It would help pay for the heroin.
That rationale lured some of the girls next door—like Hannah, the Midwestern girl with broken boyfriends—past the point of no return. It was the most malignant milestone so far in their stumbling, struggling existence, a lasting before-and-after event that, regardless of where their paths took them, would forever mark the moment when a young woman traded a piece of her soul for cash or drugs. It wasn’t only or always about being able to afford the next fix; it was more complicated than that. The affirmation and affection of older males, the pressure and influence exerted by exploiters, the desire to preserve a relationship that was just as addictive as a drug and that offered an illusory haven from trials and traumas—all ferried the soon-to-be victim across a river of hurt and into a world of pain.
Whatever the motivators were, the time inevitably arrived when sex was for sale.
For Nancy Yarbrough, the Wisconsin preacher’s kid whose trauma started with inappropriate touching and worsened after her parents’ divorce, it was the older influencers who pitched the idea of sex as a source of cash. “He was way older than me. 1 And I just figured, why not? I’m already doing everything else. Let me see if I can find some creature comforts in all the hurt that I’ve experienced thus far. So, I’m like sixteen or seventeen . . . I’m thinking about, ‘Hey, I’m already having sex, and I’m not getting paid for it.’ And that’s how he introduced it.”
Nancy went on to say that she “started experiencing a different type of underbelly. The different type of world that is hidden in plain sight.”2
Hidden in plain sight like the truck stop we pass on the highway or the big rig that zooms by us on the interstate or the young woman standing in the back of the rest stop while we fuel up.
For other women, the predatory path was more incremental. The men in their lives started them off as strip-club dancers or placed them in the shadowy business of “erotic massage.” In any case, those were entrance points to the peddling of flesh for someone else’s profit. In these transitions, it was a simple case of more money for more services so they could get more drugs or more attention, affection, and affirmation.
There were no baby steps for Nancy Yarbrough. Pimps plunged her headfirst into trafficking at truck stops across I-94 in Wisconsin. It was her training ground for yet more marketplaces.3
“We had to be groomed on what to watch for, in regard to the trucks . . . Learn the names and kinds of trucks. Learn the CB language. So that you don’t end up getting arrested. How to vet the person that you’re talking with to make sure they’re not police officers. It was just a whole organized way of life.”4
Nancy was a small, light-skinned African American with blond hair. When she recently told her story to the public, she explained that even in the microcosm of Wisconsin truck-stop trafficking, there was racial segregation and economic disparity. White women worked one truck stop; Black women stuck to another one. Nancy’s blond hair and mocha skin tone meant that she was permitted to work with the Caucasian girls. “We got paid more over there.”5
As was common practice for street-level and truck-stop trafficking victims, at the end of each night, the money Nancy earned went straight to her pimp. If she hadn’t met the mandatory threshold of at least a thousand dollars, her night wasn’t over, even if the rising sun claimed it was. She talked about the variables that determined how much she made for her pimp through transactions at truck stops and in other, much more varied environments.
“It just depends on the day. It depends on the county or the state that you are in. The younger you were, the more money you made.” If you did parties and things like that, you could make anywhere from two thousand dollars to ten thousand dollars. “Depends on your clientele,”6 she said. For Nancy, once she was trafficked beyond the truck stops, the clientele represented a cross section of society.7 “It can be anywhere between a Wall Street guy, the priest, the corner-store guy, the guy that drives the liquor truck. I had all kinds of buyers.”
For Hannah, immersion in trafficking didn’t start with truck stops. It was more subtle than that. She owed an employer some favors. He had been giving her advances on her salary, money she and her man kept blowing on dope. The boss had a client who was keen on Hannah. That’s how it began.
It became nearly impossible to keep a roof over their heads. Any available cash went to purchasing dope. Paying the bills was relegated to an annoying afterthought. Since Hannah and her boyfriend had no money for a security deposit and no legitimate employer to list on a rental application, apartments were out of the question. Cheap motels were the plentiful alternative. They charged by the week or month; there was no lease and no credit check required.
One young woman and her man, as they were burning through the girl’s cash to remain constantly high, stayed at a well-known budget-chain motel for a whole year. She explained her view of these motels’ business model: “Places like that trapped you. The fees were just high enough to prevent saving anything and just low enough to keep you from going somewhere else.”
