Join us for a powerful discussion that will leave you both moved and inspired. Our guest is Tina Dixon, a thriver, advocate, and entrepreneur who has faced unimaginable hardships and emerged on the other side as a beacon of strength and resilience. Tina bravely shares her harrowing 30-year journey from being enmeshed in human trafficking and domestic violence to embarking on a path of sobriety and liberation. Listen as she takes us through her terrifying encounters with the Dixie Mafia in a remote Louisiana brothel and her triumphant escape.
Also in the spotlight is Tina's remarkable transition from being a victim to a victorious advocate, fueled by her past experiences to empower and engage women who've been similarly scarred. As part of her healing journey, Tina shares her experiences with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, a therapeutic technique that uses eye movement and vibration techniques to help survivors reprocess traumatic events and cope with triggers. We dive deeper into the often under-recognized but critical aspect of trauma healing for survivors of sex trafficking.
The story takes a turn from the personal to the communal as Tina talks about her groundbreaking organization, Queens, founded to empower women in digital marketing and entrepreneurship. Hear Tina's invaluable advice for advocates and survivors on leveraging their transferable skills for professional success. This conversation is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of lived experiences. Get ready for this powerful conversation.
Join us for a powerful discussion that will leave you both moved and inspired. Our guest is Tina Dixon, a thriver, advocate, and entrepreneur who has faced unimaginable hardships and emerged on the other side as a beacon of strength and resilience. Tina bravely shares her harrowing 30-year journey from being enmeshed in human trafficking and domestic violence to embarking on a path of sobriety and liberation. Listen as she takes us through her terrifying encounters with the Dixie Mafia in a remote Louisiana brothel and her triumphant escape.
Also in the spotlight is Tina's remarkable transition from being a victim to a victorious advocate, fueled by her past experiences to empower and engage women who've been similarly scarred. As part of her healing journey, Tina shares her experiences with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, a therapeutic technique that uses eye movement and vibration techniques to help survivors reprocess traumatic events and cope with triggers. We dive deeper into the often under-recognized but critical aspect of trauma healing for survivors of sex trafficking.
The story takes a turn from the personal to the communal as Tina talks about her groundbreaking organization, Queens, founded to empower women in digital marketing and entrepreneurship. Hear Tina's invaluable advice for advocates and survivors on leveraging their transferable skills for professional success. This conversation is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of lived experiences. Get ready for this powerful conversation.
You know the why human trafficking work is needed To fight for the freedom of modern day slaves. But love, passion, commitment isn't all you need to be an effective and successful anti-trafficking advocate. Learn the how. I'm Dr Celia Williamson, director of the Human Trafficking and Social Justice Institute at the University of Toledo. Welcome to the Emancipation Nation podcast, where I'll provide you with the latest and best methods, policy and practice discussed by experienced experts in the field, so that you can cut through the noise, save time and be about the work of saving lives.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Emancipation Nation, episode 191. I'm Dr Celia Williamson and today I have Tina Dixon with me. She is a survivor advocate and entrepreneur whose mission is really to engage and empower women who are harmed through human trafficking and or domestic violence. So, after 30 years of exploitation and addiction, tina achieved her freedom in March 2013 after completing a one-year trauma program. So, with determination, creativity and tireless work ethic, tina was able to open Dixon Digital Marketing in 2016. That same year, she became involved in the human trafficking movement and served as a housing liaison for Empower 225 in Baton Rouge, louisiana. I don't think we've had anybody from Louisiana yet, so this is our first so tasked with securing housing for newly freed women.
Speaker 1:Tina discovered her passion and her natural ability to work with survivors as they process their experience and discover a better life. So Tina went on to create an organization called Queens. I love it. I love the name People who are supporting one another as they navigate the world of business through the female perspective. So Tina is going to talk a little bit about her experience. Hopefully, her organization, queens and Tina, is also recently an award winner, so we're going to touch on that as well. So welcome Tina. I'm so glad that you could make the time to be here.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. It's definitely an honor to be here, yeah, so.
