A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeated in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beat version, you can find that at our website, this AmericanLife.org. As long as you can remember, going back to me was a child. Same as the other spiders.
But that's here to normal way, where, you know, that's just a great one. We see a big spider or a snake or a big bug on the way. It invaded all aspects of my life at all points in the year. I was thinking about spiders all the time.
Any room I walked into, like within the corners, I looked under the table, crouched down. Every night before I went to bed, I fully unmade my bed. Walking down the street, I wouldn't walk under anything that I would try to avoid rain angles, that's not good, because that's where spiders are going to be at the time. But if you were to get the first one, it would fall on me, it was really irrelevant.
Just seeing a spider, not moving, moving, large, small. It just created a feeling in my body that was just, I would shake, I would throw up, I would faint. And of course, if you're constantly going through your life, looking for spiders, you'll find one. As kid, he didn't just sleep at this end of summer camp.
Other kids may find them. People did not understand. People pitied them. When we grew up, it did not go away.
His fear of ruined dates. He went down the spider, it says you're thumbnail in his car. And so, go that day. I had went to a psychiatrist, or a soldier therapy.
I couldn't watch an image of a spider on a TV screen. Does this name anything to you? Peter Parker. No.
Oh, Spider-Man. Yeah, could you watch his films? No, absolutely not. I don't even know Spider-Man is anything to do with spiders to be honest.
Then, you've seen him at the therapist. There was going nowhere. When he ran into the New York Times, there was a new treatment for Phobias. Then get over his thoughts in just one day.
Then we started back behind him. That's a collegeist, Dr. Merrill Kent, and Amsterdam. And she finally did be part of the study.
And get the treatment. The video nothing that was a film crew captured when having a dream student. For a country series called The Cure for Fear. You're doing fine.
He's going to be honest. Same at the Kenton outside the door of the room. She opens it, he looks in. He's preparing him with a brown furry tarantula.
Maybe four or five inches in size. Yes, there's a spider in the tank. But that's not the way to go. Nobody's going to be afraid to get a few kind of really woken room in my clothes.
The door of baggage. They're doing very well. I think you can hear that. That's how it's really hard.
And I'm feeling that there's a drone. I crouch down my arms crossed. Dr. Kent, then opens the door of the tank.
Oh, God. No, no, no. You're not going to be woken there. Yes, I'm going to ask you.
Please come with me. And then you also have to get a spider to move around this tank. She sprays it with water. And she spades it with water.
And she spades it with water. And she spades it with water. Yeah. How high is your distress right now?
It's very important. Not too high. And I get it spray the bits. You're like, oh, no.
No. Yeah, this is crazy. I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, when you scream like this, I'm going to go through your head. I feel like I can feel it on me that I'm going to be attacked by it.
None of this is rational. I know it's not right. I know that the things are going to jump out of the tank and move like four feet in the air and jump on me. I get that.
But it doesn't matter because I feel that the absolute worst things that can happen are going to happen and aren't that happening. The reason that I can't listen to max out on anxiety like this is that you want to trigger the memories and feelings of fear of spiders that are stored in his brain. And then when he's bringing us to store this big new terrible experience with the old ones, he has to re-save the old memories. And she doesn't have a drug, a beta-walker called Propranawal that disrupts the process.
And I know this sounds so simple. How can this be real? But by disrupting the way that the brain re-save those memories, she neutralizes them. The brain makes the same terms in the same room.
He walks right in. He's reading his normal. There's fear in that. I don't know this.
I don't understand my feelings. I've never been like this before. Nothing physically internally was happening that you said happens to me. You didn't feel the fear.
I didn't feel the fear. No, I said no, I don't know. I felt I guess excitement that this was new. You think you were able to touch it?
And she says, do you want to touch it? And I said, hold my hand. I'll cut this finger. And I did.
And I petted it. And then she said, you want to cut it. Yes. He touched it.
That was over three years ago. It sounds like the effect of treatment has only deepened. As he said more, calm interactions with spiders. He's on the ground with spiders anymore.
Everywhere it goes. And remember when sort of carbon he found spider in it, he told me that the day before he was driving an interview, the young's today, put down the mirror, spider dropped into his lap. He was going 60. Instead of having to happen back in the day for the treatment, he really made a crash his car.
But now, you wrote down the window, pick up a spider, threw it outside. Can you imagine how extreme the treatment was? I thought one point I was going to have a hard time with that room. Does it seem right somehow that you have to go through something so extreme to get over something so extreme?
It's what had it done. You know, fighting fire with fire, radiation therapy. You know, it's your last resort option that you have to deal with a problem that can't be solved in any other way. This is a nuclear option.
If you're a certain person with a problem, send it to the floor, the book at it. Go big. Everything they can think of. See what happens as a result.
People are defying, but also people are not in that. They're not in that. They're hitting it anyway. Maybe it's a Chicago, it's a smacking life.
On your friend, they have a radio host, I request. See what else. That's one. Catching deer when you want to lions.
