Child sex-trafficking expert and human rights advocate Kate Price reveals her own childhood history of sexual abuse and violence in her harrowing but ultimately hopeful memoir, This Happened to Me: A Reckoning. Price and her older sister grew up in a tiny Pennsylvania town in northern Appalachia, where a generational pattern of addiction and violence manifested in constant physical and emotional cruelty delivered by her father. He also drugged her and sexually abused her until she reached puberty, at which time he left Price's mother and moved out. Price coped by throwing herself into her studies and books. These, along with the safe spaces of libraries and bookstores, she credits with saving her life.
Her determination to escape her past led Price to Massachusetts to pursue an academic career, but the trauma she'd endured and buried haunted her, resulting in depression and severe anxiety. Through therapy with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, in which Price was featured, Price discovered that her father had, in unspeakably horrendous acts, not only sexually abused her but also trafficked her to other men. Over the many years that followed this revelation, Price began a long, nonlinear journey of self-realization and healing, finally breaking the cycle of trauma through sheer force of will. Price's story, told with passion and joy for the life she built for herself, is deeply moving. That she survived, thrived, and become an advocate for other sex-trafficking victims is nothing short of breathtaking. --Debra Ginsberg, author and freelance editor