Woman Sold Into Porn By Parents Works To Heal, Educate

[From article]
One of Raven Kaliana’s earliest memories is being taken to a family portrait studio by her parents, at around the age of four. The studio was in the basement of a department store in a town 50 miles from their home. Once there, they waited for another couple to arrive with their child.
‘Would you like to have your picture taken with this cute little boy?’ her mother asked, before the parents left the kids with the photographer and retired to the café upstairs. But while they sat eating ice cream, the images being made in the studio down below were far from happy family portraits. Raven and her companion had just been sold into the child abuse industry.
It was to be the beginning of a 15-year ordeal, which saw Raven regularly trafficked by her parents and other members of an organised crime ring from her home in a middle-class suburb in the American northwest to locations all over the US and abroad. In her teens, the crimes were often perpetrated in Los Angeles, where many film studios provided ample opportunity for the underground child abuse industry in the 1970s and 80s.
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Her adult life has been driven by the belief that it is important for survivors of child sexual exploitation to tell their stories, in order to make people realise that these aren’t crimes that happen ‘to someone else’.
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A shocking aspect of Hooray for Hollywood is the banality of the adults’ talk, as they rationalise the choice they have made to sell their children from the cosy confines of a café. They appear to be ordinary people, struggling a little to make ends meet; not monsters, but people who might be your neighbours.
‘You hear about a perpetrator being processed in a certain way, you hear about the police getting hold of the images, but you don’t hear about the reality for the children in those images. How did they come to be in this situation? And how have they been damaged by what happened?’
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Through her organisation Outspiral, Raven has launched a campaign to raise awareness of sex trafficking and familial abuse.
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The biggest challenge, she says, is getting the bystanders in the child’s life – neighbours, relatives, teachers, care workers, counsellors – to consider the possibility that a child might be a victim of this form of abuse.
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The most common way that offenders found their victims was through family and personal relationships.
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From an early age she began to experience dissociative amnesia – a psychological phenomenon common in victims of inescapable trauma, in which painful experiences are blocked out, leading to gaps in memory. ‘I started putting things into little rooms in my mind, and it was like: “OK, we don’t look in that room,”’ she says. ‘When there’s no one stepping in to save you and it’s clear you’re going to have to endure something, your mind just does that. As a child, dissociation is a survival advantage, but in adulthood it can become a disability.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2568706/My-parents-sold-sex-industry.html

'My parents sold me into the sex industry': One woman's campaign to raise awareness of this darkest of taboos
By NUALA CALVI
Daily Mail (UK)
PUBLISHED: 19:01 EST, 1 March 2014 | UPDATED: 17:25 EST, 2 March 2014