0:00
(upbeat music)
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- This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:21
I'm your host Kyle Thompson, let's get into it.
0:23
Our guys today, we have two people on the show
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and that is Alan Smith and Jessica Midkiff.
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And so they're the co-authors of the book,
0:30
Men Fight For Me, the role of authentic masculinity
0:33
in ending sexual exploitation and trafficking.
0:36
So both of them work with a nonprofit called Saving Innocence.
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That's an organization that basically serves and empowers
0:42
and advocates for child victims of sex trafficking.
0:44
Alan is the executive director for Saving Innocence
0:48
and Jessica is actually a survivor of sex trafficking.
0:51
So she was sold for sex thousands of times
0:54
over a 10 year period in her life while she was a child
0:57
and she spent the last decade plus advocating for it
1:00
and helping younger victims of sex trafficking
1:02
basically regain their mental and physical health
1:04
and their faculties.
1:05
And it's just an amazing thing
1:07
that we were able to even talk to her.
1:08
But this is gonna be a little bit different
1:10
than we've done interviews in the past,
1:11
especially when we've had two other guests.
1:13
So the first person I'm gonna talk to is Alan by himself.
1:15
And we're gonna talk about the book.
1:16
We're gonna talk about some of the things
1:18
that go into sex trafficking in the United States
1:20
and some numbers and some things to look for.
1:22
It's a really good time and a good interview with him.
1:24
And then I'm just gonna go right in.
1:26
There's not gonna be a break there in the middle.
1:27
Maybe there'll be an ad that pops up,
1:28
but then we're gonna go right into my conversation with Jessica.
1:31
And this is what I need to say.
1:32
I talked to her for a long length of time.
1:34
She and I did speak off air before I started recording
1:37
the interview.
1:38
And so if any of my questions, they shouldn't,
1:41
they shouldn't, but I have to kind of, you know,
1:42
cover my butt in for some of this type of stuff.
1:44
If any of my questions seem like they were inappropriate
1:47
or a little bit too personal or a little bit too direct,
1:50
she and I spoke about that off air
1:51
and we spoke about it again, off air.
1:53
She was completely fine with all my questions.
1:55
She's had some bad interviews
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where people were in her words being kind of voyeuristic,
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asking her incredibly specific personal questions
2:03
that, you know, was basically serving that person individually.
2:06
It wasn't serving an audience of any kind.
2:08
So we definitely didn't cross that threshold
2:09
or cross that line.
2:10
But guys, this is a heavy one.
2:12
This is a heavy one today.
2:13
The subject matter obviously is very, very heavy, but guys,
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if we're gonna be serious about pushing back darkness,
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'cause here at Undonk's life, again,
2:20
our mission is equipping them to push back darkness.
2:22
If we're gonna be serious about that,
2:24
we can't just walk around with our eyes closed.
2:26
Pretending like these things don't happen.
2:28
And we can't walk around all day
2:29
just sanitizing things that are happening
2:31
and just not even really engaging with what could be happening.
2:34
'Cause there's some calls to action
2:36
with this particular podcast
2:37
and within the book, if you get it and read it and you should.
2:39
But the thing about it is,
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is there is so much evil in this world
2:42
that could be stopped if men just said no more.
2:45
Not on my watch, it's not happening, right?
2:48
And so that's the encouragement
2:49
to a lot of you guys do not skip this one
2:51
because it might be a little bit uncomfortable.
2:53
Lean into this content, all right?
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So without further ado, let's get into it.
2:57
- Alan Smith, welcome to Undonk's Life of Man's podcast.
3:01
- Thank you so much, happy to be here.
3:03
- Yeah, I'm glad to have you here.
3:04
I'm glad to, well, I'm actually not glad
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to talk about this subject matter,
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but it's an incredibly, incredibly important matter
3:09
that we're gonna be discussing today.
3:10
I already warned the guys in the intro.
3:12
It's gonna be a little bit of a rougher one,
3:14
but we're just gonna kind of lean into it.
3:16
But as a means of introduction, I guess,
3:18
could you just briefly give us a little bit
3:20
of your professional background
3:22
and how you ended up almost like backing in
3:24
into working in the ending sex trafficking industry,
3:27
if there is such a thing?
3:29
- Yeah, my name is Alan Smith.
3:31
I'm the executive director of Saving Innocence,
3:34
an 11 year old anti-human trafficking agency.
3:37
And we focused on the recovery and restoration
3:41
of child victims of sex trafficking.
3:43
And I've been with the agency for six years.
3:46
So most of my adult life, I was going another direction.
3:48
It was on the Young Life staff,
3:50
faith-based organization, nonprofit, working with kids,
3:53
all over the place, all kinds of kids,
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and not specifically any kid that was trafficked
3:58
or anything like that.
3:59
But after 25 years on that Young Life staff,
4:02
it was time for a new challenge, a new change.
4:04
And so I stepped away not knowing what the next step was,
4:07
but I'd heard about Saving Innocence the year before.
4:10
And something stood out to me as a dad with a daughter.
4:14
Now you don't have to be a dad.
4:15
You don't have to be a daughter to care about this,
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but I believe that dads who have daughters,
4:19
it hits differently in a little different kind of way.
4:22
And it did for me too.
4:23
So I cold called him and cold texted the founder
4:26
and went and met with her and I heard the two hour version
4:30
on a one hour parking meter and got a ticket in the process.
4:34
And I was immediately in because like most guys
4:38
and most people out there, I know your audience
4:40
is predominantly men and that's predominantly my focus,
4:43
my lane is I'm challenging men to look at this crime.
4:46
Most men don't think of it in terms of here,
4:49
big in our country, they think about it in Cambodia
4:52
or some other place across the land.
4:55
And so here we are, I'm here,
4:57
I'm exactly where I wanna be right now.
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It's a great space for me to be in,
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to challenge men and protect children.
5:04
- Well, let's go ahead and kind of dig in a little bit further
5:06
because everyone has heard sex trafficking,
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they've heard of child sex trafficking,
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they've heard of these things,
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but they're almost like just, they're on the periphery.
5:13
They don't really understand.
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So if you could, and this isn't a quiz by any means,
5:16
but I know you know a lot of this by heart,
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give us some numbers and some data
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to give our audience an idea of just how big a problem
5:23
this is right now specifically in the United States.
5:26
And even beyond that, I think one thing that was shocking
5:28
that I read in the book that we're gonna talk about here
5:30
in a second is that the average age
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of someone's entry into being sex trafficked
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is 12 years old.
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Now that's the average, for those of you that aren't math majors,
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that means there's a significant portion of the people
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that are below the age of 12.
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But kind of make this come alive to us a little bit
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with some numbers.
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- Yeah, no, the people that count things,
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IJM is an organization that works internationally.
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That's what the I stands for.
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And they say 40 to 45 million people enslaved worldwide,
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globally, and that's more people enslaved than it is slavery.
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More people enslaved now than at any time in human history.
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If you bring it down now to our country,
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and that's where most people,
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if they've heard about child trafficking,
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and they've heard about sex trafficking,
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they probably have thought about those other countries.
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What they don't know is it's made it to our shores
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in a big way.
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We focus on the child victims of sex trafficking,
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which is repugnant and repulsive.
6:23
As you said, the average age of entry is about 12.
6:26
Again, people that kind of monitor all these stats,
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and I'll say this up front,
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it is hard to get a hard number
6:33
because it's not like a bank robbery.
6:35
We know exactly how many banks there are.
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It's robbed, there's video footage,
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27 banks outro.
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We know that.
6:40
This is in the shadows, it's in the darkness,
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it's hidden, it's not talked about.
6:46
But the best estimates, and I think honestly,
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this is conservatively probably a little bit low,
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the best estimates of children being trafficked
6:52
in the United States.
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And keep in mind, this is US-born American citizens.
6:57
These are not kids being shipped across the border,
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although that is happening to some degree for sure.
7:01
But those numbers are around 300,000
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near as we can tell, children being trafficked
7:06
at any given time.
7:08
We did some work in the state of Texas
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about a year and a half ago, two years ago.
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They asked us to come and consult with them
7:13
'cause they realized they had a big child trafficking problem.
7:17
And they determined there was 80 or 90,000 children
7:19
just in Texas alone.
7:22
And now you look at all the other big population centers
7:24
and you get to 300,000 pretty quickly and pretty easily.
7:27
- Yeah, I think by state,
7:29
the majority of our listeners to this show
7:30
are in the state of Texas.
7:31
And so that should be an eye opener for a lot of you guys
7:34
that, you know, there's this,
7:37
always I have this kind of weight on me that I might've been
7:40
in a diner somewhere, I might've been in a gas station
7:42
with someone that was being trafficked
7:43
and I was too busy trying to pick out what chips I wanted
7:46
or busy with something going on on my phone.
7:48
And it's just literally all around us.
7:49
And in the book, you know, you talk about, you know,
7:51
ways that you can kind of identify that.
7:53
But in the book, in the book that I keep alluding to
7:55
and then I keep talking about is a book called
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Men Fight For Me, the role of authentic masculinity
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in ending sexual exploitation and trafficking.
8:03
And we'll get into a lot as to kind of why you're framing
8:05
it that way, why you titled it that way.
8:07
But one thing that you brought up in the book
8:09
that I thought was very, very interesting
8:10
is the common misconceptions about how certain people
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end up getting into sex trafficking.
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You know, we watch movies like that are sensational,
8:18
like Take In or something like that.
8:20
And it's this big crazy thing over a couple of days
8:23
and then the people are kidnapped.
8:24
And things like that certainly do happen.
8:26
But what are some of the more common ways
8:28
that people end up being sex trafficked?
8:31
- Yeah, the most common way that we see
8:33
is the would-be pimp, the exploiter begins to masquerade
8:38
as a boyfriend, if you will.
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And he comes along, he begins a process
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where he's grooming her, if you will, befriending her,
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sees her at a bus stop or at a school
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or walking home somewhere.
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And that trafficker pretends to be a boyfriend
8:58
that pretends to be interested in her.
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And for about 80% of the kids that we're working with,
9:04
they're already in the foster care system.
9:07
And most of those kids have incurred a devastating,
9:12
a traumatic time period in their life
9:14
before the trafficker ever entered their picture.
9:15
They've been sexually abused, oftentimes,
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by those that are supposed to be close to them,
9:20
oftentimes family members, they put in the foster system.
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And now they're 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 years old.
9:26
And they are yearning for what everyone at that age
9:30
or any age is yearning for,
9:32
someone to pay attention to them, to notice them,
9:34
to care about them, to love them, someone to protect them.
9:38
All those kinds of things are sort of the human desires
9:40
of the heart of all of us.
9:42
And in walks is slightly older male, usually.
9:45
And he starts saying all those things
9:47
that she's always wanted to hear.
9:49
And for this particular child, she's never actually seen
9:53
a good, healthy version of a male in her life
9:55
that has protected and loved her appropriately.
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So she can't tell the difference.
10:00
She doesn't see the warning signs
10:01
because it seems better than she's ever had before.
10:04
And oftentimes, it actually is in the beginning.
10:06
And so they become romantically involved.
10:09
And at some point, it becomes clear that his intentions,
10:13
that she's a part of his business model.
10:15
And she realizes very quickly, she can't say no.
10:18
She'll be met with force, oftentimes lethal force,
10:21
if she were to run or say, I don't wanna do this.
10:24
But a lot of times, it's really interesting, Kyle,
10:27
because a lot of these young girls, mostly young girls,
10:30
they, in their mind, from what they can see,
10:35
they are willingly going along with it
10:37
because well, he's my boyfriend and he loves me.
10:41
And I love him.
10:42
And I've never had that before.
10:43
And she will likely do whatever he asks
10:46
without much resistance in the beginning.
10:49
And then it turns ugly and dangerous.
10:52
And she's not allowed to resist at that point.
10:54
So it's really tragic because he's playing.
10:56
They're predators, they're actual predators out there
10:57
praying on vulnerabilities, which is tragic.
