By Aaron Klahr

Human trafficking is commonly referred to as “the game” — a game where the victim plays but never wins. For Arkansas native Kachia Phillips, this game followed her into the criminal justice system, where the crimes she was forced to commit became convictions that followed her long after her exploitation ended. In Arkansas, the absence of a trafficking specific legal remedy may mean there is no attorney who can give her the relief she needs. In a legal system where the victim plays but never wins either, what do we call it?

***

“Is this all that I’m going to be?”

Kachia was barely participating on sex calls anymore. “I was really tired,” she explains. “I was robbing them” and providing nothing in return. Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015, Kachia had concluded: “I’m going to die not being anything, and nobody is missing me.”

After more than two decades of sex work, drug trafficking and thievery fueled by a methamphetamine addiction, Kachia woke Friday morning convinced “something’s happening today.”

“In my spirit I could feel it.”

Kachia left her brother-in-law’s house for the store with a friend. As they exited the store, two Fayetteville detectives, enjoying breakfast at a nearby restaurant, spotted her. Before Kachia made it back to the house, a patrol car pulled them over.

Weeks earlier, Kachia had sold meth to undercover officers. She was arrested on two felony counts of delivery of methamphetamine. One of the detectives told her the prosecution could make it go away. They wanted Kachia to wear a wire on some people.

“I said, ‘nah, I think I’m just gonna go to jail.”

Jan. 23, 2015 Kachia was booked into Washington County jail, where she spent several nights.

A chaplain visited her and handed her a bible.

“I want you to read the red letters in this bible,” she told her, “because this is a love letter for you.”

“So, I opened the Bible to John 8, and verses 32 and 36 just jumped out at me,” Kachia said.

The passage read,

“‘You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free, and he who the son sets free, is free indeed.’”

Kachia served a nine-month sentence inside the Northwest Arkansas Department of Community Corrections.

***

“Forced criminality,” occurs when a trafficker uses force, fraud or coercion to exploit an individual to engage in illegal activities for the trafficker’s benefit. Victims may be forced to cultivate, transport, sell or use illicit drugs; commit theft or identity fraud, participate in violence; or to engage in criminalized forms of sex work.

Instead of committing the offense themselves, traffickers use the person they exploit to carry it out— and to serve the punishment. The crime is part of the trafficker’s control.

Six in 10 trafficking survivors reported being arrested, detained or cited by law enforcement. Of those encounters, 81% occurred during the respondents’ trafficking experiences, and 71% resulted in criminal records.

For Kachia, recognition of her exploitation came years after her cases had closed. When she finally said it out loud— I’m a victim of human trafficking— the words landed in a space the system had not yet built for that sentence. She wasn’t simply an offender; nor simply a victim. Rather, she was operating in a justice system that had already decided which side of her story mattered.

Arkansas has a trafficking-specific process for sealing a conviction, but there’s no trafficking-specific legislation for vacating convictions resulting from forced criminality. Even though Kachia can now describe the trafficking, it doesn’t reopen her cases or change her convictions but complicates her understanding of criminal justice.

Because in Arkansas, survivors can be forced into criminality, be prosecuted and suffer lifelong consequences— all while remaining unrecognized as trafficking victims.

***

On a summer night in 1992, Kachia and her friend couldn’t afford the cover charge at a University of Arkansas fraternity party. Her friend knew a man who would pay Kachia $100 if she would “go over there” and let him “do what he has to do.”

A people pleaser with low self-esteem, Kachia didn’t want to disappoint one of her few friends.

“When we got there, I was scared to death, but I went anyway,” she says quietly as if telling a secret. “I went and did it, and this whole wave of shame came over me.”

That man was the father of two boys who Kachia attended high school with. Embarrassed, she dropped out at 17 and enrolled in night school in Springdale to earn her GED.

Until her parents divorced when she was 14, Kachia says she grew up in a “strong Christian home.” After her father left, Kachia and her younger sister “fluctuated to the people that accepted us for who we were,” and “paid us attention.”

At 18, Kachia entered an abusive relationship and had her first child. She was one of the many girlfriends he was seeing.

Around the same time, Kachia’s younger sister, Anna, became involved with a man twenty years older than her. He smoked crack and marijuana with her, drank with her and bought red heels and halter tops, dressing Anna in the clothes he wanted her to wear.

“He wasn’t a mean person,” Kachia recalls. He was charismatic. “He knew how to talk to people.”

