+++++++++++++++++++ Trigger warning: trafficking, prostitution, rape +++++++++++++++++
Two weeks ago, a young woman who I think of as a niece, went missing. Again.
This was not the first time her mother and I worried and texted late into the night. Her boyfriend, the young man who came for her, was not really her boyfriend. That was a ruse. The man who called her family, was actually her pimp. He had been grooming her with his love for years. Gaining access, opening her heart, prying it wide, and then when she was least prepared for it, gutting her open, sternum to sinew, when he demands she work for him, get money to support him.
There’s the brand. The tattoo with his name and a crown over the top. It extends from wrist to elbow. She is marked. She is his, it says to the world of people selling humans, although to most civilians, it’s a random tattoo. I’m not going to tell you everything here. The young woman is writing her own story with me and someday you will hear her words. But I am left stunned, the buying and selling of a child I love, right here in my own life, has hit me in the most devastating way.
What I know is that if you asked me a month ago, I would’ve told you that sex work is part of how people often manage their lives, their histories and their economics. Sex work pays for life. It’s how people survive. Obviously, no one should be forced to perform sex work against their will. But, you know, I would’ve said, how different is doing sex work to pay for college vs selling your plasma to make tuition or cleaning rich people’s toilets? And I still believe this to some extent, but I also believe in the way people’s histories make them vulnerable to doing sex work they don’t want to do. That being in a marginalized community, or having a rough unstable childhood, or having multiple ACES (adverse childhood experiences), having endured previous acts of sexual abuse prime you for these roles, making the choice barely a choice at all. We know that being trafficked is not the first trauma.
And so where it once seemed more clear, now I see all its complications.
Didn’t Robert Sapolsky just write a book about how we probably don’t have free will? That from a neurobiological stand point our choices are probably programmed into us by genetics, hormone fluctuations, environment, childhood experiences, culture and adverse experiences, like feelings of safety, hunger and stress? That maybe we make the choices we are forced to make instead of the ones we think are making? Maybe we are at the mercy of everything that made us and our decisions spring predictably from that well?
Maybe we have so much less room to maneuver than we originally thought. Maybe we are puppets and the strings are our lived experiences and we are reactive and agency-less.
What is striking about trafficking is how deeply psychological it is.
Traffickers are not stupid. They are entrepreneurs, keenly aware of basic economics, supply and demand, and how to market and sell and promote their products. They are sex influencers. What’s more they know how to get product and make it malleable and ready for consumption.
See how quickly a young woman’s body can become a consumable object?
It often happens over the internet, but not always. Young women are looking for love, attention, to be told they are special, pretty, worthy, maybe for the first time. These men are there. They see your weaknesses. There are periods of trauma bonding where they talk about their pasts, the ways in which they were hurt and mutilated by life. And this is important because the pimp trauma bonds, too. The girl, the young woman, is the rescuer, the only person who understand his pain. “He needs me,” she tells herself, and this bonds them together. His pain makes him human, fallible, desiring of her empathy, and this is where it goes very Stokholm-syndrome, but in an all-consuming way where the relationship she thinks she is getting is pure fantasy.
He moves her into his apartment with his family. There is love but also hate. It’s a deeply imperfect and complicated relationship, and so women in them are often unaware they are even being trafficked. They don’t want to leave. They love this man. They release their families so they can be with this man. They go into hiding with him. When they are found and retrieved, they return. They feel imprisoned in a place without walls, that looks free but actually tethers them.
This is her man. She will stay to the end. The drama keeps her hoping for more, for better, for a return to something she never really had, just the ephemeral ghostiness of what she wanted in the first place and thought sure she had.
And this is the loyalty he is looking for. She thinks she will stay with him forever.
No matter what he does next.
Then, predictably, it goes badly.
Her boyfriend “breaks” her with beatings. The breaking is a shock, a mortification that comes out of nowhere. She reels and tries to understand. He rapes her over and over. There is yelling, chaos, and threats with his open carry gun. And then deep remorse as he confesses and promises it won’t happen again. He threatens her family, her friends, anyone who tries to get her to leave. Everyone is suspect. He keeps her close by. She is rarely out of eye sight. He watches her talk to her mother through the partially cracked open window of her Toyota in the parking lot. He listens to the conversation by phone. Talks in her ear. Tells her what to say. The girl talks to her mother like the man would, “Leave me alone, stay out of my life, you are ruining everything, I don’t want you in my life…” But the mother knows this is not the sound of her daughter at all. The mother goes home alone to worry more.
He makes her video herself when she is out in the world so he knows what she is doing. He takes her phone, every phone she gets, and throws it, breaks it. He texts for her on various phones, acts as if he is her, burner phones appear and disappear, he sends texts in her voice with his words, alienates her from family, friends, pulls her into a small, claustrophobic, fragile world.
The trust makes this possible. She is invested and like the first hit of heroin, she wants to get back to that closeness, that shared experience, that worthiness he made her feel. He is her drug. She is hooked.
