44. Inhuman Trafficking

Amanda Blackwood:  I got there and it was probably within two hours, he had my driver's license, my passport, my debit card, all that stuff.

 And this was because he said he wanted to keep hold of it for safekeeping, just to make sure that, you know, nothing happened to it.  

Totally made sense to me.

I trusted this man. I'd known him for seven years. So I gave it to him.

And it was within seven days he started trafficking me.  

Early days

[00:01:08]

Steve W: A word of caution before we begin: today's episode contains some adult themes, specifically sex trafficking and human trafficking, so please bear that in mind. Amanda Blackwood is a gem. She's fun. She's full of life. She loves black and white movies. But the most extraordinary thing about Amanda is that she still here today.

Amanda Blackwood:  So the earliest memories that I have are of early childhood abuse. When I was about four years old, I had already been living in this household where my mother was mentally and emotionally abusive, my father was physically abusive and I was sexually assaulted. I was molested when I was four. This was by my older brother.

Steve W: How old was your brother?

Amanda Blackwood:  He was about seven at the time, maybe seven and a half. And I have to believe that something had happened to him too that was about the same time that he had started wetting the bed.

Steve W: The thing is Amanda's brother was her only friend.

Amanda Blackwood:  My father was in the military. When you move around a lot, you don't typically build a lot of relationships with people outside of your immediate family.

I didn't really have grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins that were around me regularly.

I didn't really know those people at all. My brother was my whole world. He was my best friend. He was the only person that I could talk to about anything.

Steve W: Where do you think your parents abusive tendencies came from?

Amanda Blackwood:  Their families, their parents had survived the Great Depression and World War II and the Korean conflict and they had survived so much.

 They raised their kids the way practically everybody of that era did. My parents had a lot of neglect and abuse in their childhoods as well.

Amanda starts taking Ritalin

[00:02:57]

Steve W: When Amanda was four years old, her mother had been talking to friends and discovered that several of their children had been diagnosed with ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a condition usually appearing at an early age, typically leading to restlessness, lack of concentration, sleep and anxiety disorders and so on.

Amanda Blackwood: And there was this new miracle drug, it was in 1984, and it was making all of the kids sit down and be perfectly still and silent in class and she wanted her kids on it too.

So she took us to the doctors because I had already begun acting out. And the doctors told my mother that I was fine, but my brother had ADHD.

So they gave him his very own prescription for Ritalin and my mother did not believe the doctors. So she started breaking my brother's pills in half and giving them to me every day at four.

 When I was about five and a half, she took me off of the pills for a couple of days, took me back into the doctor and, of course, as a five year old with a drug withdrawal - this was legal speed - I was, of course, pinging off the walls and going through some pretty major stuff, and they said, "Yeah, she's, unfortunately, she's got it too".

 So they gave me my very own prescription for Ritalin. And I grew up taking this every single day.

Steve W: And that Ritalin had a devastating impact on Amanda's childhood. She was picked on by teachers. She was bullied and at one point a mother said to her...

Amanda Blackwood:  "If these people have an issue with you, then there's one common denominator. You're the one that's doing something wrong. It's your fault".  

At 12, I was molested by a stranger in a swimming pool. At 13, it was an uncle by marriage. At 15, it was a stranger in a video rental parking lot, broad daylight, about noon, one o'clock in the afternoon, I don't know.

At 17, I was raped by somebody I thought was my best friend.

And all this time I kept thinking to myself, "It's my fault. All of this is my fault. Because it keeps happening to me".

Steve W: So when she was 15, Amanda started running away from home. She'd stay with friends and go to school from there. Her father would show up at school, drag her back home and punish her. So she stopped going to school.

Leaving home

[00:05:39]

Amanda Blackwood: Two days after I turned 18, I had a plane ticket to leave the state and I had my dad drive me to the airport. At 18 years old I was on my own, out in the middle of Arizona.

It's hot, it's sticky, I have dropped out of high school, I don't have a degree of any kind, I have no formal education of any kind. I took whatever job I could get, which wasn't much.

I flopped around from one place to the next, always looking for somebody that I could stay with, because I could not afford to take care of myself.