As addiction raged on, any money earned went to heroin; any heroin went in their veins. As tolerance to hard drugs developed, the two of them needed increasingly dangerous cocktails of illegal drugs. Practices like speedballing—mixing cocaine and heroin and injecting it in one shot—made money vanish quicker than the lovebirds could find a vein. Not even the threadbare weekly budget motel was affordable anymore.
The girl’s inner turmoil and overwhelming anxiety, fueled by a combination of hard drug use, dangerous dealers, violent men, and weekly panic over whether the motel bill would get paid, were surpassed only by the traumatizing terror of selling herself to trucker after trucker, all night, every night.
Most victims, despite their misery, don’t understand that they are being trafficked. They know only, often through a heroin haze, that they are being used. The anti-trafficking organization Polaris works to dispel myths about victims. One of those myths is that trafficking victims always want help to leave the trap that ensnares them. From the home page of the Polaris website, we learn that myth isn’t reality:
“Every trafficking situation is unique8 and self-identification as a trafficking victim or survivor happens along a continuum. Fear, isolation, guilt, shame, misplaced loyalty and expert manipulation are among the many factors that may keep a person from seeking help or identifying as a victim. But the Polaris organization recognizes and rejects the myth that all trafficking victims are locked up or physically prevented from escaping.
“People in trafficking situations stay for reasons that are more complicated. Some lack the basic necessities to physically get out—such as transportation or a safe place to live. Some are afraid for their safety. Some have been so effectively manipulated that they do not identify at that point as being under the control of another person.”
Shame was a roadblock too wide for these young women to bypass and ask for help. What would their family members think of them if they knew the truth? Drug addiction was bad enough, but telling your sister, brother, mom, or dad that the girl they loved was being sold to strangers—that was a bridge too far. That’s one reason why contact with family members is often broken off. It’s not that the victim doesn’t want to speak with her loved ones; it’s more that she can’t bring herself to do it. Sometimes, it’s the family members who decide they can’t bear the pain of hearing about another failed rehab attempt or new arrest, who don’t want to listen to the latest plea for bail money.
That’s why sometimes the offer of help needs to be more of a confrontation. I heard several stories from these girls of elaborately staged interventions in which the victim suddenly found herself surrounded by caring friends and loved ones offering love and help. Too frequently, the girls’ responses sounded like a script penned by an eternal pessimist:
“I have bills to pay.”
“I’ll only go if my boyfriend goes with me.”
“I need time to think about this.”
“How can I continue my life if I’m stuck in rehab?”
As if what the victim was going through was somehow “living.”
Those excuses reflected a fear of the unknown. Yet there was another factor at play in the rejection of help: the fear of the known. Anyone who had been to rehab knew that detox, the first step in any rehabilitation, was the equivalent of sustained torture. The girls knew that the pain of detox was the only way to climb out of the hellfire of their misery, but the prospect of going through withdrawal again was enough to make the most despondent addict crawl the other way.
In fact, crawling, begging, defecating, and vomiting were all part of most addicts’ withdrawal experiences, whether they were in plush private centers or waiting for hours in a big-city hospital ER. Usually, an IV sedative was administered—assuming a nurse could find a vein that hadn’t collapsed from the brutal abuse of months or years of hypodermic heroin use. Next, addicts were transferred to a detox area for days of nothing but sleep, meds, and vital sign checks; they were usually unable or unwilling to eat a morsel of food.
If you survived the detox ordeal, you often got your first exposure to Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous right there in the facility. They’d encourage you to keep attending meetings once you were out, and if you were fortunate, someone in AA or NA would offer to be your sponsor. You’d likely wait for weeks to get a space in a sober-living house—that is, if state funding or private donations were still in place that month. Then, unless you were wealthy and in a longer-term private setting, you were thrust out of the nest like a fledgling still missing some feathers.
There is good news and bad news about rehab success rates for addicts in America. A 2020 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute on Drug Abuse concluded that about three out of four addicts eventually recovered.9 The bad news was the “eventually” part. Recovery seldom happened with the first attempt. In fact, victory took almost a decade of trying and failing and trying again.10 It was during the failing phases and relapses when a trafficking victim’s daily struggle to survive looked a lot like a death march.
