The Advocacy Sponsorship Program
Dear friends,
We’re continuing to come alongside great local organizations to join in the fight against domestic trafficking, specifically by contributing to resources for survivor intervention and advocacy. The need is huge in Portland (and beyond).
According to recent stats provided by our friends at Safety Compass, a Portland-based advocacy group, 384 survivors received crisis intervention between October 2018 and October 2019. Of these survivors, 171 have been child victims. (These numbers are reflected from Clackamas, Marian, and Washington County.)
Exploitation and abuse can intensify during these times of economic hardship. Safety Compass has already seen an increase in domestic violence and abuse between traffickers and the people they exploit. With a lack of income from legal employment, there is a lack of access to the most basic resources like food and baby formula. Advocates are working 24/7 to help relocate survivors in creative ways never attempted before, but they are completely overwhelmed.
Where might you come in? Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, partner guides, and all the good-hearted people that support FFC, we’re launching our new Advocacy Sponsorship Program. Every $2,000 that comes in for this program can provide a trauma-informed advocate for a trafficking survivor for an entire year. This advocacy provides survivors with a specialist who can offer crisis response, safety planning, law enforcement interview accompaniment, resource referrals, court accompaniment, case management, and mental health referrals.
To give you an idea of the difference that victim advocacy can make, I’ve included a couple of real life narratives from local cases below. Just a few minutes of reading their stories and I promise you’ll feel the same things we do. A sober reminder of how we can make a massive impact in lives of people that most need our help.
Thank you all for your continued support in providing sustainable solutions to poverty and human trafficking. We couldn’t do it without you.
Bucky Buchstaber
Survivor Narratives
Names and some details have been changed to protect the victims, but these local (Portland, OR) situations sadly, are real.
“Lorraine”
“Lorraine” was 4 years old when her biological mother began selling her for crack. She never knew her father, and due to the sexual abuse in her childhood she did not regard adults or authority figures as safe people. She ran away from home at age 10 and found a man who was willing to drive her to a new city where he said she could make a life and become a star. He turned her out into the sex industry.
When Lorraine was 11 years old, she reported being sexually assaulted by an unidentified man and was admitted to a local emergency room to receive a sexual assault forensic medical exam. She also disclosed that she was being trafficked. At the time, the criminal justice system still perceived commercial sexual exploitation as a crime of prostitution—meaning even children like Lorraine were considered the perpetrators of a victimless crime. Lorraine was cited for the crime of prostitution and released to her pimp.
The pimp took Lorraine to another state where she was trafficked for years. One day he beat her so severely that she sought help by calling 911. The detective on her case interviewed her respectfully along with an advocate who brought her a bag of care items: toiletries, food, magazines, and a soft new pair of pajamas. Shortly after the interview, she was taken to juvenile detention for “safe keeping” since she was an unaccompanied minor from another state.
All of her interactions with the criminal justice system related to her abuse had resulted in her own citations, charges, and now incarceration. She had no reason to trust the new adults in her life, but she took a leap of faith because this time things seemed different. This time she was told she had rights as the victim of a crime, and she was being offered support for the first time, such as safety planning and other long-term self-sufficiency options. Her advocate continued to show up day after day and support her while the detective investigated her case.
While incarcerated, she went “cold turkey” off of a whirlwind cycle of heroine and meth use and became sober for the first time in years. She also found out she was pregnant. She was flown to a treatment environment out of state where she was told she would be able to live until she turned 18. During the prosecution of her trafficker, she was flown back to testify.
All this time, Lorraine stayed clean from drug use, crediting her pregnancy and motherhood for the will to stay sober. She went on to graduate from high school and community college before becoming a nurse. Now she has two children with her long-time boyfriend who is safe, sober, and a loving father. She raises her children in the suburbs and stays in touch with her advocate via social media to this day.
Lorraine recalls the night she met her detective and advocate team who intervened after she called 911, which she views as the turning point of her life. She acknowledges the nurse that she met in the ER at 11 years old, who touched her so profoundly with compassion that she was inspired to become a nurse too. She credits the house mother at the treatment environment for giving her viable options for a self-sufficient future. These professionals remind her that she was the one who took every brave step to invest in her future and the life of her children. The steady relationship with her advocate is the longest-running relationship Lorraine has ever known, and she describes that connection as the closest thing she has to family beyond her partner and two children.
“Sasha”
“Sasha” grew up wanting to be a veterinarian. Her parents attended her sports events, she was an honor role student, and she received a scholarship to college. No one outside her home knew how chaotic and dangerous her home was behind closed doors. She held up a brave smile in public, but at home she navigated her father’s cycle of violence and attempted to protect her mother from his rages. When her father would sexually abuse her at night, she pretended she was someone else and retreated into her mind.
When she leaves for college, Sasha thinks she is finally safe. But being confronted with safety, her mind finally has time to process 18 years of abuse, and she turns to pills and alcohol to cope. She finds it difficult to concentrate in school, her grades drop, and she loses her scholarship.
