Translator: Julie Walker Reviewer: Denise RQ
I'd like to know:
what does this image bring to your mind?
See, typically, most people would think of how cattle are branded
to mark them as goods and mark them as property of their owners.
However, I think of slave brandings.
It's been going on since the transatlantic slave trade
where Europeans and Americans,
along with other slave masters hot-iron branded their slaves.
Then, in Christian Europe,
we see Muslims who had branded Caucasian women as sex slaves.
Then, it evolved a little bit
to where in the Armenian Genocide,
the women that were taken captive
were tattooed with brands on their face and hands
in order to label them as sex slaves
and/or the wives of their captors.
And then, of course, we know
the Jews that were brought into the concentration camps
were tattooed with identification numbers.
So, in my mid-twenties,
I was leaving a very domestic violent relationship
and I was trying to rebuild my life.
Then I met Prince Charming.
He was amazing.
He made me feel so special and so loved,
he treated me like a queen, and he put me on a pedestal.
It wasn't just financial and materialistic needs
that he provided for me.
More so, it was the emotional needs that I had and the voids I had
from a lifetime of abuse.
At the beginning of this relationship,
I had designed a heart-shaped tattoo with an empty banner.
Down the road, I wanted to put
all the names of my children in this banner.
However, I mean, he was so nice to pay for it.
However, I did not know that he paid his friend
to put his name in the banner of this heart.
He justified this by saying,
"I want you to know how much I love you,
how I will always be there for you, and I will always have your back."
In that time frame, I also got two more tattoos, willingly.
I got his name on my arm, and I got a little devil,
- which was a nickname - on the other arm.
I did that willingly because I wanted to show
my loyalty to him and my dedication to our relationship.
The dependency on him in the relationship changed dramatically
when he introduced heroin into the equation.
It did not take him long
to use the relationship and the dependency on the drugs
to coerce and manipulate me into prostitution.
That's when I realized the meaning of my heart-shaped tattoo.
It turned into, "You can never leave. I am always right behind you."
So, he has me start working the streets of Columbus.
I ended up getting kidnapped by a fellow trafficker,
drugged, taken out of the city,
and when I finally escaped that situation, I ran back to my boyfriend.
I needed him that bad.
So, I ran to him, you know, crying,
"They drugged me, and they kidnapped me,
and they sold me."
He slapped the taste out of my mouth
and dragged me into the house by my hair.
Later that evening, I was tattooed,
"property of" his name, above my vagina,
because he thought he was losing power and control over me,
and wanted me to remember whose property that was.
So, there came a point
where I wasn't meeting the quota that he wanted me to meet,
bringing in the money that he wanted me to bring in.
He walked me down the street and sold me to some low-level drug dealers.
I don't know what he received for me, but I can tell you this:
globally, the average cost for a sex slave is 90 dollars.
So, I worked for them for a short stint,
had some traumatic events happened to me,
and I ended up back with this boyfriend.
However, this time was different.
See, my once Prince Charming, I knew now as my captor.
And so, I was broken and shattered
from the life of enslavement that he had forced me into.
So, when he hit me, I would hit him back.
I was combattant.
So he taught me the most horrific lesson I had ever learned in my life:
he sold me to the most violent gang in Columbus, Ohio.
I was forced to work for them.
It was at that time when I switched ownerships
that I had to be rebranded.
I had to be marked by my new owners.
It started with their gang insignia and the name of their leader on my neck.
And then, it was promised if we-- there were about 12 of us,
if we got "Loyalty is royalty" across our back or in miscellaneous areas
and showed our loyalty to this gang, we would have increased privileges.
Privileges for us were being able
to have time to come in and get something to eat,
time to take a nap every three or four days,
or maybe, just maybe, the ability to take a shower.
So, we willingly got these tattoos.
What they turned into were threats of violence
and promises that if we tried to escape,
we would be killed, essentially.
We were cattle, all of us.
When I finally reached a life-threatening situation,
I'd been raped for two and half hours with a butcher knife,
and attempted to take my own life afterwards,
because I couldn't live like that any more.
It was at that point when I decided
I had to either die or risk my life to leave my traffickers.
And so I did.
It was a battle.
It was hard enough trying to survive what I had been through,
but every time I got in the shower, every time I looked in the mirror,
the reflection I saw looking back at me
was that enslaved person, that property, that cattle.
I earned the money for my first cover-up,
which was a tattoo of my choosing
going over top of the demoralizing tattoo that I carried, that constant reminder.
That encouraged me and empowered me
to the point where I wanted to start a grassroots non-profit
called Survivors Ink to pay forward the grace and mercy that was given to me;
the liberation.
That was a very big risk for me,
because to earn the money
to give scholarships to these other survivors,
I had to put my story out there.
I had to face the judgment, the criticism,
the questions of the public.
I also had to face, possibly,
my traffickers identifying me and looking for me.
These are some of the brandings that we have helped cover up.
It was a risk to start doing this,
but it was also a risk when we started doing street outreach
and reaching out directly to them to offer them help.
That brought along another risk,
because when they needed help, we had to intervene and aid their escape.
But, all the risks that we take
are so worth it,
because we not only get to be a part of them
restoring their lives, and restoring their bodies,
taking this mark of violence and ownership,
and turning it into something that shows
their strength, their growth, their courage, their survival.
We risked everything and will continue to,
because we are not cattle.
We are human beings.
Thank you.
(Applause)