Antislavery Usable Past

Marq

2016 (Narrative date)

Sex trafficking is a form of modern slavery that exists throughout the United States. Traffickers use violence, threats, lies, debt bondage and other forms of coercion to compel adults and children to engage in commercial sex acts against their will. The situations that sex trafficking victims face vary, many victims become romantically involved with someone who then forces them into prostitution. Others are lured with false promises of a job, and some are forced to sell sex by members of their own families. Victims of sex trafficking include both foreign nationals and US citizens, with women making up the majority of those trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation. In 2015, the most reported venues/industries for sex trafficking included commercial-front brothels, hotel/motel-based trafficking, online advertisements with unknown locations, residential brothels, and street-based sex trafficking.

Marq was trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation for 8 years in the United States. In this narrative he talks of the importance of believing victims and the particularities of being a man trafficked in to sex work.

We’re scared. We’re scared to run. We’re scared to tell anybody what’s going on.

If we’re recognizing signs, we’re able to do something about it. My trafficking was for almost 8 years. He was a close friend of the family. The words were used: "If you tell, I’ll cut you. I’ll bust you in your head. I’ll bust you in your nose." Being a male and being sex trafficked, when you go to a person and say, "Hey, so-and-so is doing this to me,"—"Oh, we don’t believe you. Stop lying." We’re the victims. We need people to believe who the victims really are.

Being a male survivor, that’s what’s needed: support. Being able to understand that it happens to everybody, you know, not just the male or the female, but to everybody. If others can see that there are male survivors, and that’s it’s okay to tell, then maybe we can get additional help out and get the word out that we’re here to help.

Courtesy of the Office for Victims of Crime

Country

United States (slavery location)

Theme

Sexual exploitation

Type

Narrative

Tags

male sexual exploitation

VOICES: Narratives by Survivors of Modern Slavery

This is the world's largest archive of modern slavery survivor narratives. Across more than a million words spoken or written by survivors of modern slavery, we can see why slavery persists in particular hotspots, analyse patterns in trafficking routes, identify vulnerabilities, understand more about the challenges survivors face in liberation, and discover new antislavery solutions. These narratives offer the chance to systematically design new antislavery strategies based on the experiences, ideas and solutions of enslaved people themselves.

The database is searchable by country, name, theme, and narrative date. Narratives can be viewed in list or map form. A short introduction provides context to each narrative. Narrative provenance appears after the main narrative text.

For ideas on how to use this database, please see our accompanying guide.

Project Lead: Zoe Trodd. Team Members: Andrea Nicholson, Lauren Eglen, Rosemary Pearce, Olivia Wright.

Project Funders: AHRC Antislavery Usable Past grant (2014-19), ESRC/AHRC PaCCS Modern Slavery: Meaning and Measurement grant (2016-19), and AHRC-GCRF Antislavery Knowledge Network grant (2017-2021).

For any queries about the collection please contact: [email protected]. If you wish to cite a particular narrative, please acknowledge the survivor’s name, the provenance of the narrative and cite: Voices Database, the Rights Lab, University of Nottingham.

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