Things Survivors Wish You Knew: Hannah's Story
By Hannah Blair, Survivor and Dressember Blog Contributor
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 childhood made me the perfect target for sex trafficking. Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse constructed my reality and caused me to live most of my teen years believing nobody could ever want me or love me. We often talk about the things that make someone vulnerable to trafficking, like poverty or addiction, but I think one of the biggest risk factors we leave out is loneliness. My abuse and feelings of loneliness made me vulnerable and the more vulnerable you are, the more powerful traffickers become.
When I was 21, I met a military man who promised me the world. He was everything I dreamed of, the type of man my parents taught me to wait for. He was perfect… until he wasn’t.
It started with little things - little things that I dismissed or made excuses for because I was so desperate for the love he gave. Abuse was normal for me; it felt woven into my identity. So, I took the beatings and bruises if it meant I got the love. I let him break my body if it meant he “fixed” it afterwards. Once the abuse started, things spiraled very quickly.
I don’t know how many times I was bought and raped during my exploitation. I read a testimony from another survivor that she was raped 43,200 times in the span of a year; I was trafficked for a year. I drank constantly to get through the day, and drank constantly to get through the night. He tracked everything I did—where I went, who I talked to—so I was extremely isolated. I had to go to the ER multiple times for stitches and x-rays. I have stood naked in the middle of a room while men bid on what a night with me was worth.
There’s an assumption with trafficking survivors that physical safety equates psychological and emotional safety, but that just isn’t true. I think people underestimate what it takes to heal from trafficking. Physically getting out of the harmful situation is 2% of the journey. The other 98% is the hard, long-term work of healing that follows.
In many ways, healing after my trafficking experience was much more difficult than the trafficking itself. I went from having every single decision made for me, every word spoken for me, and everything done for me to being thrown into a world where I all of a sudden had to do all of that for myself. Despite the trauma that I went through, I was expected to know how to live in society as a normal young adult - how to have relationships and maintain a job and go to school. But the reality was that I didn’t know how.
Finding out I was pregnant with my son became the turning point in my story. I stopped simply surviving and began seeking resources to help me thrive. I wanted to be the best mom I could be, and I knew that started with working through all the awful things I had been through. I began seeing a trauma therapist and got involved with a local anti-trafficking organization, who helped me get on my feet and provided me with financial resources and a support system. I started pursuing my Bachelors in Sociology and began taking medication to help me with my C-PTSD. With these vital resources, I was able to flourish and now I’m able to share my story to help educate others and bring awareness to the realities of trafficking.
I didn’t need some extravagant rescue team breaking down my trafficker’s door to come in and carry me to safety. I needed the urgent care clinic to notice that it wasn't normal that I visited seven times in the span of a couple weeks for recurrent UTIs. I needed my teacher to notice how I went from having perfect attendance and straight A’s to failing tests and not showing up for class.
We have to change the cultural narrative about trafficking. Honestly, for lack of a better word, I feel fighting trafficking has become almost a fad. But anti-trafficking advocacy isn’t some bandwagon trend. Like the way we see an influx of anti-trafficking campaigns around the Super Bowl or National Human Trafficking Awareness Day, as if trafficking doesn’t exist outside the bounds of these two events. But it does, for so many of us.
And it’s time we are seen. Will you notice?