INVISIBLE CHAINS...
TODAY'S SILENT FORM OF SLAVERY
This is part of "Tonya’s" story she met "Eddie" when she was 13, she went to school with his stepdaughter. They eventually started a relationship when she was 15 and one night she says “He approached me and told me in so many words, ‘I want you to have sex with this guy for money,’” Tonya said. “I was very uncomfortable and I kept saying no, I didn’t want to do it. He kept telling me, ‘If you love me, you’ll do this. It’s just one thing. Just try it.’”After nearly 30 more minutes of constant pressure, Tonya agreed to have sex with the man. What she thought would be a one-time thing became an everyday routine for the next few weeks. Night after night and bar after bar, Tonya would go out with Eddie while he advertised her to potential “suitors.” Tonya thought she loved him. She felt she could deal with the physical toll the trafficking took on her body. It turned out that the hardest part to deal with was the emotional and psychological effects. Later on, a hotline received a tip about Eddies crimes and in 2015, he plead guilty and was sentenced in 12 years in prison.
"Karla Jacinto is sitting in a serene garden. She looks at the ordinary sights of flowers and can hear people beyond the garden walls, walking and talking in Mexico City.
She looks straight into my eyes, her voice cracking slightly, as she tells me the number she wants me to remember -- 43,200.
By her own estimate, 43,200 is the number of times she was raped after falling into the hands of human traffickers.
She says up to 30 men a day, seven days a week, for the best part of four years -- 43,200.
Her story highlights the brutal realities of human trafficking in Mexico and the United States, an underworld that has destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Mexican girls like Karla.
Human trafficking has become a trade so lucrative and prevalent, that it knows no borders and links towns in central Mexico with cities like Atlanta and New York.
U.S. and Mexican officials both point to a town in central Mexico that for years has been a major source of human trafficking rings and a place where victims are taken before being eventually forced into prostitution. The town is called Tenancingo."
Until the age of 20, Phalla lived a relatively normal life in Cambodia. After her father died, with no one to support her family, she was forced to move in with her grandmother. According to Equality Now, a global network that advocates for gender equality and human rights, the grandmother sold Phalla to a brothel two months later.
The grandmother reportedly drove the girl to a brothel in the nearby city, Kampong Som, but Phalla was unaware of her grandmother's intentions. At the brothel, Phalla was locked in a room and assaulted several times a day. Her reality for the next several months included being sold from one brothel to another.
Then, she met a man who helped her back to her native Cambodia. It seemed like a new lease on life, but she was soon put to work in a karaoke bar, and her employers sold her to foreign tourists for days at a time. When she tried to leave, she was beaten. It took several more months before she was able to gain her captor’s confidence, escape, and turn herself over to authorities.
Imagine at the age of 16 being sex-trafficked by a pimp named "cut-throat." After days of being repeatedly drugged and raped by different men you were purchased by a 43 year old child predator who took you to his home to use you for sex. You end up finding enough courage to fight back and shoot and kill him," the post reads.
"Your (sic) arrested as (sic) result tried and convicted as an adult and sentenced to life in prison," it continues. "This is the story of Cyntoia Brown. She will be eligible for parole when she is 69 years old." Brown is serving a life sentence for the murder of a Nashville man in 2004. According to Brown, after a childhood marked by abuse and drugs, she was raped and forced into prostitution by a pimp, and ended up killing one of her clients out of self defense when she was just 16 years old. Despite her youth, she was tried as an adult and given a life sentence.