The story of Megan Stephen, a victim of sex trafficking

Megan had a troubled upbringing. Her parents divorced when she was four and both her father
and mother had problems with alcohol. Her childhood was chaotic and punctuated by fights: I
was never taught boundaries or rules or life skills. At the age of 14, she went on holiday with
her mother to Greece. She remembers, at the time, being desperate to be loved.

So when, on the first night away in a local bar in a seaside town, Megan caught the eye of Jak, a
handsome Albanian man, and he started paying her attention, she responded. Within days she felt
herself to be in love. Within weeks Megan had persuaded her mother not to return to England
and had set up house with her new boyfriend.

Why did her mother allow it? Megan shrugs. She was not a well person back then.

In the book Megan recounts how her mother had also struck up a relationship with a local bar
owner. Greece seemed to offer them both the opportunity to start again. Her mother moved in
with the bar owner; Megan moved in with Jak.

When we left England we left our lives, really, Megan says. There was nothing left behind for
us.

Jak, dark-haired and dark-eyed, was attentive and kind at first, despite the language barrier which
meant that neither of them could communicate beyond a few words. By her own admission,
Megan was deeply naive.

He treated me so well, she says now. I just believed him. I loved him and he loved me pretty
much instantly. He was charming, really.

But as time went on, this charm turned into control. Jaks moods could shift without warning.
He started talking about how his mother was ill with cancer and how the family needed more
money for treatment. He told Megan he dreamed of having children with her, of living in a nice,
big house in the future. In order to make that happen, he explained, they would have to move to
Athens, where his cousins could get them caf work. Megan agreed, even though it meant
leaving her mother behind.

But the caf work turned out to be something else entirely, and once they got to Athens, Megan
found herself at the mercy of a network of pimps and traffickers. At first she wasnt sure what
was happening. It was only when Jak gave her a cardboard box and deposited her outside an
office building telling her to deliver it to a man on the top floor that she began to suspect
something was awry: I remember shaking and stumbling up the stairs, because something felt
odd.

A man opened the door to her, took her into a small, windowless room with a single bed. At the
foot of the bed was a video camera mounted on a tripod.
And that was it, Megan says now. He just raped me, really. He was filming it and I was
paralysed, because I was really shocked.

Afterwards, with blood on the bedsheets, the man gave her a wad of 50 notes. As Megan was
leaving, she saw the cardboard box she had been asked to deliver contained several packets of
condoms. It was the first time she had ever had sex.

What, I wonder, would the Megan sitting in front of me today say to that scared teenage version
of herself if she had the chance?

I dont know Get out, you stupid girl? she says, phrasing it as a question. I still blame
myself. Im struggling with it. Ive got quite a lot of anger at myself.

But Megan didnt get out. She began having sex with strangers for money up to eight clients
a day. She was in love with Jak, she says, and would do anything for him. He made her think
that escort work was the only way to raise enough money for them to be together. He would
shower her with affection one minute and, the next, humiliate her in public. If she said she
wanted to stop, he would threaten to kill her mother. Gradually her confidence was eroded to the
point of no return. She was utterly reliant on Jak and his network of underworld associates for
everything: clothes, food, transport.

For a while she was a streetwalker in Italy (That was horrible I was scared of the other
women as well as the clients. They were very, very tough characters) and then she was forced to
work in a series of brothels where men would pay 20 for a grubby, two-minute encounter. It
was just the way they operated, Megan says. They [the men] were queuing up outside. There
were 10 to 15 rooms in the same place and its just literally, you dont stop If I did 40 to 50
people, that would be nothing. It wasnt enough.

On one particular night, she says she had sex with 110 men before being violently sick. The
owner of that brothel closed up early when he saw how ill she was. I thought that was decent of
him, Megan writes, which shows just how distorted my sense of normality had become.

In the book Megans narrative seems to exist outside normal chronology. She was in a mental fog
for much of it. She was ill underweight and exhausted. She contracted syphilis and salmonella
six times. And if she misbehaved, there was violent retribution on one occasion, she was
punched in the face by Jak and dragged across the floor by the roof of her mouth. Things like
that happened all the time, she says blankly. I can taste the blood even now.

