At 11:30 on a Friday night, five women park outside a strip club called Cabaret Royale in Northwest Dallas. They're about to launch a mission. The women — Rebekah, Dominique, Lisa, Aeisha and Emily — are representatives of an organization called Valiant Hearts which seeks to end sexual exploitation in North Texas. This is their monthly outreach, when they visit places where women are possibly being trafficked for sex. They offer the victims a way out.

At a prayer meeting hours before, Rebekah Charleston prayed for safety. Charleston is the leader of Valiant Hearts, which doesn't share the last names of volunteers or the women they help. She, Dominique and Lisa unload pink gift bags from the trunk — enough for the 40 dancers working at Cabaret Royale this night — and head for the club's double doors.

The other two women stay in the car. They're the support team. Charleston will be on a two-way radio the whole time they're in the club, just in case tensions flare.

Inside, they're greeted by a house mom, a matronly club employee with a long skirt and a supply of snacks and hygiene products for the dancers. Her name is Patty. She gives Charleston a hug and ushers the ladies to a backstage dressing room where several women sit in front of makeup counters, smoking and ignoring the throb of music and men on the other side of the wall. Lacey is on stage. She always dances to Brockhampton.

The visitors pass out the gift bags and ask the dancers about themselves. They don't sell or cajole. Charleston is uncompromising on that point. The women need to feel that they have a choice. For many, it's the absence of choices that landed them in this life.

It was for her.

Rebekah Charleston grew up in Keller, part of a stable, middle class family with six kids. In 1986, when Charleston was five, one of her brothers committed suicide and the family didn't know how to deal with that pain, didn't know who to ask. Charleston said her parents were autocratic, and at age 16, she moved in with a friend. She started going to school less, using drugs more. Twice before she was 17, she was raped, but she kept the secret for fear that she would be blamed.

Her parents were worried sick. Afraid, they took drastic action. They put her in an institution in East Texas, a group home. To them, it was an intervention, an act of love. To Charleston, it was abandonment.

Six months later, Charleston earned a home visit for good behavior. On the last night of her visit, she slipped out of her parent's house and never looked back. She lived with anyone who would take her in. She stole food. She couldn't get a job. Eventually, she found a group of people who would take her in: people who had a spare couch, people who didn't judge, people who had drugs.

"I was always attracted to other really broken people because I felt like they would accept my brokenness and not judge me," Charleston said. "And while they did that, they also had other intentions for me."

When the drug business hit a lull, her new friends talked her into stripping. She got a job at a club called Dreamers on Industrial Boulevard. She was 17. She didn't have an ID. She was hired on the spot.

"I hated what I was doing," Charleston said. "I remember just feeling gross, sitting on 56-year-old men's laps drinking shots of Hennessy just to make it through the night."

Before they say goodbye to the dancers at Cabaret Royale, Charleston pats the hand of a red headed girl wearing a tiara and a lot of makeup. Charleston knows the look. It's a mask to cover her age or her shame or a face that doesn't seem pretty enough in the mirror. Tiara girl is holding a highball. The ice cubes clink. Charleston and her colleagues head back to the car.

North Texas is home to hundreds of businesses like Cabaret Royale, though it's almost impossible to accurately count sex businesses, workers or traffickers. There are Google listings for 26 strip clubs in Dallas alone. Add porn shops, massage parlors, modeling studios, spas and other categories, and the number skyrockets. A 2016 study by the University of Texas Institute On Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault estimated there are 79,000 minor and youth victims of sex trafficking in Texas. The global sex trade is the fastest growing form of commerce, worth $32 billion annually, according to a 2013 study by the National Institutes of Health. In fact, human trafficking is the fastest growing category of organized crime in America.

Most sex workers are trafficked. According to a 2005 report from the U.S. Department of State, "The vast majority of women in prostitution do not want to be there. Few seek it out or choose it, and most are desperate to leave it."

And trafficking is common at legally-formed sexually oriented businesses. Charleston said, "Where you have porn you have trafficking. Where you have dancing, you have trafficking. For me, I met both my traffickers in strip clubs."

Rebekah Charleston was a victim of sex trafficking before making it out to get an education. Now she is the director at Valiant Hearts, a Colleyville nonprofit that helps victims of prostitution and sex work. (Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

'The first day was great'

"I met this guy that seemed really cute," Charleston recalled. He was charming. And he had drugs. He could take care of her. She wouldn't have to strip any more. So she ran away from the club with him.

"The first day was great. He told me all of his dreams, and we got high together," she recalled. "The next day I would find out what his dreams were going to cost me in the form of my body."

Her trafficker — she thought of him as a boyfriend — was named Goldie. Goldie introduced Charleston to two other girls and told her they would show her the ropes.

