Latest / The Rachelle Starr Podcast / Made in the Image of God | The Rachelle Starr Podcast Episode 9
Transcript
- Rachelle Starr: Hi, I'm Rochelle, the host of the Rochelle Star Podcast, where we equip the church to bring the hope and love of Jesus to women in the adult entertainment industry. We're going to be having honest conversations about what that really looks like. So if you've ever wondered how to engage in this space or how to do it well, you're in the right place. Welcome back to the Rochelle Star podcast. This is Rochelle and Natalie. And we are so excited to be talking about understanding the industry today and the differences between exploitation and trafficking strip club versus IMB. What does that even mean? What does digital outreach look like? And ⁓ how does Skrull Hope engage all of these things so that we can bring the gospel and the light of Christ to all of it? So yes. We need talk about it. So we're gonna dive in and talk about the difference between exploitation trafficking. I wanna first start with ⁓ many years ago a woman came up to me and said, Well, I don't really agree with your ministry because you minister to dancers and they choose to be there. And our organization and our ministry serves trafficked women and they don't choose to be there. And so, you know I started on the path of just trying to educate people of what this actually looks like and why is it important to understand. And a couple of things right off the bat is all of these people in the adult entertainment industry in human trafficking are exploited. Amen. That is how money is made, is through the exploitation of an individual. Point point. There are plenty of differences between somebody who is dancing at a club. Somebody who is ⁓ working at an illicit massage brothel is what they're called, or somebody who is being held captive that is being sold night overnight at a hotel, maybe, or a house or something where they are being trafficked, forced to do something they have no control. Okay. All of those things exist, right? Right. We've seen all of them. We have. Seventy-six percent of trafficking victims are trafficked through a commercial sex industry establishment at some point in time. In their journey of exploitation. A lot of women don't start out being trafficked, but they end up getting into a situation where they then find a boyfriend. ⁓ we'll talk about some of that and what does that look like? What is the difference between a trafficker and a pimp? And we're just gonna dive into it, Natalie. I love it. Love it. Natalie does our case management, Scarlet Hope, and we love having her, but she currently has a pretty full caseload and so she is upfront and personal with all of the stories and all of the differences and you know and gets to see this first hand. So let's dive in. What is trafficking? Okay, so trafficking is engaging in commercial sex acts through force, fraud, or coercion. So the difference between being exploited and being trafficked is that trafficking is through force, fraud, and coercion engaging in the industry. Whereas being exploited is technically we would say she's quote unquote choosing to be there, but there are not as many resources available to her and there's not as many options for her. And she finds herself, this is the only thing I can do. So for instance, a big ⁓ A big demographic of women in the adult entertainment industry are single moms. So there are many single moms who technically quote unquote choose to dance at a strip club. But because they are a single mom, they can't find child care during the day, they can't afford, they can't ⁓ find jobs that make give them enough money because they have a lack of education, they have a lack of support, they have a lack, a lack, a lack, a lack, lack. And so those Barriers are exploited by the industry, and they're told, Hey, if you just do this, you'll make all this money. And so they use those barriers instead of helping them overcome those barriers, the industry uses those barriers to get them into the industry. Whereas trafficking, it's a lot more of like I said, the it's force, fraud, and coercion, and also a lot of times has the aspect of like traveling, like taking a woman from one state to another state, one city from another city. Keeping her, you know, confused and not in her and no connections. And so that there is a big difference there and how we engage with those two women are different. But both of them still need help. Yes. Okay. That's great. So we're gonna go on a little bit of a journey with two individuals that one She was not trafficked, but she was exploited, but the the industry exploited her vulnerability. And so her story starts with aging out of foster care. She ages out of foster care. She's in and out of foster care through her ⁓ middle school years, teenage years, eventually ages out. And the industry provided at 18 years of age a way to make a lot of money. When you are a homeless teenager at 18, And your foster care family says, because they're not collecting a check anymore, that they can't support you. There are very few things that an individual can do. A thousand percent. So, ⁓ so we meet this woman in the club, you know, a year into her dancing or so, and she is, you know, rough around the edges edges, doesn't trust anyone. So we meet her in the club. She's sharing her story