“Cat” was a teenager when it started.

Her parents had kicked her out when she was 15. With no family and no place to go, she landed in Lewiston, surviving any way she could.

At 19, she thought she’d found a relationship and, finally, a home. Right up until her “boyfriend” demanded she have sex with other men for money to support them.

“It’s not something that I chose to go there and do,” she told a judge in Cumberland County Superior Court in Portland last month during the sentencing of her boyfriend’s accomplice, a 32-year-old man who drove her and another girl to meet johns. “It wasn’t what I was expecting to happen.”

Thin, in glasses, her hair pulled tight into a ponytail, Cat still looked like a high-schooler.

“It’s heinous,” she said.

Five years ago, it would have been called prostitution, a crime as likely to land the woman in jail as her john or pimp.

Today, in Maine, it’s called sex trafficking.

And it’s getting attention.

“We would have thought it’s sad that these girls choose to be prostitutes, and they have sad lives, but they’re victimizing themselves,” said Meg Elam, Cumberland County’s deputy district attorney. “It’s a sad thing to do and it’s against the law, but why should we get all bent out of shape about it? What we’re becoming more and more aware of is that the women who are entering into the commercial sex industry, according to federal statistics, enter that world between 13 and 14 years of age … there are people who are treating them like property and selling them like a commodity.”

With that attention comes changes — changes in law, changes in perception, changes in how the people involved are treated.

Changes — police, prosecutors and victim advocates hope — for the better.

“Look at it through a lens of compassion and realize, you know what, I don’t know how she got to where she is, but obviously something’s wrong and broken,” said Jasmine Marino, who said her “boyfriend” sold her for sex in Maine for years and who is now a victim advocate. “Because no little girl dreams of this becoming her life.”

All ages for sale

Sex trafficking looks different depending on the victim: Adults who get into a relationship only to be terrorized and forced into having sex with strangers. Teenagers who are seduced by an older man or woman and then drugged or otherwise coerced into selling their bodies in exchange for food, drugs or a place to live. Children who are sold, sometimes by their parents.

Jane was 9 when, she said, her father began sexually abusing her and 11 when he started regularly selling her to his friends and strangers for drugs. Sometimes he filmed the encounters, she said.

“There were many days when I questioned how I could go on, how I could live with the stain of what happened to me,” said Jane, who is using a pseudonym for this story. “But I just kept living. My tunnel seemed dark and dank, but when I realized that there could be a light if I created one. I searched until I found that spark.”

Jane said her father regularly sold her between ages 11 and 14, then sporadically after that, all while the family lived in New Jersey. At 17, she said, she fled to Maine, where a friend lived.

Jane’s father was charged in New Jersey in 2011 with her sexual assault and with endangering the welfare of a child, but the charges were dropped. She said she learned through her mother that the district attorney declined to prosecute because there was not enough physical evidence to convict him.

Now almost 20, Jane recently graduated from Central Maine Community College in Auburn. She has a loving boyfriend, a best friend and plans to attend Smith College in Massachusetts on a full scholarship this fall. She often talks about her experience on her blog and has been open about her life in a GoFundMe campaign she set up to help pay for books and other things her scholarship won’t cover.

When she was younger — “too indoctrinated to distinguish a healthy relationship from an abusive one” —  Jane used to worry even more about leaving her father’s home only to fall prey to someone else’s control.

It was a rational fear. Experts say kids who were sexually abused are more vulnerable to sex trafficking.

Confronting the issue

“It started off with, ‘Well, my dad was doing it to me,'” said Auburn police Chief Phil Crowell, who has been among those working to raise the issue of sex trafficking in Maine and helped start a local coalition to address sex trafficking. “Once they got older and got out of that environment, they were more subject to fall into a situation where, ‘Well, my dad loved me; he did this. This guy says he loves me and he’s doing this. This must be the way it is.'”

Others are vulnerable because they’re so young. Or because they’re alone and desperate for food, shelter or love. Or because they have low self-esteem — attention can turn to control very quickly.

Both men and women can be the victims of trafficking, though studies say most are women.

It’s hard to gauge precisely how many people are the victims of sex trafficking. Experts say the nature of trafficking — secret, shameful, often taking advantage of runaways and others invisible to society — make accurate statistics difficult.

In 2012, the United Nations’ International Labour Organization estimated that 20.9 million adults and children are trafficked worldwide for labor or sex. That same year, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said nearly 60 percent of trafficking victims were bought and sold for sex.

In the United States, one of the most often cited studies is from the University of Pennsylvania, which estimates that nearly 300,000 kids are at risk for becoming sex trafficking victims each year. The Polaris Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group created to combat human trafficking, said it has fielded over 85,000 calls to its national sex trafficking hotline since 2007 and has identified 11,000 victims of labor and sex trafficking.

In Maine, statistics are even harder to come by. The University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service is currently working on a study.

Crowell began raising the issue of sex trafficking in Maine five years ago. With no good state statistics to back him up, no specific sex trafficking law on the books and little awareness, he had trouble convincing people to take it seriously.