So again, within simple United States Congress, it's a thing of a problem. And then using all the powers, everything they can, moving decisively, to eliminate the problem forever, and finally, we're stopping this case. Well, prostitution is illegal in America, but the remains of ads were online. Someone advertising women and children who were held by sex traffickers.
Congress wanted to stop sex traffickers ads. So that's what I think most people agree with. The past is overwhelming majority is a house in Senate. When producers and the cities, there's only a thing to play out from that point.
The people that are supposed to help, they can be sex trafficking. But also, other people who are not the official target of law. When you hear the story of one woman, who is trafficked, and then you're going to get the story of law, and then after that story of how law actually affected her, when he was in her, there's no explicit content in the story at all. But that's how sex and sex trafficking.
Here's me now. When people get a phrase, sex trafficking, I think a lot of the time, I kind of heard you in a version of it pops up in their heads. Let me tell you what I meant in Cara's case. We'll start in 2006 when she was 17, or when we weren't really know.
We know pizza place. She decided to try to come in as her. Figuring to be better money, but she really didn't know anything about it. Like she had no idea what she was doing.
To prepare for her shift, she meant dress shopping. Found a problem, dress she liked. Yeah, it was a purple dress. I got it from Macy's.
Like, we're like, we're like, we're like, we're like, we're like, we're just blowing things in it. You know, they're like, right over my knees, it was a halter top. And I'm just looking at these girls and they're like, fish knives and clear heels. And this was about the time there was a song.
It's called Apple Bottom Jeans, the boots with the fur. And I kind of just say what I could and just on the pole, they're like, slid down. It wasn't like a sexy stripper slide. It was like holding on to her dear life and kind of bouncing down.
Cara found her fling soon enough. Actually, she really liked the job. The tips were good. She had more money than she never needed.
And she liked the attention she got doing it. But then she went later. Another stripper the club pulled her out of the job and he worked the painting better. All she had to do was go out on these men.
Cara understood the job as something called escorting. She did not understand the escorting meant having sex. In any case, she got on a plane for very first. And she went to a white plane from New York.
A guy called Larry, he prepared her to good. And he took her drive down to Brooklyn. He went to Junior Street, and I forget it. He was trying to explain what escorting was.
And I was so, I call it green, oblivious, naive to the facts of what it was. I remember, like, how many are nails done? How much tips do we get to keep? Like, how much money do we get to keep?
And he just laughed. Because you're asking the kinds of questions that we're relevant at the strip club, not necessarily. Like a tip out. And he just laughed.
No matter what. I was going to do it. I was 18. Next Larry took care of actually looking to end.
He had her pose in her underwear to pick her seat later post online and escorting ad. And then Larry said, it was time for her first date. What was he telling you? That basically happened just to hang out with people.
Like I said, I was going to have a date. This is 18 years old. I have a date. So I don't know what it is.
I just went to me and he left room. I died on the door. I let him in. And when I let him in, he pretty much like coaches me.
There was a whole day. And so many was exchanged. She basically told me where to put the money. They had sex.
Later, Cara told me that once it was happening, the first feeling she had was, oh, of course, escorting insects. Did you feel shame? Like, what had she gotten herself into? When Cara was a kid, she was actually a guy family member.
And had the courage to come forward about it. She was in the old school. Here, looking to end six years later, she didn't even know who she was before this, too. Or how to describe what was happening.
So she attached. The one thing she was clearly is a piece of advice that client gave her that night, which Cara says she reciting her head when ever seen any client from the non. He was getting ready to leave and I told him, all right, I'll see you later. And when I said that, he was like, no, you never just let somebody walk out on their own.
You always walk into the door. And you shut the door behind them. You never just let somebody just walk out because anybody could come in after them. You know, they could be holding the door for somebody, whatever.
So I walked into the door and I shut the door. When I shut the door, I broke down later on. I had found out that he was actually like when I was home, but he was when I was friends. One of Larry's friends and he had basically sent his friend in to have sex with me and to teach me what to do.
In the next few weeks, she says she realized Larry was part of the game. When I asked her, how did you figure that out? She laughed. She's not like some big, cinematic reveal.
Just after that night, the camera started to zoom out. She had lots of carers assigned to lots of Larry's. She was just one piece of decent line. I wanted to go home, but I had, you know what, that point I couldn't call my family.
I couldn't call anybody like I was stuck. And it was basically all right, like you got to do what you have to do. So eventually make your back home. I wasn't tied up so bad.
I wasn't, I was just ashamed and I was terrified. And when I found out what I had actually been introduced to him, so I was whole gang, like the intimidation. You know, if you go home, then we're going to do this or not. And you know, it just, it's stuck me there.
And that was like the beginning of just a world in my life. From then on, Larry wasn't trying to be carried eight, who she had sex with and where she went. She and Larry traveled around the country, strategically targeting places that attract a crowd. Were you making pennies on a dollar?
Were you making any percentage? You weren't getting to pack any of this now. No. And if you got caught stashing money, oh my gosh, you're getting your ass beat.
Okay, it's $20. No. So if you need something, you go to the store and you get it for you or whatever. But what did you really need other than food or condoms?