Speaker 1:Louisiana is in the house. So can you tell us, tina, how you got involved in your organization? I think before that, I guess. Tell us about your trafficking experience. And then I want to ask you some questions. You know how you evolved from there to be successful and to be able to give back like you're doing.
Speaker 2:Sure sure. I actually entered the trafficking at about 14 years old. My father was in an outlaw motorcycle club, my mother was a psychic. It was a very dysfunctional home. I was being abused and I ran away from home and I went to New Orleans and of course somebody was able to get me an ID.
Speaker 2:I was kind of well developed for 14 year old and I started dancing on Bourbon Street and I met this guy that was in the Dixie Mafia and during that time this was the late 70s there were brothels all throughout the state of Louisiana, in like the deep swamp areas.
Speaker 2:The Dixie Mafia ran that state, mississippi and a few others, and they called them lockup joints. And so this man brought me to one of these lockup joints where I stayed for about three years and we were there. It was just like it was a brothel, and when people came in we lined up, they picked one and it was very, very traumatic. I was kind of hard headed in those days and so my trafficker was called often to correct me, and often they correct me in front of all the other girls, and it was just a really traumatic time for me. And then I went on from that Once we got out of the brothels, he brought me into his bar, where he caught me one night doing drugs with a client, and he beat me unconscious and left me in an alley for dead.
Speaker 1:Let me back up a little bit. So I am not aware of Dixie Mafia, so I'm assuming that this is a criminal enterprise that operates around Louisiana area.
Speaker 2:Yes, ma'am, it's a criminal operation that operates in the southern states. Actually, there was a movie about a sheriff who got rid of some of them, called Walking Tall, back in the day.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm familiar with that movie, this lockup or what did you call it? They?
Speaker 2:called it a lockup joint. It's kind of interesting and what the title of my book is is when you got ready to go to work because you'd go home for 10 days and then they bring you home for a couple of days and take you shopping and party and all of that, and then they bring you back and they'd say come on, let's go to the country. And these locations were secure in very small towns throughout Louisiana. Generally they had a bar in the front, they had a back room, poker room, and then they had little rooms in the back where the girls worked out of.
Speaker 1:Okay, I had never heard of that. Do you suspect that some of those things exist still today?
Speaker 2:I suspect maybe in a few of the remote areas in Louisiana there may be something like that still in existence. I know the trafficking team here works closely in those areas and they recently opened up a program in a rural area. So I don't have the T, so to speak, but I believe that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it seems like, since it's all about the money, it seems like that would still exist in some form or fashion. So you were 14, you got caught up in this situation. Then how long were you a victim of this type of sex trafficking or exploitation?
Speaker 2:Well, I actually was in the life, as they call it, for about 30 years, for a really long time. From that time I was able to escape this man and I went to Dallas, texas, and I met my first trafficker that worked girls on the street and I got into what they call street game and I became addicted to crack cocaine and so, as a result, I kind of, you know, went from trafficker to trafficker, thinking in my sit traumatized mind that maybe one of these got one of these men were going to help me overcome my drug addiction. But what happened was nothing like that. I stayed until, and so, literally in 1992, I got pregnant while I was out working and I got away from that for a little while and then I had the baby. My sister ended up adopting the young man and he actually works in in trafficking now. He's a great, he's a great kid and we've reunited and I'm really, really proud of him right now.
Speaker 2:And then I, as I tried to get myself together, I really had not overcame all the trauma that I mean I had been beat and mercy was locked, locked away. A lot of things really happened to me, traumatic in those situations, and so I attempted to get married. That didn't work. I left my husband and went back to my, to my trafficker, and I I would try. You know, I started learning marketing, I learned graphic design, I went to work for a Cajun chef down here in Louisiana and my husband passed away. And my husband passed away, I went to it back in the life and I really just bounced back and forth in the life, from the square world, as we call it, to back in the life, because I really hadn't addressed the demons that were inside of me. Yeah, it wasn't really until I was 50 years old that those demons were addressed.
