She was sexually abused by her father until she was about 12 – and he would also sell her to other men. Then she grew up and began researching child sex trafficking, slowly piecing together clues about her own life
Kate Price is now an academic, but it was at six that she conducted her first piece of research, leaning into the cab of her father’s truck and pressing the side button of his CB radio, the black plastic hot from the sun. She spoke the name she’d heard into it, “Chicken Plucker”, and a man’s voice replied. It was her first proof that the name she’d somehow associated with being taken from her bed in the middle of the night was attached to a real person, and that perhaps he would have answers. Then her father caught her and she was too terrified to try to contact him again.
Five decades on, Price has written This Happened To Me, a memoir that reads, in part, like a detective story, piecing together clues to create a picture of the horror that had been done to her as a child, as well as her path to healing. When we speak over Zoom, Price is in her office at Wellesley College, the women’s college in Massachusetts, where she researches commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) – a world away from the rural Pennsylvania town where she grew up. For as long as she can remember, Price was sexually abused by her father until she was about 12, and he left the family. What she didn’t discover until she was an adult was that he had also been drugging her and, in the middle of the night, “selling” her to men.
