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Former sex slave shares story
USINFO | 2013-08-14 14:36
Chong Kim can tell you what about the harsh realities of human trafficking and what it takes to survive. A survivor of sex trafficking within the United States, Kim is now working to educate the masses about human trafficking and its American ties.
TinaMarie Craven: From 1995 to 1997, you were a sex slave in a human trafficking ring. How did this happen?
Chong Kim: Well, actually I met this guy who I thought was my boyfriend, and unlike a lot of fictional human trafficking stories where it happens in one day, this guy, I was convinced that he was my boyfriend. And so when you’re that in love, you don’t think about, “OK, he’s going to traffic me,” if that makes sense. So we were living in Dallas, Texas, and he told me about after two or three weeks of us dating, and he said to me, “I want to take you out of state to go meet my parents.” And my girlfriend said that if a guy says that to you that he likes you, so there was no ‘be careful’ — none of that. I was real excited. I call it the Cinderella syndrome, where we write our names with their last names and future kids’ names. But what happened was instead of ending up in Florida where he said he was going to take me, I ended up in Oklahoma handcuffed to a doorknob in an abandoned house, and from that point on, he contacted the traffickers to come pick me up. So I was transported to Nevada.
TC:How did you escape?
CK: It took a series of planning — it’s not a one-day thing. The first year I was in there, I literally became numb, I thought I was going to die as a sex slave. … When I started to become defiant with the traffickers, the traffickers would look at the girls we were close to, and with that, they would actually tie us to a chair and make us watch the girl that we were close to or the child we were close to get tortured, sodomized and raped for hours and hours on end. We went through beatings, we were held in the bathtub with ice, so from that point on, the only way I felt that I could get out was — it’s kind of like you’re in this hole, [and] you have rocks around you, [and] the way you get out is to climb out and get to the people on top, which are the traffickers. Basically, I had to manipulate my way to carve out their power, to make them think that I was on their side to free myself. And that’s how I got away.
TinaMarie Craven: From 1995 to 1997, you were a sex slave in a human trafficking ring. How did this happen?
Chong Kim: Well, actually I met this guy who I thought was my boyfriend, and unlike a lot of fictional human trafficking stories where it happens in one day, this guy, I was convinced that he was my boyfriend. And so when you’re that in love, you don’t think about, “OK, he’s going to traffic me,” if that makes sense. So we were living in Dallas, Texas, and he told me about after two or three weeks of us dating, and he said to me, “I want to take you out of state to go meet my parents.” And my girlfriend said that if a guy says that to you that he likes you, so there was no ‘be careful’ — none of that. I was real excited. I call it the Cinderella syndrome, where we write our names with their last names and future kids’ names. But what happened was instead of ending up in Florida where he said he was going to take me, I ended up in Oklahoma handcuffed to a doorknob in an abandoned house, and from that point on, he contacted the traffickers to come pick me up. So I was transported to Nevada.
TC:How did you escape?
CK: It took a series of planning — it’s not a one-day thing. The first year I was in there, I literally became numb, I thought I was going to die as a sex slave. … When I started to become defiant with the traffickers, the traffickers would look at the girls we were close to, and with that, they would actually tie us to a chair and make us watch the girl that we were close to or the child we were close to get tortured, sodomized and raped for hours and hours on end. We went through beatings, we were held in the bathtub with ice, so from that point on, the only way I felt that I could get out was — it’s kind of like you’re in this hole, [and] you have rocks around you, [and] the way you get out is to climb out and get to the people on top, which are the traffickers. Basically, I had to manipulate my way to carve out their power, to make them think that I was on their side to free myself. And that’s how I got away.
