Forced Into Prostitution as a Teen, This Survivor Works to Save Trafficked Children From the Streets
Meet Daily Point of Light Award honoree Tina Frundt. Read her story and nominate an outstanding volunteer or organization as a Point of Light.
It’s Tina Frundt’s job to know these horrifying numbers: More than 2 million children run away from home each year. About a tenth of them – some 200,000 – become tools in sex trafficking. Their average age: around 12 for girls, even younger for boys.
“People hear the term ‘sex trafficking’ and they think of girls overseas being traded,” says Frundt, executive director of Courtney’s House, an organization that works to get children on the streets out of danger. “They don’t realize that it’s just a legal term for forced prostitution and that it’s happening every day here in America.”
As a confused and troubled 14-year-old, Frundt herself was one of those thousands. Befriended by an older man on the streets of Chicago, encouraged to trust him and eventually convinced that she loved him, she left her family and moved with him to Cleveland.
There, the man introduced her to a different family: a group of teenage girls he had seduced and put to work on the streets. Frundt would remain tangled up in his scheme until she was in her late 20s.
Once she escaped, she found a job with Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking organization in Washington, D.C., then moved on to start Courtney’s House, in 2008.