At 18, Anna married him and reluctantly moved to Minneapolis for him.

Kachia says it was his opportunity to “break her in.”

Months later, she called Kachia. Her husband was abusing her and working her day and night at his escort service, Southern Beauties. Kachia went to Minneapolis intending to bring her sister home. Instead, she stayed.

“By the time I got up there, everything was kosher, and they were getting along.” Her sister lived in her husband’s Annadale condo, drove his nice cars, and was regularly taken on shopping trips. As a young girl,” Kachia says, “the world taught me that your value lied in the money you made, in the material things you had.”

After a year in Minneapolis, Southern Beauties relocated to Fayetteville in 1998. They could be found in the yellow pages.

At first, Kachia organized calls for her sister, but $25 per booking wasn’t enough. More comfortable in her hometown, Kachia began escorting too.

Working as an independent contractor, Kachia was legally responsible for what happened with clients.

“The money was far more attractive,” she recalls. “There wasn’t a day we rested.”

To match pace with the lucrative hustle, Kachia was kept awake “for days at a time” and slept eight hours maybe “one day out of the month.” Kachia frequently awoke with a meth pipe already in her mouth.

“We didn’t think it was trafficking; we just thought we were getting money.”

***

Kevin Metcalf has seen human trafficking from both sides of the criminal justice system. After more than a decade as a felony prosecutor for the Washington County Prosecutor’s Office, Metcalf directed the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Human Trafficking Response Unit.

After working counterterrorism in the early 2000s, Metcalf attended law school in his late forties and led a prosecutorial career focusing on technology used in crimes like human trafficking because “no one was doing it.”

“Forced criminality is not only misunderstood, but not understood well at all,” he observes. Now, the Arkansan attorney advises Kachia and her clients on cases.

Kachia once had a public defender who told her, “I guess you gotta do what you gotta do,” after she revealed herself as a working escort struggling with drug addiction.

Metcalf worries that too many criminal justice professionals touch only on the basics of labor and sex trafficking, a problem he attributes to high caseloads and limited training.

“It’s not only prosecutors, investigators, and defense attorneys that don’t recognize a victim as a victim,” says Metcalf. Victims tend to think, “I did all this. I deserve the punishment.”

While Kachia’s actions may have started voluntarily, consent can be withdrawn, he explains.

It was in 1998 through another childhood friend that Kachia began escorting at Dial-a-Date, based in Fayetteville. In the summer of ‘99, her other childhood best friend, Lynn, recruited Kachia to work for her pimp in New York.

Kachia’s trafficker would pick up “the work” and bring it back to the hotel. For the rest of the day, Kachia and her best friend were expected to memorize the personal information associated with the stolen identities.

For six months, Kachia wasn’t allowed to leave the hotel she lived in.

She’d be placed in front of a blue poster board and photographed with her hands at her sides and an unassuming expression. Her photo was forged onto a fake identification card with someone else’s information.

Kachia was then forced to open instant-credit accounts at electronic, jewelry and retail stores across New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. Her pimp told Kachia what to purchase. She’d then take the goods to 42nd Street and 10th Avenue, where the fenced products were sold to Iranian and Pakistani stores for a fraction of the price.

Yet Kachia never saw any of the profits.

On Kachia’s first job, she was arrested in Columbia, Maryland, after opening a credit account at Target with fraudulently altered government ID. To ensure Kachia wouldn’t snitch, her trafficker left her in jail for a month before bailing her out. After her release, he told Kachia that her friend Lynn had run away. Really, she was relocated to another hotel to ensure operations continued smoothly. Wanting to return home, Kachia convinced her traffickers to move the operation to Arkansas.

Later that year, the operation was raided in Pine Bluff. Kachia was arrested on felony charges for forgery and theft by deception.

***

She insisted that she acted alone. She spent 90 days in prison, and everyone else went home.

Her growing criminal record made alternative employment difficult, and she joined the nearly three-quarters of self-identified trafficking survivors who reported losing or being denied employment due to their record.

Kachia found work at restaurants and fast-food locations. But her best friend constantly reminded her that she’s a felon and would never find the kind of employment that sustains her desired lifestyle.

“It’s like boiling a frog,” Metcalf explains with his hands. He puts the frog into cold water and gradually turns up the heat. By the time the frog realizes what is happening, it’s thinking, “Oh shit, I’m in hot water. I can’t get out.”

Afraid she couldn’t survive financially, Kachia returned to the game.

