WORLD
‘I was raped 43,200 times’: Human trafficking victim reveals harrowing ordeal
Karla Jacinto, now 23, says she was lured from her home in Mexico as a 12-year-old by a trafficker who used lollies, a fast car and his affections to groom her before forcing her into prostitution.
She was eventually taken to the Mexican city of Guadalajara, where she was forced to work in a brothel in horrendous conditions.
“I started at 10am and finished at midnight,” she told CNN in a harrowing interview.
“Some men would laugh at me because I was crying. I had to close my eyes so that that I wouldn’t see what they were doing to me, so that I wouldn’t feel anything.”
At one point, Ms Jacinto, who was then just 13, said police conducted a raid and she believed she was saved.
But the officers simply rounded up the girls and demanded sexual favours or they would send naked pictures of them to back home to their families.
“I thought they were disgusting. They knew we were minors. We were not even developed. We had sad faces. There were girls who were only 10 years old. There were girls who were crying. They told the officers they were minors and nobody paid attention.”
Beaten and abused by pimps, she fell pregnant to one and gave birth at 15. The man used the infant as leverage, she said.
Ms Jacinto was eventually rescued in an anti-trafficking sting in 2008, after a four year ordeal in which she estimates she was forced to have sex with an average of 30 men a day, seven days a week.
CNN says it confirmed Ms Jacinto’s story through the United Against Human Trafficking organisation, which looked after her after she was rescued.
She has previously spoken with Pope Francis at conference on modern slavery in July and has shared her story in the US Congress.
She said she had “no other identity” beyond that of a sex object and urged the Congress to do more to stop the criminal enterprise, The Washington Times reported
“I was forced to serve every kind of fetish imaginable to more than 40,000 clients,” Ms Jacinto told the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, global health, global human rights and international organizations.
She said many of her clients “were foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me”
Sex trafficking is believed to account for 80 per cent of the world’s 20 million to 30 million “modern-day slaves”, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes told US politicians after Ms Jacinto’s address in May. Two million of those are estimated to be children like her.
There are between 20 million and 36 million slaves around the world in 2015, including 5.5 million children.