At some point, Jak left and handed her over to another pimp called Christoph, who moved her
around wherever the work might be from hotel to brothel to private apartment. All the time her
captors told Megan to send postcards to her mother (who was still living with the bar owner in
Greece) telling her she was working in a caf and happy with her new life in Athens. She agreed
because she felt helpless and didnt want to put her mother in danger. She was also ashamed.

These traffickers are really, really clever, Megan says. I want people to understand its not as
easy as getting up and leaving. I should have got up and gone, but I didnt because of the mental
power they had over me. It is really powerful. Its actually like theyve taken over what identity
you have and turned you into their property, a thing to be controlled. Robotic is the right word.

This seems incredible, especially when Megan writes in the book that she helped a Polish girl
escape by asking a rich client to book her a plane ticket back home. She says it simply never
occurred to her to do the same for herself. Her own sense of worth had been diminished to such
an extent that she no longer knew her own mind. And she was still only a teenager. She had been
given no chance to grow into an adult capable of making her own decisions.

Megan was picked up a few times by the police, but was too frightened to tell them the truth in
case they were in league with her abusers. She didnt trust authority. I was so, so paranoid, she
says. At that point, I was scared of being killed.

Eventually she suffered a psychotic episode and was sectioned in a Greek hospital for three
months. Cocooned from the outside world, she began to feel safe enough to confide in some of
the staff about what had happened to her. They contacted Megans mother, who, in spite of living
just hours away, said she had no idea about the kind of life her daughter had been living. The two
were reunited shortly afterwards. What was that like?

Really I was just zombified because I was on so much medication. I was emotional. All I
wanted to do was go and drink, and I definitely didnt want to talk about it.

Megan and her mother returned to the UK. A doctor put her on Prozac. For a long time she
struggled with everyday existence. She was scared of crowds. She jumped at loud noises. She
couldnt find the words to explain what she had been through. She turned to alcohol as a crutch.
She spent too much money and had a series of bad relationships.

Inside I still feel like a kid, a 10-year-old, she says. I struggle with sex. I do not know what
making love is. Just it that way it she fumbles for the right word, it just makes me
feel so odd, so different and not normal. There are relationships I have been in where Ive had to
be drunk to let anyone see me naked or let them do what they want to me. I struggle to say no to
sex because I thought that was all men wanted. I actually hate that. I dont value it [sex] at all. I
think its horrible.

Eventually she found the confidence to get a job as a shop assistant, and she confided some of
her story to a colleague, who notified an anti-trafficking charity. The charity got in touch with
Megan. Within days she was in a safe house in London.

After all the turmoil and chaos I had been used to, she says, it was like living in a calm, well-
organised family home.

Today Megan is cautiously rebuilding her life. She has ambitions to set up a charity of her own
to help trafficking victims like herself. She is in therapy and has been alcohol-free for seven
months. She has a group of trusted friends, made through her local church, and she is rebuilding
her relationship with her mother.
Does Megan blame anyone for what she has been through?

There is a long pause. I dont want to sit here and say: I blame my mum, she starts, uneasily.
I believe my upbringing could have been better and I should have been protected more as a
child, but I understand why that wasnt the case.

It is interesting that she doesnt immediately point the finger at her abusers and a sign, perhaps,
of the complicated intermeshing of love and fear she experienced at the hands of the men who
exploited her. She confesses that, shortly after returning to the UK, she called her former pimp,
Christoph, because I just I actually felt in love with him, I did. I look back and its horrible. I
felt trained into it.

It is only recently that she has finally felt free from that mental imprisonment. And yet the young
woman in front of me is still clearly damaged, existing at one defensive remove from her own
past. She isnt yet sure how to be, or what kind of person she is when shes not living in a state of
constant terror.

I ask Megan to try to describe herself in three words. She finds this difficult.

Strong, she starts, hesitantly. I feel strong. A pause. Determined. Could that be one? she
asks. I nod. Yeah, and hopeful, she adds in a small voice. Thats me.

