Teenage girl kidnapped, raped 43,200 times in 4 years of hellish sex slavery
A 23-year-old woman who fell into the hands of human traffickers at age 12 has said she was raped at least 43,200 times.
Karla Jacinto said she was barely five when she was handed her first inhumane dose of sexual abuse.
Her story, a heart-saddening tale she shared with The CNN Freedom Project, unfolds in Mexico where some whole communities practically survives on their human trafficking “industry.”
Tenancingo, that’s the name of the town many say young girls are taken and forced into prostitution. The place has been dubbed the global headquarters of human trafficking.
“I came from a dysfunctional family,” Karla begins a story she’ll rather not relive.
“I was sexually abused and mistreated from the age of five by a relative,” she says.
When she was 12 she was targeted by a 42-year-old trafficker who lured her away using kind words and a fast car.
She probably wouldn’t have followed him had she not been rejected back home. Her subtle kidnapping came after her mother locked her out one night like that.
So began a four-year phase in her life that was nothing short of hell, apart from the first three months.
“I lived with him for three months during which he treated me very well,” Karla says.
“He loved on me, he bought me clothes, gave me attention, bought me shoes, flowers, chocolates, everything was beautiful,” she says.
Things later changed and Karla was told she would be a prostitute.
“He started telling me everything I had to do; the positions, how much I need to charge, the things I had to do with the client and for how long, how I was to treat them and how I had to talk to them so that they would give me more money,” Karla says.
“I started at 10 a.m. and finished at midnight,” she says.
“Do the math; twenty per day, for a week. 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,” Karla says.
Karla later got pregnant and gave birth at 15, to a girl. She said her pimp abductor used the daughter to tighten the noose around her neck: if she didn’t fulfill his every wish, he would either harm or kill the baby.
Her reprieve did not come until 2008 during an anti-trafficking operation in Mexico City. She was still a minor, only 16, when it ended — but she has endured a lifetime of horror that will stay with her as long as she lives.
Karla is now 23. She has become an outspoken advocate against human trafficking, telling her story at conferences and public events, the CNN reports.
She told her story to Pope Francis in July at the Vatican. She also told the U.S. Congress in May.
While relating her ordeal to CNN’s Rafael Romo, Karla said she recalled being raped at least 43,200 times.
“By her own estimate, 43,200 is the number of times she was raped after falling into the hands of human traffickers,” Rono wrote.
“She says up to 30 men a day, seven days a week, for the best part of four years – 43,200.”
Karla has put that behind her now as she helps vulnerable girls escape this kind of hell.
“These minors are being abducted, lured, and yanked away from their families,” she says.
“Don’t just listen to me,” she tells Rono, and the rest of the world.
“You need to learn about what happened to me and take the blindfold off your eyes,” she says.
