Laura, I’m going to tell you the same thing I’ve told other trafficking survivors in my network: These selfish, self-entitled overprivileged self-propelled shitcannons running the anti-trafficking/abolition ‘movement’ (after they’ve shoved poor trafficking survivors aside so they could monetize this human rights crisis to serve as their personal cash cow) are not and never have been our allies — they’re merely using poor trafficking victims as a ‘cause’ for them to make money off of for themselves by riding the tax-exempt Non-Profit Industrial Complex gravy train for their own further enrichment, not for our benefit because we sure as hell aren’t getting any anti-trafficking funds even though we’re the ones that actually suffered for that money.
One month before Jennifer Kempton, a fellow trafficking survivor, died at the age of 35 (largely due to the very real material deprivation that abject poverty is), she spoke at the Thompson-Reuters anti-trafficking conference this past April. This is what she said:
“Once we escape, there’s a whole new hell. You can rescue us all you want but what we need is opportunity. We want jobs, we want educations, we want choices, we want our children back. There needs to be more startup money for survivors who want to start up their own businesses.”
You can view the conference and listen to her here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxB76nrlWeE
A month later, she died. Her funeral and memorial service was on May 24th — my 50th birthday. Within 2 days of her death, a funeral Gofundme for her brought in almost eleven thousand dollars. Where was that outpouring of generosity and caring for poor trafficking survivors when she was still alive and really could have used that money to rebuild her life with housing and regain custody of her kids? One woman gave $1000 in a single donation to her funeral fundraiser.
A year before Jennifer died, she had a very small modest Gofundme asking for only $1500, which she had hoped would provide her with a “fresh start” so she could get on her feet and not be homeless — and she didn’t even get a third of what she was asking for after her “fresh start” fundraiser ran for several months. Yet, within two days of her death, all the financial generosity that she never got while still alive when she actually needed it, came pouring out of the woodwork.
If that’s not a big final “Fuck you”, then I don’t know what is. They’ll stand by and watch us suffer from abject poverty, homelessness, starvation, lack of medical and dental care, and won’t give us one red cent in direct support to so we can get the things we need in order to rebuild our lives, but when we end up dead from lack of healthcare, poverty and homelessness they’ll generously provide us with a coffin. (And for that, we’re expected to be “grateful.”)
The wolves in sheeps’ clothing getting all of the anti-trafficking money while claiming to be our “allies” NEVER wanted to allow for ANY conversation about poverty due to job discrimination and the lack of enough jobs for all and the absence of any real safety net (Welfare Reform, anyone?) as being the culprit of human trafficking. All these people want is to get their trauma porn fix on while using poor abused, marginalized trafficked women’s stories for getting money for themselves — by re-exploiting the poorest of the already exploited.
The only allowable discussion in anti-trafficking circles was the “fallen/broken woman” spiel. I wasn’t “fallen”, I was PUSHED. I didn’t “sin”, the society that threw me away and totally neglected me as a homeless orphaned 12 yr old female child with NO FAMILY is who sinned. I’m not “broken” — the system is.
Bottom line, they didn’t want to hear the truth: Privileged people’s selfishness and contempt for (and discrimination against) the poorest and most disprivileged women is what caused human trafficking.
Middle class and rich Americans’ demanding the shredding of social programs for the poorest of the poor (which was done “just for the principle of it”); the elimination of what few social programs we once had, very briefly, that DID help homeless kids (before the Reagan Revolution put the final nail in the coffins of most of those programs) is EXACTLY what caused human trafficking here.
The ending of “welfare as we know it” when welfare was never enough to live on in the first place, without ANY genuine commitment to: (1) Eliminating job discrimination against POOR women, and; (2) Providing everyone with the guaranteed right TO a job with dignity that pays enough to actually survive on with just a little tiny bit of human fucking dignity.
