Nobody was there for me

I grew up without being accountable to anyone.  I never knew my father, and my mom was an alcoholic; she was around, but not there…all I know, I have learned from my own experiences.  I wish there had been an adult in my life to teach me what is right and tell me what to watch out for, or what could happen to me.  I just didn’t know.

When I was 12 years old, a guy I thought was just a “dope boy” kept following me in his car when I walked to school.  He was older and real cool, and he said I was really cute.  He paid a lot of attention to me and eventually I got in the car with him.  For a while we were girlfriend and boyfriend; we would go everywhere together.  It didn’t take long before I experienced the real treatment—being beaten, stomped on, manipulated and sold all day every day.

When I think about how it must have looked to people, a baby-looking girl like me with an older “boyfriend,” it makes me wonder why nobody was ever there to stop it, or even ask any questions at all.  I think in our society there is nobody that even wants to stop it.  It’s just normal.  Everything is about sex everywhere you look in our culture, and sex with little girls is just another part of the picture.  That’s the way it seemed to me when I was 12. When I realized my boyfriend was a pimp, I thought, well, I guess that’s just the way it is and I did what he told me.  I thought I was making the choice, and that was pretty much what I would have to do to get along in life.  Nobody ever told me–I didn’t understand what a choice really was.

People have asked me how I could have done what I did—sell my body on the street, in cars, in trucks, anywhere and everywhere and then deliver every last dollar to my pimp.  Looking back on it from my vantage point today, I can’t answer that question…I’m amazed myself, that I was so under the control of that man.  He was the only person in my life that I felt connected to and I even felt like he was my only protection; therefore, I would have done anything to stay with him. The price was for me to sell the only thing I had, my body.  He gave me a different name, a street name…it was Cookie.  That was fine with me because Tonya would never do the things Cookie did; I was a different person when I was tricking.

Sometimes the john would tell me they knew I was young and they wanted to help me get out; I always took it as a joke because they would go ahead and use me anyway. They acted like their pity or their money helped me.  They never did anything to help me and I stopped hoping that anyone ever would.

It’s a very strange world when you are in it.  In a really screwed up way, I had a family.  It was a family of “wives in law” that fought each other out of jealousy and competition for our pimp’s attention. We were only allowed to talk to each other, never anyone outside the family.  I was arrested 17 different times in all kinds of cities and every time I went to detention, they thought all they had to do is change where I was.  So I ended up in group homes where people had serious drug and mental problems, but not my kind of problem…there was nothing to help me deal with the trauma of what happened to me. I wanted nothing to do with those places.

Being with the “family” was at least something I was used to, so I ran away and back to my pimp every time.  Each time I was transferred from out of state back to Ohio, it was in handcuffs and leg shackles and I was surrounded by policemen that I felt were my enemies.  Despite my age, I spent 8 months in prison when my pimp caught a federal case.  Yes, I’m the one that went to prison.  I could never trust anyone.  Sitting in a facility with criminals didn’t help, it only made me more bitter.

What did help was to finally meet someone who had walked in my shoes and survived.  This lady was real, not just in what she said, but because she had been where I was; I had a torn-soul to torn-soul relationship with her.  So many others are out for the publicity, but girls like me can tell when someone is sincere, understands what it is like to be a slave, and really wants to help.  I have a new life now, and I am going to study to become a doctor.  The day that changed my life, I was walking to school.  I was going to a special program because I was smart.  A lot has happened to me and I’m wiser now, but I’m going to go back and pick up with that smart girl and move ahead.

It was my own family member, my adoptive brother, who took me from my house and sold me into prostitution.  He talked to me about a place in Bombay where I could earn money knitting sweaters but when I was reluctant to go, he drugged me with some juice. I awoke far from home and found I had been bought by a man who also owned other girls.   I was so frightened and confused, but those girls would not tell me what was happening.  I was kept in a locked room and I could do nothing of my own will.  Eventually I had to give up and do what they wanted me to.  The reality of what my life had become made me want to kill myself. Though my spirit had died, I remained alive in that place for 4 years.

Girls in the brothel suffer terribly.  Many of them are locked in dungeons in utter darkness, unable to tell if it is day or night, unable to talk to anyone at all, their only contact – the men that use them.  I was fortunate that my brothel owner permitted me to go out on occasion and I met a girl named Gina, who told me about the Lord.  Gina would meet me and take me to her church, and it is in that place that I found hope – hope that I could get out of that life and hope that I would have a family again.

With money I had hidden, I fled to the train station and to Nepal.  I hoped my family would accept me, but though my parents wanted to take me in, my village would not permit that.   In the Hindu culture, if a girl is out for even one night the village assumes the worst and will not accept her back. I had been gone for four years; in their eyes I was ruined, even though it was I who had been betrayed, and my family member who had wronged me. I was shunned and rejected, and now found myself utterly alone in my own homeland.

By a miracle, I remembered the phone number of a lady from Bombay Teen Challenge and the church that Gina had taken me to.  Her name was Bimila and she had visited me in the brothel in Bombay before she returned to Nepal some months earlier.  Bimila was now the housemother for a new home that Shared Hope just built with Believers’ Fellowship in my own country!  They made a home for me and accepted me and became my new family.

