It just...it was awful, the whole experience.
Trafficking, it doesn’t know any boundaries. And it happens all over America. So I came from kind of a more privileged background, but I still...it still happened to me—and a male. The victim can be male, female, transgendered, anyone.
You’re initially brainwashed. And then, over a period of time, you become conditioned where you start to accept that this is all you can do.
I was kicked out of my parents’ home because of my sexual orientation, and, in a lot of ways, it really conditioned me for being very vulnerable
To describe the relationship between the trafficker and a victim is a domestic violence situation. There’s this connection to the abuser.
The biggest thing that I went through was therapy and acceptance. Acceptance that the abuse that I went through, I didn’t deserve; that I didn’t bring that on myself. I relocated out to Los Angeles for graduate school in psychology. I wanted to work with, not just the victim, but the whole victim support network—family members, friends, whoever is in their support network.
Courtesy of the Office for Victims of Crime
