In Focus: Foster Youth Fall Prey to Traffickers

At 18, Crystal had already experienced a lifetime of pain.
She was molested by her mother’s boyfriend and spent the rest of her childhood being moved between foster homes, enduring more sexual abuse, beatings, a failed adoption and a stint in a residential treatment center. She had just escaped a violent boyfriend when someone recommended a woman who would take her in.

Crystal said that, after growing up in foster care, she was coerced into the sex trade. Photo Credit: Patrick Michels/Texas Observer

That woman, Crystal said, was the first person to sell her for sex. She gave Crystal drugs and used Crystal’s body to pay the rent, she said. “A guy offered her $1,500 and she said, ‘Crystal, we are going to be out on the streets. Can you please do this? Can you please do this?’ And I did it,” Crystal recalled in an interview with Children’s Rights. “After that, she expected it. She told me if I didn’t contribute to her in that way, I was out. I had no place else to live.”
A few months after moving into the house, Crystal said she went to a party with a man who slipped her a pill, then “had sex with me and told me that I was his.” He made her work in a strip club, sold her to other men, and kept the money for himself, she said.
“There were times when I knew if I wasn’t going to do it, I would get beaten, if I wasn’t going to do it, I would go hungry,” she said.
Crystal is one of the countless young people in the United States swept into the foster-care-to-sex-trafficking pipeline every year. “Unlike a drug, which is sold once, a person can be sold for sex thousands of times a year, with little risk since sex traffickers are rarely prosecuted,” said human rights activist Molly Gochman, who received the Children’s Rights Champion Award this year for her work to fight sex trafficking.
READ MORE:http://www.childrensrights.org/newsletter-article/in-focus-foster-youth-fall-prey-to-traffickers/