Today marked a first in my research on human trafficking. Today I read about a victim who shares my name.
The quota was $1,000 a night.
That's how much Katie Rhoades, then 19, was forced to make having sex with men for money. Every night. For three years.
"If you got good at manipulation, you didn't have to turn as many tricks," said Rhoades, adding that beatings and emotional abuse befell the women who did not obey the sex trafficker's commands or bring in the $1,000. "If you don't think there is an out, you learn to survive within it."
In 2002, she was a homeless, drug-addicted stripper barely out of high school when the pimp and his "bottom girl" -- the one responsible for luring girls and women, training them, and enforcing the "rules" -- trapped her with promises of a better and more glamorous life as their recording studio production assistant. Instead, 72 hours after she moved from Portland to San Francisco with them, she was held captive and forced to strip and have sex with men for money.
(More details about this period have been omitted from my reposting. You can read the original story here and more about her new advocacy group here.)
Eventually, she was able to escape and get help from a former family physican to enroll in a drug rehabilitation program miles away in Minnesota. She got clean, earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in social work and now runs a victims' advocacy group, Healing Action. She also helps train hotel staff to recognize sexual trafficking.
Not only does this woman, roughly my age, share my name, but she earned her MSW (I start mid-August) and is actively campaigning against trafficking. We have similar outcomes from drastically different paths.
Those of us in aid work and social services often have to focus on "the one". In other words, the cause we care about is often too complex and overwhelming for us to continually think about as a whole. Instead, we must focus on the individuals affected. In them we see change and healing and growth. Today "the one" hit close to home.
The quota was $1,000 a night.
That's how much Katie Rhoades, then 19, was forced to make having sex with men for money. Every night. For three years.
"If you got good at manipulation, you didn't have to turn as many tricks," said Rhoades, adding that beatings and emotional abuse befell the women who did not obey the sex trafficker's commands or bring in the $1,000. "If you don't think there is an out, you learn to survive within it."
In 2002, she was a homeless, drug-addicted stripper barely out of high school when the pimp and his "bottom girl" -- the one responsible for luring girls and women, training them, and enforcing the "rules" -- trapped her with promises of a better and more glamorous life as their recording studio production assistant. Instead, 72 hours after she moved from Portland to San Francisco with them, she was held captive and forced to strip and have sex with men for money.
(More details about this period have been omitted from my reposting. You can read the original story here and more about her new advocacy group here.)
Eventually, she was able to escape and get help from a former family physican to enroll in a drug rehabilitation program miles away in Minnesota. She got clean, earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in social work and now runs a victims' advocacy group, Healing Action. She also helps train hotel staff to recognize sexual trafficking.
Not only does this woman, roughly my age, share my name, but she earned her MSW (I start mid-August) and is actively campaigning against trafficking. We have similar outcomes from drastically different paths.
Those of us in aid work and social services often have to focus on "the one". In other words, the cause we care about is often too complex and overwhelming for us to continually think about as a whole. Instead, we must focus on the individuals affected. In them we see change and healing and growth. Today "the one" hit close to home.