Source: Elizabeth Day, The Guardian

What is sex slavery/trafficking?

Sex trafficking or slavery is the exploitation of women and children, within national or
across international borders, for the purposes of forced sex work. Commercial sexual
exploitation includes pornography, prostitution and sex trafficking of women and girls,
and is characterized by the exploitation of a human being in exchange for goods or
money. Each year, an estimated 800,000 women and children are trafficked across
international bordersthough additional numbers of women and girls are trafficked
within countries.
Some sex trafficking is highly visible, such as street prostitution. But many trafficking
victims remain unseen, operating out of unmarked brothels in unsuspectingand
sometimes suburbanneighborhoods. Sex traffickers may also operate out of a variety
of public and private locations, such as massage parlors, spas and strip clubs.

Adult women make up the largest group of sex trafficking victims, followed by girl
children, although a small percentage of men and boys are trafficked into the sex
industry as well.

Human trafficking migration patterns tend to flow from East to West, but women may be
trafficked from any country to another country at any given time and trafficking victims
exist everywhere. Many of the poorest and most unstable countries have the highest
incidences of human trafficking, and extreme poverty is a common bond among
trafficking victims. Where economic alternatives do not exist, women and girls are more
vulnerable to being tricked and coerced into sexual servitude. Increased unemployment
and the loss of job security have undermined women's incomes and economic position.
A stalled gender wage gap, as well as an increase in women's part-time and informal
sector work, push women into poorly-paid jobs and long-term and hidden
unemployment, which leaves women vulnerable to sex traffickers.
 At least 20.9 million adults and children are bought and sold worldwide into
commercial sexual servitude, forced labor and bonded labor. 2

About 2 million children are exploited every year in the global commercial sex
trade. 3

Almost 6 in 10 identified trafficking survivors were trafficked for sexual

exploitation.4

Women and girls make up 98% of victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation. 5

1. Boys make up 50 percent of the sex trafficked victims in the U.S

The modern response to commercial sexual exploitation of minors has

been driven by a centralized view of the victim: predominantly a girl,
rescued by law enforcement, who doesnt engage in self-help. This more
popular sex trafficking narrative' has tended to focus on the plight of
women and young girls, while young boys have been essentially left out in
research, policy and practice. Yet, studies show that boys are as equally
affected by sex trafficking as girls and along with transgendered youth are
considered a high-risk, hidden population.

According to a 2008 John Jay College study in New York, Commercial

Sexual Exploitation of Children in New York, as high as 50 percent of
commercial sexually exploited children in the United States were boys
alone. These findings coincide with a more recently released study, And
Boys Too by End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking
of Children for Sexual Purpose (ECPAT-USA), which discovered that boys
make up almost half of the victims. Of the 40 informants contacted in the
ECPAT study, 18 said they would serve boys.

2. Most children who are sex trafficked dont have a traditional pimp
While most of us are familiar with the conventional pimp portrayed in the
media who preys upon and kidnaps children off the streets, in reality, this is
not typically how children enter the life of prostitution.

In fact, the John Jay study revealed that most children are not pimped in
the traditional sense but instead recruited by familial procurers or friends
known to them who do not manage their work but rather facilitate them by
offering shelter or referring them to buyers in exchange for clients or a
share of their earnings. Licensed independent clinical social worker
Steven Procopio explained these exchanges to AlterNet:

Children can have pimps, but generally as the boy [or girl] ages out into
his/[her] late 20s, he/[she] may rent an apartment with several others in the
life and in exchange for those younger kids having shelter and a room to
sleep, they work for the older boy/[girl]. Another scenario is the fee-for-
service drive-by-pimp a guy will drive his car, ask a child if he wants to
make some money for the evening, pimp him/her out and then at the end
of the night the child may never see that person again. In other situations,
families may pimp out their kids to support their drug addiction, he said.

3. Many youth show a surprising amount of agency and control over

their work

Perhaps most difficult to reconcile in the minds of human rights activists

intent on rescuing under-age sex workers is the fact that many of these
kids dont believe they need saving and consciously make the decision to
work in the sex trade.

