I can't stop thinking about it.
I can’t seem to get this one scene out of my mind.
I recently started watching one of the most popular shows on streaming. I just finished the first season, and it was quite the ride—filled with moments of sheer absurdity, desperation, and many heart-to-hearts.
In the first episode, the main character—high and drunk—parties poolside with two female “friends” in the dead of night. A few episodes later, an old friend introduces one of those women at a gathering he hosts as his "girlfriend." To which she signals the now-shocked main character to stay silent. When another guest asks how she and the host know each other, she casually replies, "Oh, I used to be a sex worker."
She used to be a sex worker.
“Used to be…”
“…a sex worker?”
I had to pause the show. I looked over at my husband, who was watching beside me, and I chuckled in disbelief. I was so annoyed. I’m sure he braced himself as soon as he heard her comment. “Oh yeah, ‘cause it’s just soooo easy to up and leave the commercial sex industry,” I retorted, rolling my eyes. My husband listened like always and held space with his quiet, gentle presence. After a few more minutes of indignant ranting, I let us resume the show.
I just couldn’t get over it—that one line kept replaying in my head over and over—for days. It felt tone-deaf.
As for the part about the female character in the show referring to herself as a “sex worker,” as if to suggest that exploitation is an occupation, which I know is often a topic of controversy nowadays, all I’ll say is this. Regarding the issue of choice in commercial sexual exploitation, lived experience expert Esperanza Fonseca says,
“If prostitution would be based on choice, those with the most choice would be doing it.”
Now, to address the “I used to be” part of the female character’s line.
The reality is, leaving the commercial sex industry, or ‘the life’ is not easy.
In fact, in her memoir, Girls Like Us, anti-trafficking advocate, author, and lived experience expert, Rachel Lloyd, CMG, says, reflecting on her time with one of the first women she served through street outreach, “From Jennifer, I learned that leaving ‘the life’ takes practice. The girls need to try multiple times without having someone give up on them.” Did you catch that?
Two questions we can count on being asked any time we do any speaking engagement, info booth, or really just any time we talk about what we do here at Traffick911 are, “Why do they stay or go back?” Why do people—in our case, children—who are recovered from trafficking situations so often return to their trafficker? And the classic, “How many times does it take before they stop going back?”
Well, to quote Ms. Lloyd—simply put, it takes “multiple times,” and the reasons why are profoundly complex.
Why do victims often stay with or return to their trafficker?
Trauma, normalization, belief in false promises
Traffickers can be likened to “street psychologists.” They know exactly how to spot a vulnerable person and what lies to tell them to try and build trust. Once they’ve recruited and groomed their victim, they then turn on them and use power and control dynamics such as coercion and threats, intimidation, isolation, minimizing, denying, blaming, etc., to keep their victims compliant.
However, many survivors will tell you that even in the midst of all of the manipulation, fear-mongering, and violence, there are brief moments where everything feels okay, where their “boyfriend” (trafficker) makes them feel loved again, and all seems like it is turning for the better—just until something sets him off—then it starts all over again. Living in that environment day in and day out then becomes the victim’s “normal”—and parts of that experience may have already been part of home life for that victim even before their exploitation.
Furthermore, any trauma, especially living in a constant state of trauma, alters brain chemistry.
Dr. Rachel Yehuda, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience of Trauma, says,
“We don’t go back to the way we were. After trauma, the brain’s job is to remember what happened and develop survival skills for the future.”
In a study spanning nine countries, including the United States, Melissa Farley and her team found that 68% of prostituted women met criteria for a diagnosis for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
For comparison, here are the rates of PTSD diagnosis among other traumatized populations:
• 20.2% of women who were victims of sexual assault met criteria for PTSD.
• Military combat veterans showed a 24% overall PTSD rate.
• 8% of combat veterans from the Somalia peace-keeping efforts met PTSD criteria.
• Terrorist attack survivors met PTSD criteria at a 37% rate.
Drug addiction, houselessness, and other instability in the home
Many traffickers will use drugs to keep their victims compliant, and/or the victims, in our case, the youth we serve, may come from homes where substance misuse is present.
Other common characteristics we’ve seen while serving minor victims across North Texas for over 15 years include:
A history of physical and/or sexual abuse
Unstable home life
Poverty and a lack of basic needs
Minimal family support
Involvement with CPS/DFPS
Involvement with the juvenile justice system
Current or past mental illness
Low self-worth
Runaway history.
