When I was arrested side-by-side with my trafficker, as if I were partnered with him in some way, I was further victimized and everything that my trafficker had told me about the system just came true. Law enforcement can't be trusted. Government services can't be trusted. Three days had passed between the raid and the arrest of which the entire time he beat me senseless to ensure I couldn't talk. He convinced me that if I said one single word about anything to anyone or disobeyed him in any way, he would kill me and my children would grow up motherless
Dear john, The Diary of a Prostitute ~ Julia Anderson
One of the first things traffickers do is isolate their targets. By severing other ties, traffickers replace those many relationships with a single dominating one. Instead of interacting with many people and participating in many activities, the victim becomes ensconced in a hegemonic relationship with one person. There's only one person they talk to, only one person they interact with, and only one person they can turn to. They don't just know their trafficker better than anyone else; they don't know anyone else. They even start to lose themselves and become wholly dominated by another person.
After having my will and self-worth beat out of me... saying no was no longer an option for me. I wasn't allowed to stand up for myself...because I didn't know what that even meant anymore. I had no value to stand up for. All I knew in this moment was that I had been hurt and I was powerless to stop it... Aren't you a cop?
This is the heart of a prostitute. She can't step up, she can't get out
Interactions create relationships. Positive or negative, relationship form. You can't help but build a relationship with someone over time. You start to get to know them—to understand their temperaments, their moods, their likes and dislikes. Whether you love or loathe the other person, you begin to understand them on a visceral level. Perhaps you don't know about their family or occupation or even their name, but you learn their dispositions and behaviours.
I don't know why you are the way you are, john. I don't know if something happen to you in your childhood... or if there is a mis-fire in your brain. People ask me all the time why you did what you did. I think that is the stupidest question in the world. I have no idea why
Julia had been bound to her trafficker for months, years. It wasn't a healthy relationship, but it was deeply and firmly rooted. She knew him. She didn't know all about him, but she knew him. She didn't know the police officer
Since he took us hostage, he had followed through with every threat he'd ever made with the one exception of death (although he did play Russian roulette with a gun to my head, so there's that). Unfortunately, I trusted him to keep his word, now, more than I trusted you to keep yours
Trust isn't always a good thing. Even if you don't like someone or what they do, if you know them, you trust them. With traffickers, they're all you know. Everyone else is unknown, and we fear the unknown. Even if we think the unknown is better, even if we know that anything must be better, we can't really be totally sure—because it is unknown. So then it's safer to stay with what we know, even if what we know is killing us
Sometimes you can't escape. Sometimes you need to be rescued
I'm writing to every law enforcement officer or politician who participated in our sexual services and looked the other way knowing that they were participating in our trafficked lives. I'm calling out all the men in blue whose job it is to protect and serve but instead enslave. I'm questioning the moral value of those who feel that rape-for-profit is justified as long as it has the title 'prostitution' and feel entitled to treat those women as nothing more than a human toy. Let me ask you, when you go home at night, do you set your badge down and say 'job well down'?
Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash