The flower on Jennifer Kempton’s neck starts just behind her right ear, fanning in inky petals out towards her jawbone, a tropical medley of yellow and pink and green against her skin. When she gets up in the morning, the flower is the first thing she looks at, and it reminds her of what she’s survived.

A year ago Jennifer visited a small tattoo shop just outside her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, with a very different marking where the flower now blooms. Then, the side of her neck was marked with a crude black crown and the words “King Munch” – the insignia of the dope gang that sold her for sex out of boarded-up houses in a poor suburb of Columbus.

The tattoo on her neck was not the only scar that Jennifer carried from this period in her life. Men had also tattooed their names on her arm and her back. Just above her groin another announced that she was “Property of Salem”, marking her as his possession and money-maker.

Pimp-led prostitution is one of the most violent and prolific forms of trafficking found in the US. Many are branded with tattoos by their traffickers as a sign of ownership and control. Jennifer Kempton explains how she left years of abuse and drug addiction behind and is helping others to do likewise Guardian

“I was branded like cattle,” she says, standing outside the Among the Living tattoo shop in Lancaster, Ohio – the place where she says she freed herself from a life of violence and slavery. “But coming here that first time, knowing that when I walked out the door I’d have replaced that sign of evil with something that was beautiful and full of life and hope: I knew I was going to set myself free, and man, that was a great feeling.”

Jennifer’s journey into the darkness of human trafficking started, like many of the women she worked alongside on the streets of downtown Columbus, with a chaotic and abusive childhood, a history of violent and destructive relationships and a downwards spiral into street prostitution and drug addiction.

A year and a half ago she was, in her own words, exhausted, starved, addicted and barely alive. Amid the horror of her existence, she put a noose around her neck in an attempt to end her life. The rope broke and she survived. Yet although she managed to escape the streets into sobriety and recovery, those tattoos remained.

Reliable statistics are rare, but those in the field estimate hundreds of thousands of women and girls – the majority of whom are US citizens – are sold for sexual exploitation in America’s $9.5bn human-trafficking industry. According to the US Department of Justice, 300,000 of those at risk are children.

Branding, whether by tattoo or intentional scarring, has become a disturbing characteristic of one particular subset of this thriving criminal operation. Pimp-led prostitution is widely considered one of the most brutal and violent of all forms of human trafficking found in the States. Brad Myles is chief executive of Polaris Project, an influential US anti-trafficking organisation. “When you look at this particular type of trafficking,” he says, “where you have thousands of self-labelled pimps selling hundreds of thousands of women and children for profit in every state across America, the branding is all part of the extreme nature of the ways they control and profit from this trade.”

Myles says his organisation has come across hundreds of women and children who have had their arms, backs, legs, faces, breasts and even eyelids and gums marked with pimp’s names and gang tags or with barcodes, sexual slang words or dollar signs.

Others, like Jennifer, have “property of” tattoos on their groins or foreheads. In recent years, trafficking tattoos have also started to be seen in other countries, such as Spain and Romania, and there is anecdotal evidence of it happening in the UK. But it is now systemic in America.

New beginnings: Andrea was the first woman to be given a Survivors Ink scholarship. Almudena Toral Photograph: Almudena Toral

When I ask Jennifer how common the tattooing was when she was on the streets, she laughs and says that pretty much every woman who survives the streets comes out with some kind of mark on her body. Some women get the tattoos willingly, while others are forced or pressed into it. She tells me of crack houses where a tattoo artist would often be in residence, swapping tattoos for drugs and branding the women as they came in between jobs.

Even after she freed herself of the gangs and the drugs, the tattoos on her body kept her trapped in that life, unable to move on. “Those tattoos to me meant betrayal, because I went from thinking I was in the first loving relationship of my life with a guy who treated me like a queen, to becoming an addict and being sold by him to supply his drug habit,” she says. “And then he sold me again for financial gain to a known gang that put me on the streets and took me to the darkest point in my life.

“And after enduring this, being raped and beaten and abused, and after getting clean of my addiction, every time I took a shower or tried to look at my body I was reminded of the violence and exploitation I’d suffered. I was so grateful to be alive, but having to look at those scars, seeing those names on your body every day, just puts you in a state of depression. You begin to wonder whether you’ll ever be anything but the person those tattoos say you are.”

Looking at Jennifer as she stands in the morning sunshine, it’s almost impossible to believe that less than two years ago she was living the life she describes. Today, although clearly still traumatised by what she experienced, she is confident, ferociously bright, passionate, driven and utterly unstoppable. She has been clean of all drugs for more than a year, has a job and is active in her local church. After a year and a half in rehab she is back living with her grandmother and working towards finding an apartment with her daughter. At several points over the five days I spend with her I wonder where she would be if she’d had a loving and abuse-free childhood. “I’d be in the frickin’ White House!” she screeches, lighting up another cigarette and punching her fist in the air.

