This survivor of human trafficking in SC uses her past to solve the problem | News

While South Carolina’s leaders promise to end human trafficking and prosecute its perpetrators, a woman from Lowcountry is turning her focus to survivors of such horrors.

Kat Wehunt, who survived years of sex trafficking as a teenager, knows she is lucky to have escaped. But she worries that her colleagues in the state of Palmetto do not have a simple, complete and accessible system to help them keep their lives free from abuse.

Its solution is the Training Project, the only non-profit organization led by survivors from the state dedicated to ending human trafficking. While law enforcement, legislators and religious leaders work to take victims from their attackers, Wehunt focuses on the next step: connecting them with resources to ensure they can prosper for the rest of their lives with the physical and emotional support they deserve.

Sent from heaven

A woman named Heaven led her to do this.

Heaven, a mother of three who left the trade, was succeeding in all measures. Wehunt worked with her for about four years, she said, and watched as the woman saved money, bought a car, took on an administrative position at her Orangeburg factory and took custody of her children.

For every step that Wehunt’s colleagues took, Heaven was a success story. She stayed out of trafficking, lowered her heroin addiction and started sharing her story with others. Even Wehunt realized that she was safe.

But one day, when Wehunt had already moved to Charleston, but the Training Project had not yet started, she received the kind of call she is always preparing for and never prepared for. Heaven overdosed and died.

The news shocked Wehunt. The two became good friends, she said, and Heaven never mentioned needing help.

Years earlier, heaven had called Wehunt a hotel room.

“I need you to get here,” she said. “My dealer is on his way and if you arrive before him, I will go with you. But if he gets here before you, I’m leaving. “

Wehunt ran to the hotel, briefly examining her mental catalog of which emergency shelters, rehabilitation clinics and hospitals might have rooms for her friend. But the sky had a different plan.

“Take me to CVS and I’ll be detoxified,” Wehunt remembered Heaven saying to her. “Just take me, I can take care of the rest.”

So Wehunt was especially shocked when the sky died without warning.

“It almost made me leave the field,” said Wehunt years later. “It is so easy for organizations to get a job for someone, or go to rehab, and then consider them a survivor. … So she has been my driving force. “

Sharing privilege

For every atrocity that Wehunt survived, she keeps a record of the privileges that made it easier for her than for many of the victims she serves. She is white and grew up with good grades and a stable family income. An older man started trafficking her at 14, she says, but she managed to cut ties with him before her 18th birthday.

Wehunt knew that she would need help to cure sexual abuse, and the particular trauma of trust was betrayed by the man she knew. But – perhaps in part because she said she always thought of sex trafficking as a crime committed by violent strangers – she didn’t realize she had survived until she learned the definition at a social service training clinic.

“I was like, oh, I’m in the wrong place,” said Wehunt, pointing to a group of survivors. “I think it should be there.”

Almost 10 years later, she has not publicly identified her abuser, but wants to share her story so that other victims can acknowledge the abuse.

Wehunt had never seen a trafficking survivor with his story. She knew women who had been kidnapped by strangers, desperate for addictions and uneducated. They are overwhelmingly marginalized: transgender, undocumented, poor or women of color. They shared essential experiences of abuse, but Wehunt remains aware of his blind spots.

“On the one hand, it is exhausting to be the only survivor who is an organization leader here, and it is really painful when people don’t seem to hear,” Wehunt told Post and Courier. “I think it’s about using the privilege to open doors and then bring in (marginalized survivors) and put them on the stage.”

Wehunt said she is looking forward to sharing more stories from South Carolina survivors, but has failed to pressure them to join her. No public awareness or education is worth a person’s well-being, she said – a lesson she learned the hard way.

Healing

How do you get out of the worst part of your life and get reminders of it?

It is something Wehunt meditated on, but he never found an answer. In her early days as a social worker, she used all of her energy to help others and took a total breakdown to realize that she needed to prioritize her own happiness, as she does with other survivors.

“It’s selfish to even take a lunch break, when the people you’re trying to help don’t have food, health care, or work,” she said. “I still struggle with it.”

In the past two years, Wehunt said, she has gotten better at looking after her own needs. She hangs up after work and spends her nights painting or playing music with her husband, without interruption.

“I started to take a step back and remind myself that if a survivor I was helping told me that she worked 16 hours a day, I would see this as a major obstacle to her healing,” said Wehunt. “That would be a failure.”

So whenever Wehunt starts to feel overwhelmed or demoralized, she remembers the joy she feels when another survivor finds a therapist, gets a job or starts a healthy relationship. If there is hope for one of them, she said, there is a future for everyone.