Safe to Hope

Season 6: Episode 5 - Carya's Story Part 1

• Ann Maree Goudzwaard

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In this first part of her story, Carya offers a window into her childhood— the one outsiders saw, and the one they didn’t. Her narrative reveals how abuse and trafficking can be carefully concealed behind the mask of normalcy, community, and even “Christian” culture. As you hear her story, we urge you to listen slowly and carefully, not just with your ears, but with your heart.

We begin here to challenge the illusions, to equip the church to respond to real evil, and to stand with survivors like Carya who risk everything to speak the truth.

Warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of childhood sexual abuse and trafficking. Please use discretion and prioritize your emotional safety as you listen.

SHOW NOTES:
Bearing Witness Episode 1 Introduction
Bearing Witness Episode 3 Julia, Ann Maree and Carya
Bearing Witness Episode 4 Self-Care

Informational Resources:

Self-Care Resources:

Safe To Hope is one of the resources offered through the ministry of Help[H]er, a 501C3 that provides training and resources for those ministering in one-another care, and advocacy for women in crisis in Christian organizations. Your donations make it possible for Help[H]er to serve as they navigate crises. All donations are tax-deductible.

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We value and respect conversations with all our guests. Opinions, viewpoints, and convictions may differ so we encourage our listeners to practice discernment. As well, guests do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of HelpHer. It is our hope that this podcast is a platform for hearing and learning rather than causing division or strife.

Please note, abuse situations have common patterns of behavior, responses, and environments. Any familiarity construed by the listener is of their own opinion and interpretation. Our podcast does not accuse individuals or organizations.

The podcast is for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional care, diagnosis, or treatment.


Ann Maree
This particular season of the Safe to Hope podcast is extremely difficult to hear. The 2025 season is for mature audiences only. We advise listeners to apply an abundance of caution and discretion, and we warn those who might be significantly triggered. This story includes childhood sexual abuse, rape, sex-trafficking, satanic cultish and ritualistic abuse. 

Throughout the 2025 season, we will occasionally insert breaks between segments of the story to provide our listeners with an opportunity to come up for air. At other times, we will offer the audience an opportunity to skip over difficult subject matter. 

For more information about how to even process these stories, please listen to episode 4 and episode 6 on the Safe to Hope podcast. 

I've asked our storyteller to describe the details she thinks will be helpful so the audience will understand the terror she endured. While this story is hard to listen to, living it was unbelievably hard and horrific. We bear witness as we listen. These stories are disturbing and may even be confusing. One of our goals throughout this series is to help the audience understand specifically, knowing good from evil, but also to have compassion, exhibit empathy and acquire the ability to minister to those in need. 

While this type of abuse is less common than others, we listen for two good reasons. First, it is a reality that we need to be prepared to understand and respond to this kind of abuse. Second, even if we never encounter a similar situation of this storyteller's experience, it teaches us, in a concentrated way, about dynamics that are at work whenever people commit harm against others. 

It has been my privilege to meet and get to know our podcast storyteller Carya, and to help her tell her story. Carya’s story is amazing for a number of reasons. Carya herself is actually amazing. I'm confident the audience will benefit from hearing you Carya, and getting to know you better. In spite of the difficult subject matter, I'm just now going to let you determine the best place to start. 

Carya  
I'm going to start out with a sketch of my growing up as it might have looked to someone on the outside, someone who had no awareness of what was really going on in my world. Someone who could only see the version of me that was allowed to be seen in public. 

I didn't grow up in a Christian home, although, if you would ask me, then I would have told you that my family was Christian. From as far back as I can remember, our family went to church. We also said grace over meals with poetic prayers or songs like, “God is great, God is good. Let us thank Him for our food. Amen.” I understood that we were Christians, and at some early point, I learned and loved the story of Joseph and the many colored coat. Someone gave me a Children's Bible, and I would ask my mom to read the Joseph story to me, scooching up near her on the couch or on the padded window seat near our front door. We attended a church in the city where I was born, and after moving across the country, when I was six, my parents prioritized finding a church there. 