You know, you get clothes. You know, they take you, all goes as a group of nails and get your hair and say, did you have friends? Yeah, you have friends that are called your wife and the laws or other girls are working. You don't have normal friends.
You know, you completely withdraw and isolate from anything and everybody that you knew. So write down in many terms, you're being raped all day and you're not getting nothing out of it, but it's a nail. You're here, Diana, whatever, to look good for the next drawing, client, trick, whatever you want to call them. I asked her a lot of way of questions, navelie, but a lot of different scenarios.
What if you try just getting nothing leaving, taking a day off, getting a boyfriend, then what? And her answer was always the same. You get beat up. She never heard the term sex trafficking.
At that time, a lot of people had it. But that's what this was. Cara was being sex trafficked. She would be for another seven years.
Sex trafficking. As any time someone is forced or coerced into a sex act, her money has exchanged. They could be brought across eight lines or international borders, but that doesn't have to be a part of it. While she was being trafficked, Cara had a quota and the amount of money she was supposed to bring in for the gang.
She could bring in $1000 by seeing three clients in a day, each for an hour, or six a day, each for half an hour. The traffic is found clients for Cara like advertising online, or Craigslist, later on on what's called Back page. Whenever arriving at your new, they post a local ad for Cara. It includes photos of her, and short description.
Guys with CD ads and book appointments. If the online ads didn't attract enough business, her traffic would take her trucks off for bars and have her typing a client's there. Okay, so I said, if you make $1000 and $12.00, you're not all for the day. You're continuously, you know, before some to make more money.
But $1000 was just like, okay, you have to have this every day. I don't care if it's slow, on the lines, don't get it, go find it. Cara said she was traded between gangs three times, which while she was playing that, she actually gestured at a tattoo on her chest. That's the brand on my chest.
What is it? The brand on my chest. This is usually the ledger thing is for the gang, the sex money murder. It's a red heart with a spike through it, and the tip of the heart is bleeding.
In the center of the heart, there's a person's name. That was his actual government name, and I was there to make it on either side or those nuts and egg eyes. Snake eyes. The name right across the heart belongs to the guy I've been calling Larry, and just below the heart, there's a date.
December 23rd, 2007 is when I was at him. Why haven't you gotten removed? I actually, it's hard for me to answer that question. It is a part of me that when I look at, it reminds me.
At the end of the day, this past that I'm speaking of will always be a part of me, so I don't know if it's due to my lack of healing, or, you know, it's like a part that I haven't had it like go yet. I haven't moved on from it. It's not like because I like looking at it because I'm a nazator. I guess it's a reminder that it was real.
But if you look and attach to those, I have razor marks. I would try and cut them out of my own skin. Yeah, I tried to take a razor and cut it with his name off of me. The whole time care was being trafficked by these gangs.
She kept getting in trouble with the police. She says, no cop that were asked her if she'd help, they didn't see her as a victim. They saw her as a criminal. She says, nowadays, the police might ask her if she was being trafficked.
Nobody asked her that back then. Carers says they just charge her with solicitation and tell her that's what you got to be in the prostitute. They got to get to pay her fine. Sometimes she went to jail.
The first time she got in trouble was in 2008, just six months after her 18th birthday. And then again, in 2010, and again, and so on. She was charged at least eight times in three different states. Virginia, North Carolina, Florida.
In 2014, she and her trafficked time. I call him Adam. We're on a long drive headed north to Coda for an oil boom. By then, they spent enough time together that he trusted her, let her have a phone.
He actually relied on her for help planning her destinations. He'd be driving, she'd be in the front seat, standing in the news where parts of the country was sent in flexes of people. I mean, that's how you figure out, you know what city is good to hit because she's a trafficker when happy basically like Project Manage. I'm very versatile.
Yeah. There was plenty of time to fill. While she was with Adam, she read the word of tears on her phone, and the Hunger Games. She watched a long order, and she read the news.
It was on this particular drive that carried out an article about a woman who had in sex traffic. Her name was Wendy Lizzico. This was the first time Cara had ever seen that term, sex trafficking anywhere. And suddenly, the last seven years of her life, they weren't different, but her framework for them was.
By the time Cara and Adam got to the North Dakota boom town, they posted ads on backstage. It was a Tuesday night. It was a pilot's note side, and their ads weren't getting any bites. But she still had to make quota, so Adam sat carried out stairs to the hotel bar, so she tried picking up in the old fashioned way.
But something had changed, and she just didn't. She couldn't shake the article, she read. So she sat at the bar drinking. I just wanted to go.
I didn't care if, you know, what happened? I just knew that I had to find a way to get him away from me, because I couldn't get away from him. Cara came up with a plan. There at the bar, she called a friend in Florida, such as it helped.
She was about to go upstairs back to her room, until Adam and she had me quota. She'd leave her phone on with her friend in Florida still listening in. And not if, but when things turned violent, Cara's friend was to call the local police, which had to be in the room next door, called noise complaint. Cara's entire forecast was spot on.
