Alice Vol. 4 No. 2

om “He
and Bac
Editor’s note: The source in this article requested
anonymity for safety and privacy reasons.
Madison needed to sustain her narcotics
addiction. It was the thing that was keeping her
going.
She had not always been like this. In fact, there
was a time when she was clean. She quit drugs
when she became pregnant with her son, but three
years after his birth in 2011, she relapsed.
Soon after, Madison’s father died and she
relocated from Omaha, Nebraska back to the
South.
She was homeless. She didn’t have anyone to
go to for help. She lacked a system of support,
and she would soon fall prey to a system that was
anything but.
Next thing Madison knew, she was in
Montgomery, Alabama, in a world she described
as “Hell.” In this Hell, she was robbed, abused
and raped. In this Hell, people preyed on her
vulnerability. In this Hell, she was forced into the
world of human trafficking.
“I had lost my child, my health, everything,”
she said.
It was her drug use and vulnerable state,
Madison said, that made her more susceptible to
being trafficked.
It all started out, she said, when the traffickers
told her, “You don’t have to be one of those girls,
you don’t have to do that.” But then they told her,
“Here’s this much of drugs, go sell that.”
The traffickers were setting her up to be robbed.
Once she was robbed, she was in debt to them. So,
she had to do other things to work it off.
“All of the major cities are
connected with interstate
systems, and it flourishes from
Huntsville down to Mobile.
We are all connected to a
statewide circuit.”
“It’s like a moth to a flame,” she said. “They’re
drawn to people like me who don’t have a network
of support, and so – easy targets.”
Victims can easily become trapped in an
industry that is at work across the state of Alabama,
and one that has become a pressing concern
among law enforcement officials and human rights
organizations throughout the Southeast.
Madison is not alone as a human trafficking
36 Alice Spring 2019