SHELLY

Shelly was only 12 when she ran away from home and was quickly scooped up by a trafficker named Ted.

A lot of people don’t understand why these girls don’t run the minute they get the chance. But regular beatings, often torture, are meted out by traffickers and pimps to punish the girls for any perceived infraction of their rules – everything from money shortages or not meeting their quota of “Johns,” attempts to run away ... or just to keep them off balance and in line.

Girls have been beaten on the back, head, arms, hands and toes with baseball bats, pipes, two-by-fours and hammers. They have been branded with irons, burned with acid, pistol whipped, tied up and gang raped.

“One time when I wanted to leave, he filled up the bathtub with water, poured a bottle of gin into it and made me sit in it with open sores. More than once, he would hold a gun to my head and tell me I had to do sex like he wanted for as long as he wanted or he would blow my head off.”

Can there be anything more devastating to a child’s body and spirit than the combination of physical and psychological torture ... the humiliation and degradation and isolation pimps and traffickers use to control them? The answer is NO.

Covenant House has been at war with child predators since we first opened our doors in 1972, and every day we go up against pimps and drug dealers and pornographers who violate children in unspeakable ways.

But we need your help if we are going to abolish child trafficking forever! Please ACT Now! The names and faces of some of our kids have been changed to protect their identities.