She went upstairs, told Adam there was no money. He made her stripped down, naked, to prove she wasn't hiding bills anywhere. He got violent. He was yelling and hitting her, and all of a sudden, there's a knock at the door.
And I just looked at him. I said it sounds like the cops. Let me open the door, and tell him I just got out of the shower. Because they weren't going to stop knocking, and he knew that.
Cara opened the door. Adam was arrested on the spot, and the cops were ten for domestic abuse. For once, a run with the cops didn't result in ticket or flying for Cara. And whatever that felt like for her, overwhelming, relieving, confusing, was immediately wiped away by another cop telling Cara that because she was staying in a room that was under Adam's name, she had to leave on a very cold night in North Dakota with nowhere to go.
Then I remembered her. I remembered when he was in co. When he was a trafficking victim, I cared about him in the car. She lived in North Dakota, the same state that Cara was in, and I got on the computer, and I lobbied, and I asked you to put it on a phone, and I called her.
After that, everything changed. Starting with basics, when he found Cara a bit of sleep in, closed to air, food to eat, and a job bartending, so she'd make a bit of cash. Adam played guilty to domestic abuse, such as her time of jail. Later, they charged him with promoting prostitution, and Cara says she could have testified against him in court, but she feared her safety, and so she didn't.
The case was eventually dismissed. No one could have been able to bother her again. And, essentially, she saved up enough money. Cara drove back home to Florida, in 2015.
So this is a part of the story where I explained a lot of Congress enacted, what they wanted to do, and when it ended up doing, especially Cara. Most people call this law a sessafasta. Sessa is where for stopping a blank sex trafficking act, and it's goal was to stop sex trafficking by focusing on something really specific. A lot of go after sex ads on the internet, like the kind of ad that Cara's traffickers posted.
The lawmakers figured, get rid of all the ads, and you'll cut off a whole part of this market. The kids are trafficking and already tried to go after back page, and sites like it, for facilitating sex trafficking and prostitution, even while Cara was still being trafficked. But most of us efforts failed, because it's something called Section 230. Section 230 basically says, online platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Craigslist, anywhere users post early comments.
The companies that operate those platforms, they're generally not responsible for what these are say. So if someone posts something to the inventory, or something that results in harm, like if an exchange on a dating app leads to harassment in real life, the social media platforms can't be sued. Congress established this back in the early days of the web in the 90s. It's a provision of the Communications Agency Act.
But by 2018, celebrities like Amy Schumer and Sessmaier's were doing anti-trafficking PSA's calling for a change to Section 230. That's a Chinese general from nearly every state, signed a letter to Congress, and finally, Congress of Action. This bill is completely bipartisan from the beginning to end. This is Senator Richard Lindfall, and the Captain can't get the Davis' sassafasta vote.
This bill essentially would clarify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, that was never intended to give websites a free pass to aid and a bet. Section nothing. Lots of the outreach and the floor debate, and several years of hearings that led to it. What's about children being trafficked?
There are thousands of children out there who are waiting for our health. Children are being forced into sex slavery. We can't allow our children to be lured into this kind of health. Just a word about that.
Roughly half the federal prosecution for sex trafficking in the US are for people younger than 18. We are to vote. It was nearly 750 teams in children. Interhabit cases of mine are seeing advertised on websites like Backpage.
97 senators voted yes on the bill, almost unanimous. Republicans and Democrats on the same page, whichever happens. But sassafasta didn't just be on ads for mine or being trafficked, or sex trafficking in general. It'd be on ads for all paid sex, whether or not trafficking was involved, just to make sure that every possible case could be prevented would be.
And websites would now be responsible, not just for ads, but for any content anyone posted that any else sex trafficking. That mandate was so broad that websites radically changed their rules to eliminate any possible posts that they could be sued for. The entire small social media platforms sub-redits Craigslist message boards, Instagram hashtags, and Twitter communities were suddenly gone. Tumblr, long known as the place for DIY, all porn, and sexual content across their site.
Five days before sassafasta was signed into law, Backpage was seized by the FBI. The site had long been focused on federal criminal investigation and what sassafasta did as soon as it was enacted, was preventing you from popping up in its place. By then 2018, care happened out of being trafficked for three years. But in any wonder, had sassafasta passed in 2008 instead of in 2018, do you think it would have gotten you out of being trafficked?
Absolutely not. It's not any way. Because there are things other ways to be trafficked, you know, not everybody is trafficked on the internet. People act like that's the only way that, you know, there's not just internet.
It was not a traffic. Probably it would have been worse. Worse because Jimmy very well would have liked to do the job without customers from ads. And he's when Craig's list are packaged in work.
Care has to go find customers yourself. You've got to casino bars, check stops, anywhere, you know, walk the streets. So, yeah, I firmly believe that if that bill would have been passed, it would have been worse. It doesn't, it's going to help you out of being trafficked.
The traffic that you're in out of care is to eat is right. If a law really didn't have much of an effect on the traffic in business, law makers definitely hope it would reduce the number of people being trafficked. So, to do that, the best answer I could find is nobody knows. We don't know how to accurately count the number of people being sex trafficked, much less whether it's rising or falling.