“We were just not getting a lot of support,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of people behind this. They were saying, ‘That’s something that happens in India or somewhere else, and that doesn’t happen here.'”

But Crowell believed it was happening in Maine. He’d encountered the issue while working with the Foundation for Hope & Grace, a local organization that helps orphans internationally. He’d looked at numbers and visited India and Ecuador, and he believed Maine wasn’t immune to traffickers who sought vulnerable people to exploit.

“Traffickers look at rural communities to take young girls who want to go to the big city and lure them away,” he said. “I think that we are primed to be a feeder into sex trafficking.”

Slowly, he started finding support. Three years ago, he helped pull together “Not Here,” the state’s first annual conference on sex trafficking. Sixty people showed up.

One of the most pressing issues at the time: getting a sex trafficking law in Maine.

“It reminds me of the prosecutions of domestic violence maybe about 20 years ago. Where, one, we weren’t calling it domestic violence. Law enforcement wasn’t identifying it as such. Many times, the victim was getting arrested,” he said. “Here we are, fast forward 20 years, and now we’re looking at sex trafficking. What are we doing? Well, we’re arresting victims for prostitution when actually they’re probably part of a sex trafficking ring.”

Recognizing oppression

Experts debate whether anyone ever enters prostitution freely.

“Many women are enslaved into prostitution, but I cannot say there are not some who have made it their choice,” Crowell said. “I feel some made the choice as part of survival. Either way, it is the worst oppression against women.”

Elam, the deputy district attorney, was initially among those who believed a law was unnecessary. She thought prostitution was simply a sad vocational option some women chose. Then, in 2011, she got a case.

“We had a woman who was operating in tandem a prostitution operation and a crack-trafficking operation and who ended up slashing the face of a woman and threatening to kill one of the women who was working for her as a prostitute,” she said. “So when we met those women and talked to them and got just an inkling of what was going on, it was a real eye opener. It was hard to think of them as ‘crack whores’ anymore when they became real people to you.”

The Not Here conference, a spate of well-publicized, national sex-trafficking busts and personal revelations, like Elam’s, began to change perceptions in Maine.

“The more you learn about it, the more you understand how to identify it, the more people think back, particularly on cases they may have dealt with, and think, ‘Oh, gee. Perhaps that was a case of trafficking,'” said Marty McIntyre, executive director of Sexual Assault Prevention & Response Services in Auburn.

By 2013, the Legislature turned “promotion of prostitution” into “sex trafficking,” a move that changed little in the law but, advocates say, more accurately labeled the crime.

Last session, the Legislature unanimously approved a bill by State Rep. Amy Volk, R-Scarborough, that protects trafficking victims from being prosecuted for prostitution, increases fines for traffickers and gives trafficking victims access to the state’s Victims’ Compensation Program.

Gov. Paul LePage quickly signed it.

In April, 300 people attended the state’s third Not Here conference — a dramatic increase over the 60 people who showed up for the first event three years earlier.

Prosecutions begin

Although there are no good statistics for Maine, there is evidence that sex trafficking is here. In March, three people were arrested in Gorham and charged with forcing a 19-year-old to have sex with paying strangers in order to settle a debt.

In April, just an hour after LePage signed Volk’s bill into law, Maine State Police charged three people in two separate sex-trafficking busts, one in Sidney and one in Litchfield.

There have been no sex-trafficking prosecutions yet in Androscoggin, Franklin or Oxford counties, but tri-county District Attorney Norm Croteau believes it’s only a matter of time.

“When we deal with sex cases, prostitution cases, sometimes even drug cases, all kinds of things like that, I think it’s sensitized us to the notion to look beneath the surface,” he said. “Because what you might have here is some form of human trafficking that may appear on the surface as being some other kind of case but does involve people who are essentially being held against their will and are being used as chattel.”

In Portland, Elam has prosecuted five people so far this year, including the man who drove 19-year-old Cat and another girl to meet johns. In Elam’s cases, victims have ranged from 15 years old to mid-30s. One trafficker had burned one of his victims, a young woman, with a knife blade he’d heated with a lighter.

Even though state law now acknowledges sex trafficking, prosecutions aren’t easy.

“Probably more than any other case, these victims are very reluctant to testify. They have all sorts of trauma issues, often have substance-abuse issues, often have divided loyalties to these people who they might have really have thought liked them, cared about them, really were their boyfriends,” Elam said.

Defendants pleaded guilty in all five of Elam’s cases this year, avoiding trial. Judges ordered jail sentences that averaged six to 12 months. It’s not always as long as victims, prosecutors or advocates want.

In Cat’s case, Elam asked for two six-month sentences, one for each of the two counts of trafficking. She wanted the sentences to be served one after another, for a total of a year behind bars.

Instead, the judge ordered the sentences be served together, cutting the requested jail time in half.

