Dr. John A. King describes sexual abuse starting at age four that resembled trafficking. He didn't recognize it as abuse at the time because he had no frame of reference, faced threats to stay silent, and saw it as normal. Only as an adult could he process what happened.
No, I don't think you do. So I was abused from the—
my earliest sexual memory was about 4, up until I was just literally too big when I was, I don't know, man, 12, 13 or something, or 14. The abuse changed. Some aspects of it we'd call trafficking, being trafficked. But as a child, when you're in those environments, you don't realize what's happening to you because you've got nothing to compare it with. So you're in this situation and every day you're just surviving. It's not the sort of thing that you go to school or rugby and talk to people about. Number one, you think it's just your environment. Number two, there's this icky feeling that people shouldn't be told about it. Number three, you've been threatened straight out not to discuss it. So there's a whole range of these internal things that it's only until later in life that you have the wherewithal to be able to process these things that you start to ask yourself a different set of questions.
And I can see that because as a child, that was your normal.