And eventually, one of the people that I met that took care of me was a man who was more than twice my age, and decided he wanted to be my boyfriend.

 It was like this shining prince. He brought me to his home and moved me in with him and I had all this room and he bought me new clothes and I had freedom and I was able to go get a part-time job at a gas station as a cashier and I had a sense of identity.

 I felt like I had found somebody who would be safe to be around. It was the first time I'd really experienced that.

Settling in Arizona

[00:06:48]

Steve W: But this fairy tale wasn't going to have a happy ending.

Amanda Blackwood: This guy was treating me well. He had lots of money. He made good money. He said it was while he was selling medical equipment. I didn't know what that meant necessarily, but things went along great.

He treated me like I was an absolute queen and he had one friend who came over all the time and they would sit there and they would watch sports together and hang out and laugh and joke and I would be the good little girlfriend.

I would go get them beers when they asked for them. I would grab snacks or something and make sure that they were well taken care of, hand them the remote if they asked for it. I was a good girl. That's what I'd been trained to do.

And this one friend, this exact same guy that I had gotten to know, one day was having a birthday party in Las Vegas and he invited us both to go and my boyfriend said that he couldn't go.

He had work to do, but I could go and how would I like to go? It's an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas and I could go for a couple of days and have a lot of fun and then come back home.

Human Trafficking experience 1 - Las Vegas

[00:07:55]

Steve W: The trip to Las Vegas didn't turn out to be fun at all. At the airport the friend took possession of her ID. In later life, that would trigger a warning, but not yet.

Amanda Blackwood: We got to Las Vegas. We went straight to the hotel.We went up to the front desk and he paid handsomely with cash for them to not ask questions.

He told me to keep my mouth shut before we ever got up to the front desk. And, "You know, you're... you're supposed to look like you're my daughter, so I need you to be good. I need you to be quiet".

I still didn't know what exactly was happening. They asked him how many room keys and... he said, "Only one". He told them I was allowed to get room service but only once a day and I'm thinking, "Well, if I'm going to be out of the room, I probably won't need it but once a day".

But when they brought up the room service they were to leave it outside the door and walk away before I retrieved it. They made sure that I was aware of this too.

So we got up to the room. He told me, You can't go anywhere. If you do, you can't get back in. I'm gonna go gambling and I'll be back in a little bit".

And he went down, he went gambling. He came back up. He would rape me.

He would maybe eat a bite or two of whatever it was that I had ordered. He would go back down and gamble maybe a little bit, come back up, maybe sleep. This happened over a period of 52 hours, so a little bit more than two days,  we flew back out.

Steve W: And you couldn't leave?

Amanda Blackwood: I couldn't leave, he was right about that, because I couldn't get back into the room.

I had no driver's license, all I had was an ID. He had whatever I had. It was all in his pocket.

 If I left, I wouldn't have been able to tell the police who I was, where I belonged. I didn't have anybody to return to.

If I left, I would have been homeless in Las Vegas. And it was better for me, I figured if I just kept on lying to myself and saying, "I've been through worse, I can get through this too".

I'd rather be homeless in Arizona than in Las Vegas. At least I know people. And that's exactly what I did.

I was raped, I lost count how many times, by that one person. And this was how he wanted to spend his birthday weekend. I was the party favour.  

Steve W: And looking back, trying to rationalise how you got into this situation with your boyfriend in the first place, what conclusion did you come to?

Amanda Blackwood: He swept in, he saw somebody who was basically a damsel in distress.

I was young and naive and I know he saw that as being a weakness. I thought he saw that as being something charming.

What I didn't realize was my boyfriend, at that time, had connections to organised crime and drug trade.

And I do believe I was... a trade for either money or drugs.

Steve W: Amanda got out of Arizona, stopped for a little while in Arkansas, got a job, and then...

Moving to Florida

[00:11:14]

Amanda Blackwood: I fell out of a hayloft and twisted my knee really bad and needed knee surgery. So, the whole point to going to Florida was because that's where my dad's mother lived.

I wanted to go and stay with her while I got my knee surgery and maybe get to know my grandmother a little bit because I'd never really had that chance.

