Recently, a young woman named Carmelita approached our rescue agents in the Philippines. A few months earlier, they’d helped police rescue her, along with several other girls, from a human trafficker who was selling them for sex.

Now, she was ready to give back. Carmelita offered to join our team during rescue operations with a specific goal in mind: she wanted to comfort the victims as the trafficker was arrested.

Amidst all the stress of a raid, survivors sometimes express distress at the thought of being separated from their trafficker. It was an experience Carmelita was all too familiar with; just a few months earlier, she’d wept as her trafficker was led away.

But after receiving excellent counseling from caring caseworkers, her perspective changed completely. She was herself again, composed and bright.

So what had happened to her mind while she was exploited?

Child sex traffickers are master manipulators, warping their targets’ foundational perception of self.

Physical freedom is only the first step on a long journey toward mental and emotional recovery for these survivors. To help them along the way, we have to understand the mechanics of what their traffickers did to them.

Balance

At the core of each person is his or her sense of self. That’s not just how we see ourselves in relation to the world around us; it’s also the source of each individual’s sense of value. In children, this sense of self is still developing. It’s that sense of value that traffickers target first.

There are myriad pieces of ourselves that we value: our ideals, intelligence, physical appearance, humor, etc. While sex traffickers may appeal to those other facets while grooming a victim, they are ultimately concerned with only one of them: sexual worth.

There’s a simple reason for this: that’s how child sex traffickers make money. Every other aspect of the victim’s personhood is a potential hindrance to the trafficker’s paycheck; a child who thinks for herself and believes she deserves more will only make the criminal’s job harder. To remove those barriers and make their target as “productive” as possible, human traffickers employ a few different techniques to warp their victim’s sense of self.

Suppression

One technique is really quite simple in theory: brutally crush any parts of the victim’s personality that don’t make money. Despite being a less common technique among traffickers, it can be extremely damaging to the victim’s psyche.

These traffickers often bludgeon every aspect of the victim’s self-image, save her ability to earn money through sex. In crushing those other parts of her, they create a fearful, docile victim who often begins to think that she’s nothing apart from her earning potential.

Harris said that traffickers will sometimes demean their victims to make them think that sex work is all they’re capable of: “It might be a manipulation (like) reminding them of where they’re at in life and how hard and difficult it would be to achieve something else.”

Kioni, our project leader in Kenya, said that sometimes traffickers will insult their victims until they think they are only good for sex work, saying things like, “You are not beautiful. You will never get married.”

The resulting diminished sense of self-worth keeps victims firmly in the trafficker’s grip. When this technique is successful, victims may eventually stop trying to escape because they’ve been conditioned to think they are not capable of anything else.

False Elevation

Far more often, we see cases where children become convinced that selling their bodies is a perfectly normal—even an admirable—way to earn money.

Coming to that conclusion is a complex process. For most kids, it begins with months of grooming. Sometimes, the initial grooming process happens without a trafficker at all. Social media influencers who celebrate the “sugar baby” lifestyle, combined with negative peer influences, can take a child halfway there. “There are all kinds of external influences that are… conditioning the girl to make those decisions,” explains Harris.

By the time a trafficker steps in, he or she only needs to act as a “middleman” to connect the victim with predators.

Other times, groomers disingenuously inflate the child’s feeling of sexual worth. Chase, a rescue agent in Kenya, calls it, “the flattery of affection. ‘You are beautiful, I love you, you look appealing,’ things like that.”

After acting as a friend or romantic interest, the trafficker works to create a positive link between sex and reward. According to one study, “gifts and money may function as a way to make the youth feel accomplished after the trafficker has sex with her and creating associations between sex and receiving material items or money.”

In either case, the child’s perception of what is sexually acceptable has been distorted. “They are exposed to (sex work) because of the manipulation of those around them,” said Samantha, one of our caseworkers with a license in social work.

Now, it’s important to note that beyond these external manipulations, child sex work is always a crime. It doesn’t matter whose idea it was, what led to the transaction or if everything appeared to be consensual.

In this case, the victim’s perceived sexual worth has been perverted, artificially elevated and, most harmfully, monetized.

Enmeshment

Traffickers often target children from broken or dysfunctional homes. It’s a sad truth that many children don’t receive the love and attention they need from their parents. “As a child, you should be supported by your family, especially since you’re still growing,” said Samantha. “If that support crumbles and your needs aren’t met at a young age… that’s when you become vulnerable.”

When a child feels disconnected or unloved, she starts looking outside herself for stability and happiness. That’s where the trafficker steps in.

Enthralled to have met someone who appears to value her, the victim feeds off her trafficker’s happiness. He heaps praise upon her after sex, rewarding her “work” with money. “Because they’ve been groomed by this stage,” says Samantha, “(they think), ‘Oh, this person is kind, they’re giving me money.’ That’s why their attachment and dependency on the subject becomes so strong.”

Desperate to feel a sense of worth and approval, the victim subconsciously begins to identify with what makes the trafficker happy, feeding off his desires and emotions. Soon, her personal happiness becomes dependent on him.

This process is called enmeshment.

Traffickers use enmeshment to ensure that their targets remain under their control. Victims enmeshed with a trafficker cannot imagine life without them; their joy, wants, and desires become synonymous with whatever the trafficker wants. In one particular case, a child who was trapped in an exploitative child marriage was so distressed when her “husband” was arrested that she threatened to take her own life.

“Their weaknesses are manipulated and taken advantage of,” Samantha explained. “which is why they become victims.”

For the criminal, the situation is perfect: the victim’s devotion is complete because she’s no longer just dependent on him for money; she depends on him for her very identity.

Breaking Free

But, thankfully, those injuries can be healed.

Caseworkers, whether ours or those employed by government shelters, patiently nurture survivors through unimaginable emotional and mental damage inflicted by their abusers. A big part of that is helping children abandon the lies they’ve been fed so that they can find themselves again. One bold survivor said, “I have a chance to live with dignity and respect. I want to spread this message to my fellow sisters who live at risk.”

The thing is, that dignity was always there. Like an oak tree planted in a shoebox, each victim’s intrinsic, God-given value was stifled by her environment. Our caseworkers don’t “make kids better,” they just help remove the remaining unseen confines left by exploitation.

Once a survivor is truly free from those internal chains, she can accomplish more than she ever thought possible. We have countless stories of survivors surpassing the abuse they endured and becoming so much more. Many are running their own small businesses. Others have gone to college or graduated from a trade school. Many now have happy, stable families of their own.

Will you help free a child from the physical and mental confines of exploitation? Your gift can help free a victim to finally reach for her potential. Fill out the form below to rescue a child today.