Bridging Trauma to Hope: In Conversation with Jessa Crisp
- Nadia Jahnecke
- Jul 1, 2024
- 26 min read
Updated: Jun 27
Jessa Crisp is a licensed professional counsellor, public speaker, and anti-trafficking activist. A victim of sex trafficking as a child, Jessa is now working on a PhD in Counsellor Education and Supervision. She is the former CEO of Bridge Hope, an anti-trafficking non-profit within the Denver-metro area and has worked with hundreds of individuals who’ve experienced trauma, depression, grief, and anxiety.
CJLPA: Welcome, Jessa. I would like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to share your story as a heroic and courageous survivor of human trafficking. I want to start the interview by asking you to tell us about your childhood and how you first became a victim of sex trafficking.
Jessa Crisp: I was born into a family that I use the word evil to describe. They perpetrated a lot, my childhood had a lot of sexual abuse connected to it. I have seen images of my child pornography, for which technically the term is child sexual abuse material, from when I was a really small child, I would say a toddler. So I would have to assume that my trafficking started when I was very young, because, at least in the US, the federal definition of child sexual abuse material is human trafficking. And that is a huge part of my early childhood experiences and setting the stage for other people to purchase me. I experienced a lot of extreme abuse and traumas. I was not allowed to go to school as a child. When I was 17, I was taken to a hotel in Indianapolis where I was labour trafficked during the day and sex trafficked at night. That was a huge part of what I knew as my ‘normal’. I did not know anything else, just those extreme abuses. That truly lays the foundation for the person that I am today, where my passions exist, how I see myself, but also just how I see humanity. I have experienced the very worst of humanity, I have experienced that gross indignity of what humans have the ability to do. But on the other hand, I have also experienced so much joy and beauty, so much healing through humanity as well. So for me, holding that disparity between such stark experiences has really given me this desire to go, ‘how can I be able to be that kindness, that verse of good in the lives of others, but also create change around the globe, and how human trafficking is seen and engaged with?’
CJLPA: Thank you for sharing this difficult past. You were so young when you were subjected to these heinous crimes. And the people you would trust the most, the people that were meant to protect you, your parents, were the ones that subjected you to these unforgivable crimes. At such a young age, did you know what was happening?
JC: For me it was just such a normal part of how I saw life, all I knew was people using and abusing me. My body hurt so, yes, I knew that something was not right. I remember looking out my window at an elementary school just beyond my backyard and seeing kids play in the playground and seeing kids walk to school with lunches. I remember just being so curious about that mystery, the mystery that lay beyond the confines of my own realities. I remember having those big existential questions as a child, but yet it was also so normal that I did not know how else to question it. So I always wanted to figure out what it would look like for me to have a day at that school. What would that be like? But I also did not know anything else. And it was not until years later—I am still in this process of realizing how abnormal my childhood was, and how all of that abnormality has continued to impact my life. I am still on that journey, trying to conceptualize what that means and what that looks like. But that was all I knew. And so it was my normal.