So I would have said we were Christians because we said we were Christians and we went to church. That's what a Christian was, someone who went to church, but there was no content to it. Neither of my parents talked about God or read the Bible or prayed. Despite this lack of content, though, I seem to have believed something like the gospel from a very early age. I knew that Jesus was God's son and had died on the cross for my sins, and was the only way I could get to heaven. I doubt that I really understood any of these key concepts, like God's Son sin or heaven. I but I believed them all the same. I don't even know where or how I heard them, but I can't recall a time in my life when I didn't know that they were true. 

Our family kept going to church until I was about 12. My mom died shortly before then, and she had been the driving force behind our family's weekly attendance. Once she passed away, it seemed that the impetus was gone. But at exactly that same time, my own faith became important to me. I started asking how my belief in God should affect my life, and I continued going to youth group on my own, even though we weren't going to church anymore as a family. I don't know if I came to saving faith so young that I can't remember it, or so gradually that I can't pinpoint it, but in those middle school years, I claimed it as my own and started seeking to really live it out. 

My dad seemed like a parent who was content to let me do and become whatever I wanted. He didn't encourage me to stick with church, nor try to steer me away from it. He seemed to provide very little direction or guidance about anything, and gave me very few rules. I never had a curfew, despite once asking for one. You would have thought he was the epitome of a laid back parent, the opposite of a helicopter parent, and you might have wondered how much he was raising me versus me raising myself, but it must be said, it seemed like it was working. At every stage of my growing up, I was respectful, mature and never rebellious. I was smart, I got good grades, and I was good at sports. To be frank, I was the kind of kid that adults thought highly of. I was often the teacher's pet. 

All my childhood, I was a strange mix of a kid, adventurous, athletic and tough, yet also studious and quiet. In contrast to my younger brother, I seemed like an extrovert. He could spend hours alone in an imagined world; GI Joe or Star Wars action figures spread out before him. Sometimes he played with another friend, but he didn't need one to be content. I too could spend blissful hours alone, lost in a book, but the way I played was rough and tumble, climbing trees, running, swinging, chasing balls, tackling people. I was a tomboy through and through, with no interest in dolls or dresses or really pink things. 

Where I grew up, girls softball didn't exist until high school, so I played little league baseball for years, always the only girl on my team, and sometimes the only girl in the whole city league. And I wasn't relegated to right field either. No, I was the catcher, and my favorite part was when there was a play at the plate, a collision as I tried to block the runner and tag him out. It only ever heard if the runner was safe. 

By middle school, I had short hair and was often mistaken for being a boy. It became common for me to go into a public restroom and be told by some well meaning person,”this is the ladies room.” I got so tired of it, I would just say “I know” and proceed into the stall. This sometimes continued even after I went through puberty. One day when I was in seventh grade and my brother in fifth grade, we were walking home from a trip to the store to buy candy. As we stood at the corner of the busiest intersection, I noticed a group of teenage boys on the other side, waiting to cross. When the light turned we all started our opposite ways, but after meeting in the middle, the teenagers suddenly turned back around and started following us. Soon, the leader started leaping up and down, flapping his arms in the air, and shouting out, “I am the white Mike Tyson, I am the white Mike Tyson!” This was quite scary, but we ignored them and kept walking. But they wouldn't leave us alone. One of the boys lifted up his foot, placed it on my brother's back, and shoved him forward, making him stumble. Then he did it again. We were too far from home to run for it. 

Suddenly, I whipped around and faced the group, trying to make them back off in the only way I could think of. With my baseball cap and baggy sweatshirt, I suspected they were confused and thought they were picking on two younger boys. I yelled, “If you want to beat us up, that's pretty lame, because I'm a girl!” They shouted and hooted derisively and disbelievingly. So I turned back around, reached my hand behind my back and snapped my bra at them. They howled and ran off, and my brother and I finished our walk home in silence.