with us. She's you know, sharing different things about us. But she's she doesn't trust anyone, you know? I realize she's young. I realize ⁓ that she is making a lot of money, so it seems, in the club, ⁓ because she's telling us that she's making a lot of money. And when I later learned more about her and had we had built a friendship, she told me the first night that she walked into the club ⁓ it was a matter of weeks out out of foster care and out of her situation and she made five hundred dollars in one night. Well, that was the most she had ever made in a single day in her whole life. And she said from that moment on she was hooked. So it provided not only a you know, ⁓ the ability to get her own place, it provided for her to get a car and it ended up being a place where she didn't have to work every day. And so it was very enticing and very alluring to somebody who had such significant vulnerabilities, and it e it exploited those and she she went right into it. So, you've walked alongside her for many years. What what d else did you see in this story? They're not gonna make it look like a bad thing. The enemy is very good at making harmful things look enticing. And so for someone like this woman who she had so many vulnerabilities, so many barriers, and not a lot of support. And so when something looked too good to be true and seemed good too good to be true, it was very easy for her to jump in, like you said. ⁓ and but what I have seen is instead of exploiting and using those vulnerabilities to get her into the industry, what Scarlet Hope has done is instead addressed those vulnerabilities, doing the hard work of saying, okay, this is a barrier, this is a vulnerability for you. Let's work on that. Okay, you didn't have a support person. Let's surround you with support people. Yeah. Like you didn't have education when it comes to finances. Like let's sit down and talk about them. You didn't have experience going on job interviews or searching for jobs. let's empower you to do those things on your own. Let's look at your let's let's help you with your resume. Let's help you do the thing. You don't ha like using those th like addressing the barriers instead of using the barriers is what I have seen has made a huge difference. And now that those barriers have been addressed, now she sees what the industry you know, she was able to see, ⁓ this is what the really the industry. Because what I also saw was, yes, ⁓ I think one of the big lies of the industry is that everyone is just like just covered with money, just like drowned with money twenty four seven. And the the the realness of it is it's a very fast money culture. So yeah, she made a lot of money that first night, sure. But what I have found, and in her case as well, as there were still months where she couldn't pay her bills. ⁓ yeah. Because the culture is, hey, I made five hundred dollars tonight. I won't I don't have to save for my rent. I'll just make it the night before. Right. Well then she doesn't make it the night before. You know, it's it's very much ⁓ let's spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. Yeah. And so instead of exploiting that financial like not being educated financially when we address that her kind of s kind of the layers of the industry started to un appealing. So I think that's really important in case management what I do is not using barriers and vulnerabilities to exploit a woman, but to address them. Yeah. Yeah, actually she just said to me a couple of weeks ago, ⁓ this particular woman has an incredible testimony and she shares it with everybody. She's like the woman at the well, she went away and she you she had an encounter with Jesus and now she's telling everybody about it. ⁓ but she said to me is I wish every dancer in the industry would take a financial literacy class because it's what keeps them trapped. Amen. And in that fast money culture. And so that's a very real thing. The second story that I that comes to my mind when I think about understanding the industry as it is today, because like back in 2008, it looked very different. We didn't have the iPhone, we didn't have ⁓ a lot. We had there was pornography, of course, but I remember seeing some research project that said there were 900 known pornographic websites in 2010 or nine. And in by two thousand ten there were ninety thousand because that's the year like two thousand eight is when the iPhone launched and then it started growing and more people had it by two thousand ten it was more readily available. And so, ⁓ I mean this is just staggering, honestly. But today, exploitation and these vulnerabilities can show up in so many ways. And so, ⁓ this story happened several years ago, ⁓ where I got this call from This group out of North Carolina, and they asked me if they could help if we could help with our ⁓ technology find this particular individual. And so I was able to locate her through her number and through her phone number. And what had happened was she ⁓ was 16 years old and she was on social media and she herself, she was adopted and You know, just struggling in those year her s early teen years of trying to discover who she is. And you know, ⁓ the parents probably did wonderful things to help her do those. She was a great Christian family that this happened to, but she still had these wounds of not being accepted