Self-blame
One survivor writes, “For a long time, I did not realize that I was trafficked. I thought that because he gave me a choice to stay or go, and I chose to stay, that it made it my fault and my responsibility.” This is something we hear time and time again. In fact, virtually all of the youth we serve do not self-identify as a trafficking survivor for a long, long time, if ever.
Shame and Stigma
Rachel Lloyd offers a prime example of these two contributing factors in her memoir, Girls Like Us. Describing her experience doing outreach at Rikers Island, she writes,
“…the girls and women who come in are scorned by staff and the other residents or inmates alike…If the other girls and women didn’t know what the girl was in for, the guards and staff made sure to announce it.
To have been on the street, to have been, ‘in the life,’ as the girls called it, was to be on the lowest rung. It didn’t matter how old they were, they were shunned and mocked…In this environment, it’s jarring to go public for the first time about my own experiences—the looks, the snide comments, particularly from the adults who are supposed to know better, make me flush with shame, cry at night.
It isn’t surprising to me then that the girls go back to the familiar, where they’re at least accepted, even if that means being sold and abused. Most of them really didn’t have anywhere else to go…”
Hopelessness, resignation, and having nowhere to turn
At Traffick911, we once conducted a group feedback survey with some of the youth that we serve, where they shared something quite profound. When asked where they’re going when they go AWOL or run away, they told us, “When I’m running, I’m not running to something; I’m running from something.” Unfortunately, that is often the reality for the thousands of youth and adults who are recovered from sex trafficking situations every year.
Once again, Ms. Lloyd offers a poignant peek into her own story. Having come from a home wrought with abuse and addiction herself, she writes about taking up modeling as a teenager,
“I see modeling as my only ticket out of the town that can offer me nothing but the hopeless future I see in everyone around me. When photographers ask me to pose more seductively, to slip my shirt off, to do some ‘artistic’ nude shots for a calendar…I comply. Anything that will get me out. Anything that will make me feel less invisible.”
How many times are victims recovered before they leave their trafficker and the commercial sex industry?
While it’s hard to substantiate an exact number, let’s draw from what Ms. Lloyd says: “…leaving ‘the life takes practice.’ The girls need to try multiple times without having someone give up on them.” This is true of what we’ve seen over the past 15 years as well—it takes multiple times for a child to make the decision to leave “the life,” and multiple times can mean weeks, months, and more often years of effort.
What is key there in Ms. Lloyd’s statement and what can help tailor a more useful question to consider when addressing this issue, is this part: “without having someone give up on them.”
Perhaps instead of asking “how many times,” we can ask, “How can I come alongside their healing journey?” We can learn from lived experience experts and anti-trafficking advocates about what is and isn’t helpful in this work, and we can ask how we can continue showing up for survivors as they attempt to exit the life—multiple times.
What does this mean for us?
So, why do victims return to their traffickers and perpetrators? How many times does it take them to leave? I’ll end with this: a North Texas-based human trafficking investigator we spoke to put it this way,
“Human trafficking in the United States is primarily a psychological captivity, not a physical one. That makes the chains far harder to break.”
This means that progress in this fight is not a one-time ordeal, nor does it call for a one-size-fits-all solution.
Progress in fostering an environment, in systems, and communities where survivors feel truly seen and supported in their healing journey takes a village of people coming together, being committed to perpetual learning—listening to survivors and other experts in the field and fine tuning efforts in response. It takes an ecosystem of people refusing to give up on victims and survivors as they get knocked down time and time again.
Practically, this can look like us as individuals, equipping ourselves with a robust, well-rounded knowledge of this field—learning about local and national legislation, listening to survivor stories and insights, and reading reports and statistics from reputable sources. That knowledge should, in turn, shape the way we speak about this issue with others and online. Taking our place this fight can also look like partnering with survivor-led and survivor-informed nonprofits—whether that is financially or voluntarily.
Whatever your career, whatever your sphere of influence, there is a place for you in this fight, and it takes every single one of us.
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Note: In this article, we use "female" to refer to the victim and "male" to refer to the offender in this case. However, we acknowledge that this is not always representative of all situations.