Mm-hmm.

And then, uh, right after that, at the very same time, I'm in middle school now.

A man older, decades older than me, I say it ...

Uh, I wrote a book about my stories.

I say, "He seeped into the crevices of my life." That is how that happens.

It isn't that I'm not able to detect what's going on or I'm not self-confident.

I'm not saying that I was, but this person befriended me, showed my family that they were an authority figure, somebody to be trusted, that worked with other young people, were around other young people.

Yeah

How old were you when you realized that you were being trafficked?

trafficked?I did not know what it was until my late 30s, and just with some of the information that was coming out in news and other sectors.

I do a lot of social studying and then I started working in ABA therapy with autistic littles and adults and there was trainings on a lot of the ways that children get exploited in human trafficking, and a lot of my life started clicking together.

Um, when I was a child, it was somebody that loved me.

I loved them.

Um, they were well-liked in the community, lived close, had access, all those things, the, the normal ways that predators get into families.

Everybody trusts them, and it was slow, it was calculated, it was over time.

Uh, "How can average, everyday people spot the sub- subtle signs of exploitation in their own local communities?"