11:00
- Yeah, and I've even seen documentaries
11:02
that have kind of looked at people
11:03
that are in the sex trafficking industry.
11:04
And you think about pimps, and that's just kind of
11:06
like a colloquial thing we say in rap songs now,
11:08
but it's an awful, horrific thing that pimps actually are.
11:11
They're not dudes riding around in fancy catlax,
11:13
or fancy suits.
11:14
And the center points of particular rap and hip hop songs,
11:18
like these are absolutely horrific,
11:19
satanic human beings, or they're acting,
11:21
at least in a satanic way.
11:22
But one thing that you described,
11:24
so you described in the book at a specific instance
11:26
where a young girl that was in college,
11:28
she was approached by a guy who gave her cards,
11:29
said, hey, I can be your modeling agent,
11:31
you're beautiful, you're the top 1% of women on the planet.
11:34
And then how it turned into, hey,
11:36
you need to go have sex with this guy,
11:37
hey, you need to go do this, this and this.
11:38
And I mean, you described it well there,
11:40
but you get into specifics in the book to a degree.
11:43
And in the book, you actually warned the reader
11:46
that there are some pretty intense stories
11:48
in the book and there are.
11:49
But then you have this little quote
11:50
that I found interesting.
11:51
He said, however, rest assured we won't stay
11:53
in the dark places too long.
11:55
Now, for me, and for what we do on this show is
11:58
we don't hide away from the dark places we dive into them
12:00
because, you know, our mission is equipping
12:02
men to push back darkness.
12:03
And if you don't know where the darkness actually lives,
12:05
or if you have the sanitized view of the darkness,
12:08
it's gonna be really, really hard for you
12:10
to push back against it.
12:11
And so from your perspective, help inform me
12:14
because you actually live and work in this world.
12:17
How valuable is it to be very explicit
12:20
about what's going on?
12:21
Because for me, when I tell someone about sex trafficking,
12:24
they're like, oh, man, that's horrible.
12:26
But then when I tell them an individual story
12:28
of a five year old girl that was raped 20 times in a night
12:31
by a street gang, then it hits them a little different.
12:34
Am I making sense?
12:36
- Oh, you're making total sense.
12:37
And we certainly don't shy away.
12:40
As you read the book, there's plenty of stories in there.
12:43
Jessica, my co-author tells her story
12:44
in her first person voice in chapter two,
12:47
talks about being gang raped.
12:48
She talks about seeing girls being water boarded
12:52
and being kept in dog cages.
12:54
We do talk about some of that darkness.
12:56
But here's what I've learned, Kyle,
12:57
whether it's on a stage or at lunch
13:00
with one other person or in a small room in a living room,
13:02
everybody hears that differently.
13:06
And if we were to go all in with every conversation,
13:10
we would lose much of the crowd at some point in time.
13:13
And then they shut down.
13:15
Now, there may be a, maybe on this podcast,
13:17
there's a bunch of burly studs who want,
13:19
give it to me, I want to hear it all,
13:20
'cause I want to go take down the world.
13:22
That's good, okay.
13:23
Well, then that crowd will get a little different conversation.
13:25
But we don't just want to live in the darkness all the time
13:28
because most people want to see, okay,
13:30
there is some hope, there's some redemption,
13:31
there's some stories that most people want to attach themselves
13:35
to something positive.
13:36
And while we don't, and I don't shy away
13:39
from the horrific at all,
13:41
I do have to pick and choose the audiences
13:43
but who do I assess is ready for all of that?
13:46
And yeah, the three year old, how about the three month old?
13:50
How about the three month old being traffic for sex?
13:52
We could talk about what that's like
13:53
and the kind of physical injuries
13:55
that she would be receiving.
13:57
Most people don't want to hear all that, all that.
14:00
The documentaries and the movies that are coming out are great,
14:02
but you literally couldn't produce a movie or a documentary
14:06
and actually have it be actually really showing
14:09
everything is happening.
14:10
It would be quadruple X rated and horrifically gross
14:13
and you'd have people throwing up.
14:15
It's so brutal.
14:16
So we get as close as we can
14:18
to giving people what they need and enough for them to act.
14:22
That's kind of the idea.
14:23
- Fair enough.
14:24
I appreciate you going into detail with that.
14:25
And I want to go ahead and repeat the title of the book here
14:27
before I ask this next question,
14:28
but it's men fight for me.
14:30
The role of authentic masculinity
14:33
in ending sexual exploitation and trafficking.
14:35
So from the forward of the book
14:37
and that was actually written by the former United States
14:39
ambassador to combat human trafficking.
14:42
His name's John Richmond.
14:43
He had this short quote here.
14:44
In the context of sex trafficking,
14:46
the vast majority of sex buyers are men
14:48
and the majority of traffickers are men.
14:50
A distorted and toxic view of masculinity
14:52
has done real damage in our culture.
14:54
The lack of authentic, healthy and positive masculinity
14:58
has reached a crisis point in our country.
15:01
So I obviously agree with that sentiment.
15:03
I disagree with almost everybody.
15:05
If someone's using the framing of toxic masculinity,
15:08
almost 100% of the time I disagree
15:10
with what they're calling toxic,
15:12
but this is a perfect example of what toxic masculinity
15:16
actually is.
15:17
It's the abdication of your masculine role in society
15:20
and allowing for the suffering of people
15:21
that are weaker than you.
15:23
And we can go a lot of different directions
15:24
with something like this,
15:25
but kind of give me the reasoning why you centered,
15:29
like the center point,
15:30
the hinge point of this entire book
15:32
is basically grabbing men by their shirts
15:34
and being like, you need to get in the game.
15:37
- Yeah.
15:38
Well, yeah.
15:39
I agree with what you just said out in the world
15:43
and this crazy internet,
15:45
the social media and all the stuff,
15:47
toxic masculinity has been exchanged just
15:49
for healthy masculinity.
15:50
Like it's almost politically incorrect to be a man anymore.
15:53
And certainly to be a strong powerful man.
15:55
And that's deemed as toxic.
15:56
And so I'm reframing that in the book.
15:59
If you think about the idea of toxic,
16:00
a toxin is some kind of a poison.
16:02
If you drink, you know,
16:04
Drano or liquid plumber or something,
16:06
you know, you drink something bad.
16:07
You gotta get it out
16:08
because it's poisonous.
16:09
It's toxic.
16:10
And so there is a version of masculinity out there
16:13
that is causing damage.
16:15
It's breaking down.
16:16
It's demeaning.
16:18
It's deluding life and health and wholeness.
16:22
And that's the kind of masculinity that we wanna change.
16:24
The kind that brings pain rather than healing and strength.
16:27
And so that, you know, in life,
16:30
when you can identify a particular problem,
16:33
you know, last year I had a little spot on my forehead.
16:35
The doctor said, I don't like that.
16:36
Let's take a look at it.
16:37
I took a little piece out of it.
16:38
He analyzed it and he said, yes,
16:40
that's a little piece of skin cancer.
16:41
Come on back in, we're gonna dig it out.
16:43
Great, it's gone.
16:44
He was able to isolate and define what a problem was.
16:47
I went in, it's fixed.
16:48
Well, in this case, the problem is men.
16:53
We are the problem.
16:54
And someone might say,
16:54
"Which problem you're talking about?"
16:57
I don't know.
16:57
Pick any problem you might find.
16:59
And I bet you find a bunch of idiot men behind it,
17:00
causing it around the world.
17:02
In this particular problem of exploitation
17:06
all the way up into trafficking, it's absolutely men.
17:08
They're by far the biggest number of buyers are men,
17:11
by far the biggest number of sellers are men.
17:13
And it is toxic and unhealthy
17:16
and bringing pain and suffering and oppression.
17:19
That's the kind of manhood
17:20
that we're trying to eliminate from culture.
17:22
We're trying to rebuild a positive, healthy version
17:24
of masculinity and those that have a personal faith,
17:27
certainly, you know, that would be informed
17:29
on what a positive, healthy male is.
17:31
But someone who isn't necessarily faith-oriented,
17:34
there's also a healthy, stronger version
17:36
of masculinity of manhood that they can ascribe to as well.
17:39
And that's what we're hoping to do,
17:40
is get as changed as many men as possible,
17:42
because that's the answer to this problem.
17:44
- Absolutely.
17:45
It's because if the men abdicate the responsibility,
17:48
as I said earlier, it will continue to lead
17:50
to the destruction of the Amago Day,
17:52
people that are made in the image of God.
17:54
And Alan, just to be honest,
17:55
before you even mentioned this in the book,
17:58
all I could think about was porn.
18:00
Porn, this is exactly what's feeding into this.
18:04
It's just one of those things that people don't really realize,
18:06
but there is a direct line,
18:08
not a scattered line or a crooked line.
18:12
There's a direct straight line
18:14
from the use of pornography to the sex trafficking industry.
18:17
But a lot of men out there and a lot of young men
18:19
that listen to this show, they don't believe me.
18:21
Like, they don't believe me, they're like,
18:22
"Hey, you know, I'm just masturbating,
18:24
and I'm just using this as a masturbatory aid.
18:26
It's no big deal.
18:27
These women are rich.
18:29
They're getting paid all kinds of money to do this.
18:31
The men are there.
18:32
Like, there's a whole bunch of people there.
18:33
Like, no one's being hurt.
18:35
These are just consenting adults
18:36
are making the libertarian argument.
18:38
Like, hey, what is it your reason to legislate morality?
18:40
That kind of nonsense.
18:41
But tell us about the direct role of pornography
18:44
and how it really, really aids
18:46
what's going on with sex trafficking.
18:48
- Well, you're right.
18:49
And it's not a dotted line.
18:50
It's a firm, thick black line.
18:52
It's the on-ramp to the future buyers of sex
18:57
and the future sellers of sex.
18:59
It's an on-ramp to the future victims of sex trafficking.
19:03
They say the average age of first exposures
19:05
around eight years old.
19:06
So you have a little eight, nine, or 10-year-old
19:08
whose brain is not anywhere near ready
19:10
to consume these kinds of images.
19:12
They weren't meant to really ever consume them,
19:14
but certainly at eight or nine,
19:15
they're too immature to even process it.
19:17
And with the benefit of neuroscience,
19:19
they can talk about the fact that actually rewires
19:22
the human brain and they become addicted to this pornography,
19:27
which is obviously an unhealthy, dangerous version
19:29
of some upside down sexuality.
19:32
Now, to get at what you're asking, here's the thing.
19:36
I have a friend who's gonna be releasing
19:38
a really powerful documentary pretty soon.
19:41
He's done with it.
19:42
They're now in the process of figuring out
19:43
who's gonna buy it and how they're gonna
19:45
make it available, et cetera.
19:47
It's called Beyond Fantasy when it comes out, get it.
19:49
And he interviewed five years interviewing everybody
19:52
in the pornography industry.
19:54
So many of the actors, the directors,
19:57
the producers all the way from the OG people
19:59
who really even started it many, many years ago.
20:02
And he said to me something chilling.
20:04
He said, not some, not most, not many, but most.
20:08
Most of the women and men too,
20:10
but most of the women that are portrayed
20:12
in pornography, they're against their will.
20:14
They're experiencing a form of coercion.
20:17
We've had trafficking victims, actual trafficking victims
20:21
controlled and owned by a third party,
20:23
forcing them to go to a motel room,
20:25
forcing them to go into some kind of a movie set.
20:27
They turn a video camera on.
20:28
Now they're raped and gang raped.
20:30
And that makes itself onto a pornography website
20:32
where there's millions of views.
20:33
And one survivor said, every time someone's watching
20:37
that video, they're watching me being raped.
20:40
Now the problem, there's a lot of problems.
20:42
This problem I wanna talk about right now is,
20:44
if someone's watching pornography,
20:46
you have no way of knowing who's there truly,
20:49
consensually, and who is there against their will.
20:51
And most of them are there against their will.
20:54
And now I'm no lawyer, but unconscionable rape
20:57
is an unconscionable sexual is called rape.
21:00
So my message to guys is fellas.
21:02
Is this what we've become?
