The line between sexually trafficked children and sexually abused is a fine one. But while both sets of victims should have advocates working together, disconnects ensure child sex trafficking will continue for a long time.
SOL ReformWhen I was 13 my father raped me.
He only did it once.
He let his brother, my uncle, rape me many times.
They call us survivors because that’s what we learn to do.
We find a way of surviving, of getting through it. As a 13 year old I didn’t use all the right labels, but words like “rape” and “incest” were the first. Which 13 year old schoolgirl wants to claim words like that anyway? Sometimes surviving involves escaping. I did that too. As soon as I could, I left home and started a new life at college.
I was lucky. A straight A student.
For many others escape means a bus station, the streets. A life of looking for love, and finding it in the arms of a trafficker. Drugs, sexual slavery, arrest and incarceration. It's mostly victims just like me who get incarcerated.
Being raped at home first by my father, then my uncle, with the tacit approval of my mother, I didn’t know how frighteningly normal I am.
I didn’t know that a fifth of America’s children are sexually abused.
I didn’t know that about one in every ten of us experience the additional betrayal of parents who know, and do nothing.
Nothing. Their silence. Their permission.
I didn’t know, and I don’t know, if any money changed hands between my uncle and my father. I know his family were relatively wealthy. I know my father had just lost his job. I know my mother expected hers to end too. I know we didn’t starve. And I wonder what I was worth?
I didn’t know that trafficking brokers, just like my father, tend to rape their victims to sexualize them for the task ahead. It also helps victims build the psychological defenses needed to survive their future as sexual slaves.
I was incestuously raped. To me it makes a difference if money was involved. To society too. I’m sure there are no cancelled checks in my father’s drawer bearing the proud memo, “Sex with your daughter” but being sold adds an additional layer of abuse and trauma.
Today I advocate for all child victims of sexual abuse. Trafficked or not.
There is a growing understanding of the scope of child sex trafficking, and its damage. But treating child sex trafficking in a vacuum, without treating its causes, will ensure it continues for years.
Trying to end child sex trafficking by focusing on trafficked children is like eliminating cancer by only treating those suffering from it when it’s metastasized to stage 4.
Abuse, like cancer, can be prevented. Preventing it saves lives, money, and minimizes complications. Failing that, early intervention is the next best thing. Anything is better than the common alternatives- drugs, suicide, poverty, abusive intimate relationships, and sometimes commercial sex work.
Kids are at high risk for being sexually trafficked if they have a history of sexual abuse, being in foster care, and running away from home. In other words, having high ACE scores. An estimated 300,000 American children have at least two of these risk factors. High ACE scores mean desperate kids. Kids desperate for family. Desperate for safety. Desperate for love. So desperate they'll settle for the ugly caricatures of these things a trafficker provides them with. Desperate kids weigh the pros and cons of sex with their family for free, or sex with strangers for money. That was me when I was a kid. I just made different choices.
Sexual slavery relies on a steady stream of disenfranchised, desperate, sexualized children. The runaways from abuse at home fuel the child sex trafficking market. Without these desperate kids child sex slavery can’t exist on the scale it does.
Let’s think about that for a minute.
One in every five children can expect to be sexually abused before they reach adulthood. The Statute of Limitations on the crime makes laws against it largely unenforceable - nine out of ten offenders will never see a day behind bars. Remember that the next time someone assures you their employees have all passed a background check!
We don’t do a good job at protecting kids from sexual abuse. Then when they are abused, we rarely help them.
We know how to prevent most non-sexual abuse and neglect. Maternal home visiting programs like Healthy Families NY and Nurse Family Partnership prevent abuse, neglect and maltreatment by encouraging bonding and teaching new mothers life skills. These are the evidence based programs that Nick Kristof argues for in his new book, A Path Appears. The group of people home visiting is least likely to work for are women experiencing domestic violence. Domestic Violence calls for best practices called The Quincy Solution that slashed domestic violence in all the communities that use it.
The other cause of child sex trafficking is people who feel entitled to use a child for their sexual gratification, and are willing to pay money for it. Buying a 14-year-old who's billed as an 18-year-old, they convince themselves it's consensual. They're not pedophiles- their abuse is an extension of rape culture and male privilege.
Pre-pubescent children are usually trafficked by their parents or caregivers on a smaller scale. These children are usually raped by people who meet the criteria for pedophilia. People who are likely to sexually abuse children again and again, throughout their lives. Eliminating statutes of limitations on child sex abuse and allowing adult victims access to the courts is the best way to ensure pedophiles are arrested so we save today's children. Fixing legal loop-holes that allow people who pay for sex from a minor to escape serious legal consequences protects kids too.
Foster care is mostly reserved for children who either suffer absolutely horrifying or chronic abuse, neglect or maltreatment- kids with very high ACE scores, and the skills traffickers want. Some anti-human trafficking groups try to prevent trafficking by teaching children in foster care, and their caregivers, to recognize and avoid traffickers. Others focus on bolstering a community's emergency shelter capacity. Those are great ideas, but like focusing only on stage 3 cancer. Better than focusing on stage 4, but still waiting too long.
What we all need to do is push for programs and policies that prevent the abuse from starting in the first place.
When children are "rescued" from trafficking, usually by arresting them for prostitution, there is growing awareness they don't have homes to go back to. They need long-term, trauma- informed aftercare. This is wise and proper. But this wisdom rarely extends to non-trafficked kids.
Between 40-60% of child sexual abuse is committed within the child’s family. When sexual abuse is alleged during a divorce, the alleged abuser gets custody or unsupervised visitation 85% of the time. The allegations of abuse are viewed as a gambit for full custody by a malicious mother, even though research shows this happens less than 2% of the time.
There is no talk of "rescuing" these non- trafficked children, and except for the Safe Child Act from Stop Abuse Campaign, there is no serious talk of protecting them from abuse.
For me and so many other incest survivors, the idea of getting paid to do the same sexual acts for strangers I was doing to family for free was appealing. Even though I was a college-bound straight A student I had been taught my value in the world. Many sex abuse survivors echo that feeling. The logistics of working as a prostitute in a very small, rural town and concern for my sister were the only things keeping me from that choice.
Sex trafficking makes good headlines. It’s shocking and provides us with a perfect image of victims and bad guys. Slavery is bad. Sexual slavery is worse. We get that.
We are short-changing all our children if we are satisfied with them being abused and just don’t want them trafficked.
New York must pass the Trafficking Victims Protection and Justice Act (TVPJA), a bill that, among other things makes patronizing a minor in prostitution a felony sexual offense. And New York must also pass the Child Victims Act, a bill to eliminate the Statute of Limitations on child sexual abuse. The bill that stops New York protecting child rapists in lieu of the children they rape.
All children deserve a safe home to grow up in. That includes protection from incest, maltreatment, domestic violence and prostitution. Far too few advocates realize that we can prevent abuse from starting. We can. And we must.
And that’s why we at Stop Abuse Campaign support public policy changes that will stop all three forms of abuse, and so should you. Check out what we're doing at www.stopabusecampaign.com