When people picture a victim of human trafficking, they likely visualize what they’ve seen in police procedurals or movies like Taken. A young girl is nabbed off the street by strangers, law enforcement (or vigilante family members) search for and rescue them, and the girl is returned safely to her family. But this is often far from reality.
Take, for example, Chrystul Kizer.
She grew up in Gary, Indiana. Her mom worked to support her children and Kizer’s interest and talent in music. In junior high, she earned a spot in the city’s performing arts academy playing violin. But after her mom’s boyfriend became increasingly violent, the family fled Indiana, left most of their belongings, and moved to Milwaukee, where they stayed in a shelter for months before they found an apartment. Soon after, Kizer began experiencing violence at the hands of her own boyfriend.
Vulnerable, in 2017, a then-16-year-old Kizer met Randall Volar III, the white man who would ultimately become her abuser and trafficker. He began grooming her, buying her food and gifts, and giving her cash she could share with her sisters. He also started giving her drugs and demanding sex acts, at least some of which he recorded — unknowingly to Kizer. Subsequently, he began selling her to older men.
Black girls like Kizer are disproportionately more vulnerable to being trafficked for a number of reasons, including because traffickers admit that, if caught, they believe trafficking Black women would land them less jail time than trafficking white women.
When her abuser and trafficker was eventually arrested on child sexual assault charges, police found many videos featuring underage Black girls, including Kizer. Nevertheless, he was released the same day, and the court summons to bring him back to court never arrived.
Months later, as the abuse continued, she refused her abuser’s advances and killed him while trying to escape. She was 17 years old at the time. And now, Kizer has been sentenced to serve 11 years in prison.
That’s another reality TV or movies rarely show—survivors of human trafficking and gender-based violence in general can and do end up in prison. As the Center on Gender Justice and Opportunity at Georgetown Law reports, this is generally because they are blamed and criminalized 1) for being trafficked (on charges such as prostitution, commercialized vice, loitering, trespass, drug possession or for running away); 2) for acting in self-defense against their abusers, which may require violence; or 3) for reporting the abuse, which may not be believed due to their perceived lack of credibility and then for which they subsequently face false reporting charges.
And Black women and girls face the brunt of this. Up to 40% of sex trafficking victims and survivors are Black women, the highest percentage of any race. Black girls are arrested for prostitution and commercialized vice 4.5 times more than white youth. And among women in jail (of which Black women make up 44%), 86% of those women have experienced sexual violence, and 77% have experienced partner violence.
Kizer is now among them, sentenced to 11 years in prison for killing her abuser, victimized again, this time by the abuse-to-prison pipeline.
This must end.
As we recognize January as Human Trafficking Prevention Month, we must also demand that the criminalization of survival must stop. And there are some efforts making headway on this.
A majority of states have what are known as “safe harbor” laws that recognize and treat youth who have been involved in commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking as victims, not perpetrators, of crimes. These laws can protect people who can show that a crime they committed happened because they were being commercially sexually exploited. Most states, including Wisconsin, where Kizer lives, also have “affirmative defense” laws, which provide trafficking victims a defense for any offense related to their victimization. We not only need these laws in all states, but we also need legal officials to understand how trafficking works in practice and the actions that surround it, including grooming and abuse.
A few states also have or are considering “survivor justice” laws that allow courts to take into consideration a survivor’s experiences of gender-based violence, like domestic violence or intimate partner violence, as mitigating factors in those cases. We must advocate for strengthening and expanding these laws to all states and work to ensure that survivors are given opportunities to heal rather than punishment.
We need effective safe harbor and survivor justice laws and policies that take into account the experiences of victims and survivors and that acknowledge the often no-choice strategies they use to protect themselves and survive.
Getting these types of laws in place is a first step, but we also need survivors to be able to access the protection and compassion that these laws offer. Prosecutors and courts hold the power and often have discretion in applying these laws. We urge them to offer broad access and opt for healing-centered alternatives instead of punishment for survivors. Survivors deserve at least that much.
Sydney McKinney, Ph.D., is the executive director of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, a nonprofit organization that researches the criminalization of Black women and girls and elevates innovative, community-led solutions to address it.