21:06
Where we're gonna, after hours when our wife is maybe in bed
21:09
and you've developed a little fetish or a little addiction,
21:14
you're gonna turn on your computer or your smartphone
21:16
and you're gonna get some kind of pleasure
21:20
out of watching somebody get raped.
21:22
Now, pornography industry is a crime scene.
21:26
There should be yellow police tape around every porn site
21:30
by participating it, you're an accomplice to that crime.
21:35
At the very least, you're aiding and abetting a felon.
21:38
- Well, Alan, like to be honest with you,
21:40
like the other thing that I would tell guys
21:41
is I get pretty explicit about this particular topic.
21:44
And I'm just like, imagine jerking off in a room
21:47
where someone's being raped.
21:48
And people were like, oh my gosh,
21:50
that's what a horrific thing to even say.
21:52
I thought you were a Christian, what a horrible thing.
21:54
But it's like, oh, so it's better
21:56
because you're separated by a screen.
21:59
That somehow makes it better.
22:01
It's like, oh, you wouldn't do that
22:02
if you were in the room with these people
22:04
actually watching it and smelling it
22:06
and feeling it and all those different things.
22:08
But somehow it's a lot different.
22:09
And so again, we could spend the rest of the day
22:11
talking about the pornography issue,
22:13
but I think we pretty much had a home run on that.
22:15
I do wanna move on to something
22:16
that you talked about in the book.
22:18
And you only spent a little bit of time on it,
22:19
so I wanna get a little bit more context to it.
22:21
You talked about increasing the penalties
22:23
on buyers and exploiters inside the sex trafficking industry.
22:27
Now for me, and I've said this many times
22:29
on the podcast and I'll repeat it again,
22:30
I think that rapists and people that are participating
22:33
in rape should be castrated and killed.
22:36
I think we should have the death penalty for rapists,
22:38
especially for child rapists.
22:39
I think you go straight to the front of the line,
22:41
you get your one appeal, and then you're gone.
22:43
So that's kind of how I feel about it.
22:45
I know that's a fairly extreme position.
22:47
And with the legal system in this country,
22:48
that's not exactly a realistic position.
22:50
But for you, when you talk about increasing
22:52
the penalties on these buyers and exploiters,
22:54
where would you like that to go to what end?
22:57
- Well, I wouldn't necessarily argue with your position,
23:01
although yes, you did hit the nail on the head,
23:03
it's a little unrealistic in today's progressive society
23:05
to think that that would be a possibility.
23:07
However, depending on what county you're in
23:11
and what your district attorney and what he's prosecuting,
23:14
there's a number of, I don't wanna get political here,
23:17
I'm not sure what the deal is,
23:18
but there's a lot of liberal progressive led cities,
23:21
either governors, mayors, or DAs,
23:23
that aren't prosecuting hardly anybody,
23:25
they're not prosecuting a lot of crimes,
23:27
and they're going really soft on crime,
23:28
they're removing enhancements.
23:30
And so there's almost no penalty for sex buyers right now,
23:34
depending on what city you're in at all.
23:36
Now, there is on the books a minimum mandatory,
23:39
I think it's 15 years for sex or the minor,
23:41
something like that, that's not enough,
23:42
we should increase that, we should absolutely increase
23:45
whatever, just a sex buyer,
23:47
just make that part of the crime illegal.
23:50
There's actually a huge push right now
23:51
to fully decriminalize all of what's called prostitution,
23:54
which is gonna be a disaster if and when that happens,
23:57
because that's gonna hurt more vulnerable people
23:59
and especially children.
24:01
So, I would be up for increasing all penalties
24:05
for all versions of this crime to whatever they are.
24:07
Now, here's the thing,
24:08
we're not gonna legislate our way out of this.
24:10
The problem is a broken men mostly,
24:16
they've given their heart and their mind over
24:18
to depravity, to brokenness,
24:19
and we're not gonna legislate out of them.
24:21
There are people around the edges
24:23
that will be deterred by stronger penalties.
24:27
There is the dentist, the little league coach
24:29
that is dabbling around on the side buying sex.
24:32
Other than that, he's not a bad guy,
24:34
he's an outstanding member of communities,
24:36
he's doing a good job of the family,
24:37
other than that big asterisk, I get it.
24:39
Well, that guy who doesn't wanna have
24:40
his loses career and loses family, it may stop him,
24:43
but there's a lot of people that aren't in that space.
24:45
A higher penalty will absolutely affect
24:49
some of the buyers, not all of them.
24:51
But let's do that, let's check that box, let's check the box.
24:53
- Yeah, and here's the thing is you can say,
24:55
well, that's probably not gonna work.
24:57
It's like, well, let's check the box and then see.
25:00
Let's just see if it works in any way, shape or form.
25:02
I'm okay with doing that experiment.
25:04
And what that discussion really leads into
25:07
is discussion you get in this kind of growing trend somehow
25:10
about how people, and specifically people in blue states,
25:13
people in blue counties and blue areas,
25:16
wanting to decriminalize prostitution altogether, right?
25:19
So it's the same argument you'll hear
25:20
on the Joe Rogan talk about how if we just decriminalize
25:23
all drugs, well, the cartels just won't kill people anymore.
25:26
That's essentially a very distilled down version
25:29
of that argument.
25:29
It's a silly argument because when you increase
25:32
the supply of a particular thing,
25:35
the demand will typically go up for something like this.
25:38
Like if you decriminalize the use of weed
25:41
in the state of Oklahoma, which we have,
25:43
then you're gonna have more people that use it.
25:45
And so the black market's actually going to grow,
25:48
it's not gonna recede, it's not gonna go down.
25:50
So what is your response to people that say,
25:52
hey, if we just decriminalize prostitution,
25:55
all of the bad stuff will just magically float away?
25:57
- Well, I would say that they're uninformed
26:01
on the realities of it.
26:02
And what you just said is exactly correct
26:05
that the market will expand.
26:07
And what happens, we know every time there's an adult industry,
26:10
there's a child industry, adjoined at the hip.
26:12
And so we could talk about adults who don't wanna be there,
26:16
but my big focus point with what I'm doing,
26:19
when I work at Saving Innocence,
26:20
is we've been taking care of the child victims.
26:22
They're the ones who are most available,
26:24
they're the ones who are most vulnerable.
26:25
So when the market expands and the demand expands,
26:28
the supply is gonna fill that demand by any means necessary,
26:31
and that's going to be children.
26:32
There's going to be children, more kids.
26:35
They should be out, running around,
26:36
playing hopscotch in the street and playing video games.
26:38
There'd be more of them being serviced as sex slaves
26:41
to take care of all the broken men
26:44
that are now doing it free of any kind of legal penalty.
26:48
That's what's going to happen.
26:50
Now, if you wanna talk about adults,
26:51
there's also been a number of studies.
26:52
89% of all the women in the sex industry
26:55
say they don't wanna be doing it,
26:57
but they don't see any other options.
26:58
They don't see a way out.
26:59
They don't know what to do because of their history of trauma,
27:02
the lens that they're looking through.
27:04
They don't see any way out.
27:06
They don't know how to not do this.
27:07
And so, okay, so you've got nearly 90% of even the adults
27:10
who don't wanna do it.
27:12
And now we're gonna make it all legal.
27:13
And so it's like, if you just say it out loud,
27:15
the legalization of the buying and selling of vulnerable people,
27:19
that's what we're gonna do.
27:20
Who can vote?
27:21
Go to your thing in November, check that box.
27:23
We're gonna legalize the buying and selling of vulnerable people.
27:26
Is that sound like a society that's upright
27:29
and standing on their two feet?
27:30
No, sounds like an upside down society
27:31
where pain and brokenness is winning.
27:33
And that's exactly what would be happening.
27:35
- And we're all very, very comfortable
27:36
with euphemisms.
27:37
We don't call it the destruction
27:41
of a small human body inside the womb.
27:43
We call it a woman's right to choose.
27:45
We like our euphemisms, especially societally,
27:48
because euphemisms fit really, really well
27:50
in a t-shirt and on a bumper sticker.
27:52
But that's not the real world that most of us live in.
27:55
And Alan, you alluded to this a little bit earlier,
27:57
just basically talking to the dads in this audience
28:00
that have young girls, right?
28:02
And so in there are a lot of them in my audience
28:04
that have daughters and sons, but specifically daughters.
28:07
And you do address this in the book about the role
28:09
that a present father plays in keeping his girls,
28:13
his young girls, especially from falling into the life.
28:17
The life is this life of sex trafficking
28:19
and those types of things.
28:20
'Cause some of them go in willingly at the beginning
28:22
and then it starts their kind of cycle
28:24
of being taken advantage of.
28:26
Some are stolen and forced into this.
28:29
But what specifically is the role of a present father,
28:32
aside from just making sure you don't just send your girl
28:35
out into the world and hope she comes back?
28:37
- Yeah, us dads have an incredible responsibility,
28:41
an incredible opportunity that so many dads have abdicated,
28:45
so many dads have, they're physically not present
28:47
or emotionally not present.
28:49
And a little girl desperately needs to understand
28:54
what a healthy man looks like before she goes out
28:58
and counter any age boy or man.
29:00
She desperately is looking for role models.
29:03
Okay, what can I expect?
29:04
What should I expect from a future boyfriend
29:07
or future husband?
29:09
And she is inundated with social media.
29:13
She's old enough to be on social media.
29:14
She's inundated with the clowns at the Super Bowl halftime show
29:18
that have made millions of dollars demeaning
29:20
and degrading sex and demeaning and degrading
29:22
violently women as their song lyrics.
29:24
She's inundated with society that doesn't value life,
29:27
that doesn't value women, which doesn't value sex.
29:30
And so she absolutely is desperately looking for,
29:34
searching for someone who will treat a woman with respect.
29:38
She's watching you with your wife or maybe your girlfriend.
29:41
How do you treat women?
29:42
She's watching you out, how do you treat,
29:44
how do you speak to the waitress who's serving you dinner?
29:46
She's trying to understand what she can expect
29:49
and with you not being present,
29:51
she's left at the mercy of society,
29:54
which has got a diminished demeaned version of sexuality.
29:57
So you're absolutely critical and I'll just add you,
29:59
that's about daughters, but your sons are the same way.
30:01
Your little boys are desperate and looking.
30:03
What does it mean to be a healthy, authentic, real man?
30:07
How does a man talk about women?
30:08
What kind of things does a man allow in his house?
30:10
What kind of music is he listening to?
30:11
How does he treat the waitress?
30:12
What's going on?
30:14
I need to learn about what I need to do to be a man,
30:16
to be a healthy man, to be the kind of husband and father
30:18
and the best way, really the only real way
30:21
that your son or your daughter are gonna be able
30:23
to understand that is watching you.
30:25
You're the greatest teacher and classroom
30:27
they'll ever have on this topic.
30:28
So men absolutely get involved.
30:31
And I would say, sit on the couch, watch TV shows,
30:35
commercials they come on, hit pause.
30:37
We now have technology, you can pause it,
30:38
you won't miss it, you don't lose anything.
30:41
And interpret.
30:42
Hey, check out, what do you think that message
30:43
was saying in that commercial?
30:45
What do you think that girl in the commercial,
30:47
what does it look like they're selling?
30:48
If you didn't know they're selling shampoo,
30:50
what do you think, what else are they selling
30:51
in that commercial?
30:52
Oh, they're selling her body.
30:53
Oh, okay, let's talk about that.
30:55
So I think a healthy male in the house interpreting life
30:59
as it's coming, you don't have to look for it.
31:00
There's a daily dose coming.
31:02
And if your kids are old enough that you gave them
31:04
a smartphone and they're on social media,
31:07
absolutely you have to be vigilant
31:09
and be involved and interpret.
31:10
Now, at some point they're gonna have
31:11
to make their own decisions and at some point
31:13
they do have to go to school and maybe go away from,
31:15
you know, go to college, all those kinds of things.
31:17
So you have a finite amount of time
31:19
that you get to be an example.