Although my play was often rough and frenetic, you wouldn't guess that if you saw me at school or at home. The other side of my personality was quiet, inquisitive and meticulous. In Montessori School, which I attended for preschool and kindergarten. I loved sitting at my table carefully making maps by perforating the outlines of countries with a pushpin or looping colored rubber bands around nails and boards to make intricate designs. I loved learning, and I was an eager student, getting good grades and eventually going on to a very select college and then a PhD program at an elite university. During my freshman year of high school, I heard about an opportunity to spend the summer at a boarding school where I could take advanced classes on subjects that interested me, and I thought that sounded amazing. That's the kind of nerdy kid I was. Drooling over the prospect of spending more than half my summer in school taking classes for no purpose other than the delight in learning. 

My parents had a lot of friends and spent a lot of time with them, so I grew up very used to other adults being around all the time. When we moved across the country, one of the reasons was for my parents to rejoin several couples with whom they had a particularly close relationship. Eventually, these families all bought houses on the same street, right next to each other, and from age eight, I lived and grew up in a neighborhood where we were all in and out of each other's homes and lives constantly. The story that was told about this neighborhood, when a story was needed, was that these couples all wanted to raise their kids in an intentional community. If you had seen us, you would have thought that's what was happening, and probably you would have thought that it was pretty cool. Everyone who ever learned about it at the time certainly thought that it was. 

Each family had a set of keys for all the other families’ houses, but we rarely even needed them. We just walked in, announcing our presence by yelling, “knock, knock!” as we entered. We looked a lot more like an extended family than neighbors or even friends. Just as it would happen in a big family, all the kids stair-stepped down in age, none of us in the same grade. We related to each other like siblings. Our families often ate meals together, and we spread into one another's lives in countless daily ways. It was very common for someone from another family— parent or kid— to wander in at some point in the evening, settle down and just hang out. Invitations were not needed and never extended. We all just lived together. I moved out of this neighborhood halfway through high school, beguiled by my summer at boarding school into going back full time, but I returned during Christmas and summer breaks. 

At boarding school and then college— both at very secular schools with a tiny number of serious Christians— I got deeply involved with Christian fellowship and doubled down on my love of learning. I'd begun to gain some weight prior to boarding school, and once there, I gained a lot more, very quickly and stopped playing sports. So if you'd seen me, then you would likely have been a bit concerned about my physical health— the proverbial “freshman 15” you gained in your first year of eating at a dining hall was, in my case, many times that number— but otherwise you would have seen a teenager who was serious about school, serious about her faith, a leader on campus, and pleasant to be around. These traits continued through college and beyond. 

So, if you could have caught glimpses of me as I grew up, what would you have seen? A young girl who was a tomboy, extremely active, smart and well behaved. A middle-schooler who was good at and serious about sports, who was developing a meaningful and personal Christian faith, who loved school and who was learning lessons of grief from the untimely loss of a parent. A teenager and young adult who was flourishing academically, who was a leader in Christian communities, who was becoming seriously overweight but was otherwise mature and stable. Finally, you would have seen a single woman managing a busy life, working in ministry and then pursuing a career in academia, and one deeply invested in her church. You might have looked at the unconventional way she was raised, the lack of spiritual guidance in her home, and the extremely hands-off parenting style of the widowed father who raised her alone and, frankly, be a bit bemused by how capable and emotionally healthy she seemed. If you saw her in her late 20s, you'd even have seen her shedding that extra weight, so that by her early 30s, she was in good shape, almost done with her PhD, and preparing to launch into a career as a faithful Christian professor at a secular college. You would likely have thought she had it all together, and by God's grace, always had.

Ann Maree 
Thanks for sharing that, Carya. I know when you and I began working on your story and brainstorming how to begin, I don't think either of us really knew the best way to start. So I appreciate that you began telling us about your life from this perspective, because it really represents such a typical way of how we (in the church) likely view people, families and kids, and how we perceive their situation. It comes pretty naturally to us to ‘judge’ the who, the what and the how of people in the best possible light when we're looking in from the outside, doesn't it? It's easy to deduce your story as coming from a middle class family, having a strong sense of community, church going, as involved in the broader life of school and sports… From the outside, your life appeared normal, well adjusted, even mundane. 

Our audience might even be wondering why we tell that story. 

But the way that you've begun this narrative really highlights why it's so important to tell your story. Nothing really is as it seems. Not everything we see from the outside is going to clue us in on what happens on the inside. We (especially people-helpers in Christ's body) need to heed Jesus' warning to quote, “Stay alert. This is hazardous work I'm assigning you. You're going to be like sheep running through a wolf pack. Be as shrewd as a snake, inoffensive as a dove” (Matt. 10:16 The Message). 

Dr Heather Gingrich wrote, “I suspect most of us do not want to address evil, because we hope that by ignoring it, we will not be impacted by it.” And I look forward to hearing more from her later in the season. But for now, what I want to draw out to the audience is what Carya is emphasizing… We don't naturally go looking for evil in day to day observations. We ignore its existence. N.T. Wright has said, “First, we ignore evil when it doesn't hit us in the face. Second, we are surprised by evil when it does. And third, we react in immature and dangerous ways as a result.” 

So what makes telling your story so important is that we (in the church and in Christian institutions) must learn and hear and process so that we can respond with maturity and gentleness to those who have endured great evils in their lifetime, evil we can't even imagine if we tried. 

Carya, another reason that I think it's important to tell your story is that we don't usually hear stories like this, yet there are many others like you. So please, I'd appreciate if you'd continue and tell us more of your story.

Carya 
I said a moment ago that if you'd met me in my late 20s or early 30s, you would likely have thought that by God's grace, I had it all together. There is a lot of God's grace in my life and in my story, but I did not have it all together, and I never did. In fact, during all the years of my growing up and beyond, I was not even remotely okay. Things weren't the way they looked from the outside at all. If you could have looked from the inside, you would have seen that I was raised in and by a network of deliberate, sadistic sexual abusers. 

Before I can even remember, my parents violated me sexually almost every day. My father's sexual appetites were massive and deviant. He raped me all the time, even when I was littler than anyone wants to believe is possible, but he rarely ‘just’ raped me. He liked elaborate setups. He liked to hurt me, and he liked to humiliate me. Under his direction, my mom helped him violate me as well as hurting me herself. She raped me too sometimes. That part of the story is really complicated, though, because my dad abused her as well. It took me a very long time to come to any sort of peace and understanding about her part in this. I believe that God has shown me that she didn't want to do it, and that if she could have acted freely, she wouldn't have been a perpetrator. But that doesn't change the fact that in my own experience, she was a perpetrator which wreaked all sorts of havoc. Still, it was my dad who— by far— was my very worst abuser. 

Also from before I can even remember, my parents made me available for the same treatment from their friends, extended family members and others they knew from the larger network of like minded people they were a part of. One of my dad's favorite things was to be involved in a group session with me. He liked to watch as others violated me, and he liked to participate with several people abusing me altogether. 

From before I can even remember, my parents sold access to me to people they did not know, allowing strangers to pay for different kinds of services I could provide. When I was little, they almost always came to our home for appointments with me, though sometimes my parents would take me to their house or a hotel room or whatever other location they wanted. As I got older, they still usually came to our house, but I was also taught to meet them elsewhere, on my own for appointments, if that's what they wanted. 

One way that I know that all this started before I can remember is that I have no memories of being surprised by any of these things, no sense of shock from it happening for the first time. This reality was literally all I'd ever known. It was awful, but it was absolutely normal. 

After I left for boarding school, I never again lived in the same state as my father, although I returned home during school vacations, but before I left, he arranged for a handler who was near where I would be going to take over the day to day management of my sexual exploitation. When I graduated, he arranged for yet another handler near my college, and then I stayed in that area and under that handler's control until my early 30s. 

So if you could have seen my life from the inside rather than the outside, you would have seen someone trapped in a system where she was raped and trafficked by friends, family and strangers for over three decades.

