Katariina Rosenblatt is a graduate student in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences. She loves going to church, reading the Bible and believes her personal relationship with Jesus Christ is what saved her from human trafficking and domestic violence. Her hobbies include writing, volunteering, and working with at-risk youths. Katariina hopes to host an NSU symposium about human trafficking in the fall and has a web site, www.thereishopeforme.org, to help victims. She lives by the quote, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care” by Zig Ziglar.
I was born and raised in Miami but my family moved around a lot due to domestic violence issues. To gain peace, my family and I stayed at a hotel on Miami Beach. While at the hotel pool, an older girl approached me to give me some “sisterly advice.” What seemed to be an innocent encounter soon took a very wrong turn. I was solicited for sale at the age of 13.
However, the sale went bad. I was kidnapped, drugged and left for dead on an abandoned road in North Miami Beach. This started my encounter with the dark world of human trafficking, right here in the United States — right here within our own borders of South Florida. The term used now is Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking, but back then it was just plain old child abuse.
As a young teen, I was groomed over the course of a month by a human trafficking prostitution ring that networked throughout the hotel my family and I visited often. Coming from a single parent home with abuse in my background, it was only a matter of time before I would become the target of human traffickers. They knew who to send in that would be just the right lure to snatch their bait. An older female, probably lured in herself at some point by a trafficker, turned into one of their recruiters.
A 65-year-old man in the hotel was my first ‘buyer.’ He was willing to pay a high premium for me — a young virgin. At this time, I remembered the words that another older gentleman once told me at a Billy Graham crusade when I was nine. He said, “God loves you and will never leave you or forsake you!”
It was there in the hotel room that I prayed for divine intervention as my trafficker negotiated my sales price with the would-be John. I didn’t even know that I was for sale. The going rate for an American virgin girl in the U.S. back then was $550. Girls who I work with now balk at the price because rates have gone down considerably in the last 20 years. I guess we, as a society, have lost the value of innocence. The fact that there is even a price tag on it, or a market for it at all, is just wrong.
I was lured far away from my hotel and my mom, but she eventually found me and we were reunited. However, knowing I was bought and sold confused me as to my own value and self worth. It was only a matter of time before I found myself in a similar predicament. I was lured into a different human trafficking ring again by a fake friend at my middle school.
There was an older male trafficking young girls into a brothel apartment. The escape this time was not so easy. I got caught up in the life and was drugged for their gain, but eventually I found freedom. Something inside me, though, changed. I was different. I was angry! Why had this happened to me twice? Why hadn’t anyone rescued me from this danger? Where were the people who were supposed to protect me? I would go on to be exploited more times as I had not received any type of counseling or help to prevent further abuse.
Freedom was not cheap and the addiction to drugs that this group left me with gave me yet another vulnerability to traffickers. It took a long time to finally be free of drugs and traffickers for good. At the end of a very long road of drugs, exploitation and an abusive relationship, I not only have a bachelor’s degree in human resources management, but an advanced law degree in intercultural human rights and am now completing my final year at NSU for my Ph.D. in conflict analysis and resolution.
I also speak at universities, schools, jails, and group homes in foster care and let children and adults know about the dangers of human trafficking right here in South Florida. I have founded a non-profit organization called There Is HOPE For Me, Inc., where I meet with groups of survivors so they, too, can find healing, opportunity, purpose and empowerment.
I have developed tools that are being used throughout the country to aid law enforcement in properly identifying victims of human trafficking in the U.S. I am a part of the South Florida Human Trafficking Task Force and a national Speaker’s Bureau for Human Trafficking Survivors called the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation, which hopes to share school and university curriculum to those who want to engage in the fight against modern day slavery.
My hope is to continue to inform people about human trafficking and write a book about my life story to help as many young people as I possibly can and make a difference. I know if there is hope for me, then there is hope for anybody.
