Do You Know How It Happens?
It can be easy to as a community to dismiss victims as “girls wanting attention” or “easy money.” But do you know what vulnerable youth see and hear when a trafficker approaches them? Do you know what happens to girls who become targets?
The five-step process a trafficker uses to keep his supply steady:
- Recruit
- Groom
- Break
- Package
- Control
Daddy Day Care
“I was first forced into prostitution when I was 11 years old by a 28-year-old man. I am not an exception. The man who trafficked me sold so many girls my age, his house was called “Daddy Day Care.” … He made $1,500 a night selling my body, dragging me to Los Angeles, Houston, Little Rock — and one trip to Las Vegas in the trunk of a car. I am 17 now, and my childhood memories … are of making my own arrangements on Craigslist to be sold for sex, and answering as many ads as possible for fear of beatings and ice water baths.”
College Student
A new college student from a small town, a little naive and trusting, was date raped. She fell into the hands of a sympathetic young man who wanted to be her boyfriend. He turned out to be a trafficker, and through a series of beatings, rapes and disorienting trips to distant networking destinations, she spent 10 years trapped into a life she didn’t know how to escape before she finally found a battered women’s shelter, where she fleed with her two young sons.
Vanity Fair (2011) — one of the single most horrifying articles we’ve read so far about the reality of girls’ lives with traffickers
“There are basically two business models: manipulating girls through violence — that’s called ‘gorilla’ pimping — and controlling them with drugs,” says Krishna Patel, assistant U.S. attorney in Bridgeport, Connecticut,, who prosecuted the case of New York–based trafficker Corey Davis, a.k.a. “Magnificent.”
To force girls to do his bidding, Davis allegedly sliced a girl in his “stable” with a box cutter and stomped others into submission with a special pair of Timberland boots—a technique known as “Timming.” One teenager was zipped into a duffel bag and deposited by her pimp on a six-lane highway. The pimp of Caroline (a former Connecticut 4-H Club member) plucked out her fingernails one by one until she passed out from the pain. Natalie, an ex–Catholic schoolgirl rescued by GEMS, was from the age of 13 tortured or beaten with water, belts, chains, even a bag of frozen oranges.
“Pimping,” Natalie says, “is not cool. A pimp is a wife beater, rapist, murderer, child-molester, drug dealer, and slave driver rolled into one.”