31:21
Here's what a healthy man, here's how a healthy man thinks,
31:23
looks and acts and that will make an absolute difference.
31:26
Most of the young girls that we see at Saving Innocence
31:29
have not had any healthy man present in their life.
31:33
Now, not every little girl who doesn't have a dad present
31:35
is gonna be sucked down that path,
31:37
but all of the girls that do get sucked down that path,
31:40
it's common.
31:41
They don't have a healthy male in their life
31:42
that's loved them appropriately
31:44
and protected them appropriately.
31:46
So it's absolutely critical, like job number one.
31:49
- Yeah, it's critical and it's all about being intentional
31:51
here recently we had a pastor on
31:52
from New York City named John Tyson.
31:53
He wrote a book called "The Intentional Father"
31:55
and that's part of it.
31:56
It's like you don't just watch the game together
31:58
and see the beer commercial with the woman
31:59
just jumping around and letting her boobs flop everywhere
32:01
and not address that.
32:03
And again, you even alluded to the Super Bowl halftime show
32:06
this year, you had a lot of people
32:07
that in terms of our modern culture of canceling people,
32:10
they've all done horrific things to women,
32:13
the violence towards women and things that are known about
32:16
that they just kind of mention now.
32:18
It's just kind of like a funny thing.
32:19
It's kind of like, oh, it's just a cultural thing
32:21
that Dr. Dre's beaten up several women
32:22
and is like, oh, but he makes great songs.
32:24
I really, really like them, they're really catchy.
32:26
But hey, I don't want to get off onto a tangent here
32:28
'cause we're just wrapping up.
32:29
This is the last question I have for you, Alan.
32:31
Because it's kind of one of those deals
32:32
like you're in the business now
32:33
and part of the reason if sex trafficking is eliminated,
32:36
you kind of have eliminated yourself out of the job
32:38
but I don't really see that you're too terribly concerned
32:40
about that.
32:41
But give our audience the direct and specific calls
32:44
to action for what they can do
32:46
beyond just buying the book.
32:47
Obviously it'll be in the show notes
32:49
if you want to check that out.
32:50
But go ahead and give us our calls to action.
32:53
- Yeah, absolutely.
32:54
And the website FightForMe.net has the book
32:56
and a lot of other conversations
32:58
with a YouTube channel.
32:59
A lot of people are, you know,
33:00
we're having conversations kind of like this
33:01
with people that were in the book.
33:03
My call to action is for everybody
33:04
but really in this little season of my life,
33:07
it's really to men.
33:08
And my challenge to men is to rise up to get up
33:11
and to do something positive about this fight.
33:14
Now you don't need to go to seminary
33:17
and get a Bible degree on whether or not sex trafficking
33:20
and demeaning women is okay.
33:21
It doesn't take very long to look in the scripture.
33:22
You find out where the kids are and the heart of God
33:24
and the heart of Jesus.
33:26
You don't have to go to school
33:27
and learn an academic degree.
33:30
My challenge to men number one, look at this crime.
33:33
Understand it.
33:35
So go on a little rabbit hole, search down Google.
33:37
Go to savinginnocence.org, go to FightForMe.net.
33:39
There's a couple places to start there.
33:41
Watch some documentaries, understand it.
33:43
And now my question is when they say,
33:45
what can I do?
33:46
I say, I don't know what can you do.
33:47
You know, Kyle, you have a podcast.
33:48
You can have me on your podcast.
33:50
Thank you.
33:50
That's one thing you can do.
33:51
How about anyone else?
33:52
Where'd you go to school?
33:53
What do you know?
33:54
Who are your friends?
33:55
What do they know?
33:56
Do you have any money?
33:57
Donate to a saving, well you can't say it again.
33:59
It says, but donate to an anti-traving organization near you
34:02
if you want.
34:03
There's plenty of them in Texas,
34:03
if that's where a lot of your listeners are.
34:05
Get involved tangibly.
34:07
Do something.
34:08
And I think the biggest thing that I want men to do
34:11
is look in the mirror and take a good, honest look at yourself.
34:16
And are you dabbling with things on your computer
34:20
that are ultimately demeaning and hurting women and children?
34:23
Are you going down a certain rabbit hole of jokes
34:27
and conversations and sharing of memes on your phone
34:29
with your buddies that are tearing down or building people up?
34:32
If we can get our life in alignment
34:34
with what we want the world to look like, that's step one.
34:37
And now step two, be a leader, be a courageous leader
34:41
in the community of men that you surround yourself with,
34:43
whether it's on your neighborhood,
34:45
whether it's in your church or your golf buddies
34:47
or whoever they are, be a leader amongst them.
34:51
Take them with you.
34:52
And if we can get enough men living in this way,
34:56
accepting the responsibilities around themselves,
34:58
living courageously, standing up for injustice,
35:02
now there's no room in there for trafficking.
35:04
There's no room in there for exploitation.
35:06
There's no room in there to harm women and children.
35:08
If we need enough men doing that.
35:10
And that's one man at a time.
35:12
That's my call to action.
35:13
Get more educated, buy this book.
35:15
Proceeds are going to survivors of sex trafficking
35:18
and take another step forward
35:19
and let's just keep moving in the right direction.
35:22
- Yeah, and there's no adjustment too small.
35:23
You mentioned even earlier,
35:24
and I'll give just a small example.
35:25
I was part of this group text for a group of guys
35:27
that I love, they're great dudes.
35:29
But these guys don't really come from a Christian worldview.
35:31
So they would send memes and little gifts back and forth
35:33
that had nudity and had different random things
35:36
that I shouldn't be seeing.
35:37
That could be triggers for me.
35:39
And I just told the guys one day, like via the text,
35:41
I said, hey guys, this is my personal phone.
35:43
It's like I have this phone around my house
35:44
and all these things.
35:45
I don't want to see these images
35:46
and I don't want anybody else in my house
35:48
to see them on accident either.
35:49
If you don't mind, if you're going to send images like this,
35:51
do it on a different text without me included.
35:53
And none of the guys were like,
35:54
oh God, what a guy, are you just a prude?
35:56
And blah, blah, every guy was like, yeah, yeah, man.
35:58
Hey, dude, I'm totally sorry about that.
35:59
I didn't even think about it.
36:00
Guys, those are the small adjustments that you can make.
36:02
But again, we've talked about a lot of stuff
36:04
on this podcast already.
36:05
I'm really glad that you came on.
36:06
But that's all for me.
36:07
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
36:09
I mean, we could talk for three days if you wanted to, but I appreciate you giving us
36:13
this platform and shining your light on this.
36:16
We just, we don't have a minute to waste, guys.
36:18
We do not have a minute to waste.
36:19
There's an urgent 911 emergency right now, today, tonight,
36:22
within a mile of where you're listening to this podcast,
36:24
someone's going to be abused tonight and today.
36:26
And we need to say no more, not on my watch.
36:28
And I'm here to help.
36:29
And I hope that this book is helpful as well.
36:32
All right, Alan Smith,
36:33
thank you for coming on Undaunted Life, Amanda's podcast.
36:36
Thanks for having me.
36:39
Jessica Midkiff, welcome to Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
36:43
Thanks for having me.
36:44
I'm happy to talk to you today.
36:46
You know, obviously I wish it was under different circumstances,
36:48
but you're used to that because of the work that you've done.
36:50
And as I said in the intro, you spent the last decade plus,
36:54
so 10 plus years advocating for and helping younger victims of sex trafficking
36:58
to really regain their, their mental and physical health.
37:01
And that's not something you can just, you know,
37:03
flip a switch or snap your fingers and do.
37:04
It's a long and arduous process.
37:06
And the reason why you're able to do this is because you yourself
37:09
were a longtime victim of sexual trafficking.
37:12
And you talk about this in the book.
37:13
I've already introed the book earlier on that you were a part of.
37:17
And you've detailed some of the things that kind of befell you in your life,
37:20
things that you couldn't help or control.
37:22
And really for you, I know it's a rough place to start,
37:24
but we talked about it off air guys.
37:26
So she's definitely expecting it.
37:28
But you know, as early as the age of three,
37:30
you were the victim of sexual abuse.
37:33
And that's just kind of something that you were around.
37:35
So if you would kind of give our audience an idea of,
37:38
for you personally, what that was like as a child,
37:41
because I know there's a lot of folks that, you know,
37:43
are potentially confused about what that could look like.
37:46
They're thinking about it through the lens of an adult,
37:49
but they have children and so they just want to kind of know.
37:51
So how'd you go from, you know, suffering such abuse as a young child
37:55
to where eventually you were being trafficked yourself?
37:58
Oh, yeah.
38:00
So of course it details a little bit in the book,
38:02
but yeah, I was abused early on and it,
38:07
I don't remember every single bit of it,
38:09
but I remember parts of it and it was very violent.
38:14
It was very manipulative.
38:15
It was no healthy real adult,
38:21
especially no healthy real man would ever look at a child and say,
38:24
Hey, this child is super attractive.
38:27
I'm going to do what I'm going to do.
38:29
It was just kind of like, I basically I'm a biracial.
38:32
Obviously I'm biracial.
38:33
I was a biracial child at that time.
38:36
You know, there were people out there that were mixed,
38:37
but where I grew up, it wasn't a lot of them.
38:40
And so whatever the, I guess, whatever the attraction was
38:47
to my physical appearance, like I couldn't speak from that lens,
38:51
but it was there and I think it was also a power move as well.
38:56
Just because at that time, my mother was also being abused
39:00
and then she came to find out that I was also being abused
39:02
by the same person.
39:04
And it just, it looked really hard.
39:07
And from an early start, I thought that's what life was supposed to be.
39:12
That was my norm.
39:13
So these adults that were supposed to look after me and protect me and love me,
39:17
this person was doing, you know, everything in the opposite fashion,
39:23
but saying that he loved me and that he cared about me.
39:28
So love early on was mixed with abuse, and that was my norm as a child.
39:34
And then moving forward from there, once you've been victimized,
39:37
a lot of times people tend to be re-victimized over and over again
39:41
because of like the stage that's already been set for them.
39:44
So the set for me was, you know, I'm a sexual object.
39:49
That's all I'm really ever going to be.
39:52
And, you know, I started conducting myself as such without even really understanding
39:56
that that's what I was doing.
39:57
And a lot of our kids go through a lot of that conditioning early on too.
40:01
And that's how you can find yourself being the prey of someone
40:05
that doesn't have good intentions, you know, outside of a family unit
40:08
or, you know, outside of where you're supposed to be safe.
40:12
So I came into a number of characters over my life
40:16
that sexually objectified me.
40:18
And kids, definitely the kids that we work with
40:20
come into these characters on a regular basis.
40:23
So it's like, okay, well, this is what I'm good for.
40:25
This is what it's supposed to be.
40:27
Sex and abuse constitute love.
40:30
And I need to try to find love as much anywhere I can
40:33
because every person wants to be loved.
40:35
Every person, you know, craves companionship.
40:38
And for us, it just looks different.
40:40
It's not healthy.
40:44
It's not normal.
40:45
And so for someone to say, hey, I love you.
40:47
We can make it big. We can do this.
40:48
We can do that.
40:49
That seems appealing for a young person.
40:51
That seemed appealing for me.
40:52
And that was one of the ways that, generally speaking,
40:57
on how I got into being commercially sexually exploited.
41:22
And so with that in mind, something that you brought up,
41:27
that I kind of keyed in on is you use the word norms quite a bit.
41:37
And he said that this was your norm.
41:38
This was the norms that you had basically gotten used to.
41:42
Did you have a sense?
41:43
Because again, we're thinking about this as adults.
41:45
So it can get a little bit scatterbrained.
41:47
But when you're a child, when you're three, seven, 10 years old,
41:51
like when you're that young, did you have a sense
41:53
that that was broken though?
41:56
Because it was your norm.
41:57
But did you have the, I guess, the wear with all to know,
42:00
this isn't moral, this is wrong, this isn't,
42:02
or because I know some victims have felt like,
42:05
oh, if I think this is wrong, it's something wrong with me,
42:08
because obviously this is normal.
