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Victim of human trafficking speaks to students

UD graduate Flores, now crusades to save women from exploitation.

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By Andy Sedlak, Staff Writer Updated 11:00 AM Monday, February 13, 2012

DAYTON — Nearly 300 students, faculty and Dayton community members went to Chaminade Julienne High School on Sunday to hear from a victim of human trafficking.

Theresa Flores, a graduate of the University of Dayton, was coerced into the world of commercial sexual exploitation — reportedly a $15.5 billion business — when she lived in Michigan.

The author of “The Slave Across the Street,” and founder of TraffickFree.com and S.O.A.P. (Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution), Flores served as the keynote speaker at CJ’s Sister Dorothy Stang Symposium.

Approximately 300,000 children in the U.S. are at risk every year for commercial sexual exploitation, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

“How many is enough?” Flores, 46, asked. “This is happening in every zip code across the United States.”

Jay Bryant, an 18-year-old senior at CJ, helped promote the event.

“I heard the audience go, ‘Wow, this really happened,’ ” he said. “When we come back to school, there’s going to be buzz in the hallways ... How do we stop this?”

When living near Detroit as a teenager, Flores had a crush on an older guy whom her parents and friends didn’t like. She was drugged, raped and blackmailed into human trafficking services.

This continued for “two long years,” said Flores, as she recalled being auctioned off for sexual services.

The person who drugged her was never prosecuted, according to Flores.

She admitted she seems like an unlikely face for human trafficking. She came from an upper middle class family. Her mother was a stay-at-home mom and her father was an executive at General Electric.

Her current work has garnered high praise.

The S.O.A.P. initiative sends free bars of soap with the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline number imprinted on them.

The reason? Hotel bathrooms are often the only location girls are permitted to be alone.

About 40,000 bars of soap were recently sent to hotels in Indianapolis due to Super Bowl traffic. At least four girls were rescued, Flores said.

During his recent State of the State speech, Ohio Governor John Kasich presented Flores with the Governor’s Courage Award.

“To receive that honor from the governor, I never in my wildest dreams would imagine that,” she said.

The 2012 symposium was held on the seventh anniversary of Sister Dorothy Stang’s death. Stang was a member of the Sister of Notre Dame de Namur community.

She was a Dayton native and a CJ graduate who served most of her life in Brazil, helping peasants in the Amazon learn, among other things, how to farm. She was murdered on Feb. 12, 2005, by two hit men hired by cattle ranchers.

Flores will bring S.O.A.P. efforts back to Dayton for the Final Four Playoffs March 11. More information is available on traffickfree.com.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-6983 or andrew.sedlak@coxinc.com.

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