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I was threatened by local leaders and family if I didn’t go on a 2 year mission in another country, then when I got there, they:
- took my passport immediately and locked it in a building I couldn’t access
- required 12 to 16 hours of work a day, with discipline if productivity dropped
- refused to provide adequate food or medical care
- restricted my communication with my family
- assigned me a companion to surveil me 24/7 and report disobedience to leadership (and assigned me to surveil someone else)
- disciplined me when I was physically and sexually assaulted by other missionaries
I didn’t want to call it trafficking for a long time. I figured maybe God just had a weird way of doing things. But my spouse works at a recovery center for survivors of violence (including trafficking) and helped me realize that’s what it was.
A pretty big misconception is that trafficking has to look like selling slaves, and I agree that’s an egregious thing, but it can be a lot more broad than that.
There are a lot of resources at https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en if you’re curious. My mission experience checked just about every box for labor trafficking, and I’ve heard very similar stories from a lot of other people who have been missionaries.
I was mormon. Thankfully my parents paid to traffic me, so I could afford to go to college and cut them off relatively soon after I got home.