I just wanted to know a grandma.

 So I went to Florida and got to Daytona Beach on a bus in the middle of the night.

It was about 10:30 at night and I called them from a phone book and I said, "Hey, I made it here. I'm ready for you guys to come and get me. I don't have your address. I don't know how to get to your home. I don't have a map or anything".

We didn't have cell phones with GPS's on them. And her husband, my dad's stepfather, answered the phone and said,

"We're not coming to get you. You're on your own. Good luck."

 I had no idea what had happened. It would take many years to find out what had happened.

Steve W: What had happened was that Amanda's parents had rung through to her grandma and threatened to desert her if she entertained Amanda. So she's in a strange place, late at night, very little money, and no one to contact.

Human Trafficking experience 2 - Daytona Beach

[00:12:26]

Amanda Blackwood: While I was sitting there on the curb crying that night, a young couple came and found me.

He was in his mid twenties. She was, she looked about 18, she was actually 15, and they said that they had a place for me to stay until I could get on my feet.

 What they really meant was they had a place for me to stay until they could find the highest bidder because they sold me to a guy named Esteban.

Steve W: Incredibly Amanda was locked up by Esteban for over 23 hours with no food, no water, no bathroom facilities. Her experience as Esteban's prisoner and her subsequent escape make for another whole episode. But suffice to say for now, she spotted an opportunity to escape - and she went for it.

Amanda Blackwood: And when I got out, the first person that I saw was a female police officer driving down the street.

And I ran and I flagged her down, waving my arms and screaming at her, and she looked at me like I had sprouted a second head. I was insane in her eyes.

 I was trying to tell her what had happened. I was babbling, everything's coming out of my mouth at the same time, probably five words at a time.

 She had no idea what I was trying to say. I could not get my point across. If I had, I don't believe she would have believed me.

And then she saw the man who had locked me up, Esteban, pull an illegal u-turn on the road behind her, through her rearview mirror, when he saw me talking to the police officer.

 And she went after him.

Steve W: And was Esteban caught?

Amanda Blackwood: I never followed up. I did not go back to that place where I know there were other people being held.

I did not watch the news to see if he was caught, to see if they did anything.

I was terrified. I didn't want to know. It's not my problem anymore.

All I knew was that I was alive.

Move to California - Things looking up

[00:14:36]

Steve W: After a period of homelessness in Florida, Amanda left, took what little she had with her and landed up in California. Maybe, just maybe, things might look up.

Amanda Blackwood: I found myself out there in California and trying to get myself established.

It was as far as I could get from Florida without freezing to death or having a passport. And I was going to do my best.

I was on Alias and Will & Grace and I modelled for Harley-Davidson. I did a lot of really cool stuff. I mean, it's Hollywood. Of course I did. Everybody does.

But I still wasn't happy. I still wasn't finding me.  

Steve W: And despite being offered a recurring role in the final season of Will & Grace when it was still on network TV...

Amanda Blackwood:  I quit all of that. I walked away.

I was tired of putting my sense of value in the hands of other people.

Steve W: So what did you do instead?

Amanda Blackwood: I went to work as a, basically, a mall cop, as a security officer.

 And within five months, I had busted open a major embezzlement ring. I had become the new Director of Public Safety and Security for six properties in LA County.

I had my own apartment for the first time where I didn't have to share it with anybody. It was a loft. I had a cat. I had my own car, it was paid off.

I had established myself in the real world and I didn't have to depend on anybody.

I was so proud of myself.

Steve W: However, this wasn't the happy ending that it could have been. Internet dating had become a thing and Amanda tried it out. She met one particular man who lived a long way away in Scotland and, over a period of seven years, they got to know each other really well. They Skyped regularly. She got to know his little girl and watched her grow up over that period. Through Skype, she met his sister, his brother-in-law, they were just fantastic people. She ever met his parents. Eventually they started travelling to meet up for real. But what could they do living so far apart? Well, what would any couple in love do?

Move to Scotland

[00:16:52]

Amanda Blackwood: And he asked me to get a fiance visa to move to Scotland to go and be with him.