For this young woman, her people are irritants but his people form a family around her. There are sympathetic people, a maternal figure who can keep people from coming to her aid and also shoot out tendrils of understanding and acceptance when necessary. They manage her. “They are grown,” the mother says when someone has enough and wants to intervene, “Let them figure this out themselves.” The family’s large dysfunction envelopes the young woman. It is both comfortable and resonating. Some of this has happened to her before. Now she is controlled by a family, not just a man. She is surrounded, pulled from all angles. He controls her money and how she spends it. He forces her to work so he doesn’t have to. But he doesn’t trust her and she must always prove her trust, over and over, and her love, and this lack of trust is tied back into his trauma, and the betrayals he has endured, and she holds space for that. She wants to soothe and do right by him.
Save him. While hating him.
She is now just a skin sack, a hole for him to fuck, to beat. She is empty inside. She wants him to fill her up. Like he used to.
The relationship is a tumult. A chaos. She doesn’t know what will come next. She is always on edge. And this is for a good reason: she is always reactive, stressed and this damages her prefrontal cortex. It keeps her from making good decisions, thinking long term, seeing the realities of her own situation and planning to get out of them. She is serving, minute to minute. And this is underscored by her pimp who is both her tender place and her torturer. He is regretful when he beats her. He tells her he is sorry. That even his shortcomings, and the beatings cannot break their bond, and so when the new men come around to have sex, she is primed. Maybe not happy or willing, maybe confused and unsure, but he has a grand plan, and she trusts, and so she does it for him, for their life, for getting ahead together, for everything she needs and hopes he can give her. She shuts off the world. Holds her breath. Let’s him do what he does. Trusts that this is for them both. She never sees the money. It all goes to him.
They are a family. Having one is better than not having one.
Trafficking is a complex issue that intersects with gender - 94% are female; race - 40% of trafficked women are Black, 24% are Latino, while buyers are overwhelmingly white men; and class - poverty is a huge factor. Even though Money. Can. Never. Buy. Consent. Add to this, how gender identity and/or sexual orientation can make people especially vulnerable, same with foster kids, kids with lots of instability, and it becomes terrifying. (Boys and young men are obviously also trafficked. I’ll leave this for another essay).
Although the young woman in this story is an adult, really she is still a child, and many of our children and young adults are sold into prostitution. The U.S. Department of Justice believes 200,000 children, in the US, in our communities, living down the street, in our schools, playing ball on our fields, are AT RISK for trafficking into the sex industry right now. AT RISK. Trafficking sounds like something that happens somewhere, but not to a person I know and love and yet, here I am.
Here you are.
I notice sex work everywhere. The women at Lowes picking up builders in F150s for a quickie. The women by my kids’ Tae Kwon Do class bending into car windows on Sahara. And I wonder what it means for us women to be willing to do sex work, to make this choice? What if the confluence of environments, hormones, genetics, childhoods and generational baggage create our choices and we just follow along, thinking it’s a choice, but really its the obvious next step in a path not of our own making? Does that mean we have to “save” people from sex work? Or is being a porn star a completely reasonable empowered choice? How do we discern between people who make those choices for work versus the people who have been so psychologically bent by their traffickers that they can’t make decisions on their own because they subsumed in the murk of it all? How do we recognize that and how do we rescue people stuck in the muck of it all, or support them rescuing themselves? And what if a young woman wants to stay…Do we let her, even if she is taking beatings and is consistently sexually abused? What if this is all she knows? What if being treated badly is a familiar comfort? If a young woman doesn't have an understanding family and community to go back to, why would she be pressed to leave her abuser anyway, so she can return to something worse or nothing at all?
These are the things I’m tossing around in my head this week.
The young woman in this story is safe now, for the time being anyway. There is so much more happening than what I can say here. She is scarred and traumatized. It will take a lifetime to mend all this. She is seeking advocacy in the courts and therapeutic treatment for herself. She is surrounded by family and people who love her. She will have to rebuild, or create a new, sense of worthiness out of all this.
She will have to come back into her own body and mind with whatever sense of agency she can muster. Her well-being will depend on it. Even if we don’t have free will, and Sapolsky is right, don’t we all want to believe we can have agency? That we can make different choices?
She has the one thing a lot of women in her position don’t have - a lot of loving supportive people around her. I think this might make all the difference.
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ENDNOTES:
This amazing photo is from an interview this week in Las Vegas Weekly. I loved this interview with the brilliant, Geoff Carter, who asks the best questions. Photographer Wade Vandervort and I nearly died twice getting this photo. Check it out on line or in just about every Vegas coffee shop.
I talked to writer and teacher Barbara DeMarco-Barrett on the Writer’s on Writing podcast and I did a little thing on her Substack, Pen on Fire about how to get granular in your writing. She’s new to Substack, so give her some love!
Here’s a primer on the Nordic Model on prostitution and trafficking. Very helpful and humane.
You can buy my book here.
As always, thank you for reading. xo
Generally, the world is a strange place to be right now. I have read this article and surprisingly, I am not shocked! Rather am annoyed, that even parents are becoming helpless to protect their children from predatory men. Also, I watched an Italian show called "baby", a movie starring Jamie Fox "God Is A Bullet", and "Sound of Freedom." Where we are as civilization, it is not hard to see the end.