Sex Trafficking
It is out there and almost got me
Some months ago, I was invited to take part in a zoom meeting on sex trafficking, something which occurs more often than most people realize. Since we were in the middle the coronavirus pandemic and also dealing with continued actions for racial justice, I initially viewed this as a welcome respite to deal with an issue that is also a matter of wellbeing and justice but not considered often enough.
Besides, it reminded me of something that I fortunately or unfortunately knew about firsthand, at least as far as attempts made to draw a young woman into sex slavery.
The vast majority of people think that only poor, uneducated young women are drawn into that world. Though rarer, efforts are made to draw educated women into that underworld. I experienced it firsthand in the early seventies in Paris, France.
I had just received a master’s degree and was several months away from starting a course in simultaneous interpretation from French and Russian into English in London. Through friends I had found a lovely apartment full of books that I could take care of while the owners were away for the summer. It was a great opportunity to improve my French.
The owners of the apartment, grandparents of a fellow college alumna, were a French/American couple who frequented the American Church in Paris. They suggested that I also attend. I followed their advice and found it welcoming and a good place to learn about the city.
One Sunday during the coffee gathering after the service, I met, among others, a couple of a certain age with a daughter who seemed to be some years older than I. Almost immediately, they invited me to have lunch with them, but I demurred. Somehow, I just didn’t feel comfortable with them. The daughter, a very tall, rather heavily made-up woman, did not, in my eyes, behave like a daughter. They seemed almost sleezy. I literally moved away from them rather quickly. Also, they did not bother to talk much to the others in the post-congregation meeting.
They came a second Sunday, a third, a fourth. Each time, they made a special effort to come near me, to talk to me, to invite me to lunch. Each time I found an excuse. They did talk to others but never made an effort to become part of the whole group.
The fifth or sixth time they invited me, I proposed, really to get rid of them, that we go to lunch to a little, simple place almost right behind the church. Once we sat down and ordered, I felt as if the three were cornering me. What was it? The food came. I barely talked. The so-called daughter was really irking me, with her heavy perfume overwhelming me. Suddenly, I felt queasy. A memory floated in front of my eyes.
A couple of years before, while in college, I had developed a sebaceous cyst, one brought on by some cut while shaving under my arms. It was so painful that I was almost screaming and my dormmates called the college infirmary. The doctor ordered that I should come in the first thing the next morning and asked if meanwhile anybody had any strong painkillers. One of my dormmates, the daughter of a high ranking military officer, did, something her father’s military hospital had prescribed for her acute menstrual pains.
I had taken one or two of those pills and, after a while, thought that my head was an orange and that I should peel it. A little later, looking through the sixth floor window of my room, I thought it might be good to simply step directly outside to the ground floor. My roommate pulled me back in, and she and friends made sure that I was safe until the next morning when they accompanied me to the infirmary. There the doctor laughed. She had been in Vietnam taking care of our wounded soldiers and had never seen someone as happily drugged as I was. I was in such a state that she cut and emptied the sebaceous cyst without any additional pain killer.
All of this came back in a flood, and I knew I was in danger and was the only one who could save myself from whatever that danger could be. I smiled and said, “I really must go to the ladies’ room” and suddenly got up and headed towards it and past it as there was an exit door. I went as fast as I could, remembering that there was a metro station right near this place. I almost dived towards it, held on to the rail walking down the stairs, somehow put my ticket in and took the next train which, hard to believe, was there within a minute or two.
This was my normal route to and from the church, thus in spite of the whirling in my head, I did get off at the right stop, somehow made it to the street, to the house, to the apartment, opened the door, ran inside got a bag, filled it with some clothes, walked to the bathroom, added some essentials, went out again, took the metro again to the main train station and went directly from Paris to our US embassy in Bern. There, I reported the whole to an officer at the embassy.
Yes, these were people were trying to get me into what at that time was called the “white slave trade.” Fortunately for me, they did not know about the past that got me out of their clutches. Nor did they know about the fact that someone who had studied international relations, had worked for some weeks at the United Nations, had a few diplomats as fellow students, that someone like that, though to their taste, knew so much that she could smell them out.
When I went back to Paris and went to the American church, they had disappeared.
I wrote a few lines about it to the organizer of the meeting on sex trafficking but, somehow, the memory was still so painful that I could not manage to attend the meeting. But sex trafficking is an issue and still exists. The present pandemic and the rightful calls to justice, should not mask our minds and hearts to other issues. Young women and young men, of all races, of all cultures, of all faiths, are potential targets of this ‘trade’ and need to be educated and protected and the wider public needs to know of its existence and extent. I was reminded of this just the other day by the alumni office of my great graduate school, Fletcher. This is why, in spite of the pain, I share it with you. Remember, that even the novels that I write are historical and based on truths. There are moments when the personal truth, in fact, is so close to the fiction that it hurts. Sometimes the truth is so important that it has to come out in as it is.