We’re here today at the tattoo shop because six months ago Jennifer decided to try to help other women in Columbus still marked by trafficking brands. So she launched Survivors Ink, a grassroots project that runs a tattoo scholarship programme in which women who have lived through human trafficking, and have been clean and in recovery for more than six months, can apply to get their tattoos covered up. So far she’s given out seven scholarships, raising the money through local fundraisers at churches, universities and community events.

When you meet the women who Jennifer has already helped, it becomes clear why she felt she needed to do something. Raising the hundreds of dollars they’d need to get their tattoos covered up without the help of Survivors Ink is simply not an option for any of them. All are in recovery, still getting clean. None, apart from Jennifer, has managed to find work, thanks to histories of substance abuse and convictions for soliciting.

“Doesn’t matter that you’re trying to get your life back together, doesn’t matter if the courts have ID-ed you as someone who was trafficked, you’re still just a criminal junkie,” says Jennifer.

A few days earlier she had taken us to meet Andrea, the first woman to be given a Survivors Ink scholarship. Andrea is warm, softly spoken, polite to a fault, has beautiful eyes and is dressed cheerfully in a bright pink angora sweater. Her story, when she tells it, is savage and deeply distressing.

After a dysfunctional, violent childhood, Andrea ended up on the streets, where she fell into the grip of drug addiction and under the control of a gang of dope boys. When she was suspected of stealing a small amount of money, one of the gang, “JR”, took her off the street and beat her with a baseball bat before taking her to a house where she was set upon by a group who put out cigarettes on her body and pistol whipped her. JR then took her, barely conscious and bleeding, to the basement and held her down while his friend tattooed his initials and a heart on her breast.

“After that, in his mind, he took ownership of me,” she says. “He trafficked me out of this house until I found a way to leave. And after that I carried his name on my body for nine years.”

How did it feel to carry his name around for all that time, I ask.

“I just felt lost, like I didn’t know who I was any more,” she says. “It didn’t matter what I’d say or do: the tattoo sent a message to everyone that I was owned and was not my own person. I just felt broken. And even after I got away from him, I would have people ask me about the tattoo and then ask why I let him do this to me, and I didn’t know what to say. I guess I was lost in my addiction.”

You think you had a choice, I ask, staggered.

She looks at me, then looks away. She starts to cry. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t want it.”

She says that it’s important for her to tell her story, because for years her life had seemed to be in somebody else’s hands. When she heard about Jennifer’s project, it was as if a door opened for her. Now she wants to claim her past back for herself. “Every time I looked at that tattoo it took me back there to a lot of bad memories. I was trying to brush it off like it never happened and it never mattered – but it did, it did matter, so I felt very grateful for the opportunity to get the ownership of my body back. Getting the new tattoo has been a lot of how I’ve been able to recover and work on the scars inside,” she says.

Best foot forward: Christina with her new tattoo obscuring the mark of the husband who trafficked her. almudena toral Photograph: Almudena Toral

Instead of the initials, she now has a lily flower with her daughter’s name inside. “I’m just so in love with my daughter – she means so much to me,” she says. She sits up straight in her chair. “I got a flower because I can see I can blossom into something beautiful now I’ve left that behind.”

Like Jennifer and all the women helped through Survivors Ink, Andrea’s cover-up was done by local tattoo artist Charles “Chuck” Waldo. Waldo was so appalled that people were using his beloved tattoo art to brand women and children they were exploiting that he now does all of Survivor Ink’s tattoo scholarships for free, only charging Jennifer the price of the ink and the rental of space in the shop.

For Waldo, whose wiry frame is covered with fading tattoos, this work is also a form of redemption after a life of bank robberies, jail and “other very bad shit”, as he puts it. “I am nowhere near a saint – I have many ghosts in my closet – but with this work I know I’m impacting positively on someone’s life and that this will far outlive me,” he says.

“Tattoo art has been around since the beginning of human history, and I find it deplorable that this is happening. When I think about trafficking, I never thought it was something that happened here in the United States. It gives me an appreciation that whatever trauma and turmoil I’ve had in my life doesn’t even come close. But this gives me the opportunity to change their lives and help them move on.”

Moving on is something that is a complex and tangled process for all of the trafficking survivors I meet in Ohio. Many are involved in the state’s groundbreaking Catch programme, which offers women facing jail terms for soliciting and prostitution an alternative in the form of a three-year residential recovery and reintegration programme.

CC Murphy, who helps run the programme, says that there are still huge misunderstandings around the nature of sex trafficking, particularly in relation to street prostitution and drug addiction. “I think the majority of people still think of trafficking as all foreign or all overseas, but it isn’t what normally happens,” she says, sitting in her small office in the Columbus courthouse. “Trafficking is right next door. It can be very small and very local. It can just be a woman in a relationship with another drug user who is ordering her to solicit to support both of their habits. It doesn’t have to be a giant syndicate or some huge crime ring. It’s normally just Joe down the street who is manipulating and profiting from his girlfriend or children.”