42:10
Does that make sense?
42:11
Yeah, most definitely.
42:12
I mean, it felt wrong because, you know, it's like abusers,
42:16
they say, oh, well, you know, we're going to keep it a secret
42:19
because people won't understand our love.
42:22
Or, you know, like, I'm an adult, you're a child,
42:24
who's going to believe you?
42:26
Or, you know, so even if you have that initial fight back,
42:28
like I always say, one of the first words to come out
42:31
of a child's mouth when they're growing is no.
42:34
That's like one of the first words,
42:35
aside from mama, dada, whatever, right?
42:37
Usually a kid will have fun all day saying no,
42:40
they want to see your expressions,
42:42
they want to, you know, they love it,
42:43
they start giggling and laughing.
42:44
You want to take a bath?
42:45
No, you want to eat some ice cream?
42:47
Wow, no, and dang, well, they want to eat some ice cream.
42:50
You know, but they like to see, you know, how it affects you.
42:54
You know, that's how they kind of get
42:56
accustomed to building boundaries and stuff like that.
42:59
I didn't really get the chance to build that boundary.
43:01
If I said no, it was a smack across the face or something worse.
43:05
And believe me, it got worse and worse and worse.
43:07
And so, even if I felt as though it wasn't wrong,
43:12
I was quickly taught that putting up a boundary was wrong too.
43:18
And so, like, as I got older, did I fully know better?
43:21
No child really fully knows better, right?
43:24
You know, I started having, you know,
43:28
people in my family saying, hey, that's not okay.
43:30
Hey, that's not right, because I would act out
43:32
some of the sexual abuse things that were happening to me
43:36
and I would act them out.
43:37
And, you know, I remember putting on a show
43:41
because kids love to put on shows for people they love.
43:43
And I was at my grandparents' house one day.
43:44
I have a whole bunch of aunts.
43:46
I stack on all these different clothes.
43:48
I set my grandparents down on the piano chair,
43:51
which I have their piano now.
43:52
And I'm like, I'm going to put on a show for you.
43:55
So, I started dancing like a ballerina and doing the whole thing.
43:58
And then it turns into a full-on strip tease.
44:00
You know, my grandfather was caught off guard.
44:02
My grandmother being a preschool teacher,
44:03
she was like, oh no, something's wrong.
44:05
And I remember she quickly grabbed me and I was like,
44:08
well, didn't I make you happy?
44:09
Because it made my abuser happy and I didn't really care about him.
44:13
I cared about them and I wanted to make them happy.
44:16
Early on, I started seeing myself as a sexual object.
44:18
A lot of our kids do that where it's like,
44:21
well, it makes this person happy and these people over here
44:23
that I love, well, I'm going to show it.
44:25
So, it takes someone saying, no, that's not okay.
44:28
What's happening, what's going on, what's wrong?
44:30
To kind of set something within you.
44:34
But as time went on, because I was already groomed to be a sexual object,
44:38
I learned how to keep certain things a secret.
44:41
I still maneuvered as a sexual object.
44:43
I learned that saying no would get me in a lot of trouble
44:46
and get me harmed.
44:47
So I always said yes.
44:48
I've said yes up to adulthood for a lot of things,
44:52
which played a part of the new victimization.
44:53
Yeah, but we fight against that with the kids that we work with too.
44:56
Like they'll say no to certain things with us,
44:58
but they'll be in like all kinds of different,
45:02
dangerous situations.
45:04
And we'll be like, well, why didn't you say no?
45:05
Which, I mean, we know, but we ask.
45:07
And it's because they want to sustain the level of violence,
45:10
or they don't want any violence inflicted on them.
45:12
So they're more so compelled to say yes in those harder situations
45:16
and no to when someone's helping.
45:18
Because when someone's helping, it doesn't seem real.
45:20
So the norms are literally switched.
45:24
Right.
45:24
Even by that time the kid knows it's already switched.
45:27
It's a condition.
45:28
So the norm is abuse, sex, everything relationships are transactional
45:36
in every sense of the word.
45:37
Like it's just a huge switch for the kids we work with.
45:40
Right.
45:41
And we'll get back more into your personal experience.
45:43
But I was going to ask this a little bit later, but it's pertinent now.
45:46
How do you go about rehabilitating a child?
45:49
Because even just some of the stuff you described right now,
45:51
I know it's absolutely breaking the hearts.
45:53
Hopefully of every single person that's listening to it right now.
45:56
But whenever you work with a child there at Saving Innocence,
46:00
and you start taking them down the path of kind of rebuilding them
46:04
mentally and physically, how in the world do you even do that?
46:07
If that's what their paradigm is, if this is what normal looks like,
46:11
how do you switch that 180 degrees?
46:13
So that's a loaded question.
46:17
The biggest thing that we start out with is meeting the child
46:22
and showing them that we're not going anywhere.
46:24
Regardless of whatever they say they do,
46:26
it doesn't matter if they can cuss us out and call us everything,
46:28
but the child of God, and we're still going to be there.
46:31
So that's the base.
46:34
And we're trying to show them that we are safe people.
46:37
We don't want anything from you, but to help you.
46:40
We want to walk through life with you until you feel as though you have it yourself.
46:44
And then also too, like just, well, I said the relationship building,
46:48
helping kids with like some of the regular everyday things in life.
46:54
You know, okay, you're moving into your first apartment, woohoo.
46:57
Or, oh, you're signing up for school.
46:59
Great, let's do this.
47:00
Oh, you need to buy some like those simple little things
47:03
that we would do with our kids.
47:05
We're doing with them.
47:05
No matter what age they are, what stage in life they are.
47:09
There's a big thing that we kind of base how we work with the kids.
47:12
It's called, well, one of the things I use is the continuum of abuse.
47:16
So it's kind of explaining what the child has gone through a little bit.
47:19
And then we also use the,
47:21
whoo, what is it called again?
47:24
I can't think of it right now.
47:28
So basically, you know, there's different stages.
47:32
Oh, stages of change.
47:34
It's the stages of change model.
47:35
So where they're pre-contemplative, contemplative,
47:38
like, and it just keeps going across the board.
47:40
So we know how to come out the kid.
47:42
If the kid is, for instance, pre-contemplative,
47:44
they're not seeing a problem with the life that they're living
47:47
because their support system is the exploiter
47:49
and the people that are in that subculture.
47:52
So we try to just add ourselves to the equation
47:54
and not remove everything else, so to speak, right?
47:58
So we're removing the child physically,
48:00
but a lot of times, too, if we're like,
48:03
your pimp is horrible, these people are horrible,
48:05
they don't love you, they don't care about you,
48:06
we've noticed over time that that wrecks the kid, right?
48:10
So they're like, well, then who am I?
48:12
Where do I go?
48:13
So we try to meet them where they are,
48:15
not remove everything, so to speak,
48:17
but we do remove them out of the situation.
48:20
So it's like, okay, well, you called your exploiter.
48:22
All right, well, how did that go?
48:24
How does it make you feel?
48:25
Like, we go through these little things
48:27
and stages with them, and then if they're contemplative,
48:30
they're like, you know what?
48:31
I'm kind of thinking like this isn't the life for me,
48:33
and usually the child is separate,
48:34
like some type of heavy assault
48:37
or something really heavy has gone on,
48:40
and they're like, maybe I shouldn't be here,
48:42
maybe I do need help.
48:45
So if they're contemplative,
48:46
then we start working on that plan
48:47
and meeting them where they are there.
48:49
Oh, okay, well, look, we have this housing over here,
48:51
you want to get out of the shelter,
48:52
you want to do it, like whatever it is, we start building that,
48:55
but we build new people into the support system,
48:57
which we're part of that,
48:58
and we take our community partners as well.
49:00
We also, of course, the geographical stuff
49:04
will move them if the majority of the time.
49:07
Therapy is another big thing
49:11
where we try to push the therapy.
49:12
We ask the children to look to their higher power,
49:16
and we say higher power,
49:17
because we understand that every child
49:18
doesn't believe in God,
49:19
and we know that there are cultural differences,
49:22
but we reinforce, if you have a higher power,
49:25
reach to them, hey, we'll go to the church with you,
49:30
we'll go to the temple with you,
49:31
we'll do whatever it is we need to.
49:33
So literally, we're rebuilding,
49:35
even if the kid is already here
49:37
and being groomed and being everything,
49:39
we're starting and we're just building our way up.
49:41
And a lot of times, not always,
49:43
but a lot of times the kids establish trust within us,
49:48
and they're more so able to hear us and listen to us
49:52
and work a program.
49:54
But every program is different,
49:55
because every kid is different.
49:57
So yeah, you have 50 kids that come in,
50:01
and they've all been commercially sexually exploited,
50:03
but each one of their exploitation is different.
50:05
So we try to meet them at those points.
50:09
So every kid that's been commercially sexually exploited
50:12
was not molested as a child.
50:13
They probably had an older boyfriend,
50:17
which this is a part of the continuum of abuse
50:19
that we got from gems in New York,
50:21
is they may not have been abused as a small child,
50:28
but they were going to school one day
50:30
and a guy pulled up in a really nice car
50:31
and started flirting or whatever
50:34
and really worked on the girl
50:36
and then come to find out the dude was like 24,
50:38
and the girl's 15.
50:39
So there's this unequal power dynamic, right?
50:42
Where it's a sexually exploitive situation,
50:44
not commercially and not exactly pedophilia.
50:47
It's more so like the pedophilia
50:48
where they're into the post-pubescent children,
50:50
and so they're engaging in certain things.
50:53
They're just not having money exchange hands,
50:56
but they're on their way to being commercially sexually exploited.
50:59
I hope that was...
50:59
No, that's great.
51:01
And you made the main point there, Jessica,
51:03
which is it's very contextual to the actual child, right?
51:06
And so you can't have this one size fits all.
51:08
Okay, we're just going to put you into this mold,
51:10
and all of a sudden you're going to come out on the other end better.
51:12
And I know there's a whole lot of stories
51:13
and a whole lot of context there
51:14
that we don't really have the time to get into,
51:16
but I do want to get back to even for you specifically,
51:19
because you mentioned that you were put into
51:21
the commercial sex trade business.
51:23
I believe that was around the age of 10 years old.
51:25
And I think if I remember correctly,
51:27
that was about 10 years worth of your life
51:29
that you were commercially sexually trafficked.
51:32
And so that's astonishing for people to hear,
51:35
because...
51:35
And that's something that I talked about with Alan,
51:37
to where it's like, I like going, I don't like it,
51:40
but I feel it necessary to go into the darker sides
51:43
and give giving the details.
51:44
Because when people hear sex trafficking,
51:46
they just kind of fill in the blanks with stuff,
51:48
but they keep it fairly sanitized.
51:50
They keep it out of arm's length,
51:52
so they don't have to really deal with what that looks like,
51:54
like on a day-to-day basis.
51:56
That's certainly not what I'm advocating for you to do.
51:58
But describe to us kind of in your own way,
52:01
and in your own words however you like to describe it,
52:03
what that was like.
52:04
Because I got to be honest,
52:06
like I've thought about these types of things a lot,
52:08
because we try to equip men to push back darkness here.
52:11
That's why undaunted life exists.
52:13
But hearing in your own words,
52:14
where you would say that your pimp gave you a quota.
52:18
And in a day that you would have 10 to 25 sexual encounters
52:22
in a day.
52:23
And if you didn't hit your quota,
52:25
like a salesman would,
52:26
a lot of people in my audience are salespeople.
52:28
If you didn't hit your quota,
52:29
horrible things would happen.
52:31
So just kind of talk us through what a day in the life was
52:34
of a young gal who's being sex trafficked in Southern California.
52:38
Yeah, well, and so my story is really complex.
52:43
So we tried to put some markers in there,
52:46
because it would just take probably 10 books,
52:48
literally, if not.