While working for Dial-a-Date, a client raped her at knifepoint. Meth-crazed and angry, Kachia returned without money; her best friend accused Kachia of stealing from the company. Later, she had Kachia kidnapped.

Kachia promised God she’d quit the game if she made it out alive.

That was a lie.

***

“It takes seven to eight positive interactions with law enforcement for them to exit their cases,” Sgt. Matthew Foster explained unhurriedly.

Inside Arkansas State headquarters in Little Rock, Foster works from a collection of modest offices that offer little indication of the work conducted inside. Children’s toys lay scattered across the floor as the only suggestion of anything personal.

Foster is Arkansas’ statewide human trafficking coordinator and one of three individuals at the state police solely dedicated to trafficking cases. A part-time employee from the Attorney General’s Office helps too.

Foster says one of the largest misconceptions about adult trafficking victims is that they can simply choose to leave.

At 21, Kachia had a daughter and entered another abusive relationship. Unable to love and protect her children, Kachia gave them to her mother.

Her mother was furious. “How dare you choose that life over your children,’ Kachia recalls.

Still, Kachia didn’t view herself as someone who needed to escape. She was “too loyal.”

Kachia visited her children, but with black eyes and broken ribs. Eventually, her mother told her not to come over anymore. They tried to visit on Kachia’s birthdays, but she never showed up.

Kachia lived around the corner.

Advocacy therapy, not mental health or behavior modification, is critical, stresses Foster.

***

Since January 2024, Kachia has been the program director at Hub of Hope, a survivor-led nonprofit in Northwest Arkansas. She’s one of two employees.

“We’re not a program,” she staunchly declares. Instead, they “work therapeutically.”

Hub of Hope breaks traditional social work codes. They don’t close their doors to survivors with a criminal record or close their books on someone who returns to their trafficker. They’re a community-funded non-profit that doesn’t bill payments or insurance.

Clinical programs have their place, but basic needs, friendship and trust provide a launch pad for victims to begin their restoration journey, explains Kachia.

Unlike other forms of victimization, trafficking is built on sustained control. That control doesn’t end when a survivor leaves a trafficker. It follows them into recovery. For many survivors, entering a formal program can feel restrictive. Kachia says she was “programmed out,” by the end of her incarceration and rehabilitation.

Traditional service models, particularly those for domestic violence and sexual assault survivors, are often program-based. Curfews, bag searches and program milestones woven with constant legal and social service systems create a climate of control for survivors.

Arkansas has at least 44 advocacy centers or facilities for juveniles that address human trafficking in some way. Adults have 13.

Hub of Hope is one of two locations in Arkansas that strictly focuses on adult victim services.

Once a juvenile is identified as a victim, they automatically enter the welfare system. The Department of Human Services assumes guardianship of that juvenile and ensures their path forward. The existing system receives more robust federal and state funds, says Foster. Therefore, more access to victim services. All advocates interviewed say funding was the largest barrier to victim services.

Forced criminality doesn’t only start in adults. Half of child victims report serving time during exploitation.

Rescue and treatment are required for juvenile victims; for adults, it’s a choice.

But once a child turns 18, it appears that support decreases at the exact moment autonomy increases.

***

It’s eight a.m. and painfully apparent that Kachia has downed more than one cup of coffee as she navigates the east side of Rogers.

Behind her oversized, softly squared glasses, her almond-shaped eyes offer the clearest window into her morning joy.

“Are you ready for this” she laughs.

Her dark brown hair pulls neatly into a claw clip, leaving her full face unobstructed. Her plump lips stretch outward, fighting against her cosmetic restraint as she laughs.

As she explains what the day will look like, the radio plays beside her.

I’m alive, it’s a ride

Where I go, Lord, I know

It’s gonna be alright.

She pulls into True Self Recovery, a treatment center specializing in substance abuse and mental health services.

Striding across the asphalt with her head down, as if admiring her brightly colored Nikes, she clutches her laptop and HDMI cord against her chest as she approaches the building.

“WHAT IT DO, WHAT IT DO.”

The voice, pounding the morning air, comes from a woman balancing on a concrete railing near the back entrance. She’s no older than 30. Kachia replies with a cheery good morning of her own before continuing inside.

She enters a small classroom, and the energy follows her through the door. The room feels less like a therapeutic institution than an adult day care as the 20 or so individuals stampede into the room. As the clients settle, notebooks, pens, Jolly Ranchers and Uncrustables pile onto the tables.

