jalwhite:

Is sexual trafficking happening in your city? What about on your remote reservation? The short answer is, “Yes, right under your nose.”

Klamath tribal member and Portland, Oregon resident Jeri Sundvall-Williams’s horrific sexual slavery ended 22 years ago, and it took an attack from a male customer, who stabbed her multiple times, to give her the courage to break free. “The light went on that I didn’t want to die,” Sundvall-Williams says. “Prostituted women have low self-esteem. They don’t feel their worth. My worth was in my two children. I couldn’t leave them without a mother.”

Prostitution becomes a trafficking crime when the victim is a minor, or at any age if controlled by force, fraud or coercion. Sundvall-Williams says she had to walk up and down Portland’s 82nd Avenue, a thoroughfare running through several residential neighborhoods, each night to bring home $300 or face a beating by her pimp.

The life of a trafficking victim typically involves starvation, confinement, beatings, gang rape and forced drug use. They must also contend with addiction, broken bones, concussions, burns, vaginal and anal tears, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), sterility, miscarriages, forced abortions and even contagious diseases like tuberculosis, hepatitis, malaria and pneumonia. Psychological damage includes mind-body separation, disassociated ego states, shame, grief, fear, distrust, hatred of men, self-hatred, suicide and suicidal thoughts, post-traumatic stress disorder, acute anxiety, depression, insomnia, physical hyperalertness and self-loathing. Some victims suffer from traumatic bonding, a form of coercive control in which the perpetrator instills fear as well as gratitude for being allowed to live.

Intertwined with sexual trafficking are sexual abuse, drug and alcohol abuse and poverty. In a law review, Sarah Deer, a Muscogee (Creek) Nation citizen and professor at the William Mitchell School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota wrote that many women and girls are coerced into sex work—on and off reservations—by drug dealers to pay for their drugs.

This type of sexual violence targets Native women and girls due to the culture of silence in every community, the widespread poverty, and the legacy of appalling sexual violence committed by white men against Native women, says Deer. The U.S. government acknowledges that the rates of sexual abuse and rape committed against Native women and girls are higher than those for the general population.

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(via vampirefinch)