Ann Maree  
Years ago, Diane Langberg wrote, quote, “This world is destroying its females… little girls [like you, Carya], often victims of incest… raped and battered, [don't even] know [that] it is wrong”. Unquote. Abuse deadens the heart, the mind and the soul. But I'm not just talking about the victims. Yes, they may dissociate, and yes, that's often a gift that allows them to survive. What I don't think we realize, however, is how these abuses destroy entire societies. I don't say that to minimize what happened to Carya or diminish the evil perpetrated against you in any way. It's just to recognize that what happened will impact us all. This is not just a personal problem, one that does not need to touch us. This is our problem. Our problem. This is the church's problem. And as Carya continues, I think you'll realize at least some of the ways in which that happens. 

Still, this is about your story, Carya, I can only imagine. I can't, no, I can't imagine how difficult it is to retell, let alone relive it, as you share with us, and I am very grateful to you for taking this risk. I've asked that you provide us with the details that you feel are important for us to know, for the church to know, the story that's important for us to hear, so that we will be able to sense that full impact it had on your life. Again, to our audience, we realize this is going to be hard to hear, and has been, but please remember how much harder it was for Carya to endure.

Carya  
It's really hard to know how to tell this story, because there's so many tangled threads, and often the thread I'm following divides and goes off in more than one direction. But for right now, I'll try to follow a few of the threads that are tied specifically to my experience of family controlled sex trafficking. There are four that I'm thinking of. 

The first was the bald, bold dailiness of my dad's direct exploitation. The abuse I lived with was hidden from the outside world, but in our inside world, it was everywhere. It wasn't cordoned off into special times or secret places, but it could happen anywhere, anytime. Regardless of what I was doing, playing, reading, doing homework, eating, a meal or, of course, sleeping. If my dad wanted sex with me, he would take it right then and there, and he wanted it a lot. 

When I was little, Dad would often come into the kitchen in the morning to have breakfast and before sitting at the table, reach over to slip his hand down my pants or tell me to put mine down his. I'd end up with my clothes off, straddling his lap, or laid flat on the table with his body inside mine. Then just minutes after he finished, we'd both be back in our chairs and eating our breakfast. 

As I grew older, he trained me to be aware of his sexual desires and often to meet them without being told. For example, sometimes while watching TV in our family room, I'd see his hand go down his own pants, arousing himself, and I knew that by the time he was erect, I'd better be right next to him, having taken off my own clothes and ready to do whatever he wanted. 

There's nowhere safe, no room or spot I could go where he had not abused me .No activity I could do that would prevent him from starting again if he was in the mood, sadism and exploitation lurked everywhere. Could show up everywhere and tainted everything. My dad blended his and others' abuse of me with regular life so seamlessly that it was never safe to let my guard down. Of course, having my guard up didn't prevent anything. It just meant that I was waiting for his summons when it came, rather than taken by surprise. 

A closely related thread is about how much my dad enjoyed making me sexually available to others. He sold this availability, and that's a threat I'll get to in a moment, but he also seemed to get something out of sharing me around to his friends, network and extended family without needing to be paid for it. In our home, hospitality to guests included my sexual availability to them, and I was taught to offer it before it was asked for. For example, by presenting myself at guest bedrooms if they were staying the night. I can't recall those offers ever being declined. Often, when my parents friends came over for the evening and stayed up late talking and drinking, I would be awakened from sleep and brought down to entertain them, just as my dad could take what he wanted from me sexually any time, so could a relative or family friend, whether they were at our house or I was at theirs, or if they were careful, even if we were out in public. 

We moved into the ‘intentional community’ with my parents' friends. All this got even worse. Neighbors came and went multiple times in a day, and there were no boundaries on what they could demand for me or when or how frequently. Sometimes whoever wanted my services would take me off to another room in the house to be alone with me. But sometimes they wouldn't, and they'd do whatever they wanted right there in front of anyone else who happened to be around. My dad seemed to get high on this. Sometimes he'd just watch, but often he'd end up participating too. Whenever there were others around, the perpetrators performed for one another, trying to outdo one another and egging each other on. 