Anthony Marcus, Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College,

and part of the ground-level research team for the New York and a
subsequent Atlanta study found that many youth who engage in
commercial sex do not view themselves as sufferers, but rather perceive
their work as a curious and fascinating lifestyle:

By definition, a sex trafficking victim is a person suffering extreme distress

in a relationship that is exploitive. However, one of the surprising things we
found about the street sex market is that young women have a surprising
amount of agency. We encountered so many young women who had
expired their pimps who were brutal or bullying them, he told AlterNet.

4. For most exploited children, their trafficking situation is not the

greatest trauma theyve endured the majority has a history of sexual
abuse and neglect

While most youth entered the life of prostitution between the ages of 11-
14, their sexual exploitive situation began usually between the ages of 6-10
and documented as a child abuse case, according to Tina Frundt, sex
trafficking survivor and founder of anti-trafficking non-profit Courtneys
House.

Whats more, between 7090 percent of commercially sexually exploited

children in the United States have been sexually abused prior to entering
the life and are runaways with a history of complex trauma that usually
begins with a dysfunctional or neglectful family, as Procopio explains:

These kids enter the system for various types of reasons. But the
underlying reasons are that they come from homes where they are subject
to multiple traumas in their childhood, sexual abuse, substance abuse or
domestic violence. In other scenarios, the youth is asked to leave because
of gender identification, he said.

Moreover, 30 percent of children who are trafficked reported sexual abuse

by someone in their family and 14 percent disclosed sexual abuse by both
someone within and outside of their family, a Williamson & Prior 2009 study
revealed.

5. Trafficked children are treated as criminals despite federal law

classifying anyone under 18 years of age a victim

Despite statutory rape laws in every state explicitly stating that children
under 18 cannot legally consent to having sex, (in conformity with the
federal Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Actof 2000) most
states still allow minors to be arrested and charged with prostitution crimes.

Kate Mogulescu, attorney at Legal Aid Society who has represented

hundreds of indigent clients aged under 21 facing criminal prosecution for
prostitution, outlined her frustrations with the system at a recent seminar on
The Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Trafficking on Minors in New York:

Our criminal justice is deeply flawed. There is a fundamental

perverseness about it because you have to be arrested and charged for
prostitution first even if you are under 18. It has always been the state
versus the trafficking victim, who is considered a defendant and that just
doesnt go away. 16 and 17 year olds are prosecuted as adults even
though technically the law regards them as victims, she said.

Moreover, the U.S Department of Justice found that law enforcement

officers are more likely to arrest underage boys engaged in commercial sex
rather than refer them to social service providers, as they do with girls.

6. Women make up buyers and traffickers as well

According to the John Jay study, most trafficked children predominantly

serve white males between 25 and 55 years old, with a preference for
older, wealthy white males. However, 40 percent of boys and 11 percent of
the girls surveyed said that they had served a female client, with 13
percent of the boys exclusively serving female clients.

Moreover, in family controlled trafficking situations, the trafficker can often

be a childs mother or grandma, who tells the youth, we all make money
together, were in this household and you have to contribute, according to
Tina Frundt.

This is consistent with other reports, which tend to suggest that women
make up 35-40 percent of traffickers, as Cameron Conway highlights in his
article, Human Trafficking The Other 20%.
Ive heard from several high-ranking women in anti-trafficking
organizations, that the sex traffickers, the actual criminals in the crime, are
about 65% men. Such a statistic has a hard time taking root because
theres already the perceived and ingrained idea that men and men-only
are the criminals, he wrote.

7. Online websites such as backpage.com can be a sex traffickers

haven

Backpage.com, is a major enabler of online child trafficking through its

adult section advertisements. Last year, U.S. Senators called for
backpage.com to ease facilitation of sex trafficking, which they
argued prioritized the rights of pimps and not kids.

Nonetheless, the website continues to cop flack due to the incessant

number of cases popping up whereby pimps use the site to arrange sex
encounters with trafficked clients. Last year, three teens sued the
website alleging that the site allowed them to be forced into prostitution.

