A Young Woman Abused from Childhood Freed Herself from Sex Trafficking — Now She Helps Save Other Kids
Jessa Dillow Crisp | CREDIT: TINA JOINER PHOTOGRAPHY
This week’s issue of PEOPLE shares stories of trafficking survivors like Jessa Dillow Crisp, who now helps boys and trans kids recover from exploitation.
When she was a little girl, Jessa Dillow Crisp's family members molested her and sold her to have sex with strangers.
"I remember being shown pornography of me when I was a toddler," Crisp, now 34, tells PEOPLE in this week's issue.
When she was elementary school-aged, she remembers being dropped off at motels and brothels near Toronto. She wasn't allowed to go to school.
"I always wanted to," she says. "Looking outside my bedroom window, there was an elementary school there. So, whenever I stood at my window, I could always see the school and always see these kids playing."
"I have been taught that little girls don't go to school. That their only purpose in life is to be used for sex," she says.
Photo curtesy Jessa Dillow Crisp.
As she got older, she says her family often took her across the border into the U.S. where she was sold on a circuit. When she was 17, she was dropped off at a hotel in Indianapolis where she was labor trafficked by day, cleaning the hotel, and sex trafficked at night.
"I like to tell people that you need to keep your eyes open because a lot of people who are being trafficked and exploited don't look like the people that media shows," she says. "I wasn't able to escape."
When she was 21, she met a woman at a hotel in Kansas City. "She saw the red flags of one who was being trafficked," Crisp says. "She gave me her phone number and told me to memorize it."
Back in Canada, Crisp called the woman, who helped her plan an escape to a safe house in Colorado.
"She told me that sex does not need to define me," Crisp says.
But when her visa expired, she had to go back to Canada. She chose Vancouver, because it was on the other side of the country, far away from her family.
At a church pancake breakfast, she met a woman, "The first question out of her mouth was, 'Have you been abused?'" Crisp remembers. "She then went on to say that she had been abused, and she could just tell on my face that I had been abused and that I had experienced a lot of trauma. And so I began to tell her my story."
They watched hockey together, went to dinner and became close friends.
"She began to tell me that she loved me," Crisp says. "She wanted to be my mom."
One night, she invited Jessa back to her apartment to watch hockey.
"She stood in front of the door when we got inside and she said, 'My name is not the name you know me by.' And in her bedroom she had me gang raped," Crisp says. "The gang rape was the breaking process. She had groomed me up until that point. But she broke me."
The woman became her pimp, and sold her during the 2010 Winter Olympics.
"But I was able to escape," she says.
Crisp called the Colorado safe house, who helped her get a new visa and return to the U.S. on April 16, 2010. She got her GED, enrolled in college and was adopted by a couple on the board of her safe house.
While a student, she met her future husband, John. The two married in June 2015.
Crisp has a tattoo that says, "redeemed through unfailing love." She now works as an empathetic trauma therapist.
In 2017, she and her husband co-founded BridgeHope, a gender-inclusive, anti-trafficking nonprofit that helps boys and trans children being trafficked.
She has told her story all over the world — training lawyers, law enforcement officers, and medical students about working with trafficking survivors. She trains teachers about what to look for. And tells age-appropriate versions of her story to school children.
"I have been free for almost 12 years. And yet the reality is it still hurts. Still feels like I'm still being sold," she says.
Jessa Dillow Crisp and husband, John Dillow I Among the Vines Photography
If you or someone you know is being trafficked, these organizations can help:
National Human Trafficking Hotline: 888-373-7888
Shared Hope International: 866-437-5433
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children: 800-843-5678
Rescue America: 713-322-8000