Drawing on the past to help sex slaves

After escaping years of sexual slavery, Jennifer Kempton could not look in the mirror without being taken back to her dark, traumatic past.

On her neck was tattooed the name of one of her traffickers along with his gang’s crown insignia. Above her groin were the words “Property of Salem” — the name of the former boyfriend who forced her into prostitution nine years ago.

“Slaves have been branded for centuries and it’s just evolved into being tattooed. It’s happening all over the world,” said Kempton, who suffered horrific brutality during six years working on the streets of Columbus, Ohio.

Today, the tattoo on her neck has been transformed into a large flower “blooming out of the darkness”. Three other brandings have been masked with decorative, symbolic motifs.

Two years ago Kempton, now 34, set up a charity called Survivor’s Ink to help others who have escaped enslavement get their brandings covered up or removed.

“It was very empowering for me so I wanted to pay forward that liberation to other girls in my area who had been branded like cattle, just like I was,” Kempton told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Most requests for help come from women in the United States, but the grassroots project increasingly receives applications from other countries including Canada, Britain, Australia and Croatia. Some of the stories are very disturbing.

Kempton said they recently helped a woman in Britain whose mother had carved the word “whore” into her leg when she was a child and sold her. Every time the word faded it was recarved.

Globally some 4.5 million people are trapped in sexual exploitation, according to the International Labor Organization, generating an estimated $99 billion in illegal profits a year.

Kempton says there is a major misconception that women trafficked into prostitution are brought in from poor countries.

In the US, an estimated 80 percent of women trafficked into prostitution are US-born citizens, Kempton said, ahead of the Trust Women conference in London this week which will focus on human trafficking and slavery.

Kempton wants tougher penalties for traffickers and improved training for police to identify and help victims.

She is also an advocate of an approach adopted by Canada and some European countries which criminalizes men who buy sex rather than the women trafficked into prostitution.

Describing her downward spiral, Kempton refers to a dysfunctional background in which she was raped at the age of 12. In her 20s, after a series of abusive relationships, she thought she had finally met her “Prince Charming”.

But he soon got her addicted to heroin, put her on the streets and plied her with crack cocaine so she could work longer hours.

The turning point came in April 2013 after a brutal rape. As she fled the house bleeding she begged two men for help but they laughed and locked their door.

“The sound of the door locking just echoed in my mind. I was locked out of society, I was not seen as worthy of help,” said Kempton. Afterward she tried to hang herself, but the rope snapped.

In her despair, she heard a voice telling her she had a purpose in life “and it wasn’t to die in the basement of a crackhouse”.

Survivor’s Ink has so far provided grants to help around 100 women cover up their slavery brandings.

“It’s always amazing to see the look on their face when they no longer have to look at this dehumanizing mark of ownership and violence,” Kempton said.

“Sometimes I’ ll get a call a few days later with someone just bawling their eyes out saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I can actually look at my body. It’s my own again.’”

It was very empowering for me so I wanted to pay forward that liberation to other girls in my area who had been branded like cattle, just like I was.” Jennifer Kempton, founder of the Survivors Ink charity of the population of Israel are Arabs like Nafar, who refers to himself as Palestinian.

They tend to sympathize with the Palestinian cause and Nafar refers to himself as Palestinian.

Growing up in the 1990s in Lod, a mixed Israeli city southeast of Tel Aviv, Nafar listened to Tupac, the provocative US hip-hop star who was murdered in 1996.

Nafar said he saw similarities between the AfricanAmerican struggle for equality and the Israeli-Arab experience.

“The imagery in Shakur’s videos was similar to our reality in Lod — how the police were chasing them in the streets,” he said.

“I found out we had something in common. I didn’t speak English and I used to search for the lyrics in English, print them and sit in school with a dictionary translating them.”

DAM — an acronym for Da Arabian MCs but which also means “blood” in Hebrew and “lasting” in Arabic — performs songs that are explicitly political.

In his song Who’s the Terrorist? Nafar says: “they call me a terrorist but I live in the country of my ancestors.”

In another, he rails against so-called honor killings in Arab communities.

Now, he is bringing his message to the screen with Junction 48, a film he co-wrote and starred in under direction by Israeli-American Udi Aloni.

It tells the story of an ArabIsraeli rapper, his lover and their feelings of desolation inside Israel.