"I thought, 'Okay, this guy is my boyfriend now. He's my whole world. This has to be okay.' So I got in the car thinking we would probably go rob somewhere, which was how I was surviving at that point. But I found myself in the back seat of a car on Harry Hines Boulevard being told exactly how I had to ask people if they wanted to have sex with me and exactly how much money I had to charge them. And it was like my entire world flipped upside down on top of me. I had no idea what to do. I thought, 'If I run, I'm going to get murdered and chopped up in little pieces and no one will ever find my body.' And so I stayed and I obeyed them."

Goldie kept close tabs on the girls' work ethics. They had to do as they were told.

"If I deviated one iota from their script, I would get in trouble." (Getting in "trouble" meant being beaten.) "It was a miserable situation. I felt disgusting."

And she was starved. Goldie gave her enough money every day to get a candy bar and a soda. She worked all night, slept fitfully during the day, and repeated the cycle.

For months.

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"I got really suicidal. I should have been sitting in a high school classroom. Instead, I was being sold repeatedly to men. Crowded parking lots full of men waiting for me. I felt lower than dirt. I hated myself. I couldn't even imagine ever talking to my family again. How could they ever understand what I was going through?"

It was in one of those parking lots where Charleston met another man. She thought this one might be able to help.

"I was debating: it was either suicide or give this guy a try. He told me I was beautiful. He told me he was going to give me his number and not to give it to the other girls. He made me feel special at a time when I didn't love myself at all. And I thought I was getting away. I had no idea I was only trading chains from one trafficker to another."

His name was L.B. He was 55 years old. He had a home in California.

"I thought I had gotten out. He wanted me to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop using drugs. All these things that felt like he was making me better. That he really loved me. He was finally that romantic relationship that I had been yearning for as a young girl."

Charleston slept safely, and alone, in L.B.'s mansion for months. There were other girls there too but, and unlike her experience in Dallas, they were nice to her. Under L.B.'s leadership, Charleston started to see them all as family.

"He told me they were my sisters and that we were always going to be there for each other and that four heads are better than one and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and all these things I had beaten into my head."

He even had a rhyme:

Stick, stay, pay

never go away

do whatever L.B. say.

Charleston got new tattoos during her stay with L.B. Her left arm is decorated with this message about her new family: "Unity, loyalty, brotherhood, sacrifice, and love equals family."

L.B. was playing a long game. He groomed Charleston for months before he started to abuse her.

"It was horrific, the intense physical abuse, the verbal and emotional abuse which was almost more harmful because that's psychological torture that you can't get away from. Black eyes go away but that voice in your head doesn't."

Eventually, L.B. trafficked Charleston all over the country. She traveled in parallel with the calendar of major sporting events — Charlotte for the NASCAR races, Atlanta for the Super Bowl, New York, Dallas, Southern California.

"My clientele changed from people that were on the street to people that were in suites, but it was the exact same thing. I wound up staying with him for the next 10 years."

Working sting operations

Hotel suites have now become another forum for Charleston's rescue operations. As a member of community task forces in Dallas and Tarrant counties, she participates in sting operations.

On a cold night in Fort Worth, Charleston works with three officers from the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department in a hotel room. They post bogus messages online, posing as Johns. When women arrive for their appointments, they're arrested.

But they're also given a choice. They sit under a brightly colored abstract painting on a hotel bed where they were expecting to have sex with a stranger, and Charleston offers escape. She says they can get counseling and job placement services if they're ready to leave their profession. Few respond positively.

"A lot of times it's hard for law enforcement to understand," Charleston said. "They think that victims should come running out going, 'Help me! Help me!' And we don't. We come out going, 'Screw you. I don't want your help. This is my choice.' And so it's very hard for them to see why we feel that way. It's because we've been coerced and manipulated to believe that. We believe that somehow we chose to be exploited."

Traffickers use all manner of tools to keep their victims under their control: debt, shame, threats, flattery, guilt or the promise of better employment. Charleston can remember the moment she realized she had been trafficked. A friend and fellow victim had escaped the life, a term people in the sex trade often use to describe trafficking. They spoke often.

"She started telling me about trafficking and I was like 'Yeah right, girl. That was our choice. I know we had a pimp but it was our choice. We weren't trafficked.' And it wasn't until one day she asked me a pivotal question. She said, 'Bekah, what would he have done if you said you didn't want to go to work?' And I just started laughing because that would have never happened. I worked 20 hours a day. I was labor trafficked all day in our businesses, and I was sex trafficked all night. And I worked every birthday, every holiday. I remember working 9/11. So the idea that one day I would tell him I didn't want to go was ludicrous, but it was that light bulb moment for me of thinking, 'What choices did I really have?' And so for me that was the beginning."

Traffickers look for victims with trauma or unmet emotional needs that are easy to exploit. The 2016 University of Texas study showed that trafficking is most prevalent among three populations: those who had experienced childhood abuse or maltreatment, those served by the Department of Family and Protective Services, and the homeless. The study estimates that 25 percent of the people in these populations have been victims of human trafficking.

"It's so often that they've been abused as children, they've been raped multiple times, and they feel like that's all they're worth, is taking their clothes off for money," Charleston said. "So what we want to do is just speak to their inner core and say, 'You're valuable. We just want to love on you. If you want a way out, we want to be there to support you. And that's all we want. We don't want anything from you.'"