And the reason none of those privileged rich social parasites in the anti-trafficking/abolitionist movements won’t allow for these truths to be acknowledged and addressed is because that would mean they’d have to relinquish some of their privileges and money in order to make shit right for a whole hell of a lot of poor marginalized women and kids whose lives they’ve destroyed through their votes and all of the abusive social and economic policies they’ve demanded and supported, and they don’t want to do that. Because gawd forbid they ever take any “personal responsibility” for the hell on earth they’ve created for others who are less fortunate. Personal responsibility only applies to POOR MARGINALIZED WOMEN.
So instead they blame Satan. They blame the trafficked and prostituted women and girls, saying they’re all mentally defective or that they’re to blame for what was done to them for having personal character flaws that caused them to be in prostitution. They blame men for buying sex.
But they NEVER blame the employer/rentier class and socio-economically privileged gatekeepers for job discrimination against poor marginalized women, after ripping welfare away from us leaving us no way to survive, even at a subsistence level.
They blame everyone and everything EXCEPT themselves and the realities they’ve caused: The systemic injustices of unrelieved abject poverty and the structural oppression of systemic economic/job discrimination against poor women in a country that has never provided enough living wage jobs for all since the end of WW II, and the criminalization of the poor in general (Clinton’s Omnibus Crime Bill, anyone?) which KEEPS the poor down with no access to the means to survive outside of the underground economies.
Systems of oppression don’t just happen in a fit of collective absent-mindedness. They’re created and maintained by deliberate intent. And that deliberate intent is ALL about preserving wealth, privilege, and power for some people at the expense of others — those WITHOUT privilege.
Systemic oppression is an inter-generational privilege transfer vehicle that serves up the human rights of poor, marginalized consumable and disposable people in economies of scale. Privilege occupies the space where someone else’s human rights belong.
I dare to speak the truth — and they HATE me for it.
They hate it when an actual child sex trafficking survivor like myself who has been exited from prostitution for 35 years (I escaped my traffickers at age 17 back in 1984) speaks up about suffering an entire lifetime of poverty and real material deprivation that left me without food, housing, clothing, medical and dental care, etc. due to an entire lifetime of opportunities denied, and the lack of any real safety net due to privileged people’s GREED and their creating of a “ME ME ME” society that refuses to take care of me now that I’m old and sick (and still extremely poor) after they made damn sure I’d never be able to take care of myself by putting barrier on top of barrier in my way throughout my life so I wouldn’t be able to get hired anywhere for anything no matter what I accomplished and no matter how hard I tried — or how long I’d been trying.
I’m now 50 years old and in failing health with NO chance of ever getting hired at a real job since nobody hires poor marginalized 50 year old women, and an entire lifetime of extreme poverty didn’t do me any favors. No wonder I’ve got diabetes and Crohn’s disease now after years of literally having to eat from garbage cans. NO ONE is or ever has been willing to pay me for anything I CAN do — writing, computer programming, web app/software development. I never got a chance for a good job no matter what I tried.
I’ve suffered an entire lifetime of abject poverty ever since escaping my traffickers — which meant no money for clothing, no housing, no health and dental care (and half the time, no food), and no money to pay for any opportunities to learn any tech skills while I was still young enough to maybe get a chance for a job in the “new economy” due to all the extra barriers to employment I faced as a trafficking victim from generational poverty w/ an underaged prostitution record — on top of systemic sex/gender discrimination that automatically limited my access to any money, good jobs, credit , and other resources — no matter what I managed to accomplish, how hard I worked, how hard I tried, and how long I’ve tried throughout my life just to get UP TO ground zero, never mind lifted up out of poverty!
And THIS is why a LOT of poor older exited women in their 50’s and 60’s, many who are even older than that, end up returning to the sex trade VERY RELUCTANTLY to do “granny porn” and prostitution in the twilight of their lives — because THAT is the ONLY thing anyone is willing to pay them any money for, no matter what else they accomplished and tried to do in their lives. Yet you won’t see any abolitionists or anti-trafficking “do-gooders” doing squat to economically support destitute older trafficking survivors so that they don’t have to return to the sex trade either, do you? Now why do you think that is?
