SC survivors of human trafficking tell their stories, advocate for victims

Heather Pagan knows the life of trafficking – she lived it for 18 years.

From the age of 14 to 32, she was sold for sex and controlled by drugs.

She escaped that life 16 years ago and now helps other victims move on with their lives. She also helped pushed for a new South Carolina law that provides victims with immunity from crimes committed while they were sexually exploited.

Pagan met her first abuser at 14. He wasn’t hiding in bushes. And he didn’t threaten her life. Instead, he told her she was beautiful and that he loved her.

“He didn’t come at me and just put his hand over my mouth and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to sell you for sex and put a needle in your arm,’” Pagan said.

He told Pagan — who had a tough childhood — he wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to her ever again.

“You know what?” Pagan said. “I believed him. I mean, I had no idea the plot was going to twist a year later, but he was my boyfriend.”

A year later, she said, she was hooked on drugs and being sold for sex. She ultimately found herself behind bars for drug-related offenses. That’s what saved her from that life.

Earlier this year, S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill into law that protects victims of sexual exploitation from certain non-violent criminal convictions, including when coerced into crimes. It was unanimously approved by the Senate. In the House, only one lawmaker objected.

The bill also set in motion the ability of sex trafficking victims, such as Pagan, to have certain criminal convictions expunged from their records. Pagan, who already had gotten her record expunged, spoke before state lawmakers and told them the expungement brought deeper healing.

“It’s been 16 years of me being set free from forced fraud and coercion, the manipulation and control,” she said during her testimony. “And I’ve not been arrested on any criminal charges in 16 years.”

Pagan described it as having a really old, sticky and nasty piece of duct tape being stripped from her.

“This label that had been stuck to me my whole entire life: ‘You’re just an addict,'” she said. “‘You’re just a prostitute. You’re just a bad kid. You’re a criminal. You’re all of those things’ – now had just been stripped off me.”

Sen. Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, who was a sponsor of the bill, said the law shifts the focus to helping victims.

“What we wanted is to get these people, get these young people, out of the situation that they’re in from being trafficked, not put them in the criminal justice system,” Hutto said.

Pagan is now the survivor support director for Lighthouse for Life, a faith-based nonprofit headquartered in Columbia. The organization’s mission is fighting “to eradicate human trafficking by educating our community and empowering survivors.”

Trafficking often doesn’t happen overnight

Pagan knows all too well how young people can be manipulated into a life of despair and exploitation by someone who claims to love them.

In her case, she was just 14 when she met an abuser who claimed to love her.

“He was the only thing that ever affirmed me,” she said. “And so, a year later, by the time I was 15, I had a needle in the arm, and I was being controlled by the use of drugs and being sold for sex.”

When Pagan was 18, she had not finished ninth grade, and she was pregnant with her second child.

When she was 21, her abuser was killed.

“They found his body in Lake Murray, and I was devastated,” she said. “I had been in this life, and I had so much trauma that I had bonded with that whole time. And the next person who came into my life really was a replica of him.”

For the next 11 years it never got better, Pagan said. The abuse, the addiction and the isolation all got worse.

Her trafficker was approached by a man a few days before she made her escape. The man specifically asked for her. He was going to pay for her and fly her to New York City.

“I didn’t want to go,” she said. “I didn’t feel like it was a situation that I would return from. I had a lot of fear.”

The night before she was to get on the plane, she told her trafficker she needed to go to Walmart.

“He gave me the keys to the car, which is unusual anyway, because usually he would drive or have a driver drive us around,” Pagan recalled. “And so, I got the keys, and I had a thought: ‘Well, I just won’t come back.’ You know, it never works like that.”

She had thought about driving away, but she didn’t. While driving back that night, on Aug. 4, 2008, she was pulled over by a law enforcement officer in Charleston County for failing to use a turn signal.

“I was arrested,” she said, explaining there had been a warrant for her arrest, as she had been previously charged with drug-related crimes and failure to appear in court. “I knew that I would probably be getting some time in the penitentiary, but I didn’t care.”

She spent two years in the state Department of Corrections, but she said, at that point, those were the two best years of her life.

It’s not something most victims feel they can escape

Pagan’s friend Sarah has a story of her own.

Carolina News & Reporter is not using her full name, to protect her identity, since sex trafficking still carries a stigma.

“A lot of my childhood was just filled with a lot of uncertainty, and there wasn’t a lot of stability,” Sarah said. “Both of my parents had drug problems. So, my brother and I weren’t the priority.”

That caused Sarah to seek connections she never got as a child.

When she was 18, she moved to Los Angeles.

Six months later, she started working as a waitress at a strip club, eventually stripping, drinking and taking painkillers.

She met her trafficker on a night out and began to date him.

It started with him telling her to call her regulars at the club and set up dates with them, to get more money. Eventually that led to him pushing her to sleep with the men for even more money.

When she was 23, she found out she was pregnant by her trafficker.

Having a baby was her reason to run. She left her trafficker for the first time.

She left him many more times before he left her.

Every single time she went into those situations she was scared, and she was uncomfortable, she said.

“I realized that the feeling that my son gave me was all I was ever really looking for,” she said. “… And he needed me. And I loved that he needed me because I felt like I needed my son just as much.”

She won full custody of the boy after her trafficker accused her of kidnapping him.

Now she is in an online master’s degree program for social work. She also has an internship at a homeless shelter for teens.

Next steps

Pagan wants to teach people that it’s not always about the white van or putting people in containers and shipping them.

That it’s a problem right here in people’s backyards.

“We can’t be so fixated that it doesn’t happen,” she said. “We need eyes wide open in all directions.”

Pagan compared phones to loaded guns and said society needs to teach children how to use them safely.

“I would like to see (Lighthouse for Life) in front of more school-age children with parents,” she said.

South Carolina has come a long way in the past few years by letting the public know that when they see something, they need to let law enforcement know, Hutto said.

“I think people hear the word ‘human trafficking’ and they think of people from other countries being brought here,” Hutto said. “And that’s not it.”

It’s children, homeless and runaways who are being trafficked, he said.

“If we could deal with that on the front end, we would probably have less people susceptible to being preyed upon by these traffickers,” Hutto said.