That's the message Charleston found in 2012 at a church program for expecting mothers.

'I thought I would spontaneously combust'

On January 7, 2012, Charleston drove 23 hours straight through from Las Vegas to North Texas. She had been trafficked for more than 10 years and spent 13 months in federal prison. She had a GED, no job experience, and a rap sheet with 10 arrests including one felony. And she was pregnant.

Two hours after she drove her shaky, rented U-Haul into town, Charleston found herself at Gateway Church in Southlake.

"I thought I would spontaneously combust or something when I walked in the door," she said. "I was really moved during the worship and I went down for prayer after the service." A woman with sad eyes and corkscrew brown curls smiled at her.

"I went up to her and I said — I don't know what I said but I was single and pregnant and I was in church and I thought I would be shunned. She gave me this big hug."

Two days later, Charleston was in a program called Embrace Grace. She learned about birthing classes and swaddling techniques. And her faith grew.

"Slowly, the scales started to fall off my eyes as I committed my life to Jesus. I learned how to have a relationship with him. And a couple of months later I got a phone call from a girl I used to work with in the life and she told me there's this group of church ladies that want to help strippers. Did I want to go to the support group? I remember thinking, 'Yeah right. They're gonna be all judgy. Like, how could I ever relate to these women with these pristine lives that have probably never had my experiences?' But I was pregnant and it was a free meal and so I went."

And she kept going back. Every Wednesday. She got to know those women. And she got a gift bag.

"I remember getting that gift bag on the first night and how impactful that was for me because in my life, you know, I'm not used to people giving me things. Everyone wanted something. But here I was met with the most genuine embraces, non-judgmental eyes — women who saw me for who I was inside and didn't judge me for the things that had happened to me."

That group of "church ladies" was a new organization called Valiant Hearts, formed by a pastor's wife named Carrie Gurley after three strippers rang her doorbell one day and say, "We heard your church helps people."

The friend who invited Charleston stopped coming. Eventually, she went back to the life. But something at Valiant Hearts struck a chord with Charleston.

"I knew I was yearning for something different. I wanted a different life. I never wanted a day of my son's future to look like my past. I wanted to make a change."

Charleston graduated from the Valiant Hearts program in 2013. But escaping her pimp and graduating from a church program are not the same as healing wounds. The University of Texas study reported that women trafficked for sex regularly experience mental health symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. The effects can be devastating and permanent.

"I had to process my trauma. I had to face my trafficker. I had to learn to see myself differently," Charleston said. "Honestly the hardest part to overcome has been that voice in my head after 10 years of abuse and manipulation. It wasn't until I gave my life to Jesus and I had been out of it for a full two years that I was finally able to get my trafficker's voice out of my head. Can you imagine? Every day my leading thought was, 'What do I have to do to make him happy so I don't get beat today?' Even after I wasn't around him that still was just my normal pattern of thinking. All the negative self-talk still creeps up. Sometimes I'll catch myself, if I forget to do something, saying I didn't do it because I'm lazy. And then I'm like, 'Wait a minute, I'm not lazy.' I can only do every day. It's a lifetime of recovery. But it's worth it."

Rebranding

In 2014, Charleston took another step toward defining her life apart from the men who had taken her. It's not uncommon for traffickers to "brand" their victims with tattoos, marks of ownership. Charleston had been marked with L.B.'s name. At a tattoo shop in Deep Ellum, she permanently covered the brand. Now that spot on the back of her neck shows a tree described in the biblical book of Jeremiah:

"But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,

whose confidence is in him.

They will be like a tree planted by the water

that sends out its roots by the stream.

It does not fear when heat comes;

its leaves are always green.

It has no worries in a year of drought

and never fails to bear fruit."

And the trunk of the tree bears the name of another man in Charleston's life: her son.

"I have an amazing six-year-old little boy," she beamed.

Two years after dropping that vestige of her identity as L.B.'s property, Charleston took on a new role. Gurley made Charleston the executive director of Valiant Hearts. Since then, she has trained thousands of law enforcement and community officials about the signs and dangers of human trafficking. Valiant Hearts has served more than 400 women, 85 percent of whom have successfully left the life. Charleston has earned bachelor's and master's degrees in criminal justice. She is a consultant with the National Criminal Justice Training Center. She manages her own business, Rebekah Speaks Out.

"Sometimes it just hits you differently. The other day I was on the way to work and there was a girl walking in the rain and she had her Homecoming mum and she had her hair done. And it was just that realization that, wow, I was being sold on the street to a ton of men every night at your age. And you're in high school. It just — you mourn for what was lost. For me, sharing it makes it worth something. Otherwise it was just a hell I survived. If I can make one other person not blame themselves or not feel ashamed about what's happened to them, then it's worth it."

Ryan Sanders is a writer and pastor at Irving Bible Church. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.