OFM culture
Human Trafficking A Survivor Shares Their Story by Alice Roberts
at the time, though, was that this club was actually also a trafficking ring. They were trafficking people out of this club,” Quinn says. The trafficking ring, Quinn continues, was “basically city-funded,” as many police officers, city officials, and politicians were involved. In this system, Quinn was trafficked for over a year. They were only freed from the abuse when they attempted suicide and were admitted into a psychiatric hospital. Stories like Quinn’s are all-too-common in the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to be trafficked within the country every year. In Colorado, 176 human trafficking cases were reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline in 2019, though many more cases go unreported. Labor trafficking, which occurs when an individual is forced, coerced, or frauded into performing labor services, is common, although most human trafficking cases are classified as sex trafficking.
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uinn was only 16, a junior in high school, when they first became a victim of human trafficking. Stifled by the Roman Catholic community in which they grew up, Quinn wanted a way out. “In my early-mid teens, I was always surrounding my life around planning to get out of where I was raised,” Quinn says. “So, when I was in high school, I ended up starting to work at a strip club on the southside of Chicago.” As a minor induced in commercial sex, Quinn’s job was already sex trafficking under U.S. law. But Quinn’s situation only worsened with time. One night, Quinn’s high school teacher unexpectedly came to the club. Knowing Quinn was underage, he threatened to report the club owner if he wasn’t granted private sessions with Quinn every week. “What that teacher didn’t know
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Homeless, LGBTQ youth are especially vulnerable to human trafficking, and especially sex trafficking. A study from the Hollywood Homeless Youth Partnership found that homeless, LGBTQ youth were more than three times as likely to engage in survival sex than homeless, non-LGBTQ youth. According to a study from Loyola University, homeless, LGBTQ youth were twice as likely to have been sex trafficked at some point than their non-LGBTQ counterparts. Quinn emphasized the complexities that exist within the sex trafficking sphere. As an adult, Quinn has consensually worked in the sex industry. They described how consensual sex work often exists on a spectrum of consent. “In one day, you can wake up in the morning, be consenting to sex work, be trafficked in the afternoon, and then be back to doing what you need to do,” they says. “I think trafficking gets this black-and-white picture sometimes … and that really isn’t the case for a lot of people,” they continue.
