Katariina Rosenblatt was 13 the first time someone tried to sell her for sex.
“She approached me and made me feel like I was valuable,” Katariina tells Charisma News of the grooming process. A woman named Mary groomed Katariina. Mary was a prostitute who recruited younger women for sex work.
“She talked to me and told me that I was special and sort of relayed everything I said to her back to me, so it seemed like she was listening. And traffickers will do that when they’re recruiting their prey. They will mirror the same pain that you feel like they can relate to you. So over the course of a month, Mary groomed me.”
Initially, Mary tried to sell Katariina to a young man, but when Mary found out she was a virgin, plans changed.
Mary then dressed Katariina in white and set her up with an older man.
The buyer offered $500. Mary argued for more. Together, they settled on $550.
Though Katariina came from a broken and abusive family, she knew her worth in Christ. She had recently been saved through a Billy Graham crusade, and as Mary and the buyer went back and forth, Katariina felt the Holy Spirit tell her exactly what she was worth in His eyes.
When the woman she viewed as an older sister left the room so the man could rape the teenager, Katariina’s world shattered.
Katariina broke free, but the incident was far from isolated. She was later recruited at 14 by a girl in her middle school for a pedophilia ring run by the girl’s father. The family hooked Katariina on cocaine, and she eventually sold her body and went deeper into drugs, even marrying the son of a Colombian drug dealer who worked for Pablo Escobar.
But enough was enough, and when her son was 18, Katariina took her daughter and left the family. Now, Katariina holds her master’s degree in law and, after a thorough dissertation on human trafficking, her Ph.D.
She runs There Is Hope For Me and penned a book about her story called Stolen.
Listen to the podcast for her incredible testimony and to hear how God was faithful through it all.
For more human trafficking stories, subscribe to the Charisma News podcast or check out CPNshows.com for new episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through the rest of the month.
