve so you can be free. Do less so you can feel more. 

The title of Benjamin Skinner’s book, A Crime So Monstrous, that details the horrors of human trafficking is more than appropriate. Human trafficking IS a crime and it is a crime that is SO monstrous. 

On a daily basis, I face the consequences of being a former victim of such a crime. One of the main consequences that I have referred to, and will likely keep referring to until the end of time, is carrying a lot of shame. Shame is thinking that you ARE bad. That deep down at the core of your humanity, there is something wrong with you.

Shame and Guilt
Shame also often comes with guilt. Guilt is a feeling a person has for DOING something wrong. While shame is about your character as a person, guilt is about your behavior. In therapy, I’ve learned that guilt and shame can be healthy feelings – feelings that tell you, “hey…um, maybe you didn’t really want to do that thing…it’s not really socially acceptable, and it’s not really acceptable to your own standards, so why don’t you do something differently or correct your behavior or even apologize?”

In many survivors’ cases, guilt and shame are unduly felt.  For me, guilt and shame plague my daily life. I had to believe that there was something that I could have done differently to make my parents/perpetrators treat me differently. What they did to me was MY fault. I was the guilty party…not them. In addition, I thought there had to be something wrong with me for my parents to not love me. It couldn’t possibly be because they were damaged – it had to be because I was bad. 

Anti-Trafficking Laws
One of the reasons why passing anti-trafficking laws is so important is because it defines the nature of a crime. The law establishes that someone who is forced, lied to, and coerced into servitude is NOT responsible for that happening. The law also identifies that somebody was mistreated and somebody else did the mistreating.

It may surprise you, but I need this reminder over and over again: My parents did the mistreating and I was the mistreated.

I, like many survivors, were forced to blame ourselves in order to deal with and survive the horrors that we faced. If I did not think I had any responsibility, then I would have felt completely powerless, a feeling that was too unbearable to feel. Thus, I had to believe that my body caused people to rape me. I believed that I had magical powers to make it another human being lust after me.

When in fact, as we know full well, what somebody wears or what he or she looks like, does not and cannot MAKE another person inflict violence upon him or her. Anti-rape activists talk about this all the time. Someone wearing a short skirt is not asking someone else for rape.

Abusers want you to think it’s your fault. That absolves them of their own guilt. 

Wyoming is the last state in the U.S. that has not passed an anti-trafficking law. HB 133 just passed the Wyoming House of Reps, but it now sits in the Senate. Why does this matter? This matters because victims in the state of Wisconsin need to be identified as victims. They need to be able to have the law tell them they are victims of a crime not the perpetrators of one.

Anytime I doubt myself, I can say to myself that millions of people agree that what I went through is considered a crime. 

The United States passed the TVPA in the year 2000. In the year 2000, my parents were still selling me. While some anti-trafficking NGOs existed at the time  and understood that human trafficking and human slavery was happening in the U.S., the public was not aware of it as they are today. So while the law existed, it did not help me personally. In California, I trafficking laws were not passed until 2005. That is the year that I was in the process of escaping from my parents. I had no idea about the law and I had no idea of the term human trafficking. 

It takes many years for a law to be implemented. Even when laws exist, some can be very difficult to enforce. For example, child abuse laws were on the books during my childhood, and yet still no one suspected anything was going on in my parents’ home. Laws are important milestones. Yet, they are only one piece of the puzzle. Just like in some other countries, rape and human trafficking and brothels are illegal, however this law is not enforced at all.

Enforcing Existing Laws 

At U.S. citizens we must demand that protective laws are enforced. Laws are made to ensure public safety and to promote fairness and justice. The Constitution of United States was written so that every human being could be protected. These new anti-trafficking laws are in some ways redundant. What I mean is that the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery in our country….and yet it clearly still exists. So…if human trafficking is truly a crime so monstrous, how do make sure that both our policies AND our practices in daily life reflect this truth?