Human trafficking survivor shows Ohio’s improvement

By Marissa Barnhart, Portia Booker and Mengting Ying

She ran.

Jennifer Kempton’s only goal was to make enough money for her next dose of heroin and time to sleep. This was all routine. She had been raped, beaten, left for dead and threatened with a pistol to her head. Even the abandoned house she and her latest trick entered was expected.

But this night was the most horrific. The man forced her to perform sexual acts she had never done. When he got bored, he sodomized and raped her with a butcher knife, using her blood for lubrication.

After two hours of torture, she ran to the gang house and asked for one thing: drugs to numb the pain. Bleeding and half-clothed, she received three paper towels and directions to go to the basement.

Jarred and wanting her situation to end, she tied a rope around her neck and attempted suicide. She felt all of the trauma and abuse surge through her and leave her body. She fell to the ground. Thinking she deserved everything life had given her, she was caught by a surprise when she heard a voice say “I have a purpose for you, and it’s not to die in the basement of a crack house.”

Kempton is a survivor of human sex trafficking.

Human sex trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery that sexually exploits people. According to Equality Now, 20.9 million people globally are bought and sold in human trade, and 6 in 10 of those people have been sexually abused.

Because sex trafficking is a fast-growing crime, numerous states in the U.S., including Ohio, have started coalitions to help victims and try to keep others from becoming victims. The Ohio Attorney General’s office reported in the 2015 Human Trafficking Annual Report that 21 human trafficking coalitions exist and include 63 of the state’s 88 counties. The data showed that more than 100 investigations led to 104 arrests and 33 criminal convictions of buyers and sellers of human trafficking victims. Shared Hope International, an organization dedicated to the fight against human trafficking, awarded Ohio 78 out of 100 points for the state’s trafficking laws. This is a 5.5-point increase from 2013.

The University of Toledo’s Human Trafficking and Social Justice Institute is working with other state universities to prepare a plan on how higher education can work with organizations and federal, state and local officials to provide safety and education about trafficking to students in Ohio.

Kempton was bought and sold in various locations in Ohio, starting in Columbus. She was kidnapped by a trafficker and taken to Akron, where she was later branded with “Property of Salem,” an insignia that she belonged to her trafficker.

She was marked with his name in three places on her body: her arm, her back and above her genitalia.

It wasn’t until that night in the basement that she realized she had more to live for, and she admitted herself to the local crisis intervention center. She was sent from center to center until she found a place at Jacob’s Way, a sober living community dedicated to helping people with their sobriety.

Sober for several months, Kempton was constantly reminded of her past life every time she looked at her body. With money she saved and support from a sponsor, she was able to cover up and remove the brandings from her body. It was while she had fallen asleep while lying on the bed at the tattoo parlor that she found out how she could pay it forward.

“What happened for me in that moment was God put me back in the dope house, and I saw the other girls being branded at the same time as me,” Kempton said. “That’s when he revealed his purpose to me—to pay forward what had been so freely given to me.”

What started as wanting to help debrand the girls she knew turned into Kempton’s founding of Survivor’s Ink, a tattoo shop based in Columbus that is dedicated to raising “awareness through advocacy and education while empowering human trafficking victims by breaking the psychological chains of enslavement through beautifying, removing, or covering their physical scars, markings, and brandings, which are constant reminders of a violent past.”

“It’s pretty powerful to take that mark of violence and demoralization and recreate it and put something beautiful and power and symbolic of your choice overtop of it,” Kempton said.