Things Survivors Wish You Knew: Citlali's Story
By Citlali Martinez, ECPAT-USA Survivors’ Council Member
Trigger Warning: The following is a true story of a survivor of human trafficking. This story includes sensitive language surrounding sexual assault. Please consider this before reading further.
My name is Citlali Martinez and I am a 25-year old non-binary parent from Delaware. I am also a survivor of child sex trafficking. I am sharing my story with the hope that it will teach people to recognize the signs of trafficking so that what happened to me doesn’t happen to anyone else.
I was raised by an amazing hard-working mother. Unfortunately, my father was a very physically and verbally abusive alcoholic. Since my mother was working and never home, we had to deal with his abuse while she wasn’t around. I started self harming when I was 12 years old and looking for an escape from what was going on at home. Eventually I got tired of having to come home and deal with a belligerent alcoholic father, so I ran away to California with a little bit of money that I had made working random neighborhood jobs.
Truth be told, my travel was easier than I expected. Nobody really questioned why a 12-year-old was traveling alone. I was never asked for any kind of documentation or even where my parents were. When I arrived in California I stayed with family, but unfortunately it didn't work out. I felt like an unwelcome burden and so I ultimately ended up on the streets of East Los Angeles. Most nights I would sleep in a park and during the day I would panhandle or just wander around. I met some other kids around my age who would smoke weed and skate at the park. We became friends and started hanging out regularly. They looked out for me for a while and showed me the safe places where I could sleep.
I ended up meeting a girl about the same age I was at the time and it was obvious to her that I was desperate and disheveled, hadn’t been eating or showering, and didn’t look like I belonged. She told me that if I wanted to make some money, all I had to do was hang out with her and her friends for the night—we would smoke, drink, and just relax, and I could shower and they would give me clothes. Being the naïve child that I was, I went with her alone.
Once I got to this big house, I sensed that something was wrong because there were a lot of grown men there. I was quickly bathed, my clothes were changed, and then they locked me in a room. Once I was in that room, I knew that I had made a big mistake trusting this girl. I was held in that room for a couple days and forced to take heroin so that I would be more subservient. This resulted in a six-year heroin addiction with many attempts at getting clean. I was held in that home for a couple years and during that time I developed what I think was Stockholm syndrome and did unspeakable things. I defended my trafficker to the other girls in the home, and even at one point helped my trafficker look after the girls to make sure that they were doing what he wanted them to be doing.
My relationship with my trafficker caused me a lot of trauma and affected a lot of my future romantic relationships. I entered a lot of my romantic relationships out of survival or loneliness and even ended up in a couple of abusive relationships because it felt like that’s all I deserved after escaping my trafficker. Even after I was no longer being trafficked, I was still addicted to heroin and didn’t have knowledge of the help that is out there for survivors. Because of this, I resorted to sex work to take care of myself and maintain my addiction which unfortunately led me into a deeper hole.
I didn’t see a lot of hope in my recovery journey until I met Dr. Titchen, Lori Cohen, and other lawyers who have helped me along the way. My recovery has not been easy at all, as there weren’t a lot of resources for survivors in Delaware where I live. More than anything, I needed support with my mental health in the means of therapy, a proper diagnosis and medication. It was extremely hard to get that—it took me about a year and a half to find a decent therapist.
I’m now in a much better place. I’ve been clean for over six years, I have a stable job and I’m raising a beautiful two-year-old child. I have a very supportive group of friends and a very supportive parent. I wish that there were more resources for survivors after escaping trafficking such as housing, education programs and back to work programs. People don’t understand the complexity of our trauma. It was hard for me to be in a group of men for a really long time, so I wasn’t able to take advantage of GED classes or free workshops to help me get back into the workforce. This made me feel like I wasn’t able to try as hard as I could have, but I know it’s not my fault. I am thankful for the opportunities that ECPAT-USA has provided to me—it’s definitely helped throughout the pandemic to keep me busy and motivated to keep doing the work and keep putting my story out there so that I can help as many people as I possibly can.