A WOMAN RAPED 43,200 TIMES TELLS HER STORY

KARLA JACINTO

A Mexican woman who at the age of 12 was lured into sexual slavery has told how she was raped 43,200 times.

Karla Jacinto, now 23, was forced to have sex with 30 men a day during her four-year ordeal. She was rescued in 2008 – but not before a group of corrupt police had found her, and demanded sexual favours instead of rescuing her.

"I thought they were disgusting," she told CNN.

"They knew we were minors. We were not even developed. We had sad faces. There were girls who were only 10 years old. There were girls who were crying. They told the officers they were minors and nobody paid attention."
Beaten and abused by pimps, she was forced to work from 10am to midnight. She fell pregnant to one of the pimps and gave birth at 15. The man used the infant as leverage, she said.
"I came from a dysfunctional family. I was sexually abused and mistreated from the age of five by a relative," she said.

When she was 12, a 22-year-old man approached her and courted her, convincing her to move in with him in Mexico City.

She says she was waiting for some friends near a subway station in Mexico City, when a little boy selling sweets came up to her, telling her somebody was sending her a piece of candy as a gift.

Five minutes later, Karla says, an older man was talking to her, telling her that he was a used car salesman.

The initial awkwardness disappeared as soon as the man started telling her that he was also abused as a boy. He was also very affectionate and quite a gentleman, she says.

They exchanged phone numbers and when he called a week later, Karla says she got excited. He asked her to go on a trip to nearby Puebla with him and dazzled her by showing up driving a bright red Firebird Trans Am.

"When I saw the car I couldn't believe it. I was very impressed by such a big car. It was exciting for me. He asked me to get in the car to go places," she says.

"I lived with him for three months during which he treated me very well. He loved on me, he bought me clothes, gave me attention, bought me shoes, flowers, chocolates, everything was beautiful," she said.
He soon forced her into prostitution in Guadalajara.

Karla says her boyfriend would leave her by herself for a week in their apartment. His cousins would show up with new girls every week. When she finally mustered the courage to ask what business they were in, he told her the truth. "They're pimps," he said.

"A few days later he started telling me everything I had to do; the positions, how much I need to charge, the things I had to do with the client and for how long, how I was to treat them and how I had to talk to them so that they would give me more money," Karla says.

It was the beginning of four years of hell. The first time she was forced to work as a prostitute she was taken to Guadalajara, one of Mexico's largest cities.

"I started at 10 a.m. and finished at midnight. We were in Guadalajara for a week. Do the math. Twenty per day for a week. Some men would laugh at me because I was crying. I had to close my eyes so that that I wouldn't see what they were doing to me, so that I wouldn't feel anything," Karla says.

Miss Jacinto is now using her story to campaign against sexual slavery, and warn politicians against turning a blind eye. Sex trafficking is believed to account for 80 per cent of the world’s 20 million to 30 million “modern-day slaves”. Two million of those are estimated to be children like Miss Jacinto.

"These minors are being abducted, lured, and yanked away from their families. Don't just listen to me. You need to learn about what happened to me and take the blindfold off your eyes," she said.
In May she spoke in the US Congress, and asked a human rights committee for help in hunting down those responsible for human trafficking.
“I was forced to serve every kind of fetish imaginable to more than 40,000 clients,” she told the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, global health, global human rights and international organisations.

Her story highlights the brutal realities of human trafficking in Mexico and the United States, an underworld that has destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Mexican girls like Karla.

Human trafficking has become a trade so lucrative and prevalent, that it knows no borders and links towns in central Mexico with cities like Atlanta and New York.

U.S. and Mexican officials both point to a town in central Mexico that for years has been a major source of human trafficking rings and a place where victims are taken before being eventually forced into prostitution. The town is called Tenancingo.