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Survivor Stories

Three years after helping to formulate the Safe Harbor Act and using my testimony as a framework, we were able to help rescue seventeen-year-old April out of trafficking—one of the first to benefit from that legislation.

April, who had been victimized several times, now as an adult helps me do training sessions for law enforcement in that same county where she had been trafficked and arrested. No longer the victim, she helped us set free a fifteen-year-old girl, who in turn helped us to set free another fifteen-year-old girl.

From survivors to survivors—it’s almost as if we have our own underground freedom railroad out of abuse and human trafficking. I have been called a female Moses because I can help lead them out and help them stay out.

Increasingly, we are experiencing success because we believe we have a mandate from God and we’ve learned how to help them change. As we work with law enforcement agencies, more and more teens are rescued.

April was trafficked in Miami. She came from a single-parent home troubled with addiction and economic disadvantage. Her trafficking started in a convenience store. April was hungry and “a nice man” did a simple thing: he bought her food and was kind to her. That same day, he took her to someone’s house to meet a female already caught up in the life. Once there, they tricked her into taking a drug. After she passed out, they locked her inside a room with a padlock on the door. Then her slavery began and they forced her to service many men each night.

April is alive today only because she was able to escape through a bathroom window. She went to jail because she was caught stealing a car. That’s where I met her. She had never been reported as a victim of sex trafficking to law enforcement. Worse, it wouldn’t be the only time she would be trafficked.

I had to tell April’s father because he wouldn’t believe her. When he realized that the FBI was involved and that she was cooperating, he finally listened. Because such stories are so horrific, parents don’t want to believe them.

April’s father isn’t alone. I have to inform many parents that their child has been trafficked. Most of them respond with that same disbelieving look and ask, “You mean trafficking happens here?”

“Yes,” I tell them, “and your child was a victim of it.”

In 2013, I drove two girls to Broward College. The first one, Fanny, had come out of a life of prostitution after she had been recruited by an older man. She said she wanted to enroll so she could better her life. Because we were early for her appointment, we sat on a bench and relaxed.

When Fanny answered her cell phone, I paid little attention until I realized that she was being recruited to appear in a porn video.

“Hang up,” I said, “and let’s talk.”

She did, and when she protested that she was no longer in prostitution, I said, “Doing a porn video is the next step, right? And if you take that step, you’ll likely be back to the old life.”

That day she listened to me and didn’t do the porn film. But she might have gone back if I hadn’t overheard that conversation. Her mother is dead and she has never had a role model outside of what she learned in our program. I stand in the gap for her—that is, I pray for her and try to be available whenever she needs me. She is now on her way to becoming one of our survivor leaders and life coaches.

Kayla, who had just gotten out of trafficking, was the other girl I took to Broward College. Federal law enforcement had arrested her pimp, convicted him, and taken him out of her life. He was out, but trafficking wasn’t. Within weeks, an older man befriended Kayla and persuaded her that she could make a lot of money as a prostitute and retire as a millionaire.

At the college, while Fanny was inside at her appointment, the man drove up and motioned for Kayla to get in his car. I stood in front of the car so he could see that I was there to protect her.

“You can’t leave,” I told her.

She turned her back on me and started toward the passenger side.

His lure was that he would buy her a new phone. To many that sounds trivial, but although some of the girls may be teens, they still reason like children. The lure of money and material possessions was just too much for her.

“What are you doing?” I asked Kayla. “You just got out of trafficking.”

“But he’s giving me a new cell phone.”

“Are you kidding me? Are you falling for those same old tricks?”

I stood on the road between her and the man in his car and refused to move. “If you take her,” I yelled at the man, “I’ll call the police! She is underage and you’re going to be arrested!”

He put his car into gear and came at me as if he would ram me. I stood in place, hands on my hips, daring him to run me down. When he realized that I wasn’t going to move, he threw his car into reverse and turned around. I wasn’t able to see his license number.

I wasn’t afraid, because I know that God saved me for a purpose. Those traffickers should have killed me when I was thirteen, young, and naïve. Now I’m alive, working for Jesus Christ, and I’m not backing down.