We don't know how to make police in sex trafficking harder. Since back age was seized, sex ads have scattered to lots of different sites, recovering evidence is more difficult. I spoke with a senior analyst and then charted. The software company, the Health Law Enforcement Track Sex Ads on the Internet.
And she said, at least half of the sex ads that had been on websites in the US are now hosted by websites offshore. Meaning, the servers are in other countries. So, whatever own-so-servres is not obligated to comply with law enforcement or respondents' opinions. Federal prosecutions of traffickers have actually fallen since I've passed.
I called him to the legislators who spent years going after back age and online sex ads. Former Senator Clearing Haskell, she held her on a Senate investigation to the site, and she was one of the festivals original co-sponsors. I wanted to talk to her about the law's intentions and how it's actually canned out. If the Internet is a curb trafficking, so far as I can tell, there's no evidence that trafficking has decreased as a result of the law.
Well, you can't prove a negative. This is one of the oldest problems in crime prevention. When you're successful at crime prevention, it's very hard to prove how you were successful. So, there is no evidence to say that this bill didn't do its job.
And so, you don't know. And it's irritating to me that there seems to be this narrative that the sex workers are putting out. They're well, it didn't do any good. Well, they don't.
I believe that it does have an impact when people can't easily sell children online. They can't save in my bones as somebody who prosecuted sex crimes for many years. The ease of advertising children for sex, that going away is a positive in this country. That's not a negative.
When I asked her about testosterone making it harder to actually find a prosecute sex traffickers, she said law enforcement should quote up their game. After testosterone passed, sex on the Internet, this one comes to shock, there's a ton of it. It all seems suddenly radioactive. Not just advertising for sex.
It was true of all kinds of sex work, including people whose jobs are perfectly legal, like porn performers, cam girls, and strippers. After testosterone, tons of them said they were getting kicked off of Instagram and Facebook. Many of these were not explicit counts. No nudity.
Like one porn performer who posted a picture for testosterone Instagram on Valentine's Day, she's wearing a tank cap and mid-length red skirt, sitting under bed when she covered rose petals. The photo was captioned, Happy Valentine's Day. By the next morning, her account had been moved by Instagram. The president of an adult performers union told me she documented one of 3600 band accounts.
I reached out to Facebook, which also owns Instagram, and a company spoke for someone who responded, quote, we understand that people sometimes disagree with what we do and don't allow on Instagram. We'll continue listening and responding to the concerns of our community. Even though Cara wasn't being trafficked anymore, Salsa Fassa had an effect on her life, with a huge effect. I'll pick up her story in 2015, when she first returned to Florida.
She'd been away for seven years, so she had no idea what to do. She had no idea what to do, but it could all for a live. She tried finding a job, applied to lots and lots of them, but no one would hire her. She thinks it'd be because she had some of the prostitution charges on her record.
Not even the family dollar would give me a job, like nobody would give me a job. You were saying if you would hire a job, they would run like a background check on you, and even though it's not a felony, like in an prostitute and a picture they're like, no, you're not your mom. I was like, that's what I did two jobs. I was mad at them.
I was while, while Walmart nobody would give me a job because of these charges. And it was mind-blowing to me because I'm like, literally, it's a ticket in place that you're going to get in jail, and you wouldn't have it because it was so frowned on. Because it was looked at as like the nastiest, just immoral thing. These people would not give me a job.
I'm trying to do everything that I can to just live a normal life, just be normal, and it wasn't working. So my, you know, my next option was to do what I knew how to do. That's, I jumped into the industry that knew how to survive on. So in 2015, a couple years before the law passed, Carolyn back to trading sex for money.
Except this time for the first time ever, she got to keep the money. There's no more distinction on me. At this point in her life, what Carol was doing was sex work, which means performing any sex acts in exchange for money. Lots of things make a difference between traffic, but the biggest one is Carol chose to do it.
She wasn't being forced or coerced. For the second half of her 20s, Carol's life totally changed. Not in some Disney rags to her age as well, though she wasn't really a no, but overall, she was happy. She knew what was illegal, and that she was risking more criminal charges, but no one would hire her anyway.
And by doing sex work, she was able to get her own car, her own house, Carol was putting herself through school. She got her GED, start going classes. She wanted to be a medical technician. She was working for certification.
After that, she'd stop doing sex work. She had a plan. Nobody was in control of my life on me. I was empowered, man.
That's the biggest word I had the money to do and provide for myself. The way she made her money, the way she found her clients. It was on the back page, and you could probably see where this is going. When back page shut down, all of a sudden, everything that was working for her disappeared.
Carol kept doing sex work. Only it was more dangerous, she says. Back page, in fact, like it, made a possible for sex workers to share information on clients before agreeing to make them a person. They could warn another of a predatory clients who, for instance, won't wear condoms or refuse to pay, or try making sex workers include some service that they didn't originally agree to.
It was a lifeline. Now, to get by, Carol started doing what her traffic record had her do on the nights that she had me quota. Go outside, try to get clients on bars. And when she would pick up a guy, she'd go into those dates totally wide.
