When Anh was 5, her impoverished parents sold her for $50.

Her purchaser took her from her remote northern village to Bangkok, where she became a domestic slave. At age 11, after being sexually abused by the man of the house, she ran away. A kindly woman offered her help, then sold her into the sex trade for $250.

It took Anh 10 years as a prostitute to work that debt off, then she was lured into being a bar girl. When she was 36, she was rescued from the sex industry by Angel Eyes, a group combating human trafficking. Because she had been betrayed so often, it took Angel Eyes workers a year to gain her trust. Today, she works with the group.

A horrible story, yes, but it happened halfway around the world.

But it’s also close to home, said Mark Elam, of Oklahomans Against the Trafficking of Humans and Angel Eyes International.

Elam spoke at Northeastern State University Thursday evening, in a presentation sponsored by the NSU National Association of Student Social Workers and Beta Sigma Phi Mu Omega Tahlequah Chapter.

Take the 14-year-old all-American girl, one of several sexual exploitation survivors interviewed on a video Elam showed. She turned her first trick at age 11.

“I wanted to feel loved. I wanted to feel important,” she said, explaining why she sold herself to men.

Another girl, 13, told about how she and her counterparts climbed a fence into a truck stop on Interstate 35 (it was difficult to scale the fence in high heels), and offered themselves to 30 or 40 truckers.

While the girl was busy satisfying the trucker who had chosen her, her friend looked through the man’s wallet. She found photos of his grandchildren, who were about the same age as the girls. It sickened them. The girl sobbed as she related the story.

Yet another girl spoke of what she went through at age 12.

“I would sell myself for the smallest of things, just to get a place to sleep for the night,” she said.

With one example after another, one tragic story after another, Elam drove home his points about human trafficking.

“The average age of prostitution around the world now is 14. The average entry age is 12,” he said.