The Turn Out

In 2017, 4,687 calls were made to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. According to Truckers Against Trafficking, 1,980 calls were made by truckers. Almost half (48.5%) of the cases reported by truckers involved minors.

While I was teaching at The Ohio University School of Film, in September 2013, two arrests were made in Athens, Ohio (where I was living at the time) in a domestic sex trafficking case: a young girl was being trafficked by her father’s girlfriend in exchange for drugs and money. Eleven years prior, in 2002, a trucker parked at a travel center in Detroit made a phone call to report his suspicions of two girls being trafficked at his truckstop, and saved the lives of two young girls who were kidnapped from Toledo, Ohio.

Based initially on these two stories and the research I conducted in Ohio when I was teaching at Ohio University’s School of Film, I wrote The Turn Out in 2014. This film raises questions of women’s agency and victimization and counters the misconception that trafficking predominantly involves girls and women who come from outside the United States. It also examines the underlying causes of trafficking (i.e., poverty and addiction, among others) This film examines how a majority of the women committing a “crime” of solicitation are actually being forced into it.

Set in Southern Appalachia, the film examines domestic trafficking at truckstops in rural America through the story of a trucker named Crowbar who comes to the excruciating realization that he has become an active part of a sex trafficking ring when he engages with an underage victim. The fictionalized version the trucker is a less-than-heroic everyman who engages in the sex trade. To him, a quick inexpensive rendezvous with a prostitute is an innocuous respite.

To inform the narrative, I interviewed survivors of trafficking, truckers, truckstop owners and legislators and incorporated their voices into the narrative. The documentary elements of the film also informed the casting: a trucker plays Crowbar; a survivor of 25 years of being trafficked on the streets of Columbus, OH, is the advocate who works with the underage victim, Neveah (“Heaven spelled backwards”) is played by a young woman who, herself, was subjected to child endangerment due to the crisis of drug addiction in Glouster, one of the five poorest counties in Ohio; Jack Wright, co-founder of Appalshop, tells the story of the Wipple Company Store in Fayette county on early signs of trafficking in the region which concludes the film; staying true to the regionality of the issue, the film is set at the aging Liberty Truck Stop in West Virginia, and its owner/manager plays herself in the film.

As an additional note on the storytelling, my grandmother, a survivor of Auschwitz, often said to me: “I don’t know why they keep making those films on the Holocaust, killing us over and over on screen.” I took her sentiments to heart and for this reason, I decided not to show scenes of sexual abuse in The Turn Out on screen.