52:50
But like a typical day, it varied,
52:53
because I went through different stages
52:55
of commercial sexual exploitation throughout that time,
52:58
where it was survival sex,
52:59
where it was, you know, the boyfriend like,
53:01
"Hey, I got this friend, you know,
53:03
and I owe him money and I'm gonna get beat up
53:05
if I don't, and I have to do that."
53:07
Or, you know, or it was the full blown in the life,
53:10
on the streets, online, on everything.
53:14
And for that portion of it,
53:17
I actually was forced to work in what they would call shifts.
53:19
Right? So like how regular job they have shifts.
53:22
So I worked in what you would call almost like 72 hour shifts.
53:26
So I had to make a quota morning, middle of the day, and evening.
53:31
I'd probably sleep maybe an hour or two in between time,
53:34
if someone was driving.
53:35
There were times that I had to drive myself,
53:38
and that's what they would call like automatic, where you don't have the exploiter there with you.
53:41
And I would have to drive from one place to another.
53:45
And there were times I fell asleep a couple times,
53:47
not many, but a couple times I fell asleep behind the wheel of the car.
53:51
And by the grace of God, I was able to wake up in time.
53:53
People were honking their horns, all kinds of stuff.
53:56
And this is being off of no-dows and red bulls and coffee and still,
54:00
because I'm so tired, because I know I have to make this quota.
54:04
And if you didn't, if I didn't make it in the first shift,
54:06
I had to make the quota for the second shift and whatever I did making the first.
54:11
So at the end of the day, if I didn't reach my mark, I was tortured.
54:14
I think is the best or more general way to say it.
54:18
It wasn't just a beating, it was actual torture and rape.
54:22
So it plays a lot on your mind, because the exploiter, if you don't make it,
54:29
it's like, well, you brought this on yourself.
54:31
You didn't do as I asked.
54:33
We're trying to build something, whatever it is that they say.
54:36
And I've heard everything across the board.
54:38
And so you learned that because you didn't meet the mark,
54:43
that you're to blaming, you deserve to be tortured, beaten, raped, whatever.
54:48
And there were a lot of times I did hit my mark and still suffered some type of beating or rape.
54:54
You know, and so it's, it's, it's net, like, it's basically how everything is set up to,
54:59
is to keep you wondering, keep you guessing.
55:01
You don't have an understanding of like real time or, you know, days, whatever it is.
55:06
You just don't, you're, you're constantly on the go.
55:09
Nothing is like a regular day for like, you know, the business person.
55:14
So if the business person doesn't meet their quota, it's not exactly going to
55:18
keep them from paying their bills or their mortgage or whatever the case is.
55:22
But if they don't hit the quota consistently, then okay, those things will probably come
55:27
into where it's like, okay, got to do something because we're going to be homeless.
55:32
If you didn't hit your quota for one day in that life, it's not the end of the world.
55:36
But we don't know that.
55:37
We're taught that it's the end of the world and we're going to be out on our butts and we're
55:41
useless and just the whole nine.
55:44
So in the life, we, the, the, the exploiters do use the business model.
55:49
Um, but they just use it, I guess the way that they use it.
55:53
So, um, you know, it's a business for them, but we don't understand in those times exactly
55:59
what it is that they're doing to us.
56:01
I learned some years back that that's what they use, the business model.
56:04
It all made sense to me when I learned it.
56:06
Um, and yeah, yeah, it's, it's the same thing, but not exactly the same thing.
56:13
We're punished severely if we don't meet the mark and sometimes the exploiters make the
56:18
mark extremely high where it's like, okay, how am I going to do this?
56:21
You know, and then other days it's, you make it and you're still not good enough.
56:28
But if you do it at a job, you're good enough, even if you get halfway there, you're good enough.
56:32
But for us, it's never good enough, but that's a ploy to keep us in the life,
56:36
to keep us dependent on the person that is abusing and selling us.
56:40
Right. Just to keep that cycle going.
56:42
And one thing that I appreciate that you've done and I want to make sure that I can make
56:45
this transition with my own vernacular is you keep saying exploiters, exploiters,
56:49
whereas, you know, most people would just refer to them as pimps and you've used the
56:53
word pimp as well.
56:54
But something that was interesting as I was thinking through how I was going to prepare
56:57
for this interview is we kind of live in this culture where being a pimp is a cool thing,
57:01
right? Like, oh, that dude's a pimp or, oh, look at that guy in that Cadillac and the nice
57:05
suit and the cane and like, oh, it's a pimp thing. When I was in junior high, the first
57:09
cologne I ever owned was a bottle of pimp, right? Because it was from like, I don't know, like
57:13
gadzooks or whatever, like crazy store that was like hot topic or something, wherever that was.
57:17
And that's like, oh, that's what you want to be, right? But what that word is, is it's describing
57:23
a horrifically evil human being. And so for you, like, and I don't know what kind of music
57:29
you listen to, but even in pop culture, whether it's rap music or hip hop or in a lot of, you know,
57:34
music or sorry, in a lot of like movies and television entertainment, there's always
57:38
kind of that, that character, that pimp type character. How do you feel about that when you see
57:43
people that just look at that thing and they're like, they have no idea. They have no idea what
57:47
a pimp actually is. And yet they're like, oh, that'd be cool.
57:49
Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, we've definitely been living in a society where it's like, it is so
57:55
cool to be a pimp. You got the girls, you got the money, you got the rides, you got this,
57:58
you got like everything. And really, it's been set up that way, right? It's for everybody to
58:03
think like, oh, this is the cool person, but to be known as someone that's being bought and sold,
58:07
it's never been a cool thing, right? It's disgusting, it's dirty, it's nasty. So they never made,
58:12
excuse my language, but they've never made a perfume called ho or prostitute, right? Because
58:18
if those words are stuck to you, it's like, you don't want to, you don't want to be aligned with
58:22
that, even though in this culture now to be commercially sexually exploited, it's popular as well too
58:28
now, extremely. So, but with the culture with the pimp thing, so it's kind of almost like,
58:36
people don't know, they see like the huggy bears and they think about like Dolomite and stuff like
58:42
that, those fun caricatures, they don't exactly think of like exactly what they're doing.
58:47
But pimps are so skilled to not fully exactly show you what it is that they do, right? They're
58:54
going to only show you the glamorous side. And it's really messed up that there's glamour for pimps,
58:58
but there's not glamour for the people that are being exploited. So, it, it irks me, I do listen to,
59:06
I still listen to rap and hip hop. Some of this newer stuff, I can't really catch on too,
59:11
because I'm older, you know, I'm like, what in the hell are they saying? No, it all of it's mumbling,
59:19
you know, but like, I grew up listening to Dr. Dre, I grew up listening to Wu-Tang Clan and
59:25
I grew up listening to Snoop Dogg and Tupac and all of them too, that's a part of the culture.
59:30
But do I listen to it as frequently? Probably not, I listen to more so oldies now, I think.
59:40
You know, like, the temperies, the temptations and, you know, whatever. And I listen to my country
59:44
music, I listen to my pop, I listen to my rock, I listen to everything. Do, am I in tune with a
59:51
lot of the hip hop and the rap anymore? No. Do I still listen to it occasionally? Yeah.
59:56
But I also have an understanding of where these people were coming from,
59:59
what the climate was at that time, where everything was, gangster rap, all that, like, I understood.
1:00:04
And I think a lot of people don't understand, they kind of think of it as like, it's glamorous.
1:00:09
So someone that didn't grow up in that culture, they're going to see it as glamorous. Someone
1:00:13
that grew up in the culture, I understood what they were talking about. Was it exactly right? No,
1:00:17
but I understood it. And so that's when you get a lot of kids that listen or they look at these
1:00:22
movies, like Boston Up and, you know, all these kind of like, black exploitation films and some
1:00:29
of the hood movies and stuff, they're like, oh, this is amazing, this is great, I want to be like
1:00:32
this to an extent. For kids that grew up in the culture, we were already that. So like, there's a
1:00:39
really, really fine line. And I think that's where parents kind of come into play with talking to
1:00:43
their kids and monitoring, you know, what it is that they listen to, if they're listening to
1:00:47
something, like what I used to do with my daughter, oh, you're looking at that, are you listening to
1:00:50
that? Okay, let's process that. Because at the end of the day, this stuff is always going to be here,
1:00:56
no matter how much we fight, it probably dropped down some, but it's always going to be here.
1:01:00
So it's best for parents to kind of like speak up and talk to their kids and listen and be really
1:01:04
in tune. But does it frustrate me? Definitely to hear people like, pimp my ride, pimp this out,
1:01:10
pimp that out. Like, it's kind of like a slap in the face, because I have to actually deal with
1:01:16
real pimps, the kids that we work with have to deal with real pimps and not understanding fully
1:01:21
what the culture is. I like to say, exploiter, because exploiter does not sound cool,
1:01:25
exploiter is calling it exactly what it is. You know what I mean? And when you listen to music too,
1:01:30
they still talk about some of the pimp stuff in all genres, if you really listen to it, right?
1:01:35
And so I would like to separate the word pimp from exploiter to an extent that there's a bridge,
1:01:41
but pimp to everybody seems cool nowadays, exploiter is exactly what it is. So that's why I kind of
1:01:47
interchange a little bit. You'll hear me say pimp a little bit, but more so exploiter because I want
1:01:51
people to lock in, that they're raping, they're beating, they're robbing, they're molesting,
1:01:55
they're doing all these different things. And even down to the point of they're even murdering
1:02:00
these kids, I don't, I can't tell you how many kids that we've come across, or I've come across
1:02:07
in the years of doing this work. And even the young ladies that I was being exploited with
1:02:11
out in that life that are no longer here with us because they were murdered, either by the
1:02:16
exploiter or by the buyer, which we call the trick or the john. I don't like the word john.
1:02:22
Buyer is great. These are kids, these are people that are victims that are being
1:02:30
exploited, but they're also being murdered. If you tell, you're going to die. If you don't do
1:02:35
what I say, you're going to die. If I had a exploiter tell me when I was at the end of my rope
1:02:42
that his plan was to drive me to the desert, kill me and bury my body because he was going to get
1:02:47
out of the life and I was at the end of my rope. Like how selfish is that and how sick is that?
1:02:51
You know, so people need to understand what comes along with that pimp word and people need to
1:02:56
understand that this is an exploiter. This is a rapist, a killer, a beater, all these different
1:03:02
things. There's nothing glamorous about being an exploiter. Yeah, it's not an aspirational
1:03:07
identity. Like, but you're this suburban kid listening to this music or watching this, you
1:03:12
know, television show or something like that. And you're like, Oh my gosh, wouldn't that be awesome?
1:03:15
But again, they don't show everything. Like you don't get everything in the lyrics. I'm glad you
1:03:19
kind of set the record straight about that. But for for you, Jessica, around the age of 20,
1:03:24
you actually made it out of the life. And so you've used that phrase like that's what a lot of people
1:03:28
talked about. Like that's kind of when you started your transition out, but it kind of begs the
1:03:33
question and y'all do address this in the book. There's a lot of people that would ignorantly
1:03:37
just say, why didn't she just leave? Why didn't she just get out of the life? And if I'm being
1:03:41
honest, I would probably say something like that too. Before I read the book, before I like really
1:03:46
thought about it and really thought about the exploitation and the mind control and the physicality
1:03:50
of some of these people, these exploiters trying to really just hold down and pin down your entire
1:03:55
life. But kind of describe, because I know it wasn't an easy transition. It wasn't just like,
1:03:59
I'm out of the life today. It was kind of an in and out kind of a thing. But explain to us how
1:04:04
people do get out of the life, because it does seem like a life sentence for a lot of these young
1:04:09
ladies and young boys as well. Yeah, I mean, once you're in, you know, and that's just what it is,
1:04:14
I still have exploiters. I'm close to 40. Okay, I still have exploiters and people that still try
1:04:20
to contact me on social media. So my block game is strong, you know, you know, but it's it's getting
1:04:28
out is is a really difficult or hard thing to say. Some people get out the first time and they're
1:04:35
out and they're back with their families or they're doing whatever and they're doing well, you know,
1:04:39
but even for someone that's doing super well, they still have to stop be with themselves, right?
