Hello, I'm Calion and I
am an artist and an illustrator
as well as a child sex
trafficking survivor. I'm
someone who has a big passion
for illustrating dogs in particular,
And I also love providing peer
support and healing spaces for
people who have gone through
similar traumas to me. And I'm
also a passionate, like
transformative justice activist and someone
who really gives a voice to
other trans people like me in
my community.
My trafficking began when I was a young child,
probably right around the ages of
five or so when my trafficker
began to groom me to be
sexually exploited, primarily online, and
with other people who would come
to his house. And it really
began when I became his daughter's
best friend. So he gained
access to me, learned about me
that way, and then I would
stay over at his house. He
only lived a few houses down.
I would stay with my
best friend and he would traffick
me from there.
My trafficker provided me with a space to
express my gender identity as a
child, which was something that
no one else in my life
really knew about, or was
able to provide a space for
including just society as a whole.
So my trafficker understood that
I was a transgender boy and
I was someone who really
didn't have a space to be
validated for that masculinity that I
knew I held inside and he
recognized that he treated me like
I was his son, which was
very different from the dynamics
that people around me would treat
me with seeing me as a
young "girl". So, of course,
you know, the people in my
life didn't really know better,
They didn't necessarily know about
my identity in that way,
but that was something that my
trafficker realized in me and it
was a vulnerability that he
exploited and used to groom me and
to make me vulnerable to the
abuses that I faced as a child.
I think things could have been
different for me if society, of
course had been more accepting and
validating of young transgender children,
I think that that would have
been a key thing for me to
have spaces where I could have
been validated and noticed
and my trafficker wouldn't have
been the only person who was
able to validate that side of
me and then to groom and
exploit that side of me as well.
So, I think that would have
been one of the biggest things
as well as I think that a
lot of this could have been
prevented if there was just more
community care in general. There's
a lot of isolation in our
society and there's a lot of
people kind of learning to fend
for themselves and even in
communities that seem tightly knit,
there needs to be more care,
there needs to be more collective
healing and collective spaces to
really work on some of the
things that society could do a
little bit better on, like
expressing emotions and creating safe
spaces especially for vulnerable and
different children.
Sometimes, like children show pain in ways that
are overlooked because children
experience a lot of fantasy. We
experience a lot of, you know,
like as a child, we all
experience a lot of creativity
and different ways of expressing
ourselves that adults may not
recognize are either pain or methods
of escaping a painful
reality that we're in. So I
would, you know, encourage,
like parents and educators and
people to start to understand what
children who might be suffering,
and might be experiencing traumas
would be like. So looking for
child-based signs of like self-harm
and things that might be
exploring like sexuality or exploring
things that hurt a lot more
than a child should be doing
at that age, more
than just, you know, normal
childhood curiosity. As well as I
would really encourage people to
learn the signs of, you
know, dissociation and detachment
from trauma. So just when a
child might be like zoning out
or forgetting things a lot or
seems disconnected from the world.
So I think that that needs
to be a conversation that's
also happening around, you
know, anti-trafficking and just
around child welfare in general,
because, I think a lot of
what was happening to me,
could have been noticed a lot
earlier if that had, if that
had been a conversation that was
happening too.