Mia’s life prior to finding Selah was very dark. Her story starts in a good home, but when she was molested at 12 years old, fear and shame stopped her from telling her parents. They only knew their daughter’s behavior had changed, not why it changed.
“Their honor roll student was gone. Suddenly, I’m suspended every other week. I’m in trouble at school, if I go, and I was just completely out of control,” she said. “And then at the age of 16, I was raped at a party I wasn’t supposed to be at, so how can I tell my parents what happened? All those feelings I thought when I was 12 came flooding back, and it was kind of like the catalyst on this downward trajectory I was on.”
A year later, as a 17-year-old runaway, Mia met a 27-year-old man who would become her first trafficker. He got her off the streets, supplied her with drugs and made her feel special. He earned her trust, then quickly flipped the narrative into one where she owed him for his kindness. It took her five years, two more traffickers and 13 drug arrests before entering Selah’s TYLA program, which stands for Turn Your Life Around. The one- to two-year prostitution diversion program is a choice between legal punishment or treatment that requires trauma therapy and drug testing.
“When I came to Selah, I did not identify as a sex-trafficking survivor. I was not kidnapped. I was not handcuffed. I was not tied up. It didn’t look to me the way it looks in the movies. I didn’t know that it could still count as trafficking — that being lied to, that being tricked, that being manipulated — I didn’t know that was a part of it,” Mia said. “So now, I have the opportunity to go to different places and make sure that youths know that exploitation and trafficking can happen in different ways. Yes, kidnapping happens, but I get to be the person that brings reality to the situation and shows how it looks more often than that.”
Mia’s story was featured in the “Ray of Hope” documentary that premiered at Selah Freedom’s Human Trafficking Summit. Watch Ray of Hope Documentary. Watch Selah Freedom’s Human Trafficking Summit.