A Survivor’s Perspective
Tina Frundt survived the ordeal of human trafficking. Now she helps other young girls to escape this seemingly inescapable form of modern slavery.
It was Tina Frundt’s 14th birthday when she was lured away from her adopted family by “Tiger,” the man who would be her pimp. That first night, she was raped repeatedly by Tiger’s associates and forced into a life of prostitution enforced by physical abuse. Through tortures including myriad cigarette burns, fingers deliberately slammed in doors and even an arm being broken with a baseball bat, Tina was kept in servitude.
“I can’t count the number of times people have asked me, ‘Why didn’t you just leave?’ ‘Couldn’t you escape?’” Frundt says in an editorial for Women’s Funding Network. “To that, I simply say, ‘Do you ask a child that is kidnapped why they didn’t try to leave?’ No, we automatically say they are a victim; it wasn’t their fault. Now I know it was not my fault that a pimp manipulated a child. Under federal law, a child under 18 years who is commercially sexually abused is a victim of trafficking. However, under local law, a child is charged with child prostitution.”
This presents the dilemma faced by hundreds of thousands of children who are being trafficked in the United States today. When police discovered Frundt, she finally had the opportunity to escape the trauma of being violated by up to 18 “customers” a day, but her newfound freedom was far from ideal. Arrested and placed in juvenile detention, she received nothing in the way of counseling in the wake of such an extreme ordeal. “I spent one year locked up and came out at the end with no referrals for services or assistance to rejoin a teenager’s life in America.”
It’s an incredibly difficult transition that’s made even more challenging by the current popular culture. “The pimps who are trafficking young women and girls have a great marketing tool: the media,” Frundt asserts. “You can turn on the TV now and see pimps glamorized in TV shows, music videos and movies. Young people use ‘pimp’ in everyday conversation: ‘my ride is pimped out’; ‘your clothes are pimping.’ They do not understand the reality behind them.”
Escape is made even more difficult by the fact that children under 18 who are arrested and charged with prostitution receive no funding from the state for counseling. Any treatment they pursue must come out of their own pocket. “There’s no money for it,” Frundt says.
According to Frundt, it’s the lack of immediate, safe and appropriate shelter that’s the biggest hurdle for enabling trafficking victims to get the help they need. Because it was so difficult for her to escape her situation, overcome her trauma and re-assimilate into a normal life, Frundt made the decision to be a part of the solution for those trapped in a life of sex slavery. In 2008, she started her own antislavery organization, Courtney’s House in Washington, D.C., to provide young girls and women with a hope-filled destination and the support they need when first fleeing their captors. Soon after, she established Shae’s Place in northern Virginia, a long-term shelter and aftercare facility for young trafficking victims.
But Frundt’s positive actions belie the stark realities about trafficking in this country. “What happened to me 15 years ago is still going on today,” she says. “I can see that it is not getting any better — it is only getting worse. We see girls and young women every night being forced onto the streets, beaten and raped to make money for the pimps. … To stop the problem, we have to understand and help make stronger laws to get these traffickers.”