Episode 06 – Molding New Perspectives

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Linda Smith:

They never made choices. So teaching them how to make choices, so they could see that they were an individual in control, they could make choices, and that they would not be destroyed by them. That is restoration.

Podcast Announcer:

Hello, and welcome to Invading the Darkness: stories from the fight against child sex trafficking, featuring Linda Smith, the founder of Shared Hope International. Join Linda, as she shares stories from her 23 years of fighting the battle of domestic minor sex trafficking. Our desire is that each episode of Invading the Darkness will help you understand the importance of fighting child sex trafficking, as well as equip you to join in that fight. In this episode, you’ll experience the hope that comes when the lives of sexually exploited children are restored and healed. Listen, as Linda shares the stories from survivors of child sex trafficking, and how they were able to find hope in the midst of pain.

Linda Smith: 

It’s really kind of a funny story. No, it’s not really funny. It’s just odd. Because people say, “Well, what are you going to do with the girls now that you have them?” This was weeks after I’d been in India and started safe houses had 37 young girls and women who had been in prostitution who had fled to the safe houses. So what are you going to do with them now?

Linda Smith:

And I remember, kind of a short answer was more like, “I don’t know. But it’s better than where they were.” But I realized very quickly that they needed to get up with purpose for the day. And I started what we call now the WIN program. And it simply is to make sure that every day has purpose, let them do something that they can be fulfilled in accomplishing something. So we started western tailoring, and Cosmetology and would have teachers come into the flats, because it really was safe for them to be out. And they were still stigmatized. So we started that. And before long, the place was buzzing. It was amazing the therapy of having a purpose that you benefited from. So they would get some of the money from anything they did. Some made jewelry. Later, we bought equipment for leather products. And as the villages were opened, there were gardens of other things, but they got up each day, with some help. And then what happened is they could start dreaming, and they could start looking to their future. But I didn’t have a psychological degree or counselor degree. But the women and children ministered to each other and took care of each other. Now, it didn’t stop there. We realized very quickly that over 60% of these women were HIV positive. And I use women because if they’ve been used in prostitution in these countries, they automatically call them a woman. But they might if they were in America, still be in middle school, but they needed medical. 

Linda Smith:

We also knew there were so many more so along with Bombay Teen Challenge, we helped fund a clinic, a mobile clinic that would drive in with a doctor, and alongside of it a van that had food and other things for the women. So we go in where they were and eventually created clinics that they could get themselves in their children, even if they were in prostitution still, medical care. And they could then know where they could go if they didn’t want to stay there or were afraid to stay there. But for sure, we understood that we were not involved with raids that would take the children or the women and separate them. As we were seeing what was happening in India at that time. The kids felt kidnapped, the women were deprived of their children. So for them, we also know we needed a safe place for their children. So with the same work, the same group opened nighttime shelters, so the mommies could come see them, but they were safe. And that the buyers who would pay more for children didn’t get their children. So what did we do? We help them be the mommies the best ones they could be. And in time, we got both mommies and children who would go out to the villages, or the loving mommy would just simply say, I know I can’t go. I still owe money on a debt bondage. or next to me as my friend and she’s very sick. Or my sister and I are both here. I can’t leave her and she won’t come. These are some of the real issues. But I want you to take my little ones. keep them safe. So we let them be what God had made them to be: mommies, even if they couldn’t do everything. 

Linda Smith:

Now one of the things that we decided really soon is that some of these would want to go to school, some would not believe they ever could, and neither to have a vocation. So anyone that wanted to go to school could, or they could go and have a tutor, or maybe both. And they never made choices. So teaching them how to make choices. So they could see that they were an individual in control, they could make choices. And in their choices, they would not be destroyed by them. So they could do cosmetology, or maybe they could do beads or leather.  They might want to become a social worker. Yes, you can go to school for that. We’ll make that happen with you as you learn enough to go to college. Yes, those were the ways we walked with them. That is restoration. Just simply grabbing somebody in a brothel, whisking them off somewhere and saying you rescue them is not anything more than kidnap. I remember at first when I was there in the Mumbai area, and I said, “This is just wrong.” And at that time, I was a member of Congress, we needed to do something. And these two teenagers pulled me aside and said, “Auntie, please don’t. When the other group did that, they left and they told the world, they’d rescue people. Then the police went through, and they arrested us. And they put us in this place we call kids prison.” I found out it was called a remand home. But there would be hundreds in one of these places, and maggots in the food and no sanitation, not enough bathrooms. So the kids would climb up over mattresses, and then they could pile up and they would escape. And their mommies had been arrested, too. So they said, “Please don’t because that’s what the police do here. Please don’t tell people.” 

Linda Smith:

And so I thought, “Well, probably the best way to restore individuals is to meet them where they are, to let them tell me what they need. And then just to walk with them.” And now 22 years later, I still walk with women and children, many in the United States as the rebuilding their lives after being trafficked as middle school children. I’ll tell you some of their stories at some point. But just know, because of people like you who heard and understood, we’ve now had our girls and sometimes boys all the way through school. And they are judges, they’re doctors, they’re nurses, they’re truck drivers. And some are teachers and social workers. One young woman just got her business degree. You see because I wouldn’t have known what she wanted, but she wouldn’t have known what she wanted either. Until we slow down and let her direct our path.

