TraffickFree -- Bars Of Soap Saving Victims

2/22/2012

Theresa Flores was just 15 years old when she was blackmailed into becoming a sex slave. She grew up in an upper-middle class suburb of Detrot, Mich., with both her parents and three brothers.

When she was in high school, a boy in her class, she calls Daniel, befriended her. "He wasn't like the other boys, so he stood out," says Theresa. "He was very distinguished, very suave and he would always say the right things that any 15-year-old would want to hear."

Theresa, like many high school girls, liked the attention. One day after school, Daniel offered to give her a ride home, but cops say he instead took her to his home. Once inside, Theresa says he drugged and then raped her.

The next day at school, Daniel showed her pornographic photos that were taken of her. He told her that his two cousins were at his house that day and took the photos while she was passed out.

Daniel then told her she had to earn them back or they would send the photos to her father and circulate them around school.

For the next two years, Theresa was trafficked around her own town. Daniel and his cousins would pick her up at her house and deliver her to houses or hotels where men were waiting for her.

"The phone in my room would ring around midnight and they'd say alright now. I'd sneak out of my house and they would deliver me to really nice homes where they would take me in to the basement," Theresa recalls. "They'd announce to the room 'Here's your prize and the highest bidder gets her.'"

In May 1983, Theresa's family moved away and she was finally free from her traffickers. Ashamed and embarrassed of what happened to her, Theresa never told anyone.

Twenty-nine years later, Theresa decided that sharing her story could help save other victims, so she began speaking at sex trafficking conferences across the country.

Then one night on her way home from a conference in Detroit, Theresa began to wonder if she was doing enough. She was sharing her story, but wasn't she really helping the girl already trapped in the dark world of trafficking. At that moment, she came up with a unique way to reach those girls.

"I thought, you know, we have this toll free number, a hotline, and anybody can call it. I wished I had that number," says Theresa. "I thought of the night I was in a motel room, throwing up and laying my head on that toilet with no one to reach out to. "I thought to myself, I want to put that phone number in their hands in that bathroom."

Theresa did just that. In 2011, she created an organization called S.O.A.P. -- Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution.

The organization, through donations and hundreds of volunteers, stick stickers that have the National Sex Trafficking Hotline number on bars of soap. The soap is then boxed up and delivered to hotels in cities that host big venues.

"It could be NASCAR, it could be the Super Bowl, it could be the National Republican Convention," says Theresa. "When you have a lot of people coming into a town for an event, there's people taking advantage of that and bring in girls by the car load to service those men and make money."

In February 2012, Theresa and her volunteers traveled to Indianapolis to "SOAP" the Super Bowl. The weekend was very successful. Fifteen thousand bars of soap were delivered and accepted by hotels. Theresa also believes that at least four girls who were trafficking victims and brought to Indianapolis were rescued due to SOAP's efforts that weekend.

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