Repeated relapses inflicted unimaginable grief on a victim’s family members. It was a figurative death by a thousand cuts, and eventually families slipped into their own survival mode to save themselves from the endless despair. Visits to jail or prison stopped, as did any form of financial rescue. The now desperate victim, bereft of money, hope, and friends, reached her most vulnerable point. She sank further into the quicksand of addiction and trafficking. At a time in her life when she most needed to be clearheaded, her brain was fried.
It was during those periods of despondency that Hannah shoplifted, stole, ran scams—did whatever it took to pay for the breathtaking amounts of drugs the demons inside her demanded. The demons always got what they needed. As with so many other victims’, Hannah’s crimes led to prison. During one stint in a major American city, Hannah befriended an inmate named Amelia who had the bunk across from her. Amelia was white, younger—in her early twenties—and blond. And she had something Hannah didn’t yet have: a release date. Aware that Hannah was newly single, Amelia offered to let her stay with her and her boyfriend when she got out.
Amelia was in jail for theft, or at least, that’s what she told Hannah. Later—much later—Hannah learned Amelia lied. As Amelia was being released, she gave Hannah her number and was kind enough to put money in Hannah’s phone account to accept calls from Amelia. When Hannah finally got out, Amelia and a guy named Keith picked her up and brought her to their house. There was another man there named Derek. It wasn’t clear to Hannah where Derek fit into this picture. The one thing clear to Hannah was that these people had nice things; they had money.
Amelia was a drug user. In fact, all the housemates quickly shared drugs with Hannah. Inside her addiction-addled mind, Hannah thought: How nice—but who does this?
Who indeed.
This part of Hannah’s experience aligned with those of many other trafficking victims. This was jailhouse recruitment. Only now does Hannah understand that Amelia was a bottom, the girl who oversaw the other girls. Hannah wasn’t the only victim living in this hell. There was another house with more trafficked women. What happened next has a legal label: involuntary servitude.
In these cases, personal identification, cell phones, and belongings were taken by the captors. There was no way of communicating with the outside world, no means to travel somewhere else. Drugs were steadily supplied to maintain command and control of the newly acquired source of income. Beatings, rapes, and penetration with various objects reinforced the message that attempted escapes would prove deadly.
In this type of controlled operation, a victim might be trafficked through prearranged “dates”—at least one man a night—at clubs, truck stops, or motels for an average of eight to twelve months, or until she became more of a liability than a profit center. Among the clients were lawyers, family guys, cops. Some victims worked five nights a week, with two nights off. When I heard this from one victim I interviewed, I did the math: At twenty times a month for ten months, two hundred men had purchased the human being sitting across from me. It had been several years since her captivity, but I still saw the damage from a punch to her face. But even more, I sensed the trauma in her soul.
For Hannah, the dates around the big city continued until they were all blurred together by numbing trauma and narcotic-induced nod-offs that got her, semiconscious, through the torment of that night’s date, and tomorrow’s, and the next. Then came the truckers.
The first time, Hannah, Amelia, and two other girls were driven by Derek to a motel at a truck stop where the truckers rented rooms. Like Hannah’s other dates, this had been prearranged. Amelia ended up in a trucker’s sleeper berth, while Hannah went into the motel. Word of Derek’s girls spread among the truckers, so there were even more dates with more truckers at the very same spot. One time, Hannah was brought to meet a trucker off a highway near a well-known sightseeing destination. Derek’s girls became an illicit attraction near a national tourist site frequented by busloads of families.
Hannah offered me a couple of trucker-related insights:
“The trucker dates are always shorter because the guys had to hit the road by a certain time. But those dates still paid about a thousand dollars.”
“It seems like the truckers are either family men or single perverts.”
Two extremes with no middle. There were the guys that Hannah called creepy, by which she meant “handsy, super-handsy.” They seemed not to understand that this was a financial transaction, not a romantic interlude. Quite possibly, some of those men had never experienced the latter. Hannah saw more evidence of alcoholism than drug use among the truckers.
Trafficking victims’ fears shifted into high gear with trucker dates. The fear was legitimate; anything could, and has, happened inside a truck. A self-contained crime scene on eighteen wheels required extra vigilance against the creepiest of clients.