When Kimberly Weller applied for a job at the spa tucked into a seedy Bradenton strip mall near the airport, there was no talk about her skills as a masseuse or related work experience.
She knew. She wouldn't be giving massages or pampering soccer moms looking to de-stress. She would be having sex with a steady stream of customers. She was easily out-earning her fellow graduates from Sarasota Military Academy, class of She took the job because she wanted to be in control of how she earned her money, and as a kid, movies like "Pretty Woman" had glamorized life as a sex worker. But life at the brothel didn't bring shopping sprees with Richard Gere. Instead, it was horrifying encounters with beer-soaked construction workers, businessmen on their way to work, grandfathers on vacation.
She had never heard the term "sex trafficking" when she started work at the brothel, and she didn't notice the pattern at first โ that every other girl working there had similar stories of childhood sexual abuse.
While the spa owner's bank account grew, the girls had all become drug addicts, needing to be high to do the job and needing the job to get high. She was no longer in control. Teachers and guidance counselors had warned her and her classmates of the dangers of drinking and drugs, but no one had ever mentioned the predators looking to get rich off of broken girls like Kimberly, who believed it was her fault her family member molested her as an 8-year-old.
If a teacher or mentor had intervened when she was in elementary school and told her she was actually being abused and given her someone to talk to, her decisions down the road may have been different, she said. This month, Florida became the first state in the nation requiring sex-trafficking education as part of every student's curriculum. Ron DeSantis said upon passage of the new rule. The new policy requires every school district to implement age-appropriate lessons about the dangers of one of the state's fastest-growing industries.
