15 Years Old || A Human Trafficking Poem

15 Years Old

Nikki Kamp

15 years old
Light in her eyes long gone
Passion and happiness moved on
Within her, destruction and trauma sing victory songs.

15 years old
With shackles on her wrists.
I'm not being figurative here, no, literal shackles on her wrists.
As she whimpers and cries out between impacts of tightly clenched fists,
She looks back on how this all started: her one single wish.
A wish to do, to be, to learn.
A wish to earn a name for herself
A wish to turn herself into something special.
A wish that was supposed to be a dream come true, but instead was torn, tortured, and turned into a nightmare.
A nightmare where she was deceived into thinking that the nice man was going to take her out of her home country to get a good American education.
A nightmare where she thought she could be something besides someone's rag doll.
But, as it is, man turned monster and nightmare reigned true, and now every time she wakes up in the morning, the monster is still there.
And so is the pain.
And the drugs.
And the abuse.
And the countless men.
And the constant internal fight
Not to give up.

15 years old
Innocence lost.
No, not simply lost. Innocence taken.
Ripped out from underneath her, just like the clothes that were ripped off her back by the men last night, and the night before, and all the nights more.

15 years old but 100 years scarred.
She had never expected to live through something so hard.
Never expected that this "opportunity" would go so far
From what she had expected it to be.

15 years old
But sadly not an exception.
She's one of millions who are in dire need of love, action, and protection.
One of millions deceived and misdirected,
Enslaved, Invisible and therefore undetected.

15 years old
We must work on her behalf.
Work to save her and others from their traffickers' wrath.
We must spread awareness,
And sit back no longer.
For the longer we wait,
The number of slaves grows stronger.
Yes, we must spread the word,
For the word holds great power.
If slavery is a day's dirt, awareness is a shower.
Awareness can open our eyes to situations previously unknown,
And in trafficking cases, the common man is often the hero, statistics have shown.
So with the power of knowledge, and with a simple call,
You could change someone's world,
You could change it all.

15 years old,
Essentially numb.
Functioning under her traffickers thumb.
She needs an everyday hero.
Will you be the one?

Hey guys. So I wrote this poem a while back, during this past semester while I was in a human trafficking class at UD. This is a social injustice that I cannot shake, and therefore I feel as though word needs to be spread about it, to make a change. 

SO here's the thing. I know we all have a lot of burdens to bear, but there are some who have an absolute world of burden to bear: human trafficking victims. Human Trafficking, aka the modern day slave trade, is the heinous crime of selling human beings for sexual exploitation, forced labor, and child sexual exploitation. There are over 27 MILLION trafficking victims in the world today, and the only way that number is going to get smaller is if WE take action. How, might you ask?
Start with educating yourself. Ask me your questions or check out websites likewww.slaveryfootprint.org to find out how many slaves work for you, and how you can decrease that number or http://www.polarisproject.org/human-trafficking/overview just for general information.

Work for change.

Checked all this stuff out, and think you've seen an instance of human trafficking? Report it at 1-888-3737-888.

Thanks guys. Love y'all dearly.

- Nikki