Sex trafficking survivors call for changes, more support

The Northwest Survivor Alliance was founded by survivors of sex trafficking. Members support each other and advocate for more services to help people deal with the trauma of their abuse. They say law enforcement and the criminal justice system has made some changes in the way they handle those who force children and adults into sex trafficking. But too often victims are still being charged with crimes related to being trafficked, they say, and far more is needed to help them recover and make sure they’re not trafficked again. We hear more from Northwest Survivor Alliance co-founders Jay Benke and Robin Miller.

Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Northwest Survivor Alliance was founded by survivors of sex trafficking. Members support each other and advocate for more services to help people deal with the trauma of their abuse. They say law enforcement and the criminal justice system have made some changes in the way they handle those who force children and adults into the sex trade. But they argue that too often victims are still being charged with crimes related to being trafficked and that they aren’t being given the services they need to get away from exploitation. Jay Benke is one of the co-founders of the Northwest Survivor Alliance and a survivor herself of child sex trafficking. Robin Miller is a member of the alliance. She was trafficked in the commercial sex trade for six years and is now a case manager and advocate at Janus Youth Programs. They both join me now. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Robin Miller: Thank you.

Jay Benke: Thank you so much for having us.

Dave Miller: Jay Benke first, what do you feel comfortable sharing about your experiences after you were abducted at the age of 17?

Benke: Actually I was abducted at the age of 16 and I was exploited for over a year before a vice squad and the FBI intervened and were able to help me exit that circumstance, but unfortunately for me, and for many folks that are like me and are trapped in the commercial sex trade, I was then criminalized for the violence that I had endured and I ended up actually serving more time than my abductors/trafficker/pimp.

Dave Miller: What were you actually charged with? It means, so you were, in a sense, half rescued and half penalized for, for being a victim of a crime? What did, what were you charged with?

Benke: I was actually charged with pimping and pandering myself, even though I was a victim and I was charged with aggravated money laundering, which was, I took the money from the buyers and I gave it to the traffickers. I’m still connected with the individuals who are involved in my exit and the way that they explained it was that they don’t really have a lot of options. There were not any services at all at the time and trafficking wasn’t even a crime. This was three years before it was actually a crime, and so what they did was, they needed to make victims speak in order to have any chance of prosecution at all and they were going to be scarier than the traffickers, to then make victims feel compelled to speak to them out of fear. It was obviously a terrible method, and it’s the best that they could come up with. So I’m both harmed by it and grateful.

Dave Miller: But as you noted, you spent more time behind bars than the man who was exploiting you.

Benke: Yeah, absolutely. I served 40 days and there were two of them, they served 10. To this day, my main trafficker, he’s served time in four states, a total of 10 times and he has never been to prison. The most time that he has served is eight months because he takes a plea deal and he is still not a registered sex offender. He is not seen as a danger to the community.

Dave Miller: Robin Miller, my understanding is that you were trafficked for longer, for six years and you had three children in those years fathered by the man who was exploiting and abusing you. My understanding is that you were able to leave a few times, but then you would come back. How were you able to finally make a break?

Robin Miller: It’s a lot like the cycle of domestic violence. I’ve heard the statistic, as a victim or a survivor will leave up to seven times before they finally are able to stay exited or away from the person that was harming them. It’s a lot of those same reasons, but I had a family, who was very supportive and received me back. I had access to services and things that many of the victims and survivors I serve today don’t have access to. But also, my exit is kind of aligned with my faith. Also, there’s a huge testimony that I won’t speak to today, or I’ll take up the rest of the time talking about.

Dave Miller: I’m glad you mentioned it because for you this, your faith, it seems like it was an important part of your ability to get out of that part of your life.

Robin Miller: It was like a prayer and fellowship and a community to receive me back into what you would call a normal existence, but addiction services, transitional housing, all of the things that we need more of today to provide for victims and survivors in the exit were available to me and accessible, not specifically because of my exploitation or trafficking experience. It was because of my addiction that I was able to get connected to services.

Dave Miller: You were 21 when, I think, when you met the man who became your pimp.

Robin Miller: Yes, I was.

Dave Miller: After you finally got out, how did you grapple with the idea of choice, of the amount of freedom that you had in those years to make your own decisions?

Robin Miller: Well, what I know today about the human brain, which, when I learned this, it kind of allowed me to give myself some grace. I don’t know how much choice I had when I met him. I was deep into my alcoholism and left in a blackout with a man and then the shame and the guilt of those things just were too great.

Dave Miller: And Jay Benke, what about you? As you noted, you were forced into commercial exploitation, abducted. You didn’t have a choice, but were you made to feel responsible for what happened to you?

