- I ran.
I ran like hell.
So as a junior in my undergrad degree of social work,
I had some electives I needed to fill.
There was a class open called human trafficking.
I knew a little bit about trafficking.
It's something that happens to foreign nationals.
It's not but a few weeks into the semester,
and we're starting to lay down kind of the foundations
of what exploitation looks like.
The small of it is it's the exploitation
of another human being for labor, which includes sex,
using these three key words: force, fraud, and coercion.
And there was something particular about the way
that the professor talked about the ways
that traffickers use these types of techniques
or mechanisms to get someone to comply.
And many of those that were talked about
were actual experiences of mine
and that I had experienced exploitation,
what people commonly refer to now as human trafficking.
When you're in the relationship and you're in that space,
it's often really difficult to see what's happening.
And when this professor in particular started to lay out
this language around forced no food, lack of sleep,
being on the move consistently,
the light bulbs started to come on
because I could literally start to recall those things
as the professor was laying those things out.
I remember when I was kept up for days,
three or four days at a time.
I remember what it felt like to not have food
or to be cut off from basic needs
that would debilitate me from leaving or running
or fleeing or calling law enforcement.
Life was a little rough as a young person.
Came from a divorced family.
I had alcoholism pretty rampant in my family.
Some physical abuse that was going on in the household.
And I found substances to ease that pain.
Well, there came a day when
those substances no longer worked,
and when that started to happen I couldn't stop.
I was showing up at drug houses.
I was showing up in places where I had no business being
as a young individual.
And I was starting to date and be in intimate relationships
with other people who were either selling or dealing.
And that's when the things started to shift.
I was told that I was going to need to do some things
in order to pay off a drug debt.
Once that drug debt was paid off, then it was
you'll need to do this just to continue to stay alive.
Life got really, really shitty really quick.
So, I end up in this house in South Side Chicago
with about 13 other girls, working 15, 16 hours a day
in the middle of Chicago snowstorms
putting restaurant flyers on people's doors.
In one of the days where we were putting flyers on doors,
I stole someone's mail out of their mailbox
to steal a stamp to try to get a letter to my parents
to let them know where I was.
I don't know how many days it was from the time
I put that letter until the time I was able to leave,
but there came this moment where I'm coming the stairs
in this house, and the phone rings.
And the gentleman who was keeping us answers,
and it's my mom on the phone.
He hands the phone to me,
and she tells me to walk out the front door.
And don't look back and just walk.
And I never looked back.
I absolutely never looked back.
And I knew that I had a long road ahead of me,
but anything was better than what I had just been through,
and I knew that I needed to sit down and heal for a bit.
So that following year in 2006 I got this hair-brained idea
that I need to go to college.
And I do.
I sign up for college.
I come home.
I tell my mom.
It's like this most amazing moment in my life.
I'm gonna go, and I start my journey in academics.
It's funny to think about how
language changes your view of yourself
and how language can set you free in a lot of ways.
Not knowing or having the concept or the analysis
to understand what you've experienced
and be given that was its own set of freedom
outside of fleeing from my exploitation in 2005.
So there was a big gift, and there was a big shift.
And I did not want another young girl to think that
she was bad, she was deviant, she was making bad decisions,
that she just got in a bad relationship.
I wanted young women and people in general
to know that it's not okay,
it's not okay for people to exploit you.
So I've used that as my platform.
Here I am, seven years later,
working in this anti-trafficking movement.
I teach now the same human trafficking class that I sat in,
which is super crazy,
and being able to give that knowledge back to students
but also there's this weird space of
I wonder if someone else is in this room
who may have experienced exploitation
and will come to that realization
in the framework that I may have or that I did.
Trafficking looks different for everybody.
And it's easily misidentified,
and it's easily skewed.
And so I feel like my journey has led me here
to be the voice and to be able to share that in, again,
in a light that's authentic and real.