Whenever I read Psalm 12, it makes me think of stuff like this. Verse 8 says, “On every side the wicked prowl as vileness is exalted among the children of man.” My dad and his network sought out ways to be vile and proudly performed their vileness in front of each other and exalted it. We can come back to this in a later episode, but this reality is part of what makes me feel the need to share my story: I think that the American church writ large has lost sight of the biblical truth that there are those who seek out ways to do evil, who exalt vileness. Or perhaps we know that truth, but we think it can only happen somewhere else, not in our own seemingly safe neighborhoods. But it can happen there; it does happen there. We need eyes to see. As Psalm 64 says, “[The wicked] devise crimes and say, ‘We have perfected a secret plan,’” (verse 6). I just don't think we take evil seriously enough.

Ann Maree  
That's a hard truth from someone who knows it so intimately. This connects back to that N.T. Wright quote that I mentioned just a little bit earlier. First, we ignore evil when it doesn't hit us in the face. Second, we are surprised by evil when it does. And third, we react in immature and dangerous ways as a result.

Carya 
Yes, exactly. If we took evil more seriously, we wouldn't be so surprised when it hits us in the face, and we'd be able to respond to it better. I know my story is shocking, but I'd love to see the church get to a place where stories like these aren't surprising. 

So going back to the sex-trafficking threads I'm trying to follow… the first two were about my experience of family-controlled trafficking when money wasn't involved, when the perpetrators were people I knew and who were a part of my life. A third thread involves strangers, those who paid my parents for access to me. We referred to these people as clients, and they made appointments with my parents and later my handlers, or even me. 

On the second floor of the house we lived in until I was six, was a room we called the ‘appointment room.’ It was the room I was most often sent to when a client came to the house and it wasn't used for anything else— no one ever slept there or played there or used it for any sort of normal household activity. 

My parents tended to stack appointments, so I often spent entire days locked in the room or even tied to the bed, as a succession of men, and sometimes women, came in singles or doubles or larger groups to satisfy their perverse desires. The room had a bed to the left of the door against the wall and a comfortable chair against the other wall to the right of the door where an observer could sit. Occasionally one of my parents might be in the room during an appointment, but usually not. Clients had free rein behind that door, and I knew I had to please them in whatever ways they wanted. They wanted all kinds of different things, and there was equipment in the room for them to use if they wished— ropes and straps, objects for penetration, even a wire that could be used to deliver electric shocks. 

Another important piece of equipment in the appointment room was a tripod that stood in the corner, diagonal from the right foot of the bed. The cameras that sat atop that tripod are the fourth thread. But before I get to that, there are a few more things to say about clients and appointments. 

Since we moved, we never again had a dedicated, single-purpose appointment room in any of our houses. I don't know if this was by choice or necessity, but regardless, the appointment certainly didn't stop. Clients would simply use my room or the guest room or— once I was out of my parents’ house, whatever location my handler had arranged. Starting in sixth grade, I was a latch key kid, and most days when I got home from school, I found a note telling me what time my appointments were and where in the neighborhood I needed to be for them. If I failed to show up for one of these appointments, I'd later receive a punishment far worse than if I'd just gone, so I always did. Disobedience just wasn't worth it. 

Appointments remained a part of my experience throughout all the decades of my abuse, but they were most significant in the years before I left for boarding school. Perhaps later on, I'll say a bit more about what kinds of things clients wanted from me once I was an adult, but it was in my childhood that there were so many clients. A lot of people want sex with little girls and to be able to get it without constraints and with the full consent of the girl's parents, is worth a ton of money.

Ann Maree  
I think we just need to pause there for a minute, but also let the listeners take that in. There are people— lots of people— who will pay significant money to have sex with children. That means they are paying money to molest and rape children, and that means that someone is selling children to be molested and raped. Who do we think does that? It's typically not strangers. In your case, it was your parents. I think a lot of us think that sex trafficking means kidnapping a child and selling them anonymously as a sex slave. And that can happen, and it does happen, but it is a lot easier to sell a child you're related to or connected with than to kidnap one. The financial incentives are horrific.