About three years ago, I returned to the city of my slavery, and I moved to the Village of Hope outside of Bombay in order to reach into the darkness and shine the light of hope into the brothel. I still grieve for my sisters there and I can’t be completely happy until all of them are free.

As I began to heal with God’s help and the love of His people, I was able to help other girls returning to Nepal from the brothels of Bombay.  One lady, too sick with the disease to make the trip but desperate to save her six year old daughter from the death sentence of the brothel, sent the little girl, Mannisha, to us just a few weeks after I arrived.  We provided the comfort and love for each other that we both so desperately needed.  I think of her as my own daughter and she calls me “mommy”; we are a family of God’s making!  Today Mannisha is 15 years old and is a fine young lady and good student, testing at the top of her class and aspiring to be a doctor.

Once, I returned to my brothel to visit girls that I knew when I was there – to tell them there is hope – and all of them were gone, dead from the trauma and diseases of that life.  My friend Gina has also gone to be with the Lord in heaven.  Of my friends, I alone remain, and I know God has spared me for His purpose.

Last year I completed my first year in Bible College.  My faith is growing ever stronger, and I feel the Lord’s call to go on to business school so I will be equipped to help with the financial management of groups that reach out to help women and children that have escaped the life of slavery.  God makes all things new.  As another slave, Joseph, said, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

UPDATE: Renu was married in July 2012. During her marriage ceremony, she was escorted down the aisle by our local partner who loves and guides Renu as a father.

Leading the next generation of survivors

Anna chooses to believe that the one person who loved her more than life died in the fire that left her, at three years old, badly injured and without a home.  The next seven years, and many placements in Chicago’s foster care system, convinced her that the pillowcase stuffed with her few possessions was the only constant in her life.

Although she was finally adopted at 12 by a loving Christian family who wanted to nurture and protect her, Anna chafed in true 12-year-old form at some of their restrictions, like “don’t eat candy”!  She solved that problem by hanging out at the corner store where her allowance could satisfy her sweet tooth.  But something else was at the corner store, a new friend who always bought her a candy and sometimes a little gift.  As the months went on she shared her fear that her adoptive parents might give her back, just as every foster parent had.  Over the next six months he became her best and only friend—someone she could trust, someone she could call when the inevitable “pack up your pillowcase” moment came.  He had given her a pager for such an emergency.

And the day came when 13-year-old Anna had a fight with her mom; she paged her new friend.  Within minutes, he showed up at the corner store and she got in his car.

Anna had stepped off an enormous cliff that can only be seen when looking back.  Her friend became her master.  He introduced her to violent sex acts and the language to describe them to get her ready for the market into which she would be placed. He gave names to the things he had done to her and told her how to describe the acts she was to offer the men who would pull up beside her on the street or who would be waiting behind the door when she was delivered to a hotel or truck stop.  Out of her mouth came the words that assured the buyer she was like the girl he had seen on the porn he devoured, convincing him that this “barely legal” girl loved to do the things he fantasized.  She spoke the language!  She couldn’t possibly be innocent like his daughter or granddaughter…

Anna’s pimp moved her out of Chicago and then back again, to be part of a stable of a dozen other girls.  They were managed ruthlessly by an older girl, “the Bottom Ho,” who he had trained since she was 12.  She knew how to take care of business while he was out.  When the casinos and convention cities had to be “stocked” for special events where patrons would be seeking young girls, the whole stable was moved to the market.  By her sixteenth birthday, Anna had traveled more and seen less than most people would in a lifetime.

Through it all, she never thought of running.  The violence and beatings were terrifying, but when he was sweet to her and gave her attention and presents, she believed he really cared about her.  Besides, Daddy (that’s what he said she must call him) was her protection from the other pimps and violent buyers and she knew that crossing him meant something dreadful would happen to her mother—he promised.  Everything Daddy said appeared to be true.  He told her police arrest ‘hos’ like her and she would go to jail.  He said men like him rarely go to jail and if they do, they get out in days.  If she talked police, he would get her, and her fate would be worse than anything she had experienced so far.  Sure enough, she was arrested—not Daddy, and surely not the john. She learned quickly to lie to the police, serve her time, and find a way to call her pimp once they released her.  If she was arrested and placed in a shelter or group home she was out the back door the first night.

At one point, early in her captivity, Anna sneaked a call home for help.  Her older adopted brother answered the phone and after listening to her plea for help he told her “you made your bed now sleep in it” and hung up.  Thinking that he represented her parents too, Anna knew her fate was sealed.  Not even the pillowcase this time…

The story of Anna’s escape from this life is one that space in this letter does not allow, but she did finally escape!

Her parents had never stopped looking for her.  When they were finally reunited, Anna went to Washington, D.C. where her mother lived to care for her in her last days.  Her mother embraced her fully and helped Anna establish a survivor’s ministry to help other victims of sexual slavery.

Anna runs an outreach program and drop-in center for vulnerable and victimized youth.  As Shared Hope creates a restorative shelter network around the nation, survivors like Anna are the leaders who can teach us to protect and minister to this uniquely precious group of God’s children.