Benke: Yes. So it’s fairly common for people in the sex trade to feel, at the time, like you are making choices, but those choices are more like, do you want to have apple pie or do you want to have chocolate cake versus are you even hungry at all? Like, you’re not given a broad spectrum of choices. You’re given two very manufactured choices to choose from, both of which are evil and terrible, and horrific and will cause us great harm, but we feel very pigeonholed into these decisions. So the ability to say, I’m going to go over and run into the street and call for help, like that, it’s just not going to happen. You don’t see trafficking victims running down the road begging for help. It takes years and time away from that situation in order to be able to understand and really process what’s happening to you and what had happened to you. It’s kind of like running from a bear. You’re not going to sit down and analyze, why is the bear there? How did you come within the bears parameters? And what could possibly happen if the bear gets you? Like, you’re just going to get yourself safe and only later can you process what happened.

Dave Miller: When did that happen for you? When did you have the services at your disposal or the mind space where you could see what had happened to you in the way that you see it now?

Benke: I actually became disabled as a result of my trafficking experience. It’s something that took several years for it to happen. So I was in my mid thirties, dealing with the progression of my medical issues now being so severe that it was impacting my ability to function, and I was a bit in denial. So lucky me, my provider sent me to a therapist who just so happened to specialize in serving human trafficking survivors, and so she was able to help me identify, very gently, within that first appointment. At that point, I didn’t even recognize that I had been abducted. I would tell, rarely, but tell folks that I have been taken. She was like, well, what does that mean? So I had to walk her through the steps of what happened. And she’s like, well, there’s names for these things that had happened to you. And I just felt very responsible because I hadn’t run to the police. And so that was nearly 20 years of living my life trying to function as a healthy person and parent, believing that I was responsible for the crimes that had been perpetrated against me.

Dave Miller: Robin Miller, I know that you now work at Janus Youth with children as young as 12, some of whom are survivors of the kinds of abuse that you suffered. Where do you start with them?

Robin Miller: Oh goodness, I start where they’re at. Sometimes I start in the detention center, sometimes I start in a classroom at the school or, and it’s been one, or the youth shelter or wherever they’re at. We really work hard to bring awareness to the community and the adults who are working with children on how to identify and look for indicators and if somebody can see that, they reach out and I will show up and I just work on building a relationship. This is a very long game. This is just as much time as a trafficker will put into grooming and recruiting a victim, as providers and as people working with folks who have this experience, we have to be willing to sit as long as they are. And sometimes you don’t even get to the part about the exploitation or the abuse, it could be a year, it could be two years, it could be two days. So also, sometimes folks, they easily share and sometimes it just takes a lot of time.

Dave Miller: That must be hard.

Robin Miller: It is.

Dave Miller: I imagine you want to fix things immediately, but you know enough, as a professional and as with this lived experience that you know you can’t, if you force it, I imagine the fear is you’ll just push people away so you just have to take your time.

Robin Miller: Right and I can’t change anybody’s experience, I can’t change their circumstances, as much as I can offer opportunities, solutions, other avenues or ideas on how they can direct the course. We have to, oftentimes kids will come back from being out surviving in, as a 14 year old, for seven months in the street, right, without any supervision and only around folks who are intentionally abusing them and hurting them and we bring them back into the school system or what and they automatically want to go back to what they knew because it feels so foreign, being a normal, quote unquote “kid” amongst their peers. The stigma, one thing if I could go back to like how I stayed and why didn’t leave is like the stigma, we’re constantly told that we were, it was us, it was our choice, the violence and and the just the fear of going, how we’ll be received back, is greater often than the abuse we know we’re going back to on the other side.

Dave Miller: If you’re just tuning in, we’re talking right now with two guests. Jay Benke is a survivor of child sex trafficking and a co-founder of the Northwest Survivor Alliance. She’s also a faculty member at the Elevate Academy. It’s a virtual professional development school and online community for survivors of trafficking. Robin Miller was trafficked in the commercial sex trade for six years. She is now a case manager and advocate at Janus Youth Programs and is a member of the Northwest Survivor Alliance. Jay Benke, there have been some recent efforts, recent efforts in Oregon and in other states to partially decriminalized or fully decriminalize or legalize prostitution. Those all sound similar, but my understanding is that they would be different. What do they mean?

Benke: So partial decriminalization, sometimes called the Nordic Model, most commonly referred to as the Equality Model, it decriminalizes the person that is being bought and sold for sex while holding pimps, brothel owners and sex buyers accountable. We recognize that the act of prostitution is in itself an act of violence and trying to provide harm reduction within an act of violence is just, it doesn’t make sense, and so the Equality Model provides a three pronged system. It provides public education, which of course can help with prevention, but also what the community understands affects how we serve on juries, and how we show up on juries affects what cases prosecutors will bring. It affects the decisions that judges make based on what they’re seeing in their courtroom when these issues come in front of them. So it’s super important that we all be informed so that people like myself don’t have to serve more time than our traffickers because a prosecutor feels that they can’t get a pimp convicted.