Speaker 1:But I mean, this is this type of exploitation of sex trafficking from 14 on seems very familiar to me. This is what I know most about in in in. People are still looking for that caricature, that cartoon version of some kid get snatched into a white van. As you know, whatever it is, they believe. But the exploitation, the manipulation, the vulnerability, the needing someone to help you who exploited you from 14 years old in Louisiana and in those back areas to them, somebody who exploited you after you ran from there on on the streets and street prostitution, and the trauma Thank you leading to the use of drugs or alcohol. And if you're not taking care of that trauma, addressing that trauma, it starts to resurface in various aspects of your life. And this seems to be a lot of the common progression of what we see in the US as sex trafficking. So how did you get to a point where you wanted to get either drugs and alcohol treatment or you wanted to get out of the game?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I had drug and alcohol treatment many times. I actually went to 17 drug rehabs and each time that I went to drug rehab it was always caught the 12 steps and do this. You know like you gotta go to meetings, you gotta do this. You gotta like work your steps. We'll worry about the psychological stuff later. You need to address your addiction first, and that was not what I needed. I needed somebody to address my trauma before I could even look at my addiction problems.
Speaker 1:Hey, I wanna break into this episode for a moment. I wanna remind you that survivors of sex trafficking experience trauma as a result. Trauma-informed care is something we learn so that we don't retraumatize victims. However, trauma-informed care will not lower someone's trauma. We have survivors that need to heal inside. Most quality direct service workers connect survivors to needed services like healthcare, housing, legal services and more, but these services, while necessary, won't address the internal trauma. Even when we connect them to trauma treatment counselors, they spend about an hour a week addressing traumas that have taken over their entire lives. They need so much more. Connecting someone in needed housing won't fix the brokenness inside. Arresting their trafficker allows them justice, but it won't heal the internal pain. Linking them to a lawyer won't take them to a place of reclaiming their freedom and experiencing genuine joy. Walking alongside survivors to provide support, nurturing love, kindness and to build a relationship is critical, but they also need the tools to regain the power, choice and voice internally. Healing the internal pain requires survivors to do the internal work.
Speaker 1:I've worked with and studied the issue for almost 30 years. I recently wrote a book outlining the 12 journeys that survivors need to go on to heal the trauma and to live the life they truly wanna live. I'd love to train you to be a group facilitator, leading survivors toward the internal healing they need. The training is the TNT Survivors Journey Group. Let me train you to facilitate these important groups and put survivors on their path to living the life they want and experience the freedom and joy they deserve. To learn more, go to my website silyawaymsoncom and watch the free webinar to learn more about the course. I look forward to training you and helping you help survivors to heal. And now on with the podcast.
Speaker 2:And so it began the cycle of going back and forth and I see women my age that had the same experience. I do hear some they are addressing trauma now in treatment centers, but not all of them. There's still a lot of 12 step based treatment centers. And look, I always honored the 12 steps in the program because it helped me get on my feet. It gave me the community I needed. But let's face it, those sponsors and other people in those organizations they're not professionals and they're not equipped to deal with trauma.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I couldn't agree more because and the program that you went to that actually focused on trauma. I mean, that's even so rare because but people are talking about trauma informed care. That just means I'm informed that you have trauma. That doesn't translate into I'm helping you heal your trauma, just because I know you have trauma. So this is where we are, at least people. Some people can use the words but, yeah, they have yet to know what they mean and develop some type of program. So when you spend a year completing your trauma program, what tell us what that was about?
