By Steve Helling and Wendy Grossman Kantor, People, March 2023
The daughter of a Jamaican-born pastor and a seamstress, Kathy McGibbon Givens recalls struggling to fit in with her peers. And when her parents divorced and moved her from Canada to Houston in her sophomore year of high school, “everything was bigger, everything was faster,” Givens says. “High school was just me being a chameleon. If a guy would say, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re so pretty,’ the next thing I knew I was doing his homework. I got into a cycle of being used.
That willingness to please continued. When she was 22, a boyfriend forced her into prostitution. “I didn’t understand what trafficking was,” she says. “The psychological control is very hard to explain.” After months of being passed from stranger to stranger, she finally broke free from the mental and physical control and left—only to find herself overcome with shame. The years it took for her to take back her own life led her to found Twelve 11 partners, a survivor-led nonprofit that gives women who have escaped trafficking tools to heal and create careers. Givens, 43, now speaks of her own experience openly and often in an effort to prevent sex trafficking by making people aware of the risks—and to shine a public light on an issue often shrouded in secrecy. She also worked to push through legislation—FOSTA (the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) and SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act)—signed into law in 2018, to hold tech companies accountable for hosting websites that advertise and sell sex. “We overcome by telling our stories,” says Givens. “Had I not overcome the fear of sharing, I would still be in bondage to my own trauma.”
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