The majority of the women we serve have experienced multiple forms of abuse from early childhood. Childhood sexual abuse is a grooming process for trafficking and creates incredible shame and fear within the child. Worth and confidence are stripped away, often by those the child knows and trusts. Traffickers prey on these vulnerabilities and continue to use abuse as a form of controlling and “recruiting” the child.

The degradation of her worth and value continues within the sex trade. Coerced and manipulated, she is raped day after day, night after night. This is a grueling, painful life-destroying process that only profits the trafficker. The constant trauma is experienced within her on every level: emotional, physical, spiritual and mental.

Many traffickers use drugs to control the girls and help create a dependency to maintain the girls within their possession. Many women want to escape the horrors of their reality so drugs help numb the pain and trauma they experience daily. Once addicted the trauma, stigma and judgement she feels and faces from others is only compounded, making escape even harder.

Many people don’t understand the amount of manipulation and coercion that has happened in her life since childhood. This process has left her desiring love and belonging, which the trafficker capitalizes on by becoming a romantic partner at first. He manipulates her through this relationship, until suggesting there is a debt she now owes him. Often, she doesn’t leave or even realize she is being exploited because of her intimate connection to this partner/trafficker! Even if she is rescued, there is often a strong pull, because of these intimate relationships, back to the life she just escaped.