How I Wrote The Sad Girl

One of the most common questions I get asked about my book is how did I come to write a story about human trafficking?

The answer is an embarrassed “accidentally.”

Back in 2008, I was wrapping up Don’t Stop Believing when Bryon Quetermous contacted me about something he was doing called the Blog Fiction Project. The idea was that a bunch of people would all get the same writing prompt, write a story, and we’d all post the stories on the same day, similar to a webring. It wasn’t designed as a contest, just a fun way to get some extra traffic to your blog.

The prompt for the one I joined was “something you’d find at a police auction.” You can find anything at a police auction. Lots of bikes for starters, but these days there’s lots of small electronics available too. I let that rattle around for a while, and came up with the idea of a camera or an SD card, with pictures still on it. That was kind of interesting for about thirty seconds until I asked, “Why was it a big deal that there were still pictures on it?” Who cares, really? Who was it that found the pictures?

Danny Cumberland introduced himself to me at that point. Danny told me he was doing something like that, where he’d sell recovered police property for the agency. “That’s kind of cool. Where did you come up with the idea?” Back when he was in prison, he said. That was pretty interesting. How did an ex-con come to sell recovered police property? It didn’t really matter for the short story. And for that matter, neither did the reason the girl was on the memory card. I was only working on a 3,000 word story here. It ended with Danny realizing the girl on the memory card – The Sad Girl – was his daughter, and she was dead.

That’s where I left things for quite a while. But after DSB was done, I started thinking more about the Sad Girl story, and realized it could be a nice first chapter for a book. I did what I used to do a lot, which was to strike off on a story without really knowing where it was going. I decided that the girl had been kidnapped, but had died at some point. I had also alluded to child pornography in the original story. But I realized I needed to nail down exactly why she had been kidnapped, so in a moment of naiveté, I came up with “white slavery.”

When I look at that now, it seems archaic, and maybe even a little racist. I think I might have pulled it from a 70s-nostalgia-induced moment, when that was the danger du jour on shows like the original Hawaii Five-O. Then again, when I was watching TV in the 70s, I didn’t really know what some of those things were. I understood “slavery,” and the shows that had episodes about “white slavery” always had pretty white girls playing the damsel in distress, so even as a pre-teen watching 70s vintage family-friendly shows, I had a pretty good idea what it was all about. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how horribly inaccurate those shows were.

And as I discovered during my research for the story, most people have no clue what human trafficking is really like.

Between 2008 and 2010 alone, federal task forces investigated over 2,500 human trafficking investigations. That’s just two years, and just on the federal level, and just in the US.

In my research I read there were more people being bought and sold today than were ever enslaved back in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. And prices have dropped, too. A slave that cost $40,000 in 1809 (adjusted for inflation) now costs $90.

Even at those prices, it’s a $32,000,000,000 industry. 32 BILLION dollars. You could do an awful lot of good with that much money.

My story focuses on girls trafficked for sex, but human trafficking is so much more than that. The stereotype is a young teen girl who’s run away and who gets pimped out after arriving in her fantasy city. But the reality is more likely to be girls taking work as maids, nannies, or au pairs in foreign cities. It might be young men who respond to an ad promising wages that sound too good to be true in some exotic locale.

Once the victims arrive, the traffickers provide everything: a place to live – with twenty other people. A place to work – in horrible conditions for less than the advertised pay. A paycheck – that doesn’t cover the extra fees for things like food, rent and clothing that the traffickers have provided for you. And you can’t leave, because they’re holding your passport, and you don’t speak the local language anyway. And now that you’re behind on the rent, you need to do something extra to pay your debt…

It’s truly disturbing how much human trafficking affects your everyday life. Check out SlaveryFootprint.org to get a basic idea of who’s contributing forced labor to the products you use every day.

Operation Underground Railroad was founded in 2013 by a group of people dedicated to rescuing the children who are trapped in the hell that is sex trafficking. They target a particular area, make contact with local law enforcement, then set up a sting operation that rescues girls and gets the bad guys taken down.

Throughout January 2016, C Streetlights and I donated half of our sales to OUR. My writing research helped me see what a problem human trafficking is. Gravity gave me a way to help contribute to solving that problem.