Interview Kevin Austin

            Getting started with sex trafficking was an easy topic to really get into. It’s happening everywhere with every type of person, especially women my age. Kevin Austin is a modern day abolitionist that speaks about the Set Free Movement, he has talked to people recovering from sex trafficking and is also working different types of things surrounding this topic to get it stopped.

I asked Kevin many questions to the topic of why women get into these and if it is a choice. He described to me as it not as being a choice. The two biggest issues of how and why women are easily dragged into this is the “poverty and sexual abuse” (Kevin Austin, April 7, 2014) happening to them before they are trafficked in. Also these women are very vulnerable from all the different abuse that is surrounding them.

Another reason to how women are tricked into these types of things, like I said revolved around poverty. Women may pay to be in a agency to help them travel to a job where they may think they are going to work at a restaurant, but get there and there is no job. The agency has their money, identification and all their paper work. The agency now controls what the women do. A lot of times they tell them you stand under the red light and sell your body until you have paid us back. Which is paying them back for travel, room, living expenses. In reality these women may never pay back their “debt.”

These women don’t just give up right away. They get drugged and abused until they decide to listen. These women have no other choice. They were so poor in the first place they had to find a job, then the job turns out to be no job, and now they are getting abused and drugged into “paying back there fees that they owe the agency.”

I then asked Kevin if they go and get women out of houses like the one from the book “SOLD.” He said he has never done this but a lot of it goes through law enforcement first. There are different groups help go in and save women like in the book. Many of the women that come out alive are messed up and are so twisted they have to go through a long heeling process before living a good life again. Kevin also said he has seen many that have started living a normal life, this gives me hope that they are getting helped and hopeful helping prevent it from happening to others.