The Human Side of Human Trafficking
Beyond the headlines and the stock photos. How ordinary trafficking looks at the start, and what families, schools, and communities can do before it's too late.
Why she will not be quiet
For almost ten years, trafficking had her daughter. For most of 2020, she didn't know if her daughter was alive.
Deondriea didn't choose this cause. It came to her family. While the world locked its doors in 2020, she spent most of that year waiting for a phone call, a message, any sign at all, not knowing whether her child was still alive.
That is the side of trafficking almost no one talks about. The mother who sleeps with her phone face-up on the nightstand. The family carrying a shame that was never theirs. The silence that keeps good people from asking the right questions until it's too late.
Her daughter's story belongs to her daughter. What Deondriea carries is a mother's side of it, and a promise: no other family should have to learn what she learned the way she learned it.
2020January
A year of days. Most of them spent not knowing.
Shame belongs to the people who exploit. Never to the ones who were exploited, or the families who love them.