I refused to judge Kayla or give up on her. “I’ll always be here for you,” I said. “And I won’t stop praying for you.”

Another survivor I helped was Samantha, who grew up watching her mom and sister engage in prostitution. Samantha refused the advances of her sister’s pimps, until one day she was lured to a hotel by a friend and was tricked into prostitution.

Her journey ended when I was introduced to her at Trinity Church in Miami, one of our ministry partners. Through partnership with what I call the underground network of faith-community providers, pregnant Samantha was able to go to a home for unwed mothers.

She found a good job and went back to school. I smile when I think of her, because I had the privilege of being the first person in her life to talk to her about getting out of that life. That same day she accepted Jesus as her Savior.

Mickey, a runaway, was staying with a friend, and one day she went to a Laundromat. While there, a nice-looking, older man came up to her. “You could make money modeling—a lot of money.”

Shocked, she stared at him.

“You’re beautiful and you’re tall,” he said. “That’s all it takes.”

In a soft voice, he praised her good looks and her poise, and he said she had the kind of face cameras love to photograph.

That’s all it took to lure the fifteen-year-old runaway. He took her somewhere to teach her about the modeling profession. He showed her pictures of the dead body of another child to scare her into doing what he wanted. Then he threatened to kill her if she didn’t do what he wanted. Frightened, she didn’t fight him. That same day, he locked her inside a room with an older girl to watch her. Using threats and free cocaine, he turned her into a call girl for him.

After becoming addicted to drugs and being badly beaten, Mickey escaped and went to a medical facility. That’s when she told police about the man. Instead of helping her, they arrested her as a criminal because she was a runaway, and they placed her in a juvenile facility. That happened just before the Safe Harbor Act went into effect.

I met Mickey and she listened as I talked to her. Not long after that, she met a number of “boyfriends” who deceived her, and within a short time she went back to drugs and the life of prostitution.

She escaped a second time and contacted me. I helped her report the facts to the police. The trafficker fled and the case is still considered an open investigation.

Mickey is currently out of the life, and I’m still mentoring her. She is now sixteen years old and doing well.

Asha is a lovely blue-eyed, seventeen-year-old blonde. While hitchhiking to see her boyfriend, she accepted a ride from a stranger. He overpowered her, kidnapped her, and forced her to perform sexually for him and his friends.

They learned her father owned a gun, so they told her to get the gun and bring it to them. She made them believe she would, but she never returned.

One day after school she was followed by a man who seemed nice enough. Several times he greeted her, talked nicely to her, and finally made her believe that he had fallen in love with her. He convinced her to go away with him. Once he had her out of the school environment, he gave her alcohol and drugs, and she fell into his trap of using her for prostitution. She never fully knew what she was engaged in until I was called in to work with her by the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Her case manager asked me to help identify her as a victim and work with her from there. She was still in it when I met her. I called in law enforcement, and then they came in and helped her.

When Asha said, “You give me hope,” I knew she was on her way to living a normal, healthy life.

On Asha’s eighteenth birthday, law enforcement moved her to another state. She emailed that she had seen and shoveled snow for the first time and added, “I feel good about myself.”

I met Latoya in a jail facility. She had been recruited out of foster care when she was eleven years old and had been living in human slavery for six years. She was being trafficked by organized crime, and they grossed more than a million dollars a year from the use of her body.

When I met Latoya, she had been rescued by the FBI and placed in jail for her own safety. If she had gone back to her foster home, the FBI said that the Mafia would have killed her. She wasn’t in jail because she was a criminal; she wasn’t charged with any crime. Instead, she was there because they wanted to keep her safe, and there were very few safe housing options at the time.

Latoya looked like a magazine model. She was tall, thin, and elegant looking. She spoke well and was intelligent. When I began working with Latoya, she didn’t want to hear the gospel. All she wanted was to return to her old life.

Shortly after I met her at the jail, she had said, “When I heard your story I started crying because you talked about organized crime. And that’s where I’m at right now. I’m afraid they’re going to kill me.”

“Those FBI agents are great people,” I said, “and they’re not going to hurt you. They want to support and protect you the best they can. That’s why you’re here.”