I dropped everything. I left my job. I sold my car.

I gave up my apartment and I hopped on a plane with a single suitcase and I went to Scotland. I couldn't wait.

We'd already picked out our wedding date, which was going to be the day after the Prince and Kate got married and it was going to be kind of a cool time.

This was back in 2011.

Human Trafficking experience 3 - Scotland

[00:17:22]

Steve W: But the euphoria died down almost immediately.

Amanda Blackwood: I got there and it was probably within two hours. He had my driver's license, my passport, my debit card, all that stuff.

And he asked for it right away. And this was because he said he wanted to keep hold of it for safekeeping, just to make sure that, you know, nothing happened to it.

He could put it in the safe with his passport. That way, if we ever needed it, we would have access to it. Totally made sense to me.

I trusted this man. I'd known him for seven years. So I gave it to him.

Steve W: Amanda had seen this behavior before, back in Las Vegas. She should have known what was coming.

Amanda Blackwood: And it was within seven days  he started trafficking me.  

He listed me on a dating website that is still in use today by people just like him.

We had basically a revolving door. People would come in, they would pay him, either electronically ahead of time, or with cash at the event.

They would come in, do what it was they were paying to do to me.

I was seen as exotic. They had to pay a premium to have a piece of me.

But they paid it. Men and women. Some were repeat customers. We called them guests.

It was within the first week of these guests coming over that I decided, " Nope, I'm out. I'm done.  I don't care. It's freezing cold. I don't care. I'll do what I have to".

Steve W: So not for the first time Amanda set about planning her escape. She managed to convince her Scotsman to return her passport and debit card by getting him blind drunk one evening in order to covertly book a flight out of the country. She couldn't secure a flight for five days, during which the abuse continued and by day five, she ended up with a kidney infection from the abuse so bad, she missed the flight. At this point, suicide was an option, but then Stockholm Syndrome came to Amanda's rescue.

Amanda Blackwood: We now refer to it as trauma bonding, but I'm old so I call it Stockholm Syndrome still.

It's where you build this bond with the person that is abusing you or holding you captive which, in this case, both, and you build this bond with them to where you would do anything to please or appease them.

And you are madly in love with them. You would bend over backwards to give them the world.

And I convinced him,  I told him, I said, "You know, our date that we were supposed to get married has come and gone and we're not married yet.

So my visa is going to expire before too long. If I overstay that visa, I could be kicked out of the UK and not be allowed back.

 If you send me back, I can go and stay there for six months and live with friends. And then come back in six months, and wouldn't it be wonderful, we could spend our first Christmas together if I go soon enough?"

 And within two hours of that conversation, he had bought a round trip flight for me to leave, go to California, stay for six months and return in December in time for Christmas.

And I just disappeared.

Steve W: By the way, there's one point that Amanda hadn't yet mentioned about the Scotsman.

Amanda Blackwood: He was a police officer. He had spent a number of years in the police service and his job in particular at that point was working in the school systems with the kids.

Being tracked down in California

[00:21:23]

Steve W: Well, the police officer wasn't going to give up on his easy income lightly. He tracked Amanda down all the way to California.

Amanda Blackwood:  

I saw him one day through the peephole in the door, knocking on the neighbour's door. He had my address off by one number. He very nearly found me. I was so new there that the neighbours had no idea who he was talking about. They had no idea who I was.

Steve W: He went back to the UK and started with the psychological abuse. He contacted bosses, friends, coworkers...

Amanda Blackwood: ...and he would send all these photos and videos that he had taken of me when I was being trafficked. So, not nice things.

 And he was sending it to these people and saying, "I wouldn't want this working for me. I wouldn't want this in my life, would you?"

 And it was damaging me. I was losing jobs. I was losing friends.

 I went into hiding. I locked down all of my social media.  I didn't want to be me anymore.

Amanda Blackwood: I didn't know how to change my name, but I did what I could. I went by something else, and I did for a long time.

Move to Colorado

[00:22:30]

Steve W: Amanda moved to Colorado and it was this point when her Scottish police officer made his final attempt to humiliate her, that was the catalyst for her to turn her life around for good. It was 2019.

