“I met him on the street. He took an interest in me. He was almost 30, and I felt so beautiful and loved. It was so cool that he was paying attention to me.”
If you heard someone telling you about those feelings, would you guess that they were describing their trafficker?
Sydney (we’re using a pseudonym and representative imagery to protect her privacy) was just 16 years old when she met a charming older guy who eventually became her boyfriend. The man would ultimately spend years trafficking her for sex.
There is so much more to Sydney and her story than meets the eye.
Patterns of vulnerability
Today, Sydney is in school earning a paralegal degree, bringing her whip-smart intellect and compassionate heart to a field where she hopes to work in family law. She was always a precocious child and can’t remember a time when she wasn’t a high achiever.
Unfortunately, she also can’t remember a time when her home was safe.
“My mom was into drugs and alcohol, and my father was absent. The only thing I was good at was school, but I also got bullied at school. My mother’s boyfriends would assault me,” Sydney recalls. “So I was tossed between foster homes.”
These patterns of physical and sexual abuse, combined with the bullying at school, fed deep insecurities in young Sydney’s heart. Even though she was smart, hard-working, and empathetic, she was consistently told that she was worthless. That belief was compounded when her first boyfriend raped her and then incited others at their school to assault Sydney.
“I met someone who could see all of the insecurities in me. I think it showed on my face,” Sydney adds sadly. “It’s ironic that someone who offered me independence ended up putting me in chains.”
Because she was academically gifted, Sydney skipped a grade and started college early. But no matter how intelligent she was, she was still just a teenager. The older man who pursued her seemed romantic at first — as if he just wanted to offer her the care she’d never known.
Sydney was used to receiving abuse from those closest to her. That made it easy for her to dismiss her boyfriend’s behavior as normal when he hit her for the first time. It made it hard to say no when he first proposed that Sydney have sex for paying clients.
“He was like ‘Hey, some girls do this to make money,’” she explains. “He said, ‘Then we could get married, and we could live happily ever after. It’s going to be so great. You won’t have to talk to your family anymore.’”
At first, life felt like a freeing fantasy as teenage Sydney started going out to clubs with her new boyfriend. But the fairytale quickly evaporated.
The warning signs of exploitation
There are countless reasons why it is difficult for someone experiencing trafficking to communicate about what they’re going through. In Sydney’s case, telling the truth was a near-impossibility after a lifetime where authority figures were the perpetrators of harm.
She was still enrolled in classes, but she often bore the marks of abuse and the telltale signs of substance use. Her boyfriend ensnared her into addiction to keep her compliant.
Sydney remembers, “My dad eventually asked me if something was wrong. But I said no, he’s just my boyfriend. Everything is good for me.”
As her situation worsened, so did the signs that she was in grave danger and distress. Her official story that she told family and friends was that she worked at a restaurant as a waitress — a story that didn’t align with the high-end gifts and access to substances that her trafficker supplied.
“I think a lot of my university friends, they noticed, but they had fear,” Sydney says. “No one knew who to talk to or who to ask.”
Sydney was around countless mandatory reporters throughout her time in college. But ultimately, the adults in Sydney’s life failed her.
“I was pretending everything was OK, even when I had bruises. Then I missed a final exam completely,” Sydney shares, reflecting on her academic experience. “I had a 94% in the class, so I ended up passing it — just barely. Before that, I was at the top of the class. You’d think someone would ask: why does the top-of-the-class student not show up for the exam? I was too scared to talk to that professor. I really wish she’d noticed. Something has to be wrong for that type of student not to show up at all.”
The pressure of her double life stretched Sydney to the breaking point, and she ended up admitting to a mental health facility. Unfortunately, the healthcare providers there had not been trained in human trafficking. They did not intervene even when Sydney began to voice some of the truth for the first time: “They heard me talking about where I was working. I told them about this abusive boyfriend. I told them about drinking because I was in so much pain. I don’t think they knew what to look for, or they were just scared to ask.”
Even outside of the classroom, friends and family were missing indicators that something wasn’t right. As soon as Sydney’s boyfriend-turned-trafficker introduced the idea of having her turn tricks, he forced her to get an Instagram and start posting suggestive photos to generate business.
Sydney quickly started refusing to post that kind of content. But her trafficker still closely monitored her social media use, paying attention to what she posted, making sure it all fell in line with painting a picture-perfect life.
Making her way out of trafficking
One of the first rays of light that broke through the darkness came in the form of one of Sydney’s deepest strengths: her intellect.
She began reading Invisible Chains by Benjamin Perrin, a book about human trafficking. She dove deep into knowledge about the topic, even before she could admit that it described her own experience. Like far too many survivors, Sydney had been conditioned to believe she was a criminal rather than the victim of a crime.
