The Beginning: How I Entered the Sex Trade

Before I ever understood that I was being trafficked, I was already vulnerable, hurting and searching for connection in ways that made me easy to exploit. This is the story of how I entered the sex trade. It's not the full story of my trafficking experience but the beginning of a path I didn’t yet recognize as extremely dangerous. There are a lot of unanswered questions and confusion I still have to this day about my story and deep down I sometimes still feel I am to blame for the choices I made and what happened to me. I was 21 when I was first introduced to the sex trade. I was young, naive and careless. I wanted excitement, adventure and most of all money. I was a month away from going to university for the first time, I had an apartment picked out and a dream of becoming an occupational therapist with a program waiting for me. I was going to help people and make the world a better place, or so I thought. I was working two different waitressing jobs in my small town and working a lot of hours to save up for schooling and my future. In this time, I was struggling with my mental health and self-worth amongst other things and smoked a lot of weed to cope. I didn't have a lot of friends and the ones I did have only wanted to spend time with me because they thought they might have a chance of sleeping with me or because I had money to pay for weed. All of these relationships felt incredibly transactional and left me feeling used and worthless. I felt if  I had disappeared they wouldn't even care or notice because I could be so easily replaced. At the same time, I longed to be loved and valued, so I tried to find it in all the wrong places. I made a tinder account to find validation in sex as if it could somehow fill the void I felt so deeply in my chest. I wasn't longing for sex, what I really craved was connection and intimacy after so many superficial relationships.

After meeting up with a few people from tinder, I was drugged, raped and thrown out of the apartment after the act was done. I was so ashamed. I sat in my car crying for hours waiting for whatever I was drugged with to wear off so I could finally drive home back to safety and pretend the nightmare I was living had never happened. This moment stuck with me as I knew it wasn't my fault and I had said no but trauma has a way of distorting logic and I was sickened with the thought that that's what tinder is for, right? Who was I to deny him sex when I was the one had come to his apartment. I really hated myself after that.  I thought I was a disgusting slut and that I would never be able to wear a white dress on my wedding day because I was so dirty and unpure. At this point my mental health really declined and I thought there had to be a way I could take my power back. My warped thinking was if people could do this to me then I would make them pay for it, so I was always the winner in the end no matter how bad I felt. I think because I had no self-confidence left, I didn't care what happened to me as long as I could make more money I could forget about all of this in a month when I moved away for university.

So I decided to go online and find a sugar daddy. I had seen it glamorized on social media and that it was easy way to make a lot of money.  I ended up making an account on a website and had men messaging me to see me. They wanted to pay me to have dinner with them and all sorts of other stuff. I felt like I was in control when really, I wasn't at all. It was thrilling and new but I was so naive to the dangerous world I was getting myself into. At midnight one night a man messaged me on the website to ask if I wanted to make 1000$ a day and I jumped at the opportunity. I had been working ridiculous hours to make that much in a 2 week period and I thought damn if I could make that much in one day all of my problems would be over. I'd stop feeling the way I did and I could create a whole new reality for myself, one where no bad things could happen to me. The man said he would tell me how to make that much if I drove to Toronto in the middle of the night. Knowing how dangerous this was, I snuck out of my parents' house and drove an hour to Toronto because I just didn't care about myself or my safety anymore and I thought this could be my ticket to a better life. When I got there, he told me I could be a dancer (which is another term for stripper in the game) and make lots of money without sleeping with anybody. Because I had sexual trauma, I was excited I could make money without having to have sex. Before I left, he raped me and filmed it on his cell phone. I was so scared and in disbelief that this had happened again. After saying no a few times I gave in and let my body go limp.  It's not like this hadn't happened before, so I let it run its course. I left feeling disgusted with myself yet again but also clinging to the belief that money could help me forget. A week later I worked my first shift at the strip club. It was terrifying and exciting all at the same time. I had never been inside a strip club before and everything was so different and weird. There were so many unspoken rules that I was just supposed to know, I felt so unprepared as this was a completely new world with its own set of politics. After working a 4 hour shift I had made my first 500$ that was all mine. I was shocked, excited and so thrilled that all of my pain wasn't for nothing. I was still working both waitressing jobs but on weekends after my shift ended I would drive an hour to the club and work until 2 in the morning to make even more money and then drive an hour back home again. From there making money became like a drug to me. I felt completely awful about myself, what I was doing and my life but I felt alive when I was making fast money. It made me feel outside of myself like I didn't have to be the girl who was raped and taken advantage of, I could be someone else entirely with a different name, different look and different story. Don't get me wrong, I hated the actual act of stripping and working in the club. The men were mean, rude, entitled, degrading, violent, didn't ask for consent but did ask for all sorts of other disgusting acts. But, after all I had been through the money seemed worth it to me if I avoided these strange requests. It was a way to escape my reality, myself and my feelings. I thought I had found a way to survive, to ease my pain and to take back control of my life.

But what felt like empowerment at the time was really a trauma response shaped by exploitation I didn’t yet understand. And this was my introduction into the sex trade.

-    Baby