'Empty promises': A Sacramento survivor on how girls and women get coerced into sex trafficking

Kristie Kiefer is a program manager at Sacramento’s Community Against Sexual Harm (CASH), an organization that offers help to survivors of trafficking in Sacramento. That help includes job readiness programs, housing assistance, case management and mental health referrals.Every person within CASH who is a case manager is also a survivor. Kiefer learned about CASH while seeking her bachelor’s degree in social work at Sacramento State. She was having a hard time finding a job because she had been arrested multiple times for prostitution. Explaining her past to potential employers was a challenge, Kiefer said, especially because she had not fully processed the magnitude of what she endured.“Anytime you have to pass a background, it does come up and it’s a little jolt when you have to explain those things,” Kiefer said. The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office was able to get her record expunged, making the job-seeking process a bit easier. Kiefer said when she got into sex work she was young and naive, not truly realizing what prostitution was until she was already in it. She said she also had difficult circumstances at home around that time that overwhelmed her. Her father was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer when she was in high school and the weight of that led to drug use as a form of escape. “Heroin had been glamorized, I had a couple of friends that had graduated that were using and I sought that out,” Kiefer said. “I tried it and it made me happy and able to escape so I sought more. I became addicted and I didn’t know you became physically addicted until I was.” Amid her fight with substance abuse, she became homeless. She says men would offer her money for sex while she was walking and minding her own business.“The men who buy sex, a lot of them like young people. It’s like fishing, they have no shame in approaching and offering because they might end up getting what they’re looking for.” Eventually, she started sex work on Stockton Boulevard at 17 years old — an area known as The Blade — and became familiar with the depth of Sacramento’s trafficking problem.“That became my life until I was 25,” Kiefer said. “I was in some ‘relationships’ but they were actually profiting off of me. That’s how trafficking goes a lot of times, you think that’s your boyfriend. It was a tumultuous relationship but that’s all that I knew.” Federal law describes sex trafficking as when "a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age."The Department of Justice says coercion could be "subtle or overt, physical or psychological."Vulnerability opens the door for many young women to fall into the lifestyle. “It’s not the made-for-TV movies where you see a van pull up and grab you. It’s normally, traffickers are using coercion or empty promises,” Kiefer said. Kiefer said that girls and young women are approached by men who come off as charismatic and offer to pay for things such as meals and hair and nail appointments. They may also be influenced by seeing others who have already fallen victim to the lifestyle but have money and local status. Kiefer explained that the mindset of some victims becomes, “You like her because she’s getting this money for you, well I want to do that.”Foster youth are especially vulnerable to being coerced into sex work, Kiefer said. "I think that it would be great for there to be placements for people, especially teenagers, and a stipend," Kiefer said. She added that the lack of resources for foster youth makes them targets. Today, Kiefer works to help survivors on the same block where she was frequently exploited. She said it’s a full-circle moment for her. “I love that I’m able to give back to the community that I took so much from. I love that I can be of service to the community and show people that you can get out,” Kiefer said. While Kiefer believes she was once a nuisance to the community, she also said that one of the most important steps in solving Sacramento's trafficking problem is putting more pressure on those who purchase sex. "There are always set up to incarcerate those that are selling sex, but it's really the demand that's the issue," Kiefer said. "As long as people are looking to buy adults and children, this is going to keep going on." Kiefer said policies, laws and minds need to be changed to tackle the issue. "When people get arrested for trafficking they're not getting very much time, and the same for people buying sex they aren't getting a whole lot of repercussions for that," Kiefer said. "It's mostly just the people selling sex." The story was produced as part of the KCRA 3 Investigates documentary "Escaping The Blade" about sex trafficking in Sacramento County. Watch the full report here.