If not for my loyal friend, Marissa van Eck, who is like a sister to me, sharing what little bit of her low income that she can with me, I’d be DEAD by now from starvation, poverty and homelessness and none of those smug privileged rich fuckfaces in the anti-trafficking/abolitionist movements give a damn. NONE of them are even willing to support me with giving me as little as a lousy One. Fucking. Dollar. Per. Month pledge in my Patreon, and it’s not like they can’t afford it — these are all people who have jobs and healthcare. They’re well-employed and have stable incomes and they always manage to find enough extra money to blow far more than one dollar per month on their $5 coffees and Netflix subscriptions.
But they won’t even give One. Dollar. Per. Month — a whole whopping $12 per year — to economically support a poor struggling 50 year old woman with no income and no chance of getting any jobs who got permanently pushed out of the economy after I endured an entire lifetime of opportunities denied because of being criminalized (even though I was the crime victim) as a trafficking survivor with a prostitution record that wasn’t expunged until I was 47 — after I became “too old” for any employers to consider hiring.
An entire lifetime of being shut out of the economy and unable to get jobs while young enough to get hired also means nothing paid into social security so I’ll have something to survive on when I get old and reach “retirement age” (which is was officially bumped up to age 67) — if I can even continue to survive in extreme poverty to actually live that long. An entire lifetime of severe material deprivation takes one hell of a toll on your health and America’s poor are dying at least two decades younger than everybody else. In fact, America’s poor have a lower life expectancy rate than those in any other developed country.
As an aside, I recently attended the Tech Jobs Tour that was held in Cleveland, OH — a 2 hour drive from where I live in northwestern PA. The focus of the event was to be a networking event between marginalized job-seekers who are underrepresented in tech and employers.
One potential employer, an older black guy who came from the upper-middle class, who had years of a comfortable life from having previously enjoyed a high-paying job at a pharmaceutical company before starting his own tech company, really was impressed by what I had to offer skill-wise, but he would not hire me. The excuse he gave for not being interested in hiring me, the poor marginalized older lady with no income in desperate need of a job, was that I’d have to commute since I have no money to be able to relocate closer to Cleveland.
He said driving that distance every day would be “too hard for me” — as if having NO income, going hungry, utility shut-offs, doing without medical and dental care, and not having any money to buy any clothing since 2004, somehow isn’t too hard for me? He expressed interest in hiring the much younger privileged middle class white male who was also talking with him and asked him for his business card after declining to take one of mine.
Even “POC-owned” businesses, whom you would think would be just a little more sympathetic to destitute job-seekers who are being economically excluded due to discrimination, won’t hire poor marginalized 50 year old women. I could have used the money spent on getting my business cards made up on some badly needed plus-size clothing instead — at least I’d have something to wear besides two pairs of threadbare plus-size leggings and a pair of holy Ford pajama bottoms that are falling apart, which is the only clothing I have to wear because I haven’t been able to afford to buy any clothes since 2004.
“Female over age 50” does not mean my student loan debt is automatically paid off, or that food, clothing, housing, utilities and healthcare are now magically free for me just because no one will hire poor marginalized older women who are trafficking survivors like me after I struggled around the obstacles of abject poverty to learn and build a difficult skillset much later in life than all these privileged rich kids of ANY race who grew up with computers that got good jobs handed to them — opportunities that are denied to me by sexist, classist, and ageist employers and their socio-economically privileged gatekeepers, after I paid far more than my fair share of dues in life to be deserving of a chance for a good life.
Since NOBODY (at least, not any reputable employers that actually pay you and offer health benefits without you having to hound them for your paycheck while your electric gets shut off causing your food to spoil) hires 50 year old women for ANYTHING, my Patreon offering computer programming learning materials is my ONLY source for getting any kind of sustainable income as a poor 50 yr old trafficking survivor, and they’re so selfish they won’t even support me through that — after I’ve paid far more than my fair share of dues in life than ANY of those spoiled selfish privileged people ever had to!
My truth makes them uncomfortable, and we all know how these privileged special snowflakes are about their “right”to be comfortable taking priority over poor marginalized oppressed people’s basic human rights, don’t we? The privileged classes created this problem and now they are forcing society’s poorest and most disadvantaged and marginalized people to pay for it — through social cleansing.
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