What Most People Don’t Understand About Victims of Sex Trafficking

When people picture a victim of child exploitation or sex trafficking, I think they often picture the easiest version of the story to understand.

A helpless little girl.

Doe-eyed. Innocent. Unaware of what was happening around her. Kidnapped by a stranger and forced into a life she never saw coming.

Sometimes that is the story.

But it wasn’t entirely mine.

And I think we do victims a disservice when we act as though it has to be.

As I reflect on the years I was a victim of child exploitation, child sexual abuse material, and sex trafficking, there are realities I wish more people understood about how this actually happens in America.

There were absolutely traumas in my life before my exploitation that created vulnerabilities predators could identify and manipulate.

Those things mattered.

They shaped me.

They created needs in me that I did not yet have the maturity or language to understand.

But I also cannot rewrite my own story and pretend I had no awareness of the choices I was making.

I knew drinking was dangerous.

I drank anyway.

I knew drugs were dangerous.

I tried them anyway.

I knew addiction existed in my family.

I still became addicted.

I knew hanging around older people could put me in situations I wasn’t ready for.

I went anyway.

That can be uncomfortable to read when the person saying it was a child.

It is uncomfortable for me to write.

But here is the part we desperately need to understand:

A child can make dangerous choices and still be a victim.

Those two truths are not mutually exclusive.

I wasn’t stupid.

I wasn’t completely oblivious.

I wasn’t chained to a radiator.

I was a little girl desperately trying to convince everyone, including myself, that I wasn’t little anymore.

And predators knew exactly what to do with that.

I Wasn’t Looking to Be Trafficked. I Was Looking to Belong.

When I look back now, underneath so many of my choices was something painfully simple:

I wanted to be seen.

I wanted to be accepted.

I wanted to belong.

There was something intoxicating about being accepted by older people. Older girls and women. Older boys and men.

Being invited into their world made me feel important.

Mature.

Wanted.

Chosen.

When you are young and carrying wounds you don’t know how to name, being wanted can feel remarkably similar to being loved.

That is one of the realities predators understand better than most of us want to admit.

They don’t always have to drag a child into a car.

Sometimes they just have to make her feel like she finally belongs somewhere.

Sometimes exploitation begins with an invitation.

A party.

A relationship.

A compliment.

A place to stay.

Drugs.

Attention.

Someone telling you that you’re “mature for your age.”

Someone making you feel like the rules everyone else has for you don’t apply anymore.

And sometimes the child walks willingly through the first door.

That doesn’t mean she understood where the hallway led.

There Is a Point Where the Choices Change

This is one of the most important distinctions I can make.

In the beginning, there were decisions I made.

Risky ones.

Rebellious ones.

Sometimes knowingly reckless ones.

But there came a point where something shifted.

The deeper I went into that world, the fewer real choices I had.

Fear entered the equation.

Addiction entered the equation.

Shame entered the equation.

Manipulation entered the equation.

Adults with far more life experience, power, money, influence, and understanding of human behavior entered the equation.

And eventually, maintaining the person I had pretended to be became its own prison.

I was a little girl doing big-girl things.

And once everyone believed I was that girl, I felt like I had to keep being her.

Even when I was terrified.

Even when I was uncomfortable.

Even when I wanted to go home.

Even when things were happening to me that I never imagined when I made those first choices.

That is where people misunderstand exploitation.

They look backward and point to the first voluntary decision as though it explains everything that happened afterward.

“She chose to go.”

“She chose to drink.”

“She chose the boyfriend.”

“She went back.”

“She lied to her parents.”

“She kept hanging around those people.”

Yes.

Sometimes she did.

But you cannot evaluate the choices of an exploited child as though she were an emotionally healthy adult standing outside the situation with complete information and unlimited options.

And you certainly cannot use a child’s bad decisions to excuse an adult’s deliberate exploitation of them.

Predators Do Not Need Perfect Victims

Maybe this is the part that should disturb us the most.

Predators do not need children who are completely helpless.

They need children who are vulnerable.

There is a difference.

A teenager can be intelligent and vulnerable.

Defiant and vulnerable.

Sexually active and vulnerable.

Addicted and vulnerable.

Street-smart and vulnerable.

Angry and vulnerable.

Running away and vulnerable.

Lying to everyone who loves them and still incredibly vulnerable.

In fact, some of the very behaviors adults interpret as evidence that a child “knows what she’s doing” may be the behaviors that make her easiest to exploit.

Because predators are not necessarily looking for innocence.

They are looking for access.

They are looking for unmet needs.

They are looking for pain.

They are looking for the girl who wants desperately to belong somewhere.

They are looking for the child who thinks she is grown.

And they are perfectly willing to let her believe she is in control until the moment she realizes she isn’t.

The “Perfect Victim” Narrative Hurts Real Victims

I understand why we gravitate toward uncomplicated stories.

We want the victim to have done everything right and the predator to have done everything wrong.

It makes evil easier to identify.

But real life is rarely that clean.

Some victims fight their traffickers.

Some defend them.

Some run away.

Some return.

Some ask for help.

Some curse out the people trying to help them.

Some know they are being exploited.

Some don’t understand it until years later.

Some desperately want out.

Some simultaneously want out and cannot imagine surviving anywhere else.

Trauma is complicated.

Grooming is complicated.

Addiction is complicated.

Survival is complicated.

Children are complicated.

None of that makes exploitation less exploitative.

We have to stop requiring victims to prove that they were innocent enough to deserve protection.

Because innocence was never supposed to be the qualification.

Their childhood was.

I Can Own My Choices Without Owning What Was Done to Me

There is something important I have learned in telling my story:

Accountability and victimhood can exist in the same sentence.

I can acknowledge that I made choices that placed me in dangerous environments.

I can acknowledge that some part of me knew I was playing with fire.

I can acknowledge the ways I rebelled, lied, used drugs, sought acceptance in unhealthy places, and ignored warning signs.

And I can still tell the truth about what adults chose to do with the vulnerable child standing in front of them.

Those adults had choices too.

And unlike me, they were adults.

They chose to exploit.

They chose to sexualize.

They chose to manipulate.

They chose to profit.

They chose to consume.

They chose to take the vulnerabilities of a child and turn them into opportunities for themselves.

That distinction matters.

Because there is a dangerous question our culture sometimes asks when we hear stories like mine:

“Why did she keep putting herself in those situations?”

Maybe we should start asking a different one.

Why were there so many adults willing to exploit a child once she got there?

That is the reality of domestic sex trafficking I wish more people understood.

Sometimes the girl doesn’t look like a victim yet.

Sometimes she looks rebellious.

Sometimes she looks promiscuous.

Sometimes she looks addicted.

Sometimes she looks angry.

Sometimes she looks like she’s choosing every bit of it.

Look closer.

You may be looking at a little girl doing big-girl things, desperately trying to maintain the illusion that she is in control.

And somewhere along the way, she may have forgotten that she was ever allowed to be a little girl at all.