Murphy says she believes that around 95% of the women she works with at Catch have been trafficked. “Of course not all prostitution or sex work is trafficking, but trafficking is a very clearly defined legal term and it is far more common than anyone thinks,” she says. The legal definition of human trafficking under US federal law is: the recruitment, harbouring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labour or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery.

“There is a huge misconception about the choices women make,” Murphy says. “There are always men waiting for the girl whose father keeps hitting her or coming into her room at night, or whose mother is not present, or drunk, or high. These men often give them the first hope of love and protection they’ve ever had, and once they’re inside their heads – especially if addiction is part of that dynamic – then the psychological and emotional manipulation is often more powerful than the physical stuff.” The National Runaway Safeline in the States estimates that one third of all teenage run-aways will be approached by a potential exploiter within 48 hours of leaving home.

“The element of control is making the women feel like they can’t leave, they have nowhere else to go and that this is what they deserve.”

Erica was the second woman to whom Jennifer offered a scholarship. It was to cover up the words “Sin City”, the name of a drug gang, which were scrawled across the back of her neck. Erica says that even as they pimped her out and fed her drugs, the gang offered her a warped sense of protection and belonging after a childhood of violence and abuse.

“When Jennifer told me what she was doing, I was so hesitant at first. I was thinking: ‘Oh my gosh, I could never go back there if I got [the gang tattoo] removed from my neck,’” she says. “When I had Sin City written on me I could go to any of the guys and get what I needed to get high and now I can’t do that. They used to say: ‘Sin City will feed you, they will clothe you and they will bury you.’ Now, looking back, I can’t believe that I ever agreed to have that tattoo on my body. I mean, yes, I was pressured, but I had a choice and I did it.”

She lifts her hair off her neck and shows us what has replaced “Sin City”. The words “Free Yourself” are written in looping script with tiny birds flying out across her back.

Under cover: Erica’s tattoo covers up the ‘Sin City’ tag she had been given by gang members. Almudena Toral Photograph: Almudena Toral

Ohio is beginning to be seen as one of the more progressive states when it comes to its treatment and legislation around trafficking victims. Despite not being considered a major US trafficking hub, such as Chicago, the Bay Area or Miami, Ohio still has a significant human-trafficking problem. Each year more than 1,000 children become victims with another 3,000 considered “at risk”. A preliminary report into the scale of sex trafficking in the state by the attorney general’s office found that 50% of victims were under 18 when they were first trafficked.

The state has recently reconvened a Human Trafficking Commission and passed a House Bill known as the Safe Harbor Law which changes the charge of human trafficking to a first-degree felony with a mandatory jail term of 10 years and improves care for victims. Jennifer is about to benefit from another new procedure which will see her criminal record for soliciting expunged. From next month she will have a clean start.

Jennifer says that all of this is helping keep her on track as she tries to juggle her 50-hour work weeks, trauma therapy, church and seeing her daughter, and her Survivors Ink casefile, which keeps growing and growing. Because of her deal with Waldo, her tattoo scholarships average out at around $80 each – the cost paling into insignificance when you consider how this changes these women’s lives – but she still struggles to fundraise the money she needs to get the work done.

“At the moment I’ve got 13 applications that I’ve approved and now need to raise money for. That’s about $1,500 worth of work that I need to raise funds for right there,” she says. “Probably doesn’t seem like a lot to most people, but for me that is literally months of work, and I’m getting two or three applications a week. But that’s 13 women who are putting their trust in me that I’m going to get this done.”

Jennifer grows furious when she talks about the way women are treated after they manage to escape their trafficking situation. “There is this stereotype that we’re a success if we have a minimum-wage job and we can stay clean,” she says. To her this isn’t acceptable. “We can live way above that. Trafficking survivors have faced evil and conquered it. We have lived on the streets and survived the worst of the worst. We have had demons attack us, beat us, rape us. We are some of the strongest women in the world, and we can go above and beyond what other people can do. You’re not going to box me up – no way, I’m sorry but no. I’m here to stay.”

As we talk outside the shop, a car pulls up. It’s Survivors Ink’s eighth tattoo scholarship recipient, Christina, who has come to meet Jennifer for the first time and cover up a tattoo on her foot. It’s her husband’s name, which he tattooed on her himself at the same time as he trafficked his wife out of their marital home.

Christina is shaking with nerves as she sits in the chair. Over the whir of the needle and under Waldo’s steady hand, the name on her foot is replaced by a black and red rose and a crucifix over the course of the next two hours. When the needle first goes on her foot, she and Jennifer hold on to each other and cry.

Afterwards, as she turns her foot one way and then another, admiring Waldo’s artwork, Christina says that for her this day marks the end of one life and the beginning of her next.

“I feel like as long as I had his name on my foot he had a claim on me. I’ve felt so dead inside, but now it’s like a new chapter is starting,” she says. “It’s just overwhelming, all of this. That I get to choose what goes on my body this time. That it’s finally over.”

For information, go to www.survivorsink.org or email jennifer@survivorsink.org