Trafficking, Worldviews, Hues of Grey & Healing for Humans

Collisions of worldviews were inevitable and constant in my world growing up.  I was surrounded by people who saw the world in black and white, people who were sure they knew what the good guys and the bad guys looked like, people who thought they knew who was on the right path and who was on the wrong path and judged them accordingly. Seeing through black and white glasses was never possible for me because my father, one of their “good guys” that they were following on the “right path” was trafficking me. 

In an attempt to understand my father’s mind, in  the early stages of my healing, I watched every series on serial killers I could find.  To be clear, as far as I know my father was never a serial killer, but his mind did operate in the severe disconnection from empathy and conscience of a psychopath, which is one of the common profiles of a serial killer. The series I watched did help me to understand him a bit better, but their villain never looked even remotely like my father. Invariably the series spun a dark villain, alone in an apartment covered in pictures of their victims, driving a white cargo van. They never painted a picture of the guy next door that my father was. 

My world formed in this collision of dichotomous realities and that is why I see myself and the world in varied hues of grey. This perspective felt like a weakness many times when I crashed into the prominent black and white, hero and villain, worldview, but I have grown to regard my varied hues of grey perspective as a strength. 

Through my lens neither position nor image ever equals esteem, trust or respect. A projected image means little to me because I know all too well that there is no direct correlation between image and the internal realities of character, integrity, and the capacity to commit harm. 

This kept me safe in many dangerous spaces, but it has often created conflict for me in faith based communities that like to issue edicts about honor in stern tones, reprimanding you if you do not trust what or who they say is good. My father was a religious leader so I have collided with that world, his world, repeatedly. For a world that is so sure their black and white view is right they were entirely wrong about my father, a likely psychopath that they saw as goodness personified and followed him blindly. 

My story is just one story, but think of all the pastors, priests, leaders, and public personalities in varied contexts caught in scandals of sex abuse, rape, harrasment, trafficking, and child sexual abuse material. The world once upon a time cast them up onto a pedestal of good as a hero and yet story after story from their victims gives us a different view of who they are. In the exposure of those truths we often shift them from hero to monster, but they were never really a hero so are they now really a monster? I understand it feels that way, but is it true or does the truth lie somewhere in the human hues of grey in between? 

I do not really believe in fairytales or heroes, though I do enjoy a good action movie, with a female lead, which shares some of the same elements. What I do believe in is humans and our ability to survive and rise to overcome great obstacles. The strength of this humanity focused worldview is that I do not expect anyone to be perfect and if someone projects perfection I am not really interested in them. 

Not that long ago I got the opportunity to learn about black and white thinking from the inside for maybe the first time in my life. When I was still on Twitter aka X I started experimenting with writing snippets of my story of being Trafficked in P(opc)ORN. They came out sharp and that fared well enough with the online anti human trafficking activists crowd at the time. Despite that moderate success I could feel that something was off. I began to realize that my unprocessed pain was sharpening my voice and filtering my story into a black and white perspective that had never been me. So I stopped speaking my story until my deep dive into processing that pain was finished, which coincided with the last revision of my book “Coming of Age On A P(opc)ORN Set: Trafficked In P(opc)ORN at 14.”

The issue of extreme depictions, seeing people as monsters or machines or other than ourselves arises when we reach for the healing of those individuals, of communities, of systems, and of our culture. For advocacy these extreme depictions are effective, but for healing they are not. When we try to move from advocacy to healing we find that having cast people into the shadowy villain or monster we only know how to reach for punitive justice. We have little true knowledge of how to reach for healing nor do we have a deep connection to healing within us. Stuck inside a black and white conception of the world we don’t know how to move people from bad to good, shadow to light, monster to human, as if any human was ever that simply defined.  

When I present training on Trafficking in P(opc)ORN I share some of the background demographics of my life: “My dad was a religious man and community leader who looked like the guy next door because he was.” In the training I talk about the dynamics on a porn set that make trafficking possible, some of the myths and truths about P(opc)ORN, the collective story of Trafficking in P(opc)ORN, and throughout the training bring in pieces of my dramatic story of being Trafficked in P(opc)ORN. At the end invariably one of the first comments I get  is a shocked response about my dad looking like the guy next door, being a community and religious leader.  Out of everything they just heard, that is what sticks out to them. It surprised me at first, but now I understand. 

We try to keep the people who cause harm away from ourselves even in our minds. We need to think it doesn’t happen to people we know, in our neighborhood, by people we know because that worldview seems to keep us safe. Isn’t that why despite the stats the common belief is still that kidnapping is involved in most trafficking when the reality is that between 30 and 40 percent of trafficking is by a family member?  

I am an action movie fan, an advocate of justice that is not just words, but concrete actions. All of those who caused harm in my life and those who cause harm in the world around me deserve justice that I hope has come or is coming for them. Still, do I consider any one of them 100 percent villain without hope of change? No, I think we all have capacities for harm and for good and that we all continually make choices towards one of those ends. The more choices we make to harm the more solidified the pattern of harm becomes within us and the less likely it is that we will choose to change, but it is always still possible. It is not easy, but it is possible. 

As a culture we don’t really have a deep experience of healing so we tend to either make it too simple or impossible, another black and white depiction of a world we don’t really understand. In reality healing is hard and often long, but definitely possible. People who harm in the realm of sexual assault in its many words will not gain my respect by attending one counseling session or by vague confessions out of the side of their mouth that may be self serving, but change is possible for them if they really see the harm they have done and do the hard work of healing.  

We are all a mix of harm and healing, best described as human.  When we begin to see this we will be able to address the issues of harm in our world more effectively and heal our world together.  And erasing these extreme depictions of humanity will also help us heal our relationships with ourselves. That dichotomy between hero and villain fills us with anxiety because we sense the grey areas that we live in inside ourselves between those two extremes.  

Through my varied hues of grey lens I see the capacity for both harm and healing in every person around me, which is less safe as far as worldviews go. I have known a lot of villains, criminals, abusers, psychopaths, sociopaths, and rapists in my life and none of them looked much like the media depictions. The idea that we know what a person who causes the harm of trafficking, abuse, and sexual assault in its many words looks like makes us feel safer, but it is akin to a fairytale and has little to do with the actual reality.