Jewell Baraka: Prostitution and paedophilia are inseparable “I was trafficked by my father at 11, and at a brothel type warehouse in Portland, Oregon. I call it a brothel because it was a warehouse filled with temporary walls creating rows of rooms off of hallways. There were probably 50 rooms in total. The warehouse was kind of a cross between an underground, underage brothel and an Asian massage parlour type of prostitution. On regular working nights we were escorted from the entrance to our room and then the buyers were brought in to us. It’s the guards who took each girl to their rooms for the night and took the money as they brought the men to us. So only they knew the true numbers of men, girls, and the amount of money that flowed through that warehouse. There did seem to be a rotation of girls, meaning we were not all there every night. Still there were a lot of girls involved. They had nights for new buyers where they lined us all up for these men to look and choose and on those nights we were all there. The first time I was in a line-up I was number 87. I used to focus my gaze intently on the door to my room. All I had to do was make it from the time it opened with another buyer to the time it closed as the guard escorted him out. Interviewer: You said that your father trafficked you at 11. That’s an especially horrible way to enter prostitution. What type of family were you raised in? JB: I was raised in a very religious family by appearance, although as you might expect, my father was a sociopath. I say that from my own observation and experience, not from a clinical diagnosis. Of course, he was not the kind of man to go near any type of mental health clinician. I have no idea what made him that way, how he became the man that I knew. Trafficked can be a broad term so let me clarify what I mean when I say, “my father trafficked me.” My father is the one that struck a deal with these men when I was 11 and he was the one who upheld that deal every night for the next 6 years. I did not live at the warehouse. I went to school and church in the day, but every night two men would come to pick me up. And every night my father would strip me, put an old oil smelling blanket around me, and throw me in the trunk of their car. And then he did the reverse at the end of each night. He never actually went to the warehouse or the studio, but he was certainly the one responsible for my exploitation, which is why I call him my trafficker…” To read more, see the link in the next tweet.