New Voices New Lives

For more than a decade, Derek Williams has been working to get pimps, buyers, and their victims out of the game. Derek is passionate about helping people understand how pimps and other predators prey upon our youth, the vulnerabilities they target, how they manipulate and control them once they are under their control, and how they keep them coming back. He speaks from an in-depth knowledge and understanding of how they do this after first selling his girlfriend when he was 16 and she was 14. From there, he spent 32 years as a pimp, trafficking more than 150 people in all 50 states, Canada, and Europe. He left the game after a life-changing experience. He comprehends, acknowledges, and takes ownership of the predator he was without any excuses. His deep remorse for the hurt and pain he caused so many led him to dedicate his life to getting people out and educating others about the horrors and realities of what traffickers do and how they do it. Derek puts it this way: "By unpacking my story, I hope to give you strategies to combat the hopelessness that holds many of our children captive, making them easy prey for a skilled predator or an incubator for a beast in the making. While I can never make retribution for all the lives I ravaged, I long to prevent the destruction of more of our children."He also is passionate about teaching professionals, first responders, and caregivers how to keep our youth off the path of becoming recruiters or traffickers.