Speaker 2:Well, and actually at the age of about 45, my trafficker had actually sent me to school to learn digital marketing so that we could put the girls on the web. And I was at a porn convention and I met this beautiful person, Annie LaBeurre, and she had a program called Destiny House and I met her at the porn convention. So, fast forward about another year. I was just miserable. I could not stay. I had all this opportunity because I had all this knowledge and this professional ability, but I couldn't function in a professional environment. And, Annie, not only was I spiritually renewed, I also began EMDR. Emdr changed my life.
Speaker 1:And describe that, because there's a lot of research. And just let me for one second say that you know I want to revisit trauma-informed care. That just tells you. I know you have trauma. If I haven't done anything, I just didn't re-harm you, didn't re-trigger you, but in order to heal, EMDR has had some great results in terms of research, so I'm so glad you brought that up. Tell us a little bit about EMDR. What is it and actually what did you do?
Speaker 2:So EMDR is built up around specific trauma points. So it starts with a lot of talking therapy and the therapist identifies certain traumatic events that happen during the course of your life. Then you reprocess those. So in the first time that I had EMDR they used because I could not typically EMDRs use eye movement. It means eye movement, the syntha-sentation sorry bad pronunciation Reprocessing yeah. Reprocessing bad pronunciation. I joke around. Sometimes I say that just because I'm a redneck.
Speaker 1:That's okay, I love this accent, but go ahead.
Speaker 2:But so they used vibration. So I had these little pods that were vibration pods and I'd alternate them in my hands or under my thigh, I would begin to talk about it and the vibration would change intensity at different points. Then what happens is that they ask you to recognize what your body is feeling. So, as your body is feeling more, even based on different vibration, which is different today, I still do EMDR. I'm on my second round of.
Speaker 2:EMDR. When I got successful, I had a bunch of things come up that I wasn't equipped to deal with and we could talk about that later. But now I do EMDR with eye movement. You actually pinpoint the direction that you're looking at and you go by the cues in your body on how your body feels. So maybe looking to the left the feeling may be real intense and then maybe when you get to the right the feeling might die down some. So they work on the body and the brain. It's really fantastic, fascinating science, but it works. It's literally changed my life.
Speaker 1:And so, when you're either using the vibration or the rapid eye movement, are you thinking about like a traumatizing experience at that time, or what are you asked to think about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you think about the traumatizing experience and they basically bring you to the highest level of that traumatizing experience and then use the eye movement to bring you down. So in the future, when you think about that, the feelings are more level and you're not experiencing these highs and these lows, but you're experiencing a more level vibrational area that your body and your brain can deal with more appropriately.
Speaker 1:And so is there ever a time when you recall this memory and your stress or emotion or body's reaction is high that you can bring yourself down.
Speaker 2:Yes, I was actually taught, and I remember this, back in those days I was in Las Vegas, I had graduated from the program and I was in a sober living house and driving around, and I drive around Las Vegas and I'd see things that would trigger me, and so what I would do is I would hit my knee on the inside of the car door in rhythm and it would bring me down and it would keep me, basically because I would go in these areas, because I thought I was curious about what was going on and it basically kept me clean, kept me from using drugs under medication. Nowadays, actually, there's a YouTube video with the ball moving back and forth and I do EMDR myself all the time when I get over, stressed and so you use the tool that you were taught for your own self care.
Speaker 1:I think that's awesome, and for you it was.
Speaker 2:you had to address the trauma first, then the substance use issue, and it's exactly, and I and I addressed the trauma initially inside of a environment where I was very highly supervised, where I stayed for a year at Destiny House and I moved on to sober living and continued EMDR as I was out in the world, which was particularly healthy for me. It was a lot, it was help, it was helpful to be able to have those world day to day triggers come up and be able to handle them by myself and learn self care and learn how to take care of myself.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think that's so much rooted in there as you know, regaining your power, choice and voice, because you knew, even though they were saying oh no, you got to take your substance use issue first. You knew yourself and you knew your body and you knew what you needed, and I think that level of empowerment is really amazing and being intuitive enough in yourself to say this is the route I need to take. So you and Tina, you are also, before we talk about the Queens, I want to mention that you're an award winner, so do you want to tell the listeners?
