I was watching cable news when an organization called Fair Girls was highlighted regarding their work in combating child sex trafficking in America. The statistics they shared were staggering—an estimated 100,000 children and youth are sold into slavery each year.
During the segment, a young woman named Asia Graves spoke powerfully about her experience as a former child sex slave. She bravely shared her story and now uses her experiences to connect with and support others who have escaped or are trying to escape their abusers. Ms. Graves also touched on the challenges of explaining why victims often can’t leave their abusers and the harsh judgment they face.
Despite everything she has been through, Ms. Graves is now pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Social Work and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science, demonstrating resilience and a commitment to making a difference in the world.
Here is an except of an article she wrote in USA Today:
WASHINGTON — Asia Graves looks straight ahead as she calmly recalls the night a man paid $200 on a Boston street to have sex with her.
She was 16, homeless, and desperate for food, shelter and stability. 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.
“If we didn’t call him daddy, he would slap us, beat us, choke us,” said Graves, 24, of the man who organized the deals. “It’s about love and thinking you’re part of a family and a team. I couldn’t leave because I thought he would kill me.”
By day, she was a school girl who saw her family occasionally. 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. 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.
A plague more commonly associated with other countries has been taking young victims in the United States, one by one. 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 Exploited Children says at least 100,000 children across the country are trafficked each year.
On Tuesday, President Obama announced several new initiatives aimed at ending trafficking nationwide, including the first-ever assessment of the problem in this country and a $6 million grant to build solutions.
“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,” Obama said in an address to the Clinton Global Initiative. “It’s barbaric, it’s evil, and it has no place in a civilized world.”
Schools in at least six states and the District of Columbia have turned their focus to human trafficking, launching all-day workshops for staff members, classroom lessons for students and outreach campaigns to speak with parents about the dangers American children face.
The 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.
“They are as horrific and brutal and vile as any criminal cases we see,” said Neil MacBride, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. “If it can happen in affluent Fairfax County, it can happen anywhere.”
Across the nation, the stories arrive with varying imprints of the callousness and depravity of the sex traffickers. 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.
Young people at the fringes of school, runaways looking for someone to care and previously abused victims fall into the traps of traffickers who often pretend to love them.
The perpetrators — increasingly younger — can be other students or gang members who manipulate victims’ weaknesses during recess or after school, law enforcement officials say. They often bait victims by telling them they will be beautiful strippers or escorts but later ply them with drugs — ecstasy pills, cocaine, marijuana and the like — and force them into sex schemes.
Read Full Article on USA Today