She says, nothing violent happened to her, but she had those power. Clients started tackling. She might have paid her less money. And over time, it got too hard.
She couldn't post ads. She couldn't find clients. She wasn't making any money. I ended up completely losing the house.
Then a couple weeks later, my car. I was barely making it. I'm not even going to get by, let alone feed myself. After she lost her house, Carol moved to Touhou, and I was excited to stay places.
And to pay for it, now that someone's her work had tried it up. She did find another job. As I had catch her at 7-Eleven, she made $300 a week. Not enough to cover her room.
First of all, she tried sticking through her school schedule, going to class. But I ended up dropping out because I just said it was just too much. I gave her to her high school. So it literally changed everything.
When I spoke with Senator McCaskill, I pulled her back here. I thought she had been trafficked for so long. Finally, she had gotten her feed by doing sex work. I played her back page.
And how it's just a fast-term approach on harder. More dangerous. The bill had this kind of big negative effect on her life, even though she's not a sex trafficker. And the lies supposed to be targeting traffickers.
And so I'm wondering if this is a lot of hits the wrong target. Well, I guess I would say that if you were sitting in the shoes of the Senate in those years, you would have seen websites that were helping people traffic children for sex. And they were being protected by law, and they deserved that protection. So the intent of the law was to stop trafficking of children for sex.
One of the bi-products of that is that for adult consensual sex workers, they have to find other ways to find customers. I'm not sure that any of the complaints about the difficulty of finding clients to pay you for sex is a fair trade-off or stopping a website like that page that was facilitating the trafficking of children across this country. And that's the weighing balance that we were looking at. I asked her about all sex workers whose jobs are not criminalized, born, canning, stripping, who's taken thrown off a social media because of Cesar Costa, and now find a harder to make a living.
She said that since they're doing nothing illegal, nothing banned by Cesar Costa, they should suit a social media company's. And she repeated her point about the laws intent. Honestly, I'm more worried about sex trafficking than I am how much money they're making, stripping. Which maybe that's the point.
Congress cared about trafficking victims. They weren't focusing on all the other people who get caught up in this law, including someone like Cara, who actually wasn't trafficking victim. Just, she doesn't anymore. Cara's not doing sex work anymore.
She's getting by, but she's struggling. I told her the fact that she quite sex work, but the law made it so difficult for her fine clients. I think the law makers behind Cesar Costa could see that as a victory. Like the law worked.
You are a success story. I highly doubt that you could use it because it's a success story. Let me make it very clear. I was going into the sex worker for a while after Cesar Costa said it didn't work.
Cesar Costa didn't stop me. It didn't hinder me a few times. It got less safer. You know, I wasn't able to be able to read my calls and I should have.
It became a headache, but it never stopped me. It's funny. It was always Cara's plan to stop doing sex work. She might have finished school, did a different job, tried starting a family.
But when the law passed, it threw a wrench in her plan. She made a lot less money at sex work, which looked on her progress, and her earlier feature goals. So the law didn't push her out of sex work. She says, if anything, we kept her in for longer.
We didn't see Cesar Costa's on the purchase of her show. Coming up, new rules come down, and you think, I don't know, maybe she just went and got out of here. A very extreme example of that. That's a minute.
She talked about the video. I went up about the continuous. She's American life in our class, a day on the program. There, I fixed it.
Stories of what happens when somebody throws a book at some problem, and the fact one, it was the US Congress rolling book, and I too would be right now. It's the government of China. This is that too, belonging island. So it's been a year and a few days now, since China cracked down on Hong Kong, something called the National Security Wall, which basically was Beijing saying that people Hong Kong, okay, games over, stop the nonsense, the private mass, the protests, the calls of elections, criticism of China, and National Security Wall that's trying to wake all that away.
And as a result, thousands of people have fled. The UK has extended a new kind of visa for Hong Kong residents, and gives 70% of population, the ability to come live in the UK, and apply for citizenship. When I was a reporting Hong Kong back in 2019, I met this writer named Karen Chong. She spent the last year since July 2020, when the law was enacted, watching Hong Kong change under the new wall, and small ways of big ones.
I'm wondering if you're going to have to leave herself. Here's Karen. Everyone I know in Hong Kong has a point of no return. A point when the situation deteriorates so irrevocably that leaving is the only option.
A friend from university says her point of no return is a day when Hong Kong is forced to write and simplify Chinese characters used in mainland China, instead of the traditional characters we use here. Another friend said that her point of no return is a day to police shot a protester. That happened in 2019. For a long time, my point of no return was when the National Security Law would be enacted in Hong Kong.
I chose that because I thought it would be a long time before that day would arrive. Then suddenly, last June, the law became reality. My point of no return was here. The National Security Law is big and broad, but what it comes down to is this.
Every other day, we learn about something new that is now potentially illegal. The eight-bird slogan we all chanted a protest two years ago. Apparently, you can't say that anymore. We want to put up pro democracy decorations in your shop to police go show up.