Speaker 2:how much?
Speaker 1:you've won this award.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I've been in digital marketing for quite some time almost 20 years basically, between relapses for many, many years.
Speaker 2:But I affectionately, later in my career, became known as Mamati and when I started the Queens, I started this organization, queens, to empower women, and in order to explain the award, I have to kind of explain the concept of Queens.
Speaker 2:And so the concept of Queens for me is that internet marketing, affiliate marketing, performance marketing it's a male dominated field and I would repeatedly watch, and most of the networking is done in a trade show environment.
Speaker 2:So every time I would go to a trade show, I'd see a lot of the pretty girls would be hired for the trade show booth, and they would hire girls fresh out of college and she was basically being used as clickbait, and then, once the customer came to the booth, the guys would quickly jump up and the young lady would rarely get part of the. You know a little bit of the deal. She would not get compensated the same way that the male counterpart was compensated. And so the reason for creating Queens is that I wanted to empower these women and I wanted to give them a safe place to network. So we started doing trade show events where we'd have private meeting rooms are, and we also have cocktail parties where the women could get together, facebook groups, skype groups where women can network with each other, and this was considered a humanitarian effort in the affiliate marketing, performance marketing arena, and so it was awarded the IP because of humanitarian, humanitarian contributions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I love like I said, I loved it the name Queens. I love that you are supportive of women who use their beauty as part of their work and there are so many professions where this takes place, right so, but you empower them to be able to take control, to be able to be adequately compensated, to be able to reclaim their power in terms of their profession and what they do. So how long have you operated, queens?
Speaker 2:Queens started in 2021. I opened my own internet marketing agency in 2020 with a business partner right in the middle of COVID. Okay, I like that Okay, right in the middle of COVID. But and it's definitely been a journey, but I had the idea for Queens. I do a lot of travel and particularly flight booking, which is a vertical in our industry, and so one day this guy called me the queen of flight booking and that was just a joke.
Speaker 2:For a little while I was the queen of flight booking and then he saw me at a conference and he said there's the queen of paper call. Well, paper call is the type of advertising that we do and I really had thought to myself and I'm like I'm not the only queen here, there's lots of queens here and the idea just kept brewing and kept brewing and we launched our first event at the Las Vegas Affiliate Summit and we chartered. My company, Ringlad Media, hosted an event on the high roller wheel and so we had all the women come and join on the high roller. There's actually pictures on our website of all the events where we get together and network with one another, but that was our first event and it's just moved rapidly since then. It's really grown quickly.
Speaker 1:That's so cool. And with your digital company, do you still take on clients? Just that in general. Do you still have a thing.
Speaker 2:It's more specifically to performance, marketing and lead generation. So our company acts as basically a broker. So we have media buyers and advertisers media buyers on one side, advertisers on the other side and so I take the results of these media buyers and I sell them to call centers in different industries like insurance, home improvement, home services, internet, tv and flight booking and travel, hotel bookings. Just a lot of different industries. Oh, that's it.
Speaker 1:And you said you got started because the trafficker wanted you to learn how to better his business. But actually you took this and you spend it and actually benefited.
Speaker 2:became a pretty good career for you Exactly exactly, and that's why I'm so driven to help other women to do that as well.
Speaker 1:So, tina, tell me a lot of listeners, their advocates, they want to do the right thing, they want to do the best thing that they can possibly do to fight against human trafficking. Do you have any advice for them in general, or any advice for women? Sometimes we are a little more hesitant to jump out there and start our own businesses and shine.
