Antislavery Usable Past

Tina B

2008 (Narrative date)

There are an estimated 403,000 people living in modern slavery in the United States (GSI 2018). Sex trafficking exists throughout the country. 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.

Tina B left home with the man she thought was her boyfriend at 14 years old. He trafficked her into commercial sexual exploitation. Tina B was raped daily. She went to the police for help, but instead they arrested her and placed her into juvenile detention for prostitution.

I didn’t know what a pimp was so he didn’t come up to me and say you know, here this what you’re gonna do and I did it. It was more a domestic violence situation where they pretend like he’s your boyfriend, they care about you, pick you up, you tell them too much information that they use against you.

I was raped and forced to do it and I felt like it was my fault. He told me that you know, if I would’ve just did it and all the stuff that he did for me, all the things that he bought for me. How could I betray him like that?

I basically begged police to take me to jail and that I was a juvenile. Erm so I was arrested and for a year in juvenile detention and no one believed me, no one really cared.

So then I realized that everything that he told me of police would never believe me, they weren’t going to do anything, pimping was legal, nothing would ever happen to him erm, that’s exactly what happened. That’s exactly what happened to him. So I walked away from that situation thinking that I was in the wrong.

Narrative as told to Russia Today

Country

Theme

Sexual exploitation

Tags

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: rightslab@nottingham.ac.uk. 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.

More in this collection...