Carya  
Yeah, yeah. That's also a perfect segue to my final thread, which is about cameras. My dad shot a lot of film of the things he did with me and to me, and the things he invited his friends and family to do. When I was with clients, they could bring their own cameras, if they wanted, and set them up on the tripod that sat in the corner of the appointment room. Whether a camera was there or not, it was always the case that certain kinds of reactions were expected of me. Sometimes I was supposed to cooperate and sometimes resist. Some perpetrators liked it when I screamed, and others wanted me to stifle my screams. Some wanted me terrified. Some wanted me utterly passive, and others wanted me to participate or even initiate. Some wanted to hurt me, and some wanted my body to experience pleasure. And some wanted both. 

When someone was using a camera, they used it to capture not only what they did, but how I responded. I know what the cameras saw because I was shown. The photos they took were a training tool used to improve my sexual performance. For those to whom I was trafficked, mom or dad would pull out the pictures, sit with me and flip through them like coaches analyzing game film. Often dad paused over a photo, perhaps commenting on something I'd done or failed to do, or quizzing me about what I could do to better satisfy whichever friend, neighbor, family member or client would be coming next. 

These pictures were a training tool for me, but I also knew that this wasn't all that they were. I wasn't their only intended audience. My dad and other abusers looked at them too. Dad would sit on the couch and pull out some photos, eventually loosening his belt and starting to arouse himself while he browsed through them. Sometimes he just wanted to gratify himself, but more often, it was to gear himself up for something with me. Clients, family, friends and relatives also used photos this way, flipping through the stacks that sat in the appointment room or sharing them around the table after dinner. They used them to generate ideas, to stimulate their own arousal and to spur each other on. Sometimes someone would show me a picture and tell me that they wanted to replicate whatever was in it. 

In other words, I knew that the photos were for my abusers too. Both for the ones whom I knew and for the clients whom I didn't. But it didn't occur to me that the pictures might also be for other people, people who I never encountered. I knew about the existence of porn ‘out there’ in the world and about the prevalence of cameras in my own experience for a long time before I put the two together. I should have figured it out sooner, but I didn't. It didn't occur to me until just a few years ago, but it wasn't just my own abusers who sat looking at photos of me with their hands down their pants. My dad trafficked sexually explicit and abusive pictures of me as well as selling sexual access to my body. 

When I realized this, it was like a gut punch. Who knows how many people have seen these photos? Are there still any out there being used and circulated? Am I still being exploited in this way? And even if not, I wonder— have I ever run across someone in my normal life today who once watched— not anonymous, victimless porn, but me— as unspeakable things were done to my childish, naked body? Once that enslaved child? Even worse, I wonder: what appetites were stoked by those images? How many other vulnerable children were sucked into a maelstrom of sadistic sexual abuse to feed the demand created in part, by the availability of violent and explicit pictures of me? The whole thing just makes me sick. 

My abusers were not makers of pornography first, and therefore abusers of me. No, they did the things they did to gratify their own desires, and realized that they could take pictures to sell while they were at it. I know this because, common as the cameras were, they were much more often absent than present. The cameras only captured my exploitation. They didn't create it, but the fact that pornography widened the circle of people who used me, and that there may be some who still do, is a very bitter pill to swallow. 

So that's it with the threads. Let me go back to the outside versus inside view of my life. To an outsider, my family and I looked really normal. Respectable church-going in my younger years, if not actually religious in any real way. We had lots of family friends and lived in community. I loved school and sports and reading, and I eventually went off to good schools and looked for all the world like I was launching into the career of my dreams. But the reality was that I was being raped by my parents, relatives, family, friends and complete strangers nearly every day, usually multiple times a day. For decades. My parents gave away my body to many, sold it to others and sold pictures of it to many more people whom I never met. What outsiders could see was an utter lie. 

