Anneke Lucas: Former s*x slave reveals horrors of abuse

I'm also a survivor of child sex trafficking. I was raised in Belgium and sold into a murderous pedophile network right around my sixth birthday. I was used in this network for five years and a half. Adult men that were part of this exclusive club were there for various reasons. But there was a lot of alcohol, a lot of drugs. And the children were the commodity, the highest, the most valued commodity, and were used for sex mostly. But there were a number of aristocrats that were part of this club who also liked killing children. And then my time had come. At the age of 11, I was about to be killed. I was tortured because someone who had protected me for a while and then abused me really badly was done with me. I was strapped to a butcher's block that was black from the blood of all the children that had come before me. I was there for a few hours. My body is full of scars, and every scar reminds me of the moment. I thought that I was going to be killed like all the children that weren't loved enough to live. And I was going to be forgotten as well. And I wasn't ready to die. Someone from inside that network loved me enough to rescue me. That torture lasted a few hours. However, I was in that network for five years and a half. In that time, I was raped many, many, many times. I don't have any scars to show how many times I was raped. But I did the math. Usually, it was a whole night in the weekend. And so I gathered that I was raped, actually raped, for about six hours a week, 1,716 hours of rape. Before I reached the age of 12, I grew up with instructions that were given to me by the person who rescued me, that kept me out of prostitution, kept me away from drugs, led me out of the country, Belgium, where this all happened. As a young adult, though I didn't have any scars, I had been projected upon so much as a sexual object that I attracted men. And part of me needed that to live, because that was the only way I knew how to feel good. And as a young woman, I was so disrespected and so used. And yet everyone was so ready to put the blame with me for being promiscuous, for being, as was said, cheap, a whore, all these things, all these epithets, so quick to denounce me. And then, as I was healing, I realized, no. I have to break out of this pattern that I'm in, that I need sexual attention. So let me break away from it. Let me not objectify myself at all. Let me become a liberated woman. And so I worked for decades and decades, feeling into all the pain of what was done to me, all the betrayal of being sold by my parents. Children are the most vulnerable of our population. So we want to create a society where children will be safe, where children will have a community around them. Every child deserves safety. No child deserves what I went through and what millions of children each day go through. But unfortunately, the way the system is right now, that is part of the system. As women, we have so much potential to be truly empowered by feeling into everything that we, as women, endure. That gives us more strength than anyone. All that pain behind all that powerlessness and that humiliation, really feeling into what was done to me, really understanding that it wasn't me, that at the end of the day, I am OK. I was a child. I was being victimized. It wasn't my fault. I was in a video by Real Women Real Stories not long ago that traveled all around the world, where I shared my story for the first time publicly. I shared about being sold into sex trafficking at the age of six. I shared about rape and torture that I experienced in a pedophile network that was composed largely of VIPs.