Even films that are about protests could be banned under new censorship guidelines. These acts could be considered endangering national security or trying to subvert mainland China. The maximum present sentence for, quote, grave offenses is life. As soon as the law went into effect last June, we heard stories of people leaving.
I thought it would be one of them. I'd always thought that when a day came, it would be an easy flip of the switch from say to go. I'm only 28, and I have a whole life in front of me. It wasn't too late to start fashion in a new place.
But I didn't leave. The season's passed and I keep looking for reasons to say a bit longer. Summer. July 1st.
The day after the National Security Law was enacted is anniversary of the Hanover, when Hong Kong was handed from Britain to China, and it's an annual tradition to march in the streets. By noon, the police held up a brand new purple flag that actually read, verbatim. This is a police warning. You are displaying flags or banners, chanting slogans, or conducting yourself within a tense such a session or subversion, which may constitute offenses under the H.A.S.A.
or National Security Law. You may be arrested and prosecuted. Usually, I'm out on the streets on July 1st. The protests have been such a staple in Hong Kong for the past few decades.
For me and everyone I grew up with, that's essentially our whole lives. But this year, I don't go to the march. Instead, my partner and I actually watched an use of friends, all of us too nervous to head out. It already feels like a different world.
There's a mass panic on social media. People worry they're going to be jailed for things they've said. They started the leading social media accounts, erasing their posts, changing their user names. I want the yell at these people.
The commonest parties doesn't even know who you are. Don't play into their hands. Don't obey in advance. But the person I'm really saying this to is myself.
I like to think that I'm at the far back of the line of people who get arrested because I'm a nobody. It's too early to know how and when the security law will be used on us. How bad it will be. Still, we take small steps so we can leave if we need to.
My partner and I get married a month later. We do this so that if we decide to leave Hong Kong, we can leave together. I only have Hong Kong passport, but my partner has citizenship in an English-speaking country. We contact a lawyer, sign a piece of paper, and get married.
I tell myself that this doesn't mean we're leaving. That's just in case. This makes me sound weird, but I don't know what my partner thinks about leaving. He doesn't bring it up, and I'm too scared to ask.
When he does let something slip, this seems to change every few weeks or months. One day he says, we could leave for 10 years and then come back when it cracked down and slow. Other times he vows to stick it out here. Sometimes my partner takes baths.
I slide into the bathroom and slash the water on his face and say, by the way, I don't want to leave, okay? Late at night before we turn the lights off, I remind him that I really fucking hate the cold, and that I have seasonal effect of his order. So if we ever move to a place above his return latitude, we have to get a light lamp, and even then I probably still be crying into present and resentful. Hong Kong is the only place I've ever called home.
Our generation grew up after to British Hong Kong in 1997, and Hong Kong felt like it belonged to us. Our grandparents and great grandparents came to Hong Kong fleeing to war against the Japanese, or communist oppression. They thought about survival and nothing else. Some of them got rich along the way.
But my friends and I, we had dreams. We slept on couches and made scenes about neighborhoods we love. We wanted to build community spaces and live on farms and place shows industrial buildings and protest all our bodies were spent. We weren't going to see this place as transitory.
We were made this place our own. Even after the law, my day-to-day life hasn't changed much. I feel angry when I read the news. More than 10,000 people have been arrested for protesting in 2019, and every week, protesters are sentenced to many years in jail.
But the messed up thing is, if I want to, I can still put on his own suit and go to the beach, or bitch about life with my friends at cafes, or sit for hours on my favorite bookstores like nothing has changed. The doom and gluing space in my head, where people I've met or known have been arrested, exist alongside the sunny human streets and country parts of Hong Kong. The storm hasn't hit us yet, and that's why we're still here. Winter.
The months pass. 12 Hong Kongers trying to flee to Taiwan on a boat or caught into change in China. The founder of our biggest pro-democracy paper is jailed. A teenage protester who was shot by police in 2019 has to go into exile, but journalists is arrested for doing investigative work.
In early January, my partner and I have dinner at our friends who all call best. Best small, right studio has a beautiful balcony with lemon trees and other product creatures. Best specially helped a group of her elderly relatives get their documents in order to leave. They tried convincing her to leave, too.
Said they had to let Hong Kong from China during the cultural revolution, and they were grateful to not have had to live through that. People in our parents' generation were always fleeing for stability, for better lives. But best and a partner have no plans to go. A few days later, I'm still in bed when, through the door, I hear my partner crack open up here.
It's only 10 in the morning and he's already drinking, which means there must be another devastating development in the news, and I already know it will be a long day, week, month, year, eternity. That morning, the police had arrested dozens of pro-democracy activists. Their events, they ran into primary for an election that the government keeps postponing. It's the biggest single day I've read so far.
Weeks later, and my day job, they read about their trial. An activist on trial tells his pregnant wife that he loves her, as he's facing an indeterminate number of years in prison. I realize I have to compartmentalize and stop reading the news at work, unless I want to start bawling in the office in front of dozen coworkers. Sometimes the reason you want to leave isn't related to danger.
It isn't that you give up. It isn't that you think being somewhere else will bring you a better life. Is that your heart can't take it anywhere. Maybe what will get me to leave is not fear, but fatigue.