Sasha is desperate to stay in school and away from the reach of her father, so she decides to begin dancing at a local strip club to make money to pay for her college tuition. As soon as she auditions, the bouncer makes an extra effort to befriend her and offers to throw some of the most disrespectful men out of the club on her behalf. She’s flattered. When he asks her on a date, she accepts. It isn’t long before he starts explaining to her why she was bringing in so little cash compared to the other dancers, and that the VIP rooms are where the “real cash” is at.
Sasha is confronted with the realization that sex is an option in the VIP room, and some patrons were going to force sex regardless of consent. Rape was considered a “workplace hazard” at worst and “part of the game” at best. Her new boyfriend tells her he will vet customers and help keep her safe—that they will be a team. She refuses to agree to sleep with any of the patrons, and her boyfriend becomes angry. That night, a customer assaults her while she dances and her boyfriend, who is bouncing, does nothing to intervene. After her shift he smacks her across the face and tells her to “grow up, be grateful, and get to work.”
The next night Sasha feels obligated to begin turning tricks in the VIP room at the club. Within a week she is being scheduled to meet customers after her shift at the hotel situated in the parking lot of the club. Her boyfriend arranges everything and even tells her he will keep her money safe so she doesn’t get robbed. She is drinking a lot just to cope and catches herself wondering how life has taken such a turn so quickly. Since she was told she’d been making more cash, she feels confused about where her money is. She‘s always broke and assumes she must be spending a lot on alcohol and pills.
Sasha’s boyfriend says he has friends at a club in Vegas who can make 10 times as much cash there. Sasha thinks that Vegas could be her big break to earn enough money for the rest of her college tuition. She daydreams about having a good excuse to quit dancing and leave her boyfriend, who has become increasingly controlling. The two head to Vegas, and he makes sure she makes money in exchange for sex in every major city along the route.
One day when she’s feeling down, she says she doesn’t want to work. Her boyfriend becomes incensed, screaming, breaking hotel room glasses and strangling her almost unconscious. When the hotel staff comes to check on the disturbance, Sasha says it was her fault. As soon as the hotel staff leaves, Sasha’s boyfriend grabs her, physically assaults her, ties her up, and injects her with an unknown substance. She immediately loses consciousness.
She awakes for moments… blurring snap shots of time, and then goes unconscious again. Her memory is fuzzy and she has no idea that her boyfriend has sold her into a brothel operating out of a local gang-controlled trap house. Sasha is held captive in the brothel and sold repeatedly until one day the gang members see her Missing Person’s poster pop up on the local media. Her parents have reported her missing since she has had no communications with them for 4 months. Nervous that they may become a focus of law enforcement investigations intending to find Sasha, the gang drives her to a street in town known for drug traffic and sales—and dumps her half-clothed out of their moving car, onto the road.
A compassionate, unhoused person living under the overpass calls the police to report a body dumped on the road outside their encampment.
When law enforcement finds Sasha, she is alive but coming down from heroine, experiencing a medical emergency as her body goes through withdrawals. She is taken to the hospital for evaluation and begins to utter fragments of sentences about what has been happening to her in the trap house. The nurses call a sexual assault victims’ advocate to see if they might be able to help Sasha disclose the context leading up to her being found by police.
Sasha is disheartened to find that most of the professionals treat her like a “junkie,” and she is even lectured on the dangers of injection drug use. She attempts to say she didn’t plan to use injectable drugs, but it’s hard for her to stay conscious, let alone explain how she got into the situation. Just months ago she was a great student at a well-respected university. Now she wonders where she is, where her boyfriend has gone off to, and just how long she was disconnected from life within a drug-induced blackout.
Sasha is taken to an in-patient detox center. There, her victim’s advocate from the hospital returns with a kind detective who is working to bring justice on her behalf and find out who abused her at the trap house. When the detective explains the implications of her boyfriend selling her to the gang that ran the trap house, she hears him referred to as a pimp for the first time. At first she feels appalled by the term because she thinks of pimps as fictional characters in music videos. But the longer she sits with it, the more she realizes that he was in fact her pimp.
Sasha testifies before a grand jury regarding the events that led up to her being found and treated at the hospital. She wants so much to return to school, but first she needs to find a new normal and begin the brave work toward ongoing sobriety. She is accepted into an 18 month treatment program. She arrives there with high hopes, but within days the gang has somehow identified where she is staying. They put out a “hit” on her and send a gang member to leave bullets on her new doorstep as a threat. Immediately upon hearing the news, her advocate and detective rush to safeguard her by finding new housing out of state and adding new charges against local gang members to attempt to address their efforts to tamper with the witness.
Sasha enters the new treatment facility with much apprehension. She wants to invest in her new life and newfound safety but she is constantly looking over her shoulder. She is flooded with a lifetime of trauma. Every day she fights the urge to numb herself with drugs and alcohol from the pain of her memories, but she finds strength in the connections she makes with other women at the facility. She builds bonds with her case manager and stays in touch with her advocate and her detective. She finds solace in the facility chapel, and she is enjoying reading about animal husbandry. She enrolls in a local online college course and sets her hopes on earning her degree.
A new normal begins to emerge. Sasha says she is grateful to be alive. She has decided to change her major to either criminal justice or psychology. She wants to give back to other survivors of interpersonal violence so that they know they are not alone.