Amanda Blackwood: I found out that he made me famous on a pornography website overnight by putting all of this stuff up on the porn site.

I had already been through so much, how was I gonna deal with this too? I reached out to an anti-trafficking group.

One group paired me up with pro bono lawyers immediately to be able to go and fight the pornography websites and another group paired me up with a therapist that I traumatized, so they found a second therapist for me, and she was amazing.

Steve W: With some encouragement from her amazing therapist, Amanda decided that the way to fight back was to do the opposite of what she had always done before. Instead of running away and hiding, she published a book about her experiences.

Fighting back

[00:23:34]

Amanda Blackwood: And writing had always been extremely therapeutic to me. If they want to know the story, I'll tell them the story.

And when I first started speaking up, I sounded like a mouse. I was so quiet, little tiny voice. Very quiet, very shy, very painful.

But the more I spoke up about it, the more people would rally around me and want to support me and ask me questions and want to know more and they didn't want to know about the traumatic stuff, they wanted to know, "How did you get here? How did you do this? How did you survive? How'd you get out?"

And I finally found my voice.

Steve W: And once Amanda had found her voice, there was no stopping her.

Amanda Blackwood:  

If people were going to be finding me, if he's going to make me famous, they're going to find out why.

And if he's going to make me famous, I might as well make the money off of it.

So, it was officially published on my 10-year anniversary of Freedom from Trafficking, which was June 21st, 2021, and the following month is when I met my husband.

Steve W: And that book is called Custom Justice. Check out the show notes for details.

Amanda Blackwood:  

The picture on the book is pretty heavily photoshopped. I'm old, I've got wrinkles, it happens. I'm proud of my wrinkles.

But on the book cover, my face goes all the way around to the opposite side.

And that's because, what's the important part? the stuff between the ears.

Steve W: Love it. And the initiative to confront your experience head-on and write the book is really what turned things round.

Amanda Blackwood: By writing the book, I was able to give my traumas a physical body separate from myself so that I could set it down on the shelf and walk away from it.

It will always exist. It will always be there and I can pick it up and look at it anytime I want to, because it's not going to go away.

But it's no longer stuck in my brain, ruling my every decision in life.

Steve W: So this story did have a happy ending. And as Amanda said, she met her husband straight after publishing her book. But how did she find it in her to trust any man?

Amanda meets her husband

[00:25:54]

Amanda Blackwood: I don't even know, I genuinely don't know. I just know that when I met him, I knew he was different.

You know he was... he was honest to a fault. He... he wasn't gonna pull the punches, he wasn't gonna try and sugarcoat anything.

He had real genuine human emotions and I think that's what really did it.

 He knew my history because of the bio that I'd written, and he read my entire book.

And he told me if you could go through everything that you've been through and you could still be willing to look for love and want that connection, I need a lot more of that in my life.

The reality of human trafficking

[00:26:32]

Steve W: Now before I met you, Amanda, I imagined human trafficking to involve young children, young people being kidnapped, white windowless vans. That was my perception. But that's not right, is it?

Amanda Blackwood: That's the majority of perceptions. Three quarters of all victims are over the age of 18, they're not children.

And they're usually trafficked by people they already know and trust, like romantic relationships, like what I was in.

The fact that we think of it as being only kidnapping scenarios, only children, only prostitution, these are very, very small minorities of what trafficking actually looks like.

The reason they're so publicised is because this is what sells the headlines. People don't want to see what human trafficking actually is and that it could be happening right next door to you or in your own backyard.

You could be the person who's driving an Uber, taking somebody back to their trafficker.

 That's a pretty harsh reality, realising that it's everywhere. There's no small town anywhere that's not affected by this in some way.

And sitting down and realising what I'd been through had a name was the beginning of the real healing for me.

 Find the name. I don't care if you call it Steve. You have to call it something to get started somewhere.

Statistics about human trafficking

[00:27:59]

Steve W: And some of the statistics relating to human trafficking are quite shocking aren't they?

Amanda Blackwood: In recent years, a study has been done that suggests that anywhere between 47 and 50 percent of all victims are actually boys and men.