Dave Miller: My understanding, I thought that we have in Oregon now, of a system that’s largely like what you’ve just described, at least with the intent is like that, where the idea is to go after the people who are buying sex as opposed to the people who, whose services that they’re buying? Am I wrong?

Jay Benke: No, that is correct, at least, especially in Multnomah County. Multnomah County is no longer arresting folks for prostitution. I believe it’s been a number of years since they have, Unfortunately, victims do get arrested for other crimes, much as I was arrested for aggravated money laundering. You do get arrested for some co-mingling crimes again, because there is a lack of services and a lack of awareness in the community. So there is a lack of teeth to our justice system’s ability to hold folks accountable for their crimes.

Dave Miller: So how would full decriminalization or legalization be different?

Benke: So full decriminalization decriminalizes the person that’s gotten sold for sex, but it also decriminalizes pimps, brothel owners and sex buyers and the folks in this camp tend to believe that the sex trade can and should be self regulated. So this is a multibillion dollar industry that makes more money annually than the NFL, NBA, and NBL all combined. We’re talking about pimps, gangs, cartels, terrorists, pedophiles, the Epsteins of the world that are wanting to self regulate this ginormous industry.

Dave Miller: One of the arguments that we’ve heard over the years about that is that there are women who are in, who do sex work and they do it voluntarily and and this is something that they should be allowed to, this is a choice they should be able to make for themselves. How do you reckon with that argument?

Benke: First, I recognize everybody’s autonomy. Everyone in the sex trade, myself being a person who while in it, absolutely said I was there voluntarily, again, because of that illusion of choice and the responsibility that is put on victims on purpose, to prevent us from holding our abusers accountable, so I recognize that we can change our belief, about what has happened to us and also at the time, nobody needed to change and label me a human trafficking victim before I self identified, and if somebody is choosing, but they feel that like they can’t leave, then does that really equal consent, because we don’t have exit services, we don’t have another place for you to go after you lost out on your education, after your peers have been out here, growing in careers. You maybe got into it because of money problems, relationship issues, whatever is happening in your life, where this was, where your sex provided more value than the labor you could provide, so whatever those circumstances are that got that person within that situation, those circumstances are not then erased by the sex trade. They are still there because we don’t have services, which makes people feel they cannot leave, because the same problem they had, that got them in, prevents them from exiting. So if somebody cannot exit, is that a choice, is that consent? And for the rare folks who are in here, there may be that one in 10 who are there and they’re just loving it, that’s fantastic for them, all day. Like I have, I have no problem with this, quote, unquote “two consenting adults”. But unfortunately, what they’re trying to do and have flourish, it exists within a space where there is trafficking, pedophilia, and there isn’t consent.

Dave Miller: And it seems like what you’re saying is it’s so blurry and it’s so hard to disentangle that and that the harms for the people who are are being abused and exploited, it’s so great that that a decriminalization measure would simply make it too difficult to actually go after and help, go after the people who are exploiting them and help the people who are being exploited.

Benke: Yeah, absolutely.

Dave Miller: Robin Miller, we just have about two minutes left. But you said that you work with young people who don’t have often the kind of support that you did have access to eventually. What services or supports do you wish were more available right now, especially to the young people that you work with?

Robin Miller: I’d say supportive, like housing and programs, both residential and outpatient services, specifically for a population who has been exploited. I have kids on my caseload now who are already anticipating walking into the sex trade at age 18 because that is where they feel like, then they can take some of their power back. This issue, this is being marketed and pushed onto children now, with OnlyFans, I have kids that tell me, well, all I have to do is show my feet right? That may be where it starts, but where it ends is not at that place, right? This is something that progressively expands boundaries. So often times, I wonder, I think about folks who are actively engaging with autonomy and agency in the sex trade, and was it actually a choice or was it something that they just kind of moved into because they felt they could take their power back. The one person who typically wins in this is the sex buyer. He is the one that gets to go home to his family, his job, his insurance, vacations. The rest of the population is going back to the street or back into the brothel or back onto, we don’t have a back page anymore, but OnlyFans or whatever. This is something that, and so then there are no services. So if this becomes decriminalized, why would we build services for something that is consent, consensual?

Dave Miller: Robin Miller and Jay Benke, thank you.

Robin Miller: Thank you.

Benke: Thank you.

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