How you might wonder, did no one notice? How could it be that everyone ‘on the outside’ was oblivious? How was it that a friend or a friend's parent never noticed that something was seriously wrong? There's a long answer to that that I'll get to later on, but for right now, the short answer is that my dad and relatives and neighbors worked hard to make sure the secrets couldn't get out. They tightly controlled my relationships and activities while making it look like they didn't. My dad also spent hours upon hours training me to play my part, which is different from grooming. I'll come back to this in a future episode as well, because I think it's really important to understand how. Things could be so bad, but not really be visible.

Ann Maree  
It's all very confusing. But one particularly confusing point that you just brought up, and so important Carya is how in the world did this stay hidden from the outside world? I think the evil of it all is surprising, of course, to say the least, but the way in which it was able to happen, the church and others oblivious, is astounding. We're planning to have a conversation with Jim Wilder later in the series about what kind of church culture cultivates this horrific evil. Right now, though I'm imagining again? No, I can hardly imagine how much more hopeless you must have felt knowing that no one would ever know or that the people who did know wouldn't do anything about it. 

Talking about it now brings that darkness out into the light. Thank you. That's something Scripture even instructs us to do. Drag it into the light. Can you talk to me about some of your other thoughts of why you're choosing to tell your story?

Carya  
Thanks for that question. I've really wrestled with this. When hearing a story like mine, I think it's easy to assume that it's so extreme, but there's practically no one else who has had a similar experience. I fear that people will hear it and think, “wow, that's awful,” but also think that there's nothing they need to learn from it, because it's so rare. They think they'll never encounter someone with a story like this, especially not here in America. I fear that the very extremity of my story will make people think they can safely dismiss it as something they'll never have to deal with. 

That's what makes me feel like it's important to share. We believe in and follow a God who sent His Son into the world to wage war against evil, yet we struggle to believe that evil can be evil like this, this bad right here in our own neighborhoods, right here among people we encounter and know.

But it can. I am not the only one; not by a long shot. I want others who have gone through unspeakable evil to know that they're not the only ones, either. And I want the church to have eyes to see, even though I know it hurts to look. I know my story is hard to hear— and it will get harder— and I don't want to hurt those who listen. But the church needs to be able to see evil clearly and not be so shocked or overwhelmed by it that it can't respond. 

I also want the church to understand how lasting the damage is. By any standard, I'm doing remarkably well these days. God has done amazing things in my life, and I really look forward to talking about that part of the story later on. But even though I am doing so much better than I ever expected. And even though I'm no longer being raped and given away and sold, and even though I love and trust and have been saved by Jesus, the truth is I suffer with and from this every day. Every day. I'm not all fixed up. It's hard all the time. Sometimes just a little, sometimes a huge amount, and most of the time just the regular burden of pain and sorrow and weight. I want the church to understand that too, and to be able to walk the long road of a lifetime along sufferers of great evil

Ann Maree 
Carya, I think it's important to again say “thank you.” Thank you for revealing the ways in which you've experienced this in unbelievable ways. Your perseverance in writing and telling these stories is a testament to your intolerance of abusive people and abusive systems. Diane Langberg has said that quote, “Underlying all trauma, violence and abuse, lies evil, and the result of evil is always some kind of suffering.” There's a ‘general’ way in which we might hear this in your upcoming stories, in that, as Diane said, at the core there is evil. And by you, essentially saying, NO MORE, you effectively become an agent for change. And that's risky. So again, thank you. 

There's something I'd like to mention to our audience as we begin this season. Carya has done a very difficult work, both in the telling and remembering of her circumstances. In situations such as these, it might be tempting to believe or disbelieve based on how the storyteller communicated what happened. Please remember it is not uncommon for those significantly harmed to dissociate. It even in the telling of their story. Please consider this as you listen and set aside any expectations for Carya's demeanor and what you the listener might have expected. 

Next time on the Safe to Hope podcast, I'll talk with expert contributor Dr Heather Evans. Dr Evans is an expert in sex-trafficking who has extensive expertise in trauma care. Her Voices of Survivors project is a beautiful project that helps victims of violence express their lived experiences as survivors, and they do this through photography. I'm anxious to hear from Dr Evans about how we as listeners of these stories can listen and respond well. Join us for episode six of the Safe to Hope podcast.