 The oldest person to be pulled out of trafficking here in Colorado in recent years was in her 70s. The youngest was three months old.

And when we're talking about trafficking, most people want to talk about specifically sex trafficking. Sex trafficking only makes about 14 percent of all cases worldwide.

The majority of trafficking is labour trafficking and I don't differentiate myself by saying that I'm a sex trafficking survivor because that negates a lot of other stuff like rape and incest and sexual assault and all the stuff that I went through.

 Sex trafficking sounds like sex worker. I was never a prostitute.

The average lifespan of somebody in trafficking is seven years. At the end of seven years, they're usually dead.

Less than 2% of all victims escape with their lives.

Steve W: Today Amanda is a trauma recovery mentor, full-time author and public speaker. She teaches people how to stop living in fear, to live happier and more productive lives. Amanda's story is an American story. But if you're thinking that human trafficking is only an American problem, then think again. The United Nations says, "Victims of trafficking can be any age, any gender, and from anywhere in the world. Girls are mainly trafficked for sexual exploitation while boys are used for forced labour". So if it's all around us, what are the signs we should be looking out for?

Signs of human trafficking

[00:30:04]

Amanda Blackwood: Signs of abuse and domestic violence are exactly the same as the signs of human trafficking in most cases.

If you've met somebody who's normally a happily... happy, bubbly person and they're outgoing, and they're open with all their friends, and they love going out, hanging out with people and all of a sudden they stop all of this and they have a hard time meeting your gaze, they're looking down at their feet, they don't participate as much, keeping kind of quiet, it's usually, and quite often, an indicator of abuse.

Domestic violence and human trafficking mirror one another very much in this way.

If you see something, you say something.  

Steve W: And are there other signs we should look out for?

Amanda Blackwood: So, if somebody has a hard time making eye contact with you, you have to ask yourself, "Why?"

 If you know somebody that  never had this problem before and all of a sudden they're starting to exhibit this behaviour, that's a pretty bad sign.

Steve W: And of course you had your ID taken from you on two of the three occasions?

Amanda Blackwood: If somebody doesn't have control of their own items for their sense of identity, that means their identity has been removed from them.

Why does human trafficking keep happening to the same people?

[00:31:14]

Steve W: Got it. Now Oscar Wilde said, "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness".

Amanda Blackwood: That's such a great quote.

 Steve W: Yes. But for you, human trafficking happened three times. And I believe the average is a lot more. For those of us who are lucky enough to have been a million miles from experiencing this, it's going to be hard to understand why it keeps happening to the same people. Can you shed some light on that for me?

Amanda Blackwood: So, just like with most other survivors of trafficking, I experienced my first forms of abuse when I was very young. This is very common in this world.

The average number of times that somebody is trafficked is seven times.

The reason for that is because when you grow up in this world where this is considered normal, then you're going to keep falling for the same sort of people because it's familiar.

Steve W: So, what you're saying is that, and this is based on your personal experience and listening to the many people you've helped who've had similar experiences, it's all about the situation they found themselves in rather than having any inherent personality trait that attracts them into that kind of life. Is that a fair comment?

It's not your fault

[00:32:34]

Amanda Blackwood: Absolutely. It's never the victim's fault. A lot of us put ourselves in dangerous situations because we don't know any better.

We don't have healthy boundaries because we weren't allowed to have any to begin with.

 If you don't know what a healthy boundary is when you're four or five years old, and if you do have boundaries and they're constantly stepped all over, and you're told that you can't do anything about it, how do you think that person is going to react when they become an adult?

 They're gonna be the exact same way.

Steve W: Amanda. It's been an incredible journey, impossible for most of us to really understand. For you, how do you reflect back on that journey from where you are today?

Looking back

[00:33:16]

Amanda Blackwood: I feel incredibly fortunate. You know, I'm alive. I have this wonderful relationship with my husband. I'm a new grandmother.

I mean, my life now is this absolutely incredibly beautiful thing. And if I had given up on myself, I wouldn't have any of this.

I wouldn't be able to help people. I wouldn't be able to be the person that I was always meant to be.  I had to figure out who that was, but I'm really glad I found her.