and loved. And so she found that on social media. And so she had had this hidden profile account that she would post fairly provocative photos on and w What we've learned now about social media is traffickers and pimps are looking for that young girl who needs the validation on social media. And so some ⁓ guy had befriended her who acted like he was 16 years old, ⁓ so same age as her, but he wasn't. And he started befriending her. And for a year he built trust. He waited, he liked all of her photos, he would, you know, comment on everything, he started DMing her. Till the point where she eventually met him in person. And when she met him in person, it was not a sixteen year old man. He ended up kidnapping her and selling her online, and we were able to help with the ⁓ not only with our technology, but also the the ministry that was on the ground in North Carolina, as well as the law enforcement. We were help we helping helping them identify her ads that she was being placed in. And Because of that, our technology actually has facial recognition in the advertisements. And so we were able to turn some of those over. And they were they actually identified her face at a Walmart and she was rescued. Wow. But one of the things I actually got to s to Zoom with her after she was rescued several times. And we just started talking about, once again, her vulnerabilities. Because really, just because she had this scary situation that happened and praise God she was rescued doesn't mean those vulnerabilities went away. And she would talk to me on a regular basis how she struggled to want to go back to posting online again. And of course her parents, everybody you know, in authority in her life removed all of the access to those things, but she still struggled that she wanted to be seen and known and feel validated. And so exploitation can happen in so many different ways. But specifically trafficking in that instance is, you know, I hear these stories a lot about women, young women getting lured on social media. And so that's one instance of somebody being trafficked through that form of exploitation. I think the next one that you and I both know is a woman who ⁓ she this happened long before we ever met her. But when she was 14, her family Her parents sold her off to a man who was much older than her to get married. And he ended up trafficking her all over the United States. When I met her, ⁓ I met her when she was 49 years old working in a strip club. And her trafficker had died by this point, but she did she was uneducated. She did not know any other life other than being sold for sexual services and ⁓ using her body to exploit herself to survive. And so forty-nine years old, she's working in this club and her her body had just taken an enormous amount of abuse through the years. And I remember walking into this club and seeing her and she was holding a Gideon Bible. Do you remember those little Bibles? Yeah. And she said that the Gideons back in the I don't know, 60s, 70s, 80s, even ⁓ dropped this Bible off at the strip club. So they dropped it off outside in boxes. And it was an Orange Little Bible. She actually eventually gave it to me. It's somewhere around the Hope House. But she would read that Bible front to back. Wow. All the time. And she would pray to God, please send someone in here to help me. So when she saw the church ladies come into the club. She knew that God had answered her prayers. It would be about a year after that we met her that she would turn 50 years old. We brought a birthday cake into the club to celebrate her 50th birthday. And she blew out her as she even tells the story, she blew out her 50th birthday candles at a club, looked at me, and I said, You have a choice. You don't have to be here anymore. And she said, Can I leave with you? And she left with us. But when I got to know her, she ended up going on to write a book about her story and and the the horrible things that she witnessed. She she was somebody who was both in the industry as the adult entertainment, so dancing and that life, but also trafficked. Yeah. And so let's talk about what the the word choice means and dive into that a little bit and sort of dissect When you don't feel like you have any choices, what does that do to somebody? Yeah, well when you don't feel like you have a choice, you're gonna do everything that you can to survive. And so a lot of times these the women who have been especially trafficked for so long, no one has affirmed their choice, has has affirmed their no. So they don't even know how to say no because for so long no one listened to their no. So they stopped listening to their no. And so it's really important for us to help a woman learn how to choose things again because a lot of women have lost that ability because no one has let them have it for so long. And so I think it's really important, especially that story of how she was trafficked and she was also in the clubs, because I think there's this perception that, well, I only engage with women who want to be there. I only engage with dancers who want to be there. And what I say to that is there's no sticker s in strip clubs where a woman has I want to be here versus I'm trafficked. That's not a th ⁓ that's not a thing. And so ⁓ there's no way for someone to know if a woman is there by quote unquote choice or expectation or