The Slave Across the Street [BOOK]

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Description:
While living at home as a teenager, Theresa L. Flores was trafficked by an organized crime ring unbeknownst to her parents. As a sought-after speaker nationally to talk about stopping human trafficking, Theresa reveals the dark secrets about what happened to her for two years while living in an upscale suburban Detroit neighborhood in her new book, The Slave Across the Street: The true story of how an all-American teenager survived the world of human trafficking, released January 11, 2010 on National Human Trafficking Awareness Day.

As a licensed social worker with a master's in counseling, Theresa's story moves from a desperate girl trapped in a horrific situation to one of hope and valuable insights from a professional perspective for parents and leaders to ensure that this doesn't happen to their own children. More importantly, Theresa's story exposes the fallacy that human trafficking only happens to foreign women and children; it's happening to our own children more often that we want to admit.

Theresa writes in her book: "Lying in the bathtub, I knew it was time. Time to pour out the past onto paper. As I pondered this thought, I wondered what would happen, not if, but when, I finally opened Pandora's Box and wrote my story for others to read."

Theresa's story takes readers into the dark world of human trafficking, exposing just how horrific of a crime it is and putting a human face and a heartbeat to it. Instead of trafficking being about a crime that's committed against a child or woman 'over there,' Theresa personalizes it and shows the destructive nature behind this heinous injustice against people. And that's where this gripping true story takes readers, from beyond the nameless, faceless idea of trafficking to the real flesh and blood of a survivor who managed to escape with her life and dignity still intact.

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About the Author:
After years of living with a gruesome secret, Theresa L. Flores shares her chilling true story of how she was trafficked as a teenager living in an upscale neighborhood in a Detroit suburb--and her parents never knew about it. Flores's new book, "The Slave Across the Street," not only explains how this can happen to even American teens, but also gives a primer for those who want to do something to stop trafficking.

Book Review for busy Pastors
by Jim Miller, Pastor of Vineyard Church of Nacogdoches

Theresa Flores' eye-opening story, recently aired on MSNBC and described in her book, The Slave Across the Street, is "the true story of an American teen who survived the world of human trafficking." "This is my story," she writes, "of a girl from the suburbs who was manipulated, coerced, and threatened into terrible things against he will, while others profited. What is important is that people become aware that this is happening in cities and small towns, to kids of every color, every socio-economic background, with two parents, or no parents and how simply this can happen to any child." According to Flores, the average age of a victim of Commercial Sexual Exploitation is 14 years and the FBI reports that children as young as 9 have been rescued from sexual enslavement; in the U.S., the average age of entry is 12 years. One university study has estimated that 300,000 children in the U.S. are victims of human trafficking and more tha 15,000 girls are brought into the U.S. annually as white slaves. As staggering as this may be, the scary thing is those figures reveal that it is likely happening in a neighborhood near you.

Young people trapped in CSA are often stereotyped as disadvantaged runaways from economically underprivileged homes, the criminal underbelly of society, quite unlike our squeaky-clean kids. But Flores was a girl very much like the average middle-class American, the oldest child of goal-driven, upwardly mobile parents, an economically privileged 15-year-old living in an affluent gated-community in suburban Detroit. Her unwanted induction into the sex trade was through older more worldly-wise schoolmates who threatened her, her two uninformed brothers, and unsuspecting parents.

Flores' ordeal is both horrific and enlightening, detailing how friends, family, school, and community can fail kids trapped in sexual exploitation, often ignoring the most obvious signs. "By doing nothing,”"she writes, "(school administrators) permitted a child in their care to be hurt in ways they could never imagine. I blame the teachers and school personnel who never offered to help when they observed a kid clearly being manipulated by an ethnic group." Like administrative blindness of epidemic bullying, ignoring the obvious in schools and elsewhere has a profound debilitating effect on its victims.

Flores spends most of her book describing her tormenting months as a victim of trafficking and her sudden awakening from a naïve and easily manipulated teen into the sordid world of sexploitation, yet able to hide her abuse from parents preoccupied with getting ahead, abuse that ended only when her parents moved, yet again, to another state. But there is a bright end to this story. Today Flores is a college graduate, licensed social worker, and public speaker, traveling the nation telling her story and offering hope to families touched by this insidious crime. The last part of her book offers facts about human trafficking, a Q&A chapter devoted to frequently asked questions about CSE, a chapter offering help for its victims, and a final chapter for parents and professionals on how to spot victims and methods for helping girls trapped in modern human slavery.