At 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 15, an auditorium full of people braved pouring rain and chilly weather to attend a free lecture by anti-human trafficking advocate Rachel Lloyd. Lloyd is the author of “Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls Are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself.” She is also the founder of non-profit organization Girls Educational and Mentoring Services. GEMS is designed to help young women escape the sex industry.

Lloyd has a passion for helping these young women because of her own past, which included prostitution and sexual abuse. Originally from England, Lloyd was able to escape the sex industry and moved to New York in 1997 with the hopes of helping other young women who shared her experiences.

Lloyd was invited to speak at UNCW by the Women’s Studies and Resource Center.

“The WSRC has been building a Human Trafficking and Women’s Rights Lecture Series, funded generously by Dr. Todd McCune,” said WSRC director Michelle Scatton-Tessier. “In order to best approach the lecture series, we reached out to attorney Lindsey Roberson, assistant district attorney in New Hanover County, and of NC Stop Human Trafficking, and Deanna Stoker, advocacy program coordinator for both the New Hanover and Brunswick County Rape Crisis Programs of Coastal Horizons Center, Inc.”

Both of these women, as well as Scatton-Tessier, thought Lloyd would be a perfect addition to their lecture series.

“When I asked the two who would be their ideal speaker, both spoke of Rachel Lloyd, if we could get her here,” Scatton-Tessier said. “When Ms. Roberson represented human trafficking survivors in NYC, she had worked with Ms. Lloyd, who was instrumental in getting the nation’s first Safe Harbor Act passed. I was drawn to her as a speaker after having read her personal story as a survivor of human trafficking and how she garnered personal strength to make social change happen for others in her memoir, ‘Girls Like Us.'”

The UNCW audience agreed. Everyone was captivated as Lloyd spoke about the issue of human trafficking in her charming and eclectic accent that includes a mix of English propriety and New York brogue. Some may have been expecting Lloyd to share, in detail, her own story, but she didn’t.

“I could tell you a super-titillating story about violence and abuse. But it doesn’t further the work,” Lloyd said.

Instead, she started out by reading an excerpt from her book, telling a story of her interacting with abused girls in a correctional facility back in 1997. According to her story, one of the quietest girls in the room eventually proclaimed, “God sent you to us.”

Since that day in 1997, Lloyd has received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Marymount Manhattan College and a master’s degree in applied urban anthropology from the City College of New York. She also played an extremely important role in the passing of the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act in 2008.

Overall, Lloyd strongly believes we need not only to help young women escape sex trafficking, but to help them move on: from victim, to survivor, to leader.

“To define survivors solely by their experiences is another form of being trapped,” Lloyd said.

Lloyd’s organization, GEMS, has a 72 percent success rate when it comes to girls leaving the commercial sex industry.

For more information on Lloyd and her organization, visit their website at http://www.gems-girls.org/.