she's being trafficked through there. And so there is no way to engage in the adult entertainment industry and not engage in human trafficking. And I think that is one of the biggest lies because I think most people tell themselves, well, it's not like I'm engaging in human trafficking. You are. Yeah. So the difference between a trafficker, a pimp, and you know, I think they're very similar, but how Can you like walk us through maybe like how we would identify the difference between the two? Yeah, I think a lot of times women don't even have those verbiages when they're telling their own story. A lot of times it's like my boyfriend and so traffickers it's more organized. I think organized would be probably a big word that I would use to differentiate the two. normally when a woman says like, my boyfriend, I it's kind of more not organized and informal and that's more pimp behavior. Whereas a more organized kind of organization that either there's like one or multiple, then they have multiple women and it's not like just a one on one relationship but this woman knows there are multiple women involved. There are sometimes a hierarchy of bosses, quote unquote, are traffickers. And that's it's more organized, I'd say, is the the big differentiate. But a lot of women when I talk to them, who don't even realize they're they are being trafficked, they'll use verbiage like boyfriend. Yeah. Yeah, that no, that's a great way to to say it because I think that leads into the largest form of trafficking today is is being done online. It that is how they are making this network of of exploitation trafficking possible is through the illicit advertisements of humans. And ⁓ we get to see a side of that through digital outreach that, you know, most people don't quite know about it. And we talk a about it a lot on this podcast because it is the fastest growing means to sell an individual. And so digital outreach, the the group that created it was Microsoft and a group out of Seattle came together to figure out how do we find victims? Mm-hmm. How do we reach them? Yeah. And then but also like mass scale. Like there are Tens of thousands of millions of people that are being sold every single day online and we there's no way to to to reach them. Mm-hmm. As we know the commercial establishments are declining because the industry has moved largely online. And I'm just gonna give our listeners some a a few stats to give you like an example of this. So ⁓ there are roughly been identified about three point three million individuals being sold through unique individuals. Okay, so individuals. Like this isn't one person ten times. This is three point three million since ⁓ twenty twenty. And that, you know, we're clearly not getting everyone there ever is. Right. Secondly, ⁓ that is three point three million compared to the the Labor US labor reports there's about 480,000 entertainers. So working in strip clubs and so on and so forth. Then when we get to the illicit massage brothels, we those are the Asian massage parlors that you see like on the news, there there's stings happening towards them. They are the fastest growing establishment in America. that is roughly Forty eight hundred strip clubs compared to forty-eight thousand IMBs. Wow. So needless to say, exploitation and trafficking is happening all over the place and in many different types of establishments. But our largest outreach at Scarlet Hope is through digital. And last year alone we reached ninety six thousand individuals. praise God. ⁓ Because of advocates and because of churches and because of technology and people that showed up to to reach people and to provide hope. It's it's truly incredible. ⁓ but it's growing and so it it's very you know, we we can look at ninety six thousand and go, ⁓ my goodness, this is we would have never had access outside of technology to this many people before. But when I also look at the stats growing, it it's like we need more people to join us. And so Let's talk through how we ⁓ help individuals that are being sold online. What is that case management? What does it look like to walk along side by side somebody digitally? And then what happens if they're being trafficked? Yeah, so obviously there are kind of two pathways. So if someone is posting ads online and they are not being trafficked, they are being exploited. ⁓ and they have goals, they have barriers, and they ask to be in case management with me. I'll meet with them, we'll address their barriers, I'll address their goals, I'll help them get connected to resources, to a support network, kind, you know, basically what I did with that woman that we were talking about earlier who was in the club. Really addressing the vulnerabilities, addressing the barriers and empowering them to overcome those things. When it comes to women who are being trafficked, there is no I can't help the goals, I can't help the barriers until there is a l a baseline of safety. Kind of like that ⁓ like hierarchy of needs that ⁓ we talk about sometimes. The the first one is safety. You know, you can't build confidence for a woman, which is like the top of that. Yeah. Hierarchy of needs until there is a level of safety. So the first thing Scarlet Hope does is to work with proper authorities, pro other organizations, other programmings to help that women get to a baseline of safety. Once there