1:04:46
And now you have this this wheel going in your head or this reel where it's showing you everything
1:04:53
that you've done, you know what I mean? And like, how do you cope with that? A lot of people that
1:04:58
get out of their life and they were exploited as kids, a lot of them turn to different substances,
1:05:02
whether it's alcohol, you know, marijuana or the hard stuff, you know, like the coping stuff.
1:05:07
For me, I got out. Yeah, it's 20 a couple days before my 21st birthday. And I was in that program
1:05:15
from maybe roughly almost six months. And it was hell for me, because I actually had to sit still
1:05:21
in all of my abuse, all of my torture, all of my near death experiences, everything. And even
1:05:29
when I got out for that time, I still went back to the life. After a while, I didn't have any skills.
1:05:35
I didn't really have a full blown support system. I trusted no man. And then when I did date,
1:05:41
I dated guys, even if they weren't exploiters, they mirrored a lot of the same things that the
1:05:46
exploiters did. You know what I mean? There are a lot of things that can basically pull you back
1:05:50
into the life. And so instead of me going fully back in, I danced for a while and then kept some
1:05:55
regulars, you know, which is still not okay. It's still dangerous. It took me it took me longer
1:06:04
than 20 years old to fully be out of the life. And then when I was out for maybe about a year,
1:06:10
like fully out not engaging and dancing anything, then I started, you know, like volunteering at
1:06:18
the old program I went through, you know, and then kind of fell into this work. And I was in school
1:06:22
to be a nurse, you know, but like in that short span of time, I jumped right over to the next thing,
1:06:28
but it took me well into my twenties to actually get my life together. You know what I mean? And
1:06:33
I remember even before my 20th birthday, I tried to leave and run and escape. And I would go home
1:06:41
to my grandparents house. My mom would be there. My grandparents would be there. My daughter was
1:06:44
there at the time. And my explainer knew where I lived, knew where my family lived. He'd pull up.
1:06:51
And it's like, even if he's not there, he's already instilled in me, and this is for the girls too,
1:06:56
I'm always going to come for you. I'm always going to know what you're doing. I'm always going
1:07:01
to be there, like the super all knowing. I remember, do you remember those chirp phones?
1:07:05
Yeah, yeah. And I remember trying to escape one day and I hopped in these guys car
1:07:11
over by where the stadium is now out here because that was a really popular place back then to
1:07:17
be bought and sold and still kind of is especially during the all the stuff. And I remember I hopped
1:07:24
in this car and my explainer, he kept reaching out to me and he was like, Oh, I know where you
1:07:28
are. I know where you are. And there was no way to track the phones back then. Like there was no
1:07:32
way for one person to track the chirp phone back then because they were fairly new. And he was like,
1:07:38
yeah, I got a tracker on you. I know exactly where you are, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was so
1:07:42
convincing. And I was so freaked out. I actually jumped out of these guys car and they were trying
1:07:46
to get me to safety. They were trying to get me like to the police station or a shelter. It was
1:07:50
one or the other. And I jumped out the car because I was like, he's going to find me. He's going to
1:07:54
hurt me. He's going to hurt them. And I went back to him, took the beating and went back to him and
1:08:01
worked for a while. And then I tried to escape again. You know, and this went on for a while too
1:08:05
because I was already getting tired. And so it's really difficult, you know, when people say, oh,
1:08:11
why don't you just get out? There's so much psychological and emotional warfare and damage
1:08:16
already done by the time the expletor kind of lets you do what you do. Nine times out of 10,
1:08:21
you're going to go back. I think on average for a domestic violence relationship, it on average,
1:08:25
it takes about seven times for a person to successfully leave on average. So I always say that commercial
1:08:32
sexual exploitation is domestic violence on steroids on top of steroids. So it takes a high number
1:08:40
of times for someone to get away. You have the love ties because a lot of them will be like,
1:08:44
I love you, introduce you to their families. They'll actually build out this whole family unit for
1:08:49
you. And a lot of times the kids are looking for the family unit. I just want somebody to love me
1:08:54
and care about me. I just want to belong. And a lot of kids want to belong. Like, look at how
1:08:58
many adults want to belong. The need to belong is so strong within a kid that's growing. You
1:09:04
know what I mean? Because that's a part of that. That's one of the building blocks for a child to
1:09:08
grow into a healthy adult is to have the camaraderie and the, you know, the togetherness. We need
1:09:15
companions. And so the exploiters, they build things like that or say if they don't build a
1:09:20
relationship like that, they'll take pictures like nude pictures. If you leave, I'm going to post
1:09:25
these at your school. I'm going to send these to your parents. Oh, I know where your parents stay.
1:09:30
So if you don't do as I say, I'm going to hurt your parents and I'm going to hurt your little
1:09:33
sister, I'm going to turn your sister out. There are so many different things that it doesn't have
1:09:38
to be physical to keep someone in. And people don't get to really see that. They're just like,
1:09:43
if you're not in a, in a cage and you're not chained up, then you should be able to get away
1:09:48
with no problem. It's not that simple. I've had police knock on the door and I covered for my
1:09:53
exploiter. You know what I mean? Right. It's way more than physical. Because you describe in the
1:09:58
book how there are people that are kept in cages. There are little kids kept in cages that are
1:10:02
in sex trafficking. But then again, it's not just about the physical warfare. It's about the
1:10:06
psychological warfare that these exploiters are doing to you. And again, like to do someone who's
1:10:12
been exploited, I'm sure there's been some times when you've like chastised yourself. But you have
1:10:15
to remember like your brain's not fully developed until you're 25. So to expect like a 12 year old
1:10:20
to have the wherewithal to be able to get away, which isn't just a physical act, but it's a mental
1:10:24
act that's got to be timing intact. Like that's just not really in the cards for a lot of these
1:10:28
people. But the thing is, is that you did eventually get out and you have this quote as a short quote
1:10:33
from men fight for me that I thought was interesting. So I'd like you to give me a little bit more
1:10:37
follow up on it. It says looking back, I feel as if God was pushing me out of the life and making
1:10:42
a way of escape. Now, of all the people that I know of, you are one of the people that are in the
1:10:47
category of individuals that can be very, very angry at God and or say that your life is proof
1:10:54
that he put he couldn't possibly exist because of all the horrific, terrible things that have
1:11:00
happened to you. And yet you've mentioned God in this conversation, you mentioned God in the book,
1:11:05
you obviously seem to be a woman of faith. So walk me through that, that that you could still
1:11:10
cling to something like that, whereas most people who typically have a very easy sheltered life
1:11:15
would say, well, look at all the bad things happening in the world. How could I believe in this,
1:11:19
you know, creator God that absolutely loves every single one of his beings? Walk me through that.
1:11:24
No, I mean, I definitely turned my back on God at times in the life, because I was like, if
1:11:29
God is real, then why am I going through this? Like was I a bad person? Or, you know, I mean,
1:11:34
as a kid, I questioned it. But I think one of the big things that like kind of,
1:11:38
I was able to like maintain some type of faith. My grandmother was a huge prayer warrior,
1:11:44
you know, my grandfather was a pastor. And the level of prayer that I felt like people, you know,
1:11:50
some people are like, Oh, no, like prayer doesn't work. I really do believe prayer works. And there
1:11:56
were times literally at one time, I'll talk about one time in particular, just to give a little
1:12:02
context. I was going on at what they would call a date when you're being bought and sold. And I'm
1:12:07
in the car with this guy. And this guy is like, literally, as we're driving closer and closer to
1:12:12
this destination, he is losing himself. He's losing his mind. And I remember we parked and I'm talking
1:12:18
to him. And he turns to me and looks at me and he's, I can't do this, I can't do this. And he's
1:12:26
rocking. And it wasn't like, Oh, I can't sleep with you or whatever. This was something dark and
1:12:30
sinister. And you could see him, he's reaching like he's going to do something. And I'm speaking
1:12:36
to him. And I'm like, Oh, you don't have to do it. If you don't want to, it's all good. And I'm
1:12:40
talking him out of it. So I'm thinking at the time that, you know, I'm I'm doing this like,
1:12:46
you know, my my mouthpiece is just so sharp that I talked myself out of being raped or
1:12:51
killed, you know, or both. And it was so funny. I got a call from my mom. And my mom, she could
1:12:59
sometimes feel when something was happening. And she was like, your grandmother told me to call
1:13:04
and your grandmother hasn't stopped praying. Your grandmother's in like she's physically, like she's
1:13:09
praying, praying. And my grandmother was bedridden at the time, very sick. So she couldn't do a lot
1:13:13
at all. She really couldn't do anything. And my grandmother would just pray she would go into
1:13:17
this thing. She can't hear anybody. She's just praying. And I really do believe that she prayed
1:13:21
me about that. Because it's it just so happens how it all went, the timing and everything in my
1:13:27
grandmother's like spiritually in tune. And I do believe that people can feel one another,
1:13:32
especially when they love each other. And then when they have God that's tying it all together,
1:13:36
they can pray you out of some of the craziest things and not saying that, you know, if my time
1:13:40
came, then God was probably like, probably like, you suffered enough, come home. But it was kind of
1:13:46
like, I was like, nope, it's not your time yet. You know, and so like, that was one of the things
1:13:51
that got me out of, you know, that kind of reinstilled kind of more faith in me. And when things would
1:13:58
get crazy, I would just start praying. And for a lot of it, you could see that there were things
1:14:04
that eased up or things didn't happen. I should have been dead a long time ago, at least a dozen
1:14:08
times. And somehow I'm still here. And so, you know, God's always played a part, but he wasn't
1:14:17
huge, but God knew I needed him. It's kind of like he was there in the midnight hour every single
1:14:21
time. Because he's like, your story's not done. You're not done. And now I know for sure, full circle,
1:14:27
I was meant to go through certain things like God didn't do it to me. God steps back, right?
1:14:33
And he allows I was supposed to be here so I could help other kids where their faith may not be as
1:14:37
strong as mine was and mine was shook. You know, so it's kind of like, you know, God is like,
1:14:43
you have this capacity to bring others closer to me. You know, and so that's how I've kind of taken
1:14:49
that whole situation. And I would pray. And for the few good things that did happen in my life,
1:14:54
that was God. I wouldn't be anything without him. Do I still struggle with my faith sometimes? Yes,
1:14:59
but I don't struggle with God. I don't know if that makes sense. I would absolutely make sense.
1:15:04
Yeah. And so a lot of kids that go through not believing in God and I'll sit with them.
1:15:10
And you know, they'll ask me like, why do you believe in God if you can't see him? And I'd be like,
1:15:15
I don't have all the answers, but I know I feel him. I have faith. I've seen what he's done for me.
1:15:20
Well, how do you know it's not true? Hey, you know what? I don't know, but I choose to believe.