Tina Frundt, who works alongside FBI investigators in locating online

predators, says such websites are a feeding ground for traffickers: The
traffickers are online all over backpage and its like kiddy porn but most
providers are unfamiliar with the lingo and code words used by pimps and
buyers so were missing it, she said.

8. Criminalizing commercial sex work and branding trafficking as the

same thing raises the stakes for victims

In the United States, any person under the age of 18 whether a girl or boy
with any assistance from a third party, is by definition a trafficked victim,
whether they consent or initiate contact on their own accord.

According to Professor Marcus, attempting to criminalize all commercial

sex work and/or conflate the term with trafficking actually aggravates the
situation for children who are commercially sexually exploited. A better
solution, he says, is to normalize sex work:
 This notion of child sex trafficking has a dependency to make the stakes
so high that people have trouble talking about their experiences. Most
young people we met wouldnt go to social service agencies to get help
because social services records were tied to child sex trafficking and no
one wants their support network such as your girlfriend or boyfriend
prosecuted. For children being controlled by predators who are selling
their body for money, the only way people find out about it is by getting
information from those in the market. The solution is not increasing
punishment or more policing or stricter penalties. There is no bridge in the
law between 16-17 years olds who are doing it by choice and the
kidnapped child who is held captive. This only makes it harder to find out
who is coerced because everybody is afraid of the police. he said.

9. Most kids engaged in sex trafficking dont consider themselves

victims:

According to the Polaris Project, an organization against human trafficking,

children who are sex trafficked generally do not self-identify as victims of a
crime and thus do not immediately seek help due to a number of factors
such as lack of trust, self-blame and the habitual instructions by the
trafficker coaxing the child on how to behave around law enforcement. In
addition, traffickers chronically condition the child to believe that he/she is
engaging in sex work out of true love to pay off a debt - you would do this
if you loved me.

Moreover, many children who enter the life at an early age are
brainwashed by their trafficker to believe that this is the only job they are
cut out to do, as Sheila White, Survivor Leadership Coordinator at Girls
Education & Mentoring Services (GEMS), writes:

I too was in a place where I thought being in the life was all I was ever
capable of doing. In fact, I never saw myself as a victim of anything and I
believed that I would always be defined by my past. It wasnt until I came to
GEMS at the age of 16 that my life and self-perception began to change.
As time passed, I began to see a difference in myself; I began to believe,
confidently, I could actually have a life after being in the life, she wrote.

It is for this reason that sex trafficking survivor, Tina Frundt, says labeling
survivors as victims is misleading: We are never a victim, even on the
street. If we label kids that way we take away that notion that we had to
survive on the street. We saw rapes, murders, things people never will ever
be able to talk about and we survived and we continued on. Were
survivors and its the victim mindset we must transition, she said

10. Sex trafficking funds and resources are misappropriated

While the United States has spent almost $1.2 billion fighting sex trafficking
globally, much of those funds have been misallocated on advertising and
anti-trafficking campaigns rather than spent on actual evidence-based
research and rescue operations.

Furthermore, the tendency for organizations and anti-trafficking groups to

inflate trafficking statistics and focus disproportionate attention on pimped
girls has meant that young boys, transgendered youth and those children
of any gender who arent enslaved by the traditional pimp or subject to
labor trafficking miss out.

Ronald Weitzer, Professor of Sociology at George Washington

University and author of Sex Trafficking and the Sex Industry: The Need
for Evidence Based Theory and Legislation, explains this motif: NGOs
have figured out that they can appeal to the public, donors and funders if
they emphasize sex trafficking of girls, which has a very clear purpose in
attracting government funding, public and media attention. If resources are
being misappropriated to less frequent types of trafficking then there is a
danger that others who are victimized like hidden populations are being
ignored. Moreover, if labor trafficking is much more prevalent in the United
States than sex trafficking as the International Labor Organization says it
is, than it suggests we should alter the balance toward labor trafficking, he
said.