A few minutes later, she said, “You know, Miss Kat, I’m also struggling with going back.”

“Why would you want to go back?” I realized I was dealing with the lure of a life that promised money and freedom. I began breaking down the lie that kept pulling her back into that life. “What is it you like about it? Let’s talk about that.”

“I like the money,” Latoya said. “I’m seventeen, and I have my own condo that I share with other girls.” It made her feel like a big girl. “Also, I like having nice cars and new clothes when I ride around.”

“But is it your condo? Is it your car? Do you get to drive it?” I asked.

“No, somebody else drives us around, and there are always men with us to take care of us and make sure we have everything we need.”

“So that’s the life. You’re making big bucks and you’re really somebody. Fancy clothes and all that. Okay, so I know what you like. What don’t you like?”

From her answer to the question, I realized she hadn’t thought of those issues before. “Well, I don’t like when I have my period and I still have to have sex. I don’t like it when I have a fever or I’m sick and I’m still forced to have sex. I don’t like having sex with men six nights a week.”

We talked a little more and she added, “I don’t like getting beaten.”

“Those sound like pretty good reasons to get away from those people. One other question: What do you think they’ll do to you if you come back?”

“I’m not going back!”

Once we worked through her root issues, she came to the conclusion that the life wasn’t all it had been made up to be.

“Okay, Latoya, so now that we have gotten to the reality of it, why is it you are still struggling? What is it that would draw you back?”

“I really just want to help my best friend who is still there.”

There’s always something that pulls at them to come back. No child wants to be sexually abused by multiple partners several nights a week. No child grows up thinking she wants to be in prostitution.

“Good for you. Now let’s get the others who are still trapped. But you don’t help your friend by going back to that lifestyle. Talk with your law enforcement agents and give them the telephone number for your homegirl, and let them get her out. You don’t go back in to get her, because then you’ll likely never come out alive.”

I tried to speak objectively to her about what it’s really like. “You can become somebody and earn money for yourself and not have to earn it doing the things you don’t want to do. You don’t have to live that kind of life and put up with the abuse and beatings. What if you got AIDS? Would they care? What if you died?”

Latoya started working with law enforcement to bring her friend out. That was the last time I saw her, since federal authorities had to relocate her again for her own safety.

One time, another girl who was sent to recruit a nine-year-old said she had been beaten by her pimp, and twice she was shot—once by a pimp and once by a customer. She badly wanted to get out of that life. And she was willing to cooperate and talk to law enforcement.

But as soon as she got out, an organization I worked with reached out to her—supposedly to help. Instead of seeing the need to connect that child to law enforcement, they exploited her. They did little for her, but they used her story to bring in financial contributions. That experience helped me see the need to start my own program.

The following year, I spoke at another jail and one of the girls recognized me.

“You remember that girl—the one named Natalie—you tried to help?”

“I certainly do. I never heard what happened to her.”

“She got out of jail and before long she was back in with the traffickers again.”

Tears filled my eyes. That girl had shown such promise.

“Now she’s pregnant with her pimp’s baby.”

Then my tears flowed. That means both parents are now traffickers. That sweet girl, whom I met when she was seventeen, is now an adult and they have a baby together, and both of them recruit children for the life of sex slavery.

Those children have become the next level of our society in normalizing prostitution and human trafficking in the home by both parents, and it will continue to get worse unless we stop the business of trafficking.

The saddest fact for me isn’t just those like April, Fanny, Samantha, Mickey, Asha, Latoya, Natalie, and me who were lured into the trade. Some addicts sell their children to feed their drug habit, and they normalize prostitution as a way of life here in the United States.

It may be impossible to achieve, but our purpose is to stop trafficking in our lifetime through the voices of survivors helping other survivors. As survivors are empowered and healed, they find a purpose for living.

We do our ministry on a biblical basis. We want to give hope to those who are enslaved. Alone, I may only be one survivor, but united we are stronger than all of the traffickers. Together we can stop human trafficking!

As I give of myself and reach out, I clearly remember Billy Graham pointing at me. “Remember this: God will never leave you or forsake you.”

And he never has.

If there is hope for me, then there is hope for you and for everyone.