The house is across another street just beyond the park, hidden by trees. That’s where the action is, an ideal location—quiet, out of the way.
Sex trafficking, one survivor wants people to know, is not like the movie Taken. There’s rarely any dramatic kidnapping, no screaming, no drama, no hiding the victim in some shipping container. And definitely no heroic Liam Neeson type who will kill three dozen thugs single-handedly to rescue you.
The survivor, speaking to the cameras on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said it’s a long process. “Everybody that I know that has experienced the same things that I have experienced [said it] was done through use of their vulnerability.”
Hers was that she was a divorced single mom with a previous history of addiction.
“I met a boyfriend who I thought was a great guy.”
The message of the new Fisher Films documentary The Slave in Your Backyard: The Local Reality of Human Trafficking is that human trafficking has no face because a trafficker can be anyone, a victim can be anyone.
The survivors’ stories, the observations of advocates, the interviews with law enforcement are interspersed with chilling images—feet slowly walking, empty swings, family photos with the children’s faces blurred.
“I met a boyfriend who I thought was a great guy,” the survivor continues, “but through a long process of him using psychological manipulation and coercion on me after like two years … he introduced me to an actual real pimp. It got pretty bad.”
The aim of the film is not to create outrage (though it does that), but rather to enlighten and empower—and ultimately end the atrocity of human trafficking. Focusing on South Carolina, a state whose outdated laws on prostitution carry a maximum fine on conviction of $200, thus making it a haven for trafficking, The Slave in Your Backyard makes the point that the flesh trade is an invisible menace unless you know what you’re looking for.
“To a lot of people, they would look around and say, ‘I don’t see trafficking,’ because we don’t see people walking up and down the streets anymore, like with prostitution and things like that, but if you know where to look for it, you’re gonna find it,” Richland County Sheriff’s Department Captain Heidi Jackson says in the documentary. “It’s so easy to just walk around and be kind of oblivious to what’s happening right in front of us. Because sometimes it looks like two people just leaving for a date, or a father-daughter leaving to go see a movie together or something, and it’s not that at all.”
Another survivor, Heather Pagan, got started in the life at age 14. Her “boyfriend” said she was beautiful, said he loved her—two words she had never heard during her entire abusive upbringing. He promised to take care of her, to take her away from her broken world. Instead, he used her. Finally, after 18 years of psychological, sexual and physical abuse, she managed to escape and ultimately remake her life as the Survivor Support Director at Lighthouse for Life, a faith-based nonprofit in South Carolina that supports human trafficking survivors.
Bruce is a former human trafficker turned advocate. He speaks freely, identifying himself as once “one of the evilest humans you ever would meet.” But his story is one of transformation from victim to predator. As a child, he was sexually abused and tortured by his mother before being taken away by the Department of Social Services. There, he was continually raped by other boys and by staff, then blamed and punished for being raped, before finally lashing out and stabbing another boy at the age of eight, at which point he was put in a psychiatric hospital. There, for four years, he was used as a “test dummy” for the drug companies, strapped down and injected with Thorazine and other dangerous psychotropics on a daily basis while being videoed to monitor his reactions to the drugs.
At 18, now “of age,” he was back on the street. “They created a monster,” he says, “and released it on the public.”
Bruce didn’t bother going after schoolkids or attempting to “groom” slaves. Instead, he went online, to the infamous online hub for the flesh trade, Backpage, searching for women who were “in business” for themselves. Posing as a customer, he’d offer them to come work for him, promising to pay their expenses and keep them high. If they said no thank you, the dance would begin. The trust “was built over a crystal meth pipe, a heroin needle,” he said. Bruce would give them drugs on credit, wait until they were short on money and then pounce. He’d beat them and threaten to kill them unless they paid him or came to work for him.
What ended Bruce’s career was nine bullets fired at close range, all hitting their mark. Paralyzed and hooked up to life support, he had a chance to look at himself and his life, and prayed to be given a second chance. Surviving, he grabbed that chance and became a passionate advocate against trafficking, telling his story to anyone who would listen, often beginning with a prayer. Though crippled for life, he says he is the happiest he’s ever been.
Lighthouse for Life sponsored The Slave in Your Backyard—along with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston and the Palmetto Family Council—which has been released on select streaming platforms, including Amazon and Apple TV. At the end, Pagan sums up the film and her work as an advocate: “The trauma is not your fault, but the healing is your responsibility. There’s hope beyond what your circumstances are at the present moment … there is deliverance for what happened to you.”
Don’t miss The Slave in Your Backyard. It is an important film. It is possibly THE most important film, for it is at once an unblinking spotlight on what we are at our worst—bestial, cruel, depraved—and a plea for us to be our best—humane, compassionate, magnanimous. It will take nothing short of the best within us to uproot forever the bitter harvest of what was the worst.
Or as one survivor reflected: “[It can feel] like this problem is too huge and this is fighting a losing battle, but then you remember it’s about the one. Because I’m one. And all the people that were instrumental in my getting out of that life and my healing, if they had said, ‘Oh, I can’t solve the whole problem, so let’s just give up,’ then where would I be?”
