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One Family’s Fight to Save Their Daughter From Human Trafficking

By Jamie Winston

Grace grew up in Katy, TX, a once quiet little suburb on Houston’s westside, that attracts new families from all over the country with their many district awards and achievements. Despite the opulence of suburban districts like Katy ISD, trafficking is increasing in suburban areas across the country. Grace’s story starts like so many young girls but took a very dark turn when she turned 18. This story begins with Grace as she made her second attempt to leave the life of Human Sex Trafficking after being trafficked for one year. How it all started, what hurt her the most, and what contributed to her choices. The broken system from the top down has failed Grace, and her family, who are working tirelessly to save her life. This story is about the devastation of being pulled back into the hell that is “the life” and powerless to break the psychological grip that her traffickers had on her. Her story should inspire the community and lawmakers to step up and fight to change the broken system that is stealing the lives of so many of our children.

Grace’s life was pretty standard until she turned 12. That was the age that everything in her world would change. At 11, Grace was a student-athlete, attended church with her family, and was an honor roll student. She was tall and pretty with dark blonde hair and beautiful blue eyes, so she did what most girls her age do (what all of her friends were doing) and tried out for cheerleading. That year Grace didn’t make the squad but her best friends did. These weren’t just any friends, they had been in girl scouts and YMCA volleyball with her since kindergarten. She was disappointed that she didn’t make it, but she and her friends still had volleyball, which was enough for her. On her 12th birthday, Grace invited all of her best friends (now cheerleaders) to her small birthday party at

Part ll in our Series on Houston Prostitution

the neighborhood park. She had a cake, balloons, and plans to hang out and play volleyball (because that is what they all still had in common). That day is the day that Grace describes as the worst day of her life, which is pretty powerful given what she has been through. Someone left Grace left sitting at the park waiting for her “friends” who all said they would come. What she didn’t know is that her friends, as a group decision, leaving her waiting for them, sobbing at the park, at her birthday party, would send the message that she wasn’t good enough for them anymore because she wasn’t “one of them anymore.” Grace was devastated, and when she returned to school the following Monday, the bullying only got worse. Grace told me that story with tears in her eyes and said, “that’s the moment I decided,I would never trust anyone who says they are my friend”. She shut down emotionally, craving acceptance but never trusting that it would be genuine. Through junior high and high school Grace continued to play sports, continued to attend church, but emotionally she continued to carry the hurt that her friends had caused her that day of her 12th birthday and the years of bullying that followed. In high school, Grace struggled with the inability to feel confident enough to make friends. She struggled with her self esteem and was suffering from depression, and even had thoughts of suicide. That is also when she started hanging out with a couple of kids similarly situated from a social aspect. They were smoking pot and drinking, so she tried it too, and discovered not only how easy it was to get but also the escape it provided her from the pain of the bullying and torment that she had suffered at the hands of her once best friends. Drugs and alcohol were her escape, and they allowed her to be someone else. In her own words, she felt like for once; she could be free. During her senior year (now 17 almost 18 years old), she did not want to go to school; she just wanted to be done, so her parents (not wanting her to drop out) compromised and allowed her to participate in a smaller “high school” in the district. It offered an accelerated program to help kids finish school at their own pace, and for most, much faster. The problem was that this small campus connects to the district’s Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Program (JJAEP). The JJAEP campus consists of some of the most troubled youth in the community who have committed serious offenses that allowed the district to deem them unsafe to be present at their home campus. While attending her accelerated program, she was around JJAEP students (imagine being at a restaurant when a bus full of prisoners comes to

eat). On the shared school bus with one of the JJAEP students, she is invited to hang out and smoke weed.

For the first time since junior high, Grace felt like maybe she could fit in and possibly even have friends who didn’t think she wasn’t good enough. While hanging out with these new kids, under the influence of marijuana, they asked her to try meth for the first time. They convinced her that it was fun and would make her forget all of her problems. She didn’t want to disappoint or lose her new friends, so she tried it, and she liked it. Over the next several weeks, she started pulling away from her family. Although she continued to go to school and work, she was rapidly spiraling out of control. She spent more and more time with her new friends using drugs and falling further and further into addiction. Soon after, she turned 18 and decided she didn’t want to go home anymore because her parents were “too strict and didn’t want her to use drugs and alcohol”. Grace temporarily stayed with a friend and his mom, but that was short-lived because of her addiction. She continued to finish school and her parents were trying to work with her, keep her as close as they could, and keep an eye on her. The police had already told them that because she was 18, she could leave if she wanted to.

One morning in September, Grace was found sleeping outside her high school by one of her counselors. The counselor consulted with a second counselor and decided to take her into Houston to a homeless shelter near Montrose, which Grace knew nothing about. This shelter was for homeless teens, and every night there is a lottery drawing for beds. If you draw a bed, you get to sleep inside, and if you don’t, you have to figure it out on the street. It was on a night Grace was sleeping in the cold at a gas station, with nothing but a borrowed hoodie for warmth, when she is approached by a man twice her age. He offers to let her sleep in his hotel room, and out of the cold. This man would become her “boyfriend” and her first pimp. Grace was an 18-year-old high school senior, who had developed a drug habit, was insecure, and vulnerable. She was the perfect target.

Grace would spend an entire year being trafficked all over Houston, Dallas, Austin, the midwest and the east coast. During that year, Grace filed charges against one of her traffickers. She walked right into a police station and asked for help. They took her report and gave her a cell phone to reach her, the DA accepted the charges, and to date, no arrest has been made, although her trafficker is currently out on bond on a separate trafficking charge. No one offered her services or a way out. Grace went to the hospital numerous times with abdominal pain from damage done to her

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