Kachia opens her laptop and connects the HDMI cord to the television.

Turning to confront their rambunctious energy, she sits cross-legged in front of the room.

Unbothered, Kachia readies herself to share her experience inside the world’s fastest-growing criminal industry.

“Human trafficking is a hidden issue,” she begins.

***

The Arkansas Human Trafficking Task Force assists all 75 counties, a mostly rural expanse that Sgt. Foster says challenges local agencies to verify victims, deliver services and mount investigations. According to last year’s data from the National Human Trafficking Hotline, 106 potential trafficking victims were identified in 63 reported cases. Forty-seven involved sex trafficking, and twelve involved labor trafficking.

Yet Foster sees labor trafficking as Arkansas’ largest trafficking area. He argues these numbers “reflect underreporting rather than absence of exploitation.”

In 22 years, not once did Kachia hear the term human trafficking.

“I heard about being in the game,” but never human trafficking, she says.

“It was not a word.”

A 2022 cross-state analysis found that 89% of correctional and anti-trafficking leaders agreed that people in their state’s correctional facilities had experienced human trafficking. Yet only half of the correctional leaders agreed that identifying incarcerated victims was an important part of their occupation.

Sixteen percent of correctional leaders reported strategies to identify and respond to trafficking and 27% reported human trafficking training for corrections staff.

“The Department of Corrections was all about alcohol and drug rehab,” Kachia states. “Never in my life have I even heard somebody say human trafficking within the prison system on both sides.”

As part of her outreach, Kachia teaches monthly trafficking seminars at Benton County Detention Center.

From 2022 through 2025, the Arkansas Human Trafficking Council documented 266 trafficking-related arrests. Arrests nearly tripled from 2022 to 2024, and an additional 82 arrests were documented in partial-year 2025 data. The increase may suggest traffickers are becoming more visible to law enforcement, but not necessarily victims.

Metcalf says victims may hesitate to come forward because they know the legal process is demanding, and reliving their traumatic experiences in court proves that retreating is safer than coming forward.

“Bad things happen to victims who come forward,” he says.

***

After receiving her Bible in jail, Kachia raised her hands in the dark of her cell and told God she was done. She would sit there until He saved her. A couple of days later, her friend Mary visited jail. Kachia remembers Mary saying she had been sent by God to get her out of jail.

Twenty minutes after giving Mary a random bondsman’s number posted on the jail-cell wall, Kachia was released without paying bond. That evening, Mary took her to a women’s deliverance retreat at a Hispanic Pentecostal church.

“God had a sense of humor,” Kachia jokes. “I don’t know Spanish.”

The group laid their hands in prayer on Kachia until she collapsed onto the floor, throwing up blood and bile. At its end, she had lost her voice. Regaining composure, Kachia watched a bald eagle fly past a window and God said,

“It’s finished.”

***

“Who has authority over you?” Kachia asks.

“Drug Court,” one woman sheepishly responds. The women around her erupt in laughter.

Encouraging messages like “Never give up” and “Faith can move mountains” decorate the clay-colored walls of the classroom located inside Washington County Drug Court.

The all-women group is quieter than the bunch Kachia spoke to at True Self Recovery. Their eyes remain fixed on her as she talks, nodding along or smiling at anecdotes before she finishes them. They seem to know the punchline before the joke ends.

Some take notes and others hold coffee cups. Some hold themselves.

One woman says she was fourteen when she started giving men massages in a bra and underwear. She is nearly 40 now.

Another says she was used for sex in exchange for drugs.

Another says she was forced to cash bad checks. She is still paying fines.

A woman in the back adds that she was a people pleaser. Men would provide her with things she needed in exchange for sex. One bought her food. Another put gas in her car. Another occasionally provided her with a place to stay.

She remembers lying in a broken-down camper, praying to God that she didn’t want to continue living that way.

“When I got arrested,” she says, “it was the very day that saved my life.”

Kachia looks around the room with a knowing smile.

“If we all did the complete opposite of what we were doing, we would all be okay,” she says. The obviousness of the truth brings a chuckle, and the room laughs with her.

***

In 2017, Kachia completed the Washington County Drug Court. She returns every month to speak on human trafficking.

After completing the program and following a recommendation from a specialty court judge, her record was sealed.

One count of theft by deception. One count of forgery. Two counts of delivery of methamphetamine.

The record was sealed, but the convictions remained.

Rightly so, Kachia believes this isn’t justice.