1:15:24
And when I say, usually if I tell kids I choose to believe, they're like, you choose it,
1:15:28
you know, and that's one of those openings, you know what I mean? Because they're like, oh,
1:15:33
there's a choice, which a lot of kids have choice removed away from them. So I've used a lot of my
1:15:38
higher power, blessing, faith, and not just outright telling God and Jesus, you know, so
1:15:44
in a way, I'm a warrior for God, I guess, in that way. But yeah, and I think, you know, when you're
1:15:52
talking about God and leading people to the Father, like, there are times when you do that
1:15:57
explicitly and you show them the gospel, but as long as a lot of the stuff you're doing leads them
1:16:01
to the good news, that's that's the redeeming word. And that's what we get when we see in the first
1:16:05
four books in the New Testament. But even something you said earlier, just here recently,
1:16:09
a very, very close friend of mine suffered a deep personal tragedy. And I know that people
1:16:14
are going to try to say, you know, silly things like, you know, you know, everything happens for
1:16:18
a reason, but they mean it secularly, or, you know, even other people on the like crazy side,
1:16:23
they could be like, well, there must have been some sin in one of y'all's lives because of
1:16:26
something that happened to you. That kind of a thing. And the thing about it is, is like,
1:16:30
when you assume that there's no good that can come from a situation, you're assuming the judgment
1:16:35
seat and the viewership of God, because you, while you were in the life, I bet you there's a lot of
1:16:40
people that would have been very self righteous in saying, there's no way God could possibly allow
1:16:45
this. Look at what's happening to this poor girl, Jessica. And yet here you are today, close to 40
1:16:49
years old saying, no, I had to go through that so God could use me. It's just an incredible
1:16:54
indictment for people whose faith is so small, because they've led such an easy life and they
1:16:58
don't realize it. And their faith can just be pushed over with just like the smallest little
1:17:03
breeze because they just haven't really ever experienced anything. I know we're running short
1:17:08
on time, but I did want to ask something like this. And this is, you know, it's somewhat personal,
1:17:11
but I think that we came to a little bit of an agreement off air that yeah, we have some good
1:17:16
comfortability in terms of this conversation. But I am curious, how difficult is it for you as a
1:17:22
grown adult woman who's no longer in the life to be in a committed relationship with a man you've
1:17:28
mentioned earlier in this podcast earlier in this interview that, you know, trusting a man like you
1:17:32
couldn't trust a man for good fricking reason. Yeah, I mean, yeah, every reason in the world,
1:17:36
not to trust a man. So do you have that capability to be in that type of committed dating or marriage
1:17:45
husband type relationship? Do you feel like you have that in you? I know that's personal question,
1:17:48
but on the other side, do you feel like you could come to a place where you could forgive or have
1:17:55
you forgiven your exploiters? Because these men branded you, right? They altered your body in
1:18:01
more ways than one. Right. I mean, you know, you have a cover up tattoo on your neck, because, you
1:18:06
know, you were you were branded for one of your one of your exploiters. So that's a lot in one
1:18:12
question I realized, but I know I'm trying to mush some things together here towards the end,
1:18:16
but just walk me through that if you don't mind. I updated and
1:18:20
didn't always I haven't really picked great guys, but I think part of it too is like I'm still not
1:18:27
fully trusting. I struggle with different levels of intimacy. I struggle with, of course,
1:18:36
the trust is a really big one. So without trust, you can't really achieve full intimacy. And I'm
1:18:40
not speaking of like sex. Sex is a whole other ballpark where I lose connection with the sex.
1:18:47
So it's like I'm still healing from all that, but the intimacy of allowing someone to hug me,
1:18:52
to hold my hand, to do certain things, because I'm like, okay, so what's your angle? Because a lot
1:18:57
of men that I run into, you know, I've been a public figure for a long time out here in LA County.
1:19:03
So I've had a lot of men Google me, you know, and pull up information on me and they're like,
1:19:08
oh, this is what you used to do. And I think you need a friend and I don't need a person to come in,
1:19:12
you know, kind of like not wholeheartedly, or within most of the men come with angles. The men
1:19:18
that I trust, they're my friends, they're my support. Alan's one of the number one men that
1:19:24
I trust. There's another man named Jim that I really trust. Another man named Marquise, I trust
1:19:29
my uncles, well, not all of them, but you know, but it's more of like a brotherly friend, uncle,
1:19:38
kind of relationship, intimate, deep relationship intimacy wise, you know, like I'm single right now,
1:19:46
because I need to heal more because I'm going to, it's kind of almost rule of thumb is like I'm
1:19:51
attracting how I feel about myself to a degree. So I'm not fully aligned with where I need to be.
1:19:57
So I'm going to attract certain things. And a lot of times the men that I do attract sexually
1:20:01
objectify me. That's very, it's very, what do you call it? It's very similar to how I grew up.
1:20:10
And so if a man comes at me, I need to, I'm hoping that a godly man comes to me to be honest.
1:20:16
And a man that has patience and understanding, you know, and sees that, okay, yeah, you're
1:20:20
beautiful to me, all this other stuff, but sees more within me. And I'm working on seeing more
1:20:25
within myself. So I understand that my person is not here yet. But I do have people that see a lot
1:20:30
in me now, men that I'm friends with, they see a lot of me now. So it's helping to restore me.
1:20:36
As far as a relationship, I would love to have a relationship, a healthy one, but I'm not fully
1:20:41
there yet. And some of these guys are a little crazy. So and I just, I don't want to be sexually
1:20:49
objectified. I want to be healthy. So definitely to answer your question is, yeah, I struggle,
1:20:55
I struggle hard. And I know one day it'll get better, but a lot of our kids, they struggle
1:21:02
really, really hard and it takes them a long time. Like it's taken me a long time. And some kids,
1:21:07
you know, they grow up into young adults and they really find their person. It's just a matter of
1:21:11
where the healing is. And whoever that person is, is that the person that God has aligned me with.
1:21:17
And I haven't met that person that God has aligned me with yet. Right. Well, I envy your
1:21:22
perspective and your strength. Again, reading what I read and knowing what I know about your story
1:21:27
to hear you saying these words, it's a little bit shocking and it'd be even more shocking if I
1:21:32
didn't believe in a God in a redeeming, all powerful God. But last question I have for you,
1:21:36
because this is kind of our call to action, you know, with all this as well, because there's one
1:21:42
quote specifically from you in this book, that's haunting and haunting is the only word I can think
1:21:48
think to to apply to this. But I love that you said it because it put guys in the mindset of
1:21:53
you've got to know this stuff is going on. So I'll read it back to you here. Tonight, when you
1:21:58
tuck your kids into bed, you can imagine the hundreds of thousands of kids just getting ready
1:22:02
to go out for quote unquote work. My hope and prayer would be for you to be impacted enough to
1:22:07
ask more questions and ultimately get involved in this fight. My only request of you is that you
1:22:12
respect me for sharing all of this personal information enough to take some kind of action.
1:22:17
Children and young women like me need you to fight for them. And again, the name of the book is
1:22:24
men fight for me. So I know you're talking to the men, the audience you're talking to right now is
1:22:28
overwhelmingly men. So take us through why you decided to do that quote because I felt like it was
1:22:33
a very powerful way to end your contribution to the book. Because men are needed in this fight.
1:22:39
And so like past experiences like men haven't always respected me speaking up on my story or
1:22:45
speaking on the story of others. And it's like to look listen to it and see it through a different
1:22:50
lens, hear it on a different level, hear it deeper, that this isn't just an inner city thing. This
1:22:56
isn't just a minority thing or just a white thing or a boy thing or a girl thing or you know like
1:23:01
don't categorize it. It's listen to the information. Men are a really big part of the solution but men
1:23:07
also play a very big part in the problem. So if we can kind of switch that and men are listening,
1:23:13
men are seeing and they're doing something and they're being active and they're like hey I remember
1:23:17
this lady's voice. Like if I was able to do that just a little bit maybe they could change someone
1:23:23
else's life. If someone would have come up to me in the street and said hey I'm taking you out of
1:23:29
this I'm here to fight for you. No this isn't going to happen. Just imagine I probably could have
1:23:35
gotten a lot more help and I could have gotten a lot better earlier on. You know what I mean?
1:23:39
It's men biologically however you want to say it are protectors by nature. You know what I mean?
1:23:47
I know we live in a kind of a feminist world and all kinds of stuff and I'm not saying that we're
1:23:52
weak and you know we're these delicate flowers. If you blow a certain way we just wither and fall
1:23:57
apart we'll fight for ourselves. But it's something really special when a man stands up and says no
1:24:02
not her not today. No is she ain't got nobody to fight? I'm going to fight for her. You know that
1:24:09
backing it's the duel that's how God created us. You know men are the the the the the protectors and
1:24:16
I guess women are kind of like nurturers? I'm learning that too. And so it's really important
1:24:22
because like we have this ever grown problem it's always been here but it's more mainstream.
1:24:27
People are able to get into our children's you know bedrooms at night you know through their
1:24:32
iPhones and their their tablets and you know like strangers are walking in and out of our our
1:24:38
walking in and out of our homes you know without physically being there and having access to our
1:24:44
children and so it's like there's a lot that we have to do. If no one took anything else from me
1:24:49
today or from reading the book at least just take respect what's given to you even if you
1:24:55
don't fully agree with it you could respect it right and start trying to do something even if
1:25:00
you're not going into the community you may have a daughter a niece you know a cousin or
1:25:05
grandchild do something and then for the young men too start to start teaching the men uh the young
1:25:12
boys what you know authentic real masculinity looks like because they're going to end up with
1:25:17
their daughters one day you know what I mean one day they're going to be fathers one day so
1:25:21
we all go hand in hand so if you take nothing else like run with this teach your boys teach the
1:25:28
girls protect the girls even protect the boys because that's a whole other conversation boys are
1:25:32
actually in higher demand the girls are but we see a lot of the girls but that's a whole other
1:25:37
conversation for another day our kids are in trouble and we as adults have to stand up and do
1:25:42
something if you see something say something if at the very least you buy this book just go buy the
1:25:47
book and read it and then give it to somebody that you think will benefit from it it never hurts to
1:25:52
have a little bit of uh get a little education around you know the topic because our children are
1:25:58
in trouble and our children are going to grow into adults that may become in trouble you know so
1:26:03
i hope that was a long winded but just a little bit of that's great uh men need to realize that if
1:26:08
you put your head in the sand and pretend that darkness isn't around you the darkness is still
1:26:12
there when you open your eyes so i really appreciate you letting us get into all this stuff i know
1:26:17
it was personal but it's part of your story and it's part of what makes you an incredibly strong
1:26:20
young lady that you're able to talk about these things and really make a difference but that's
1:26:24
all for me is there anything else you want to get off your chest yeah i just you know thank you for
1:26:28
allowing me to be a part of your platform i know it took a lot for us to get here um and you know
1:26:35
just thank you for asking like great questions and i i think all of your listeners too for tuning in
1:26:40
and you know wanting to be a part of the solution whether they know it or not and to get out there
1:26:44
and go buy the book fight for me uh dot net and it'll connect you to amazon um and you can purchase
1:26:50
as many books as you want and just know that this book a lot of the proceeds or the majority of the
1:26:54
proceeds aside from some of the logistical stuff goes to um survivors so you're supporting one way
1:27:02
or another without even knowing and just continue to stay blessed and and stay protected and you know
1:27:08
i i just i thank you guys i think you um you're amazing you kyle you're amazing and your listeners
1:27:17
are amazing and i hope i get to come back and talk to you again it's absolutely i appreciate it very
1:27:21
much jessica midkiff thank you for coming on undaunted life a man's podcast thank you i'll see you again
1:27:26
thank you guys so much for sticking with us through the end i know that was a tough one for
1:27:31
a lot of you guys but we really appreciate allen jessica coming on and telling us a little bit about
1:27:34
their stories and what's going on here in the united states and really around the globe as well
1:27:38
but before we let you go we are going to do a quick resilience boost out undaunted life
1:27:41
our mission is equipping men to pushback darkness with content that for just spiritual
1:27:45
mental and physical resilience so the link i've got for you today or the links rather i've got links
1:27:49
to the saving innocence webpage and also a couple different links that i'll let you get to the book
1:27:53
men fight for me the role of authentic masculinity in ending sexual exploitation and trafficking so
1:27:58
you can go to fight for me dot net and also i've got the link there to where you can buy it on amazon
1:28:03
all right guys thanks so much for listening to the show we do appreciate it wherever you're
1:28:05
listening to this please subscribe right and leave us a positive five star review if you want to come
1:28:09
speak alive at your event or on your podcast you shoot me an email to info at undaunted life that's
1:28:14
i n f o at undaunted life you can follow us on instagram and tick tock and like us on facebook
1:28:19
and check out our website for everything else including how to donate to keep more content
1:28:22
like this coming your way just go to www dot undaunted life and we want to also think the band
1:28:27
august burns red for allowing us to use their music for our content the music on this podcast
1:28:31
is our song cutting the ties which is off their tenth anniversary re-recording of their album
1:28:35
leveler the links are in the description i'm your host kyle tomsen remember keep pushing back
1:28:42
darkness keep forging spiritual mental and physical resilience keep seeking the lion of Judah
1:29:12
you