is that baseline of safety, then we can start working on like the next tier, which is like her tangible needs. Does she have ready access to food? Does she have access to shelter? Does she have access to clothing? You know, building on those things. And then once those are established, then I can work on like goals, like I want to go to school, you know. Yeah. And then we build and build and build until there is that self-confidence that I can make my own choices, that my no is important, that my yes is important, that ⁓ and really empowering them. And obviously throughout both of those situations. looking into what is her barrier to the gospel and addressing that barrier. ⁓ because like that woman we talked about ⁓ before in the clubs, like a big barrier for her was seeing God and Jesus as a man. And so addressing that barrier. Really and like you said before, you really listen to her and building that friendship. And that's something that we do at Scarlet Hope is I don't know what someone's barrier to the gospel is until I get to know them as a person. So getting to know them and hearing them say things like, Well, I don't believe God is good. Okay, well that's a big barrier to the gospel and then I can speak into that. So I hope that kinda answers the question in the two different pathways while also addressing the need for the gospel. Yes. Yes. Amazing. I so I wanna first say really quickly that if if we encounter a child, no matter where she is at or he is at, we immediately get proper authority in and report it and get proper authority to help us with that situation. If a woman who is being trafficked is over eighteen years of age and she does not want help. She does not want to receive it. She doesn't want ⁓ report it, whatever it may be. You know, there is very little that can be done. But we do what you just said is still applies to any individual that we ⁓ that comes into our path. We want to walk alongside her. We want to provide safety and resources and all of the things, but we also some of it and I've, you know, through the years educating that woman of how she should be treated, of what exploitation and and even trafficking looks like to try to help her come to her own decision to to be ready to leave. And in some instances, women want to leave but they can't. And so we engage law enforcement and all of that. And I just want to make that clear because people will say to me all the time and i i the People who don't really understand exploitation and trafficking, they'll say, Well, why doesn't she just leave? Or why don't you just rescue her? Not everyone wants to be rescued. And that is the hard facts. Well, even Jesus asked the man at at man at the well or the man who I don't know where he was. It wasn't the man at the well. Where was he at the pool? At the devil. At the pool. At the pool. At the pool. What man are we talking about? That's there's a lot of them. Best ⁓ day to pull. Best day to pull. It was a pool. It wasn't a well. We're just gonna leave this in. So we're just gonna leave that in. Okay. So the the man, so even Jesus asked a man who asked a man like, do you want to be well? Yeah. And so again, these are all women that I'm talking about. As you said, if they are a minor, they cannot consent at all. There's no way a minor can consent to any of this. But a woman who over the age of eighteen, the question is does she like you said, does she want to be rescued? And at Scarlet Hope, ⁓ I have talked with women who are being trafficked and are not ready to leave, and that doesn't mean I you know, I message them and say, Well, when you wanna do what I want you to do, then I'll talk to you. Yeah. No, it's well let's keep talking then. And so, ⁓ walking alongside a woman wherever she's at in her journey, ⁓ is something that Scarlet Hope is really Okay, so we've talked a l a we've talked a about many different things. ⁓ and we could certainly talk about this particular topic for a really long time because there's so many nuances. I mean we've just barely scratched the surface. ⁓ but I do think it is so important to understand that all of these people, trafficked, exploited, whatever, however they got there, are all made in the image of God. They all deserve the hope of the gospel. Yes. And at Scarlet Hope, we treat each one of them as as image bearers of Christ. And we want to walk alongside them for however long it takes. And so I love that Natalie is here to provide case management and she helps train our volunteers to be able to do that as well. But truly, ⁓ I I really think that if people could, yeah, just take time to understand where people come from, we would we would probably see a lot more transformation because people would begin to trust other people. They would have a Christian to call upon when they're ready to to get that help and we would Start to see more women freed ⁓ from exploitation trafficking. So thank you for joining us on this podcast today of understanding the industry. Thank you for listening to the Rochelle Star podcast. If this conversation encouraged you or challenged you, I'd invite you to take the next step. Whether that's learning more, getting involved, or sharing this episode with someone else. At Scarlet Hope, we believe consistent presence changes lives. And there's a place for you in this work. You can learn more at ScarletHope.org.