“I was ashamed. I didn’t want to talk about it in a direct fashion,” Sydney admits. “I wanted to be a lawyer. I kept thinking, what if this showed up on my record? I thought my life would be over.”
This was a narrative her trafficker reinforced. The love-bombing of their relationship’s early days was long gone. Now, he responded to any resistance with death threats against Sydney’s family, and with promises of blackmail.
“I felt I was useless. He told me that. And I had already heard that my whole life,” Sydney says.
Her abuser warped even her strengths against her until even Sydney’s own internal dialog mirrored his shaming voice. She remembers thinking, “How pathetic or stupid are you? You think you’re so smart, but you ended up in this precarious situation. Now you’re nothing at all.”
But Sydney was so much more than nothing.
One night, she shared her dreams with another girl who was being exploited, admitting that she still had hope of becoming a lawyer.
“She said, ‘Promise me that you’re going to do it for me. You’re going to do it for us,’” Sydney recounts.
Shortly after that conversation, Sydney’s friend suspiciously disappeared.
Grieving and increasingly aware that her own life was at risk, Sydney began looking for a way out. She desperately needed to find a way to access those who might believe her when she shared what was happening.
So in an act of impossible steely determination, Sydney broke her own leg.
With the injury limiting her ability to work, Sydney convinced a taxi to drop her off at the hospital.
“That ended up with me getting surgery,” she says. “Then I was able to tell a doctor, because I had just had it. The doctor saw the marks all over me. He was like, ‘this isn’t just your leg, is it?’ A peer counselor came in who warmed me up to talking about it at all.”
Sydney’s story came tumbling out.
The hospital got in touch with her dad. She was able to receive support for the myriad mental and physical health complications resulting from her exploitation. Because of her own ingenuity and resolve, Sydney was free.
Road to recovery
At first, recovery was hard.
Now in her mid-20s, Sydney had to reckon with years of terrible abuse through her trafficking experience, compounding the childhood trauma that had preceded it. Surviving trafficking had been unspeakably costly.
Sydney says, “I had different names while I was being trafficked. If someone said my real name, I wouldn’t react. In a scary way that makes me cry to remember, I had forgotten my own name. It was stolen from me. But even after all of that? They weren’t able to steal my identity. They made it stronger.”
She was able to get connected with a surrogate mother figure who began mentoring her into healing. At first, her trafficker stalked her, haunting her footsteps with continued threats against her family and her life. Finally, she was able to elude him with the threat of legal action. She started trauma therapy. She went back to school.
Even still, the process was imperfect and nonlinear.
“It had to get so bad before it could get better. I had to be in the ICU for quite a few periods where I missed enough school that I have had to restart,” Sydney explains. She continues to live with PTSD and the aftermath of traumatic brain injuries sustained during her exploitation.
But with every setback, every difficulty, Sydney has continued to reclaim her own name. She has had conversations with other girls still in the life, letting them know that she’s here if they ever want support. She continually expands her own awareness-raising efforts, now in partnership with a loving fiance. She hopes that her work as a paralegal in family law will allow her to address some of the grave systemic wounds that made her vulnerable to trafficking in the first place.
“It’s hard to go from not even knowing my name to where I am now,” Sydney offers frankly.
Part of that has come from those healthy relationships that continually reiterate that she has worth — that she’s more than what has been done to her, and that she’s also more than even her laudable accomplishments in school.
She muses, “It was about realizing I’m not a bad person. I’m a whole human person. I have a lot to offer the world. People in my life now don’t abandon me because I didn’t get a 90% in class, or I didn’t make them money, or I stood up for my boundaries.”
When she thinks back to where she was and all of the signs that the adults around her missed, it’s clear to Sydney that she could not have been expected to reach out for help as a teenager. She was doing the best she could in horrendous circumstances.
These days, Sydney is committed to offering any other teenager in a similar position the solidarity that would have changed her life so many years ago.
“I thought my life was over. But a lot of people make mistakes. We’re all on our own journey,” she says. “I thought, if I don’t get into law by this age, I’m a failure. But my story is beautiful, even though it’s messed up along the way. I still made it.”
And more than simply making it, Sydney is filling each passing day with more passion, more life, and more hope: “It’s complicated when hurt is all you’ve known. But the resources are out there. It’s not going to ruin your life if you talk to someone. Often, these resources are confidential. Hold onto hope. You’ll get your chance.”
If you or someone you know is experiencing exploitation, you can call 1-888-373-7888 in the United States or 1-833-900-1010 in Canada. For more resources, visit our help page. For mental health crisis support, text the Crisis Text Line at 741741.
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