After the mass arrests, that's when people around me start actively discussing leaving. Soon, at dinner gatherings, the only thing my friends and I talk about is whether to go over stay. Some sign up for language classes and join Facebook groups to learn about life in foreign countries. When I see Beth again, her plans have changed.
She and her partner have volunteered during the election, and doesn't work with international nonprofits. They start getting worried about their safety too. Beth is leaving soon for school overseas, and she's trying not to think about whether she'll come back. I ask them what they're going to do with their plans, which they care for like their babies, and they're grown.
Every time someone tells me they're leaving, I picture them fading into the background one by one around a rosy dinner table, until there's only me left staring at my plate. I try to imagine living in Hong Kong where they're gone, and I'll hang out at books where together in London, discussing Hong Kong news without fear that someone will use straw. It makes me want to throw myself into Victoria Harper. I don't call them any of this.
The public conversation around leaving has become so fraught. People judge you if you're going on about your new life abroad, or see you as a deserter. Some people live without saying goodbye, not out of fear, but shame. I don't want my friends to think I'm judging their decisions, but it also means I never say out loud how much I can't bear to see them go.
Whenever my friends press me on my plans, all I can say is, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, which is true. After coming home from gatherings, which increasingly feel like farewells, my partner and I still don't talk about our plans. Talking about it makes a few real and imminent too soon, like we're going to leave tomorrow. When we talk about who gets to leave, that discussion isn't a totally tight to class and outward mobility, and therefore, privilege.
New visa policies mean that a lot more people get to leave now, but some still can't afford it. And for people who's a restaurant, they don't have a luxury of discussing what their points are no return are. The fact that I am having this internal debate that I am neither an exile or in jail is a privilege. Spring.
In April, when scrolling through the newsfeed and see that the government has come up with something truly out of this world, it's called the National Security Education Day. Photo show literature on home fake guns and all sorts of weapons. Kids barely old enough to have pocket money, but already training to be cops. Schools are introducing patriotic education, and teachers can lose their teaching license for having views or deemed politically incorrect.
I close a browser and think there is no fucking way I ever send a kid of mine to a school in Hong Kong. Recently, I sat on the back of a motorbike as a friend drove us through Hong Island. The honey history is at night required. All I can hear is a win-wearing bias and a metronomic home of traffic lights.
We passed by a road truck painting to air sour, and I noticed paint cleanse leaves near on the side of the road to cover up graffiti of now illegal slogans. We meander threw the stench of the Chinese herbs in Chiangwan, and once we're at Victoria Road, all we can smell is a damp soil. We stop at a stretch of waterfront, so far away from the light pollution that I can look up and see the stars. I feel a flood of existential dread.
I had never seen the city on the back of a bike before. How many more ways are there to experience the city I thought I already knew? And how can you possibly tell me to leave before I checked off all of them? We often speak of Hong Kong disappearing as a being safe scenario, as though the city would submerge on a water like an antise.
And as much more likely that one day in the near future, the Hong Kong cityscape will not look like how it had in 2020, but there will be nobody here who remembers the place that one's existed. This is what, if you're most, but the skyscrapers will remain intact. The countryside hike still beautiful, and a harbor rippling with nightlights. That you can still go to work and have afternoon tea at hotels, and outwardly you can't tell anything is wrong.
But the only ones left here are those who believe this is the best version of Hong Kong they're good every day. I don't know what will happen in the next few years or even weeks, but I know that when I feel stupid to say, like it does now, suddenly something as small as a discrete box on a minibus, stenciled with a word skyo, I support you, keep holding on, could be enough to make our day sing less bleak. We talk about the question of staying or leaving, like there's a right or wrong answer, a clever or irrational choice, but there's really only one question whether or not you're ready to say goodbye, and I know I'm not ready yet. For now, I can just limbo.
Karen Chon, just in last few weeks, Sarah was recording a story, things about wars in Hong Kong. Journalists have been arrested, they're pro-democracy newspaper, happily closed, free activist groups disbanded. Karen says some of our friends are going to be applying to leave, but now we can still remain. This is a show producing this country so many hands, meaning the C.C.
is largely testing, not the arena that the corn fell to dim out of women. People think that today show Susan Burton's O'Chay, and she was shown cold and engraved at Lake Relief, left landing the meets. So Nelson, Catherine Ramondo, our established English self-interest with parliament here in New York, would have been dying, and woo, managing as her son, the Raman, our senior editor of the C.M. Our executive editor is Daniel Berry.
So thanks to date form Senator Heidi Haidkamp, John Corning on the listen album, Hugh Carma, out of Central Square Hopkins, the sex worker outreach project, Kine Bar, is key to Donald Robinson, Roman follower of I believe Scott Cunningham, Greg, Angela, and Sankin, who's not a Turner, to the Robertson-Con to the place of tooth. It's only got too very late for it. Just lost it. Drove him crazy.
It invaded all aspects of my life. Any room I walked into my worked in the corners, I looked under the table, crouch down. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with most of the American life.