Speaker 2:I think you have to know your worth number one. If you don't understand the true value of yourself as a woman, then it's really hard to make yourself bigger, because that's what it takes. It takes making yourself bigger than all of the other forces around you. It starts with, and so now I have this new initiative that we just started with Queens and I had a local digital marketing training academy that trains media buyers to offer me five scholarships for human trafficking survivors to go through the program. What we've done is we've matched these survivors with mentors, these professional women in our organization, with these human trafficking survivors as they go through this digital marketing training and hopefully become entrepreneurs as a result of this. And for survivors, this offers them the opportunity to be remote.
Speaker 2:When working with girls and working with women in human trafficking, it's really important to notice what triggers them. So you have a woman and you've sent her to school and she's went to college and she's got this fantastic job and she just can't make it. She keeps going from job to job. I did the same thing. I could not handle corporate life. I could not handle somebody telling me what to do. People would be ugly, like they always are, and I would get triggered and then I would blow up and then I would walk out, and it was this cycle and it wasn't until I really embraced in 2017. I went completely remote long before COVID.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I tell survivors that are coming on is to use those transferable skills. We had natural survival skills out there. We knew what to say, went to say it, how to say it, to achieve the desired result. Well, you can take those very same skills and bring them into the professional world and be very successful, because we know when we were out there, we fought hard and hustled hard to make sure that we got what it took to keep to really avoid a beating, and so we built this natural drive and this natural hustle and so use that to your ability in order to achieve your dreams. And I heard the podcast that you did with Polaris and the survivors the survivor study I think it was called In Hormes Way and in that survivor study they talked about this place where survivors are rescued, they're emotionally stabilized and they often programs and facilities often fall short on propelling a woman to a place where she can succeed, which is the whole goal of what I'm doing with Queens and the Queens Arise Digital Scholarship Program. I love that.
Speaker 1:That is empowering, that is using someone's strengths. Some people can say why did I go through this? How can this be useful? Well, it probably made someone very empathetic, but those skills being able to read someone, because your life could depend on it, being able to assess them, being able to understand your environment and how to stay safe All of those things are what you talked about being transferable. So I thank you so much for recognizing that survivors need to become thrivers. They need to become economically successful, they need to address their trauma. These are things that many people don't talk about. They want to raise awareness.
Speaker 2:They want to rescue you, which is awesome, and they want to raise awareness. But it's so important to bring the survivor to a point where she can live comfortably, where she can have financial security, where she can take care of her family in a safe environment. So what better of safe environment than in your home? And a lot of women they go back to trafficking because they cannot support themselves. They end up in a minimum wage job I caught working at Walgreens and you just can't make it that way and so they start thinking about maybe if I just go to the hospital, maybe if I just did this one little deal. And then, as soon as they get out there, of course the traffickers are out there waiting for them and they're re-exploited over and over again and I feel like I've done well for my life.
Speaker 2:At 58 years old, I bought my first house. I recently and this is and I like I brag about this, but the significant of it is I just bought my first luxury car. I bought a Lexus and it's in my name, it's not in some traffickers name that he lets me drive.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love it I just love it. It's in my name Right and thank you, welcome to the club. I have Lexus too first one ever in my life as well, yes, and I think you deserve it, queen. So thank you, queen, tina, and thank you for making those women take their crown that's been laying over there on the ground and you're telling them in all kinds of ways put that crown on your head and wear it well. So thank you so much, tina, for your time and thank you for what you do.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. It's been great conversation.
Speaker 1:That was Tina Dixon. Please look her up. She is amazing and doing amazing work and if you need her professional services, please use survivors, use drivers, use their companies, use their business. Spend your money in places that make your money. Speak for you, queen Tina. I love it. So I looked up the definition of queen. It says a female ruler of an independent state, an independent state. She is operating as a free, independent agent. It also says a queen, according to the game of chess, is the most powerful piece on the table. Why? Because the queen is able to move in any direction unobstructed. So I wish you nothing but success, queen Tina, and all the queens that work with you. Until next time the fight continues. Let's not just do something, let's do the best thing. If you like this episode of Emancipation Nation, please subscribe and I'll send you the weekly podcast. Until then, the fight continues.