“Forced criminality is a thing,” she says. “Back when I got charged, it wasn’t a thing.”

Until 2010, no state had a law allowing trafficking survivors to vacate convictions resulting from their exploitation.

Today, most states have some form of criminal-record relief specifically for trafficking survivors.

Arkansas has a trafficking-specific process for sealing qualifying convictions under the Comprehensive Criminal Record Sealing Act of 2013. Under the current law, survivors who were minors when the offense occurred can seek to have qualifying convictions sealed regardless of the offense. Survivors who were 18 or older must have been convicted of prostitution “as a result of the petitioners’ having been a victim of human trafficking at the time of the offense.”

Convicted as an adult, Kachia does not qualify for trafficking-specific sealing. Arkansas sealed her record under its broader sealing laws, not trafficking-specific statutes.

Under this process, the conviction remains cuffed to the idea that Kachia committed a crime on her own conscience.

Kachia says that a trafficking-specific remedy would place the focus on the exploitation that produced the criminal record rather than the rehabilitation that followed it. Ideally, Arkansas legislators would expand the statute to include all offenses related to forced criminality.

Maryland law gives Kachia another option. She is working with attorneys there to seek relief for the identity fraud conviction stemming from her 1999 arrest in Columbia, Maryland. She interviewed and completed a human trafficking assessment as part of the process.

Maryland trafficking survivors convicted of 26 qualifying offenses “may file a motion to vacate the judgment if the person’s participation in the offense was a direct result of being a victim of human trafficking.” Kachia’s identity fraud case in Maryland is pending, but her drug and theft-by-deception convictions occurred in Arkansas, where no vacatur laws exist.

Metcalf says the passage of time can make that connection harder to establish. Evidence that may have documented force, fraud or coercion may no longer exist years or decades later.

Kachia doesn’t have much traditional evidence of her own. Her alias was listed by Southern Beauties and Dial-a-Date, and her services were marketed on Backpage, a site notorious for its adult services section. Kachia is one of thousands of individuals who filed a claim against the platform after the DOJ proved the Craigslist competitor was knowingly facilitating prostitution and sex trafficking.

Kachia doesn’t have phone or text logs, since those types of communications were controlled by her trafficker. However, Maryland law doesn’t require any specific documentation. As the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service notes, the law is inclusive of survivors who do not possess traditional evidence. Rather, their stories are their evidence.

Kachia has already begun helping other survivors navigate the criminal justice system. She’s helped her clients identify and document forced criminality, and in some cases, she’s convinced prosecutors to drop charges.

But getting the state to acknowledge what happens to a survivor after a conviction is tougher. In 2020, Kachia applied for a full gubernatorial pardon. It was rejected. She wants her five felony convictions vacated.

Under Arkansas’ current legal framework, there is no trafficking-specific statutory process for an attorney to ask a court to vacate a conviction because it resulted from forced criminality. An attorney could explore other forms of post-conviction relief, but none provides the trafficking-specific remedy Kachia seeks.

Metcalf doesn’t understand why there aren’t broader trafficking-specific criminal relief laws in Arkansas. He chalks up the legal hesitation to “ego” and an “us-versus-them mentality” that he considers dangerous for law enforcement and the prosecution.

For Kachia, distinction is more than legal terminology. She spent years being treated as a criminal before she understood herself as a trafficking victim. Now she wants Arkansas to recognize the connection between the exploitation and the crimes that followed it.

Her story raises a question that reaches beyond her own case:

What does justice mean for survivors when recognition comes too late to change the sentence, but not too late to change our understanding of what happened?

***

“When does it turn from trafficking to someone’s choice?”

Back at True Self Recovery, a middle-aged man, sporting an “In Arkansas, made in California” hoodie, speaks out. “Their body, their choice.”

“I’ve never met a person who’s okay with it,” responds Kachia.

He presses. Was it the drugs? The person? The money?

“All three,” Kachia explains. Then, more firmly, “I was a kid.”

Unconvinced, he interrupts, “But at the end of the day how can someone be sold unless they don’t put themselves up for sale?”

“It is a choice at the end of the day,” he follows up.

Kachia has heard some versions of the argument before. She understands why people struggle to reconcile choices with trafficking. It took her more than two decades to understand that the decisions she made were shaped by force, fraud, and coercion.

“If I didn’t understand that I was being trafficked,” she questions, how is somebody who’s never been affected by it supposed to know?

“It can happen to anybody.”