What Sex Trafficking Looks Like — From Someone Who Lived It
This is the story of my friend Dolly
She told it to me only one day after we met. I’ll never forget that soft and warm afternoon in June, with an orange sun hiding behind a tall building on Hollywood Boulevard, and my face wet with the stain of silent tears.
‘A lot of first things happened that year,’ Dolly said with a blank look in her eye, while soothing an imaginary painful spot underneath her ear. ‘It was my first time doing cocaine, my first time having sex — although not by choice — the first time getting pregnant, and the first time getting trafficked. It was a hell of a year!’
One hot summer day, as she was enjoying a date with her boyfriend on the beach in Atlantic City, where she was living at the time, Dolly’s life was cut short. He raped her, kidnapped her, and sold her into prostitution. At the time, Dolly was 15 years old and a virgin.
Nobody went looking for her: she came from a broken home; her mother was absent and cold, and her father had made a new family with a much younger woman.
After her dad left, Dolly would frequently run away from home, sometimes to go see him, and sometimes to be away from the empty home where she felt unwanted. When she disappeared this time, her mom thought it was nothing more than another escapade and she would eventually return.
But she didn’t.
