"We were the lucky ones"

This blog entry is one of the reasons I do what I do.  This is why be Lovely is so important to me.  This is how lives are changed.  Most of this blog will not be my writing, but writing of a friend who came to me asking how she could help with be Lovely.  She has that same passion as I do, just with a different story.  I asked her if she would be willing to write out her story and have me share it with the community that follows be Lovely.  Stories change people and I believe by telling her story, lives will be changed and redemption had.

Now, this is real. By real I mean, this actually happened. By real I mean, these are the harsh realities that have been unmasked.  I believe that people need to hear those harsh realities in all their intensity so there is no room for being ignorant if you choose to read.  So prepare yourself to get a glimpse of what I would describe hell on earth for a young child.

The Truth

I never had a childhood.  Not in the real sense of the word.  It was stolen from me before I was old enough to know what that meant.  My brothers, sisters, and I were the victims of child abuse. 

When most people trade memories of their earliest memories, I stay silent.  I have no memories of the time before I was rescued- only nightmares.  I have a nightmare of my older sister running to get my baby sister, who couldn’t even walk, off of the stairs as the man I knew as a father threw the woman who called herself mother down them.  I have memories of being chased by the cops while we were in a white van… to this day, I still start shaking when I see white vans.  I have memories of being so hungry, that eventually your body stops registering it as hunger.  Of watching a six-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl divvy out ketchup and spinach to their three younger siblings, because that “mother” and her “boyfriend” left all of us alone for over a month, and that was all there was to eat.  And, when that disgusting fare was gone, wishing for more of it. 

I have other memories as well.  Much, much worse.  Of being told that a body part tastes like butter.  Of being forced to watch people have sex.  Of being forced to have sex- both with those three adults, and my siblings.  I have memories of standing, huddled in a corner, all five of us, not making a sound.  Of them raping us right there, in front of each other, and thinking that that was normal.  All they had to say was “Next.”  It would only be worse if we tried to fight- the sex was bad enough, but they would find other ways to violate our bodies.  They would whip our behinds until they bled, with a belt, and then rape us anally.  That was if we were lucky.  If we weren’t, they would starve us, and punish us that way.  No, the only time that we fought back was to defend the baby.  I remember the “mother” coming over and grabbing the baby from my sister’s arms, and that my sister screamed and ran after her, wrenching her from their grasp and shoving her at us.  Of her giving herself to them, so that they stopped going after that tiny innocent.  We were all afraid for our lives, but even then, we all knew that she would die if they did that to her tiny body. 

Finally, we were told the worst news of all.  It happened one morning, when we were staying in a run-down motel.  That my sister was “old enough to earn a living,” and that we “would all have to learn”.  That they were selling her.  That didn’t make sense to us.  Then they told us that she wouldn’t come back.  My sister started to scream, and fight, as they dragged us to the door.  He punched her, hard, and told her to shut up and “be nice”, or they’d hurt the baby.   Then the door opened.  A man stood there.  None of us made a sound, including my sister.  They all spoke in whispered sentences, and then all sorts of things happened at once.  I don’t remember much of it, except that we were all ushered out of the house and into a bunch of cars.  They tried to split us up, and I remember shrieking when they pulled my older sister away from me.  A cop had to grab me and shake me, so that I would listen to him.  He said that they weren’t taking her away, but we all had to go to the station- that they were the Police, and we were finally safe.  I didn’t know what that meant.  I kept asking if that meant that my sister got to stay, and not stopping until he said that yes, they would try to keep us all together.

We were the lucky ones.  Every year, there are hundreds of children who do not get rescued.  And the rescue of the foster care system is, in some cases, worse than the situation these children have left.  Some of the parents rape the children, and some beat them mercilessly, treating them like slaves.  But these particular children never fully trust, anyway.  The boys usually have so much anger, that they end up on the wrong side of the law, with juvenile and criminal records.  A lot of people label them “unsalvageable”, because they can’t be trained to be good members of society.  And the girls, statistically, prostitute themselves by the time that they are twelve, and kill themselves before they turn eighteen.  This is not happening in some foreign country; this is the United States of America. 

I have a friend who confided that her mother sold her to a drug dealer for a hit, and that she was raped by multiple men that night.  She was twelve.  And her mother, when she came to pick her up, told her to sit in the back, because she didn’t want to ride beside a “slut”.  That girl joined the Army to change her fate. 

Our daughters and sons face this, every day.  And the world continues on in blissful ignorance.  I now have a friend who recently told me that he has a porn addiction.  It started as normal things.  Then he started to watch things that were slightly more daring, slightly more violent.  He said that it is now to the point where he looks up pictures of nude families, to see the children.  That that is all that stops him, because seeing the children makes him hate himself. 

We all hear of the criminals as though they are “born that way.”  I challenge you to think differently, and to realize that they are created.  That somehow, at some time in their life, they started inching their moral boundaries over bit by bit, until their perspective of right and wrong became so skewed that they no longer saw that the people that they were hurting were more important than their hunger.   People don’t like this perspective- it’s dangerous.  You see, the perspective that it is about choice, and addiction, and a desire to rebel, means that any of us is capable of becoming that monster.  It means that, if we don’t take reign of ourselves, and own our brothers and sisters of the world as “our responsibility”, then we share partial blame for what happens.  That the choice to look the other way is not the right one, and that the only way that this can stop is to put people before things.  That somebody else’s needs outweigh your own.  Recognize the consequences of turning on that little bit of porn before bed, or after your wife is asleep.   That when a girl or boy is standing on a street corner, she/ he didn’t ask for that life.  No matter how much you try to tell yourself that she/he is an adult, and it was “their choice”, please force yourself to remember my story.  That girl could have been me, so easily.  And that boy one of my brothers. 

Everyone was a child.  Not all of us got to experience what that is supposed to mean.  But the choice to change that for the next generation begins with you and me.

I want to thank my friend for being brave.  Its not easy to put yourself out there. But her heart is to bring awareness and redemption.  My goal for be Lovely has always been a way that stories like this could be shared. Voices that have been unheard....heard.  If you have a story that relates to human trafficking that you would like to share, please, send it to me.  I will be making a tab on the be Lovely site for stories to be shared. be Lovely is an outlet for people to bring awareness from wearing the makeup to telling their story.  email: rachel@belovely.com