Finding a safe haven

With a state sex-trafficking law now on the books and prosecutions starting, attention in Maine has now shifted to the victims.

Experts say trafficking, like domestic violence, leaves victims scarred and vulnerable, often without a place to stay or anyone nearby to help them. Sex-trafficking victims also aren’t likely to have a job and, especially if they were taken young, aren’t likely to have an education or life skills. They’re more likely be addicted to drugs, sometimes because traffickers used drugs to control them.

“The need is pretty intense,” said Bob Atherton, who helped start Amirah, a Boston-area nonprofit that provides refuge and help to trafficking victims.

Since it opened last year, Amirah has been one of the few safe houses dedicated for trafficking victims in New England. Now director of Thrive New England, Atherton hopes to build a similar home in Maine — for young victims.

Located in southern Maine, the facility would have an emergency shelter, a long-term residence and a center for education and therapeutic activities. It would be open to victims who are legally underage or young socially and emotionally.

Thrive New England is six months into its two-year time line. Atherton believes the group will need about $1 million to open with a handful of emergency beds and about 10 long-term beds.

“We would eventually build it up, if the need continues to be as acute as it is right now, to as many as 50 (beds),” he said.

It may not be the only one coming to Maine. Saint Andre Home in Biddeford is planning to create a safe house in the greater Bangor area for eight to 10 adult victims, providing help with shelter, therapy, education, substance abuse and work.

“It isn’t just being rescued; it’s creating a life,” said Saint Andre Executive Director Reid Scher.

Saint Andre already has the facility. It is now raising money and looking for a director.

Two Saint Andre board members came up with the idea for a safe house after attending a Not Here conference. The plan has been dubbed Project TLC.

“I’ve heard it said and it’s true: The world that we’re dealing with is not the world of ‘Pretty Woman,'” Scher said.

Reclaiming her life

Marino, the victim-turn-victims’ advocate, knows that well. For years, she said, she worked in Maine brothels — yes, they exist — and offered sex in online ads, forced by an abusive man whom she thought loved her.

She was 19 when she met him. He’d been sweet and charming in the beginning, lavishing her with attention. Within six months, he had groomed her to sell sex to strangers, she said. Her loving boyfriend had turned into her abusive pimp.

Marino’s saga lasted for seven years. She said she escaped multiple times, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a day, only to be dragged home, literally, or coerced and manipulated into going back.

“(He would say,) ‘You’re no good. No one’s ever going to love you. You’re dirty. You’re not smart enough. You’re never going to make money the right way. You’re not going to be able to support yourself,'” she said. “If I had any doubts in my mind, he’d just reiterate those. I felt trapped.”

Although Marino had ways out — she stayed with her parents when she escaped and she attended community college even while her boyfriend sold her — she kept her plight secret.

“The shame factor for what you’re doing for a living just keeps you down even worse,” she said. “You can’t tell anyone what you’re doing.”

Marino eventually fled, but only after he forced her to have an abortion, she said. Her escape wasn’t easy or swift. She battled a drug addition, tried to kill herself at one point and returned to prostitution before she was able to free herself from the life altogether.

It wasn’t until she was clean and sober, in a safe place and connecting with her faith that she was able to acknowledge she’d been trafficked.

She believes safe houses would help victims, as would drop-in centers and greater advertising of sex-trafficking help.

“Imagine if I was on the highway one time driving down from Maine or whatever and I saw a billboard with a sign or a bathroom (with a sign saying) ‘Are you in this situation? Do you need help?’ with the (Polaris) sex-trafficking hotline number. That may have sparked a little thing in my brain,” she said. “Because I can’t call the cops. It wasn’t safe. They would have arrested me and then he’d beat me for ratting.”

Today she works with survivors and talks regularly about her experiences. In April, she spoke at the latest Not Here conference.

Marino is the mother of two young children, a 5-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter. She already knows what she’ll tell her children as they grow up.

“(To my daughter,) that she’s worth something and not to define her worth in people, places or things. And that boys need to treat her like a lady because that’s what she is. And just to make sure to know who her friends are,” Marino said. “And for my son to know girls are to be respected and they are not for sale …  they are not to be used.”

ltice@sunjournal.com

Resources for victims:

Polaris national hotline: 1-888-373-7888 or text BEFREE (233733)

Sexual Assault Prevent & Response Services: 1-800-871-7741 or www.sapars.com

The Maine Domestic Violence Statewide Helpline: 1-866-83-4HELP

New Beginnings Emergency Shelter in Lewiston: 795-4070 (Serves young people ages 12 to 19 from all over the state. Access to shelter, crisis counseling, and free family mediation services.)

New Beginnings Outreach Program: 795-6831 or go to the Outreach Drop-In Center at 245 Lisbon Street, Lewiston. (Serves youth and young adults at risk of homelessness in Androscoggin, Franklin, and Kennebec counties, connecting them with emergency supplies, referrals and help getting housing. Drop-In Center provides a safe place, with access to meals, clothing, shower, phone/mail and recreation.)

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