Linda Smith:

One of the very first girls, she was 14, maybe 14 and a half when I met her. She was a part of a large case in the United States, where the FBI, and local law enforcement were arresting the traffickers, the people that were snatching up kids all over the United States, and selling them in prostitution. And they brought to me a couple of these girls, because I was creating with Shared Hope how trafficking really worked from the inside out, using both foreign undercover video and several places in the United States. We’d been asked to go in and look and figure out what was going on. And then to use that, we created these videos, which are very simple, but they’re for law enforcement to see what happens to this child so they would treat them as a victim instead of a prostitute. So in creating that video, they brought me these two girls very different. So I’ll tell you about the one and I’ll tell you a little bit about her background. She was in and out of the foster care system. Her mother was an alcoholic, her grandmother would try to find a way to keep this little girl safe and stable took her to church with her. Very smart and she would walk to school about 12 blocks. And during that time, lo and behold, a man in a real fancy car would pull up beside her and talk to her. And over months, she talked to this person to where he wasn’t a stranger. One day it was raining, and he says, “I’ll give you a ride.” But she knew she wasn’t supposed to get it in a car. But she knew him. she’d already met him. She got in the car, and she never went home. Not for a long time. He was a part of a large gang of traffickers that shared and exchanged girls all the way down into the south, all the way over to the east coast. And to the west coast. There was a large event, they would put a call out, and they would all bring their girls to that point or put them on a bus and send them. And he had several girls. He told her, “I didn’t make you get in the car. You chose to get in the car.” And after she had been raped and sold, he says, “You’re a prostitute. You need to understand prostitutes go to jail. Even the law says you’re a criminal. So you’re a criminal. You go to jail if they pick you up. You never turn me in, never turn me in. And if you do, I know where to find you.” He did know where her grandma lived. He did know how to find her. 

Linda Smith:

So this little girl went along, was used by a lot of different traffickers that were in a network. But one day, the FBI, and in essence, last task force of the FBI, they started realizing they were connected. So there were several cases around the United States that realized they were connected. And they all come back to this little girl’s hometown, Toledo, Ohio. There was a generational culture of traffickers generation after generation raising up the next traffickers. And they were actually even in their middle schools, and they build relationships with the children. And then they would end up being a trafficker. And it went on and on. As I sat there with this girl, I’ll call her Lacey, I do use her story sometime. She didn’t act like a victim. She didn’t portray like a victim. And she would look me straight in the eye, which was, I think, a little bit disarming, because I didn’t know how a girl that had been so deeply abused, who had been put in jail, I thought she maybe would act a little more like a victim. She was strong. And looking back at her school records, she was both gifted. She was an athlete. And I guess you could say kind of a survivor. Right in the middle of me talking to her about her options that now she could do other things. There were people like me that would help her. She stopped me. She looked me in the eye and she says,”I’m not a victim, I’m a criminal.” I said, “Well honey, you’re not a criminal. They did that to you.” She got her back, straightened up, looked at me again and said, “I was put in jail. I’m a criminal.”

Linda Smith:

Now, I didn’t know that the traffickers gave him kind of blue ribbons for being put in jail and not giving them up. I didn’t know that at that point. But she learned the things that were blue ribbons instead of her sports or her art. She learned that she got blue ribbons, commendations, good words from the pimp, she got that by not giving them up when she went to jail. And she was sure she was a criminal. He’d said she was a criminal. She was just a prostitute. The law had proven it, put her in jail over and over again. And she had some level of pride in that. Because this little girl that was barely 13 when they got her, had been raised with the values of a pimp and given the blue ribbons that would mark several of her years. Walking with Lacey over the years, what she needed was to be told, “You’re a person, you’re a valuable person, you can make decisions. You don’t have to go that way. You have other options.” 

Linda Smith:

And that’s what many of you listening to this show say, “I could do something”, and you might be able to help a local shelter or one of the homes that have been established in your state, or more important, I think right now is to become a foster parent. Many states are training families to be able to take these trafficked girls and teach them how to live a normal life. You might want to become a nurse and know that when one comes into the emergency room, you’ve got a protocol now, and you can make sure she doesn’t go back out that door to the pimp. That she goes into the loving arms of someone that understands the complex trauma she’s gone through. See we’ve grown as a movement, and this is growing fast. But there aren’t enough people in our culture that still don’t see Lacey as a prostitute worthy of services, and justice. Some of you already decided that you want to do something. I would hope all of you would, but simply go to sharedhope.org to get the resources you need to help a girl like Lacey or maybe a little boy.

Podcast Announcer: 

Thank you for listening to Invading the Darkness: stories from the fight against child sex trafficking. If you would like to learn how you can help put an end to child sex trafficking, please visit sharedhope.org/take action. New episodes of invading the darkness are released every Tuesday at 9am Pacific. If you have enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a five star rating as well as a written review. Join us in Episode Seven where Linda talks about the time male survivors spoke out during an event forever changing her perspective. We hope you will join us. Thank you again for listening to Invading the Darkness.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai