Sex Trafficking Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the USA (or, The Nation’s Plague in Plain Sight)
And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could. Asia Graves looks straight ahead as she calmly recalls the night a man paid $200 on a Boston street to have sex with her.
The remembrance fills me with sorrow and shame. “If you want attention and you see that you’re getting it, you just follow your feelings,” senior Araceli Figueroa, 17, said. “It’s sad.”
It pains me to tell you of it; but I have promised to tell you the truth, and I will do it honestly, let it cost me what it may. A plague more commonly associated with other countries has been taking young victims in the United States, one by one.
I will not try to screen myself behind the plea of compulsion from a master; for it was not so. “They give you money, drugs and a fun time, but in the end they want your dignity and your self-respect,” she said. “It’s invisible chains that these kids are tied with.”
Neither can I plead ignorance or thoughtlessness. By day, she was a school girl who saw her family occasionally.
For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood. The [outreach] efforts by high school and middle-school officials in Washington, D.C., Virginia, Connecticut, Oregon, Wisconsin, California and Florida come as experts say criminals have turned to classrooms and social media sites to recruit students into forced domestic sex and labor rings.
The influences of slavery had had the same effect on me that they had on other young girls; they had made me pre- maturely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world. Sold from Boston to Miami and back, Graves was one of thousands of young girls sexually exploited across the United States, often in plain sight.
Though the scope of the problem remains uncertain—no national statistics for the number of U.S. victims exist—the National Center for Missing and Ex-ploited Children says at least 100,000 children across the country are traf-ficked each year. Globally, the International Labor Organization estimates that about 20.9 million people are trafficked and that 22% of them are victims of forced sexual exploitation.
I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation. From ages 14 to 17, [Katariina Rosenblatt] says she was drugged, abused, raped and trafficked by several people including [a class mate’s] father’s friends, a neighbor who ran a trafficking house, and man who offered her a role in a movie.
But, O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely! “I want to raise the compassion bar so that any girl who becomes a victim is never seen as a girl who asked for it,” said Andrea Powell, executive director of Fair Girls.
Among others, it chanced that a white unmarried gentle-man had obtained some knowledge of the circumstances in which I was placed. He knew my grandmother, and often spoke to me in the street. The perpetrators—increasingly younger—can be other students or gang members who manipulate victims’ weaknesses during recess or after school, law enforcement officials say.
He became interested for me, and asked questions about my master, which I answered in part. He expressed a great deal of sympathy, and a wish to aid me. At night, she became a slave to men who said they loved her and convinced her to trade her beauty for quick cash that they pocketed.
He constantly sought opportunities to see me, and wrote to me frequently. They often bait victims by telling them they will be beautiful strippers or escorts but later pry them with drugs—ecstasy pills, cocaine, marijuana and the like—and force them into sex schemes.
I was a poor slave girl, only fifteen years old. She was 16, homeless, and desperate for food, shelter and stability.
So much attention from a superior person was, of course, flattering; for human nature is the same in all. She was alone on a corner in Boston during a snowstorm when her first trafficker picked her up.
I also felt grateful for his sympathy, and encouraged by his kind words. Young people at the fringes of school, runaways look- ing for someone to care and previously abused victims fall into the traps of traffickers who often pretend to love them.
It seemed to me a great thing to have such a friend. “He said I was too pretty to stay outside, so I ended up going home with him because he offered me a place to sleep and clothes to put on,” she said.
By degrees, a more tender feeling crept into my heart. “It’s about love and thinking you’re part of a family and a team.”
He was an educated and eloquent gentleman; too eloquent, alas, for the poor slave girl who trusted in him. “When a little girl is sold by her impoverished family, or girls my daughters’ ages run away from home and are lured—that’s slavery,” [President] Obama said. “It’s barbaric, it’s evil, and it has no place in a civilized world.”
Of course I saw whither all this was tending. The man said he wanted to take care of her but that she would have to earn her keep. “He showed me the ropes,” she said. “How much to charge for sex” and other sex acts.
I knew the impassable gulf between us; but to be an object of interest to a man who is not married, and who is not her master, is agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave, if her miserable situation has left her any pride or sentiment.
It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion. She stayed, however, and found comfort in other girls—called “wife in-laws”—who went to area schools, got their hair and nails done together and then worked the streets for the same man.
There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment. Then came the violence. Her attempts to leave were met with brute force. “He punched me. He stripped me down naked and beat me.”
A master may treat you as rudely as he pleases, and you dare not speak; moreover, the wrong does not seem so great with an unmarried man, as with one who has a wife to be made unhappy. Other violent episodes left her with eight broken teeth, two broken ankles and a V-shaped stab wound just be- low her belly button.
There may be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible. “You think what you’re doing is right when you’re in that lifestyle,” Graves said. “You drink alcohol to ease the stress. Red Bulls kept you awake, and cigarettes kept you from being hungry.”
I was sure my friend, Mr. Sands, would buy me. For two years, she was sold from tormentor to tormentor, forced to sleep with men in cities like New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Miami.
He was a man of more generosity and feeling than my master, and I thought my freedom could be easily obtained from him. “They said they were escorts and that they made $2,000 a night. I figured if I go out one night, I’ll never have to do it again.”
“You can sell drugs once,” says Alessandra Serano, an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of California. “You can sell a girl thousands of times.”
With all these thoughts revolving in my mind, and seeing no other way of escaping the doom I so much dreaded, I made a headlong plunge. He was the first of dozens of men who would buy her thin cashew-colored body from a human trafficker who exploited her vulnerabilities and made her a prisoner for years.
Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! “They are as hor- rific and brutal and vile as any criminal cases we see,” said Neil MacBride, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely un-protected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of an-other. “I couldn’t leave because I thought he would kill me.”
You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice. “If we didn’t call him daddy, he would slap us, beat us, choke us,” said Graves of the man who organized the deals.
I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do. The painful and humiliating memory will haunt me to my dying day. One girl was sold during a sleepover, handed over by her classmate’s father. Another slept with clients during her school lunch breaks. A third was choked by her “boyfriend,” then forced to have sex with 14 men in one night.
Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others. For some of the time, Graves herself remained in high school, attending classes sporadically in boy shorts, small tank tops and worn heels. “In the schools, they thought I just dressed provocatively,” Graves said of the teachers and staff who missed chances to help her. “Now, people are actually understanding that these girls are victims.”
What could I do? I thought and thought, till I became desperate, and made a plunge into the abyss.
Copyright Credit: "Sex Trafficking Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the USA (or, The Nation’s Plague in Plain Sight)" from semiautomatic by Evie Shockley © 2017 by Evie Shockley. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.
Source: semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)