January marks Human Trafficking Awareness Month, and survivors like Alicia Tappan are speaking out. A former high-achieving teenager, Tappan’s life changed at 17 when she was drugged and assaulted at a party hosted by her track coach.
“Then it turned into a nightmare, and he drugged us,” Tappan said. “He had us in very vulnerable situations.”
The coach recorded and sold footage of her rape. Though initially unreported, a school administrator noticed behavior changes and investigated. Tappan told him: “I don’t know, I think I was raped.” Law enforcement discovered, “I was one of 33 other victims. He had these kinds of gangs in school before mine, my school and then another school. And he had gotten away with it for 10 years, victimizing children.”
Years of substance abuse and exploitation followed. “My real experience of late teenage relationships were always very violent and always very sexual,” Tappan said. “I assumed that’s how men treated women because I didn’t understand healthy relationships. I didn’t have an appreciation for hard work because I knew how to make money quickly.”
She described the cycle: “You got to make money fast. You’ll do anything to get what it takes. You’re willing to hurt people. Meanwhile, you’re being drugged, you’re being raped, you’re being put into positions where you don’t have a ride out.”
While in rehab in 2022, Tappan had a breakthrough: “I realized it wasn’t my addiction that was holding me back. It was actually a psychological issue … my brain was so used to keeping me safe. It would black out. It would forget things.”
Survivor-Led Solutions
She founded Survivor-Led Solutions to help others. “Survivor-Led Solutions is really birthed out of an idea of getting on my own as a survivor and wanting to do the work to help the long-term needs of survivors who are trying so hard to create a new pathway for other women and men to come forward.”
Survivor-Led Solutions consults organizations to become survivor-informed and centered with an emphasis on trauma-informed care. Its mission includes providing survivors nationwide with leadership, professional development and ongoing mental health services. The organization partners with business coaches, speaking coaches, mental health professionals, law enforcement, military and non-governmental organizations to provide training and consulting for human trafficking awareness and trauma-informed care.
Now pursuing a doctorate in forensic psychology, Tappan works to prevent trafficking and improve victim identification. “A lot of kids who are trafficked will at some point become incarcerated because of their behaviors, whether it’s truancy from school or acting out and crimes that were committed,” she explained. “Law enforcement wasn’t really trained to see those victims, so they were always the perpetrator.”
Her organization provides comprehensive support: “We do a top-down approach, meaning we work with survivors who are in leadership positions, helping cultivate more professional development through contracts, public speaking gigs, training and also a bottom-up approach, meaning we work with the women who are coming out of incarcerated situations and are in recovery and walking along their healing path.”
Tappan addresses systemic issues. “As you continue to move down this narrative, you start to understand the research and the lack of restorative justice programs across the nation. We are finding that a lot of survivors, in some point of their life, whether in childhood or as an adult, prostitution included, that we had victims being incarcerated.”
Because I Wore This
As part of Human Trafficking Awareness Month activities, her organization is hosting its second annual “Because I Wore This” fundraiser tonight at Step One Maserati Pensacola.
Survivor-Led Solutions is hosting its second annual Because I Wore This demonstration fundraiser from 6-8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 30, at Step One Maserati Pensacola. To order tickets, visit survivorledsolutions.org.
AUDIO VERSION
