When Noel Gomez walked Aurora Avenue North, she lived in a parallel universe. She’d think of families huddled around Christmas trees while she looked for “dates” on the holiday. In the morning, after being trafficked all night, she’d see people jogging before their office workdays. “When you’re in that space,” she says now, “looking at those people is like looking at aliens.”

Gomez was trafficked in the sex trade. She was in “that life” for 15 years. Her story is a very common one, she says. A boyfriend she met during her youth turned out to be a pimp who threatened the life of her son if she didn’t work. He trafficked her up and down the West Coast, but she inevitably spent time on one of the country’s most notorious “tracks”: Aurora Avenue North.

The thoroughfare in North Seattle has been a destination for commercial sexual exploitation for about as long as anyone can remember. By the middle of the twentieth century, cheap motels flanked what was once the city’s sole highway, making it a central locale for drug deals and sex work. Even once I-5 surfaced, Aurora’s reputation still encouraged traffickers, en route to Canada or elsewhere, to stop off with girls and women.

And they still do. Today sex trafficking continues to pass through Aurora’s cheap rooms and adjacent parking lots. Demand is high enough that sex workers can often only grab quick bites from the street’s many fast food chains without drawing the ire of their traffickers. It’s a parallel universe governed by its own jargon, unwritten rules, and racist and misogynistic power dynamics, but also buttressed by the city’s own policies and inequities.


Definitive data for the number of people trafficked on Aurora, or elsewhere, does not exist. But Noel Gomez says Aurora has visibly “blown up” over the last few years. Another survivor-advocate says it’s the worst she’s seen the street in decades. Survivor-advocates also note that the shutdown of Backpage.com has contributed to more visible sex work on Aurora.

Its current condition can be traced to some of Seattle’s most pressing challenges, from Covid’s toll on employment to the fentanyl epidemic to a lack of staffing in the Seattle Police Department, which has also led to de facto decriminalization. “It is very, very easy to go up to Aurora and buy sex,” says Mar Brettmann, the executive director of Seattle-based nonprofit Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking (BEST).

For Liletha Williams, who’s worked with BEST on its trainings, the foremost underlying cause is the same as it’s always been: poverty. The Central District native, now in her 60s, was first trafficked when she was 12. She’s seen how traffickers separate girls and women from lower income communities in South Seattle by bringing them up to Aurora. In her experience, “most of the girls that get purchased are young Black girls between the ages of 11 and 17.”

The few available data points back her up. A local study estimates that between 500 and 700 youth in King County are experiencing exploitation. And over a decade span, about 45 percent of children involved in King County sex trafficking cases were Black, though they made up just 7 percent of the population, according to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

At the same time, this legal data shows people buying sex from minors in King County are disproportionately white. And from 2013 to 2021, at least 77 percent of charged buyers were employed, with about 30 percent of those working in tech and business—an “incredibly privileged sector of our society,” says Ben Gauen, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney who focuses on human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation cases. “I can’t think of any other subset of offenders that we see who have that level of employment at the time they committed their offense.”

The problem lies, then, not at the distance between the free and trafficked universes along Aurora but at their intersection. “The buyers are the ones with all the agency in the situation and all the power in the situation,” says Brettmann.
 
For close to a decade, King County’s justice system moved toward a “Nordic Model” that criminalizes sex buyers, or johns, rather than sex workers. (In 2010, there were 408 prostitution charges filed across King County, compared to zero in 2020 and three in 2021.) But the lack of accountability for johns lately has troubled advocates. Studies suggest full-on legalization would only lead to more trafficking.

Gomez once ran diversion programs to educate johns. And when she was trafficked, she saw clients from all sorts of income levels. One even took her to The Phantom of the Opera in New York. But a trip into that world didn’t make her feel like she was worth more. “In the end, it’s all the same,” she says. “It doesn’t matter where it is, or how it is, or whether you’re on carpet or on concrete.”


When Gomez was in that life more than two decades ago, local authorities treated trafficked girls and women like the enemy. “We went to jail all the time,” she says. Others fell victim to substance addictions and abuse.

After a while, Gomez, like many who are trafficked, didn’t feel like she belonged in polite society—that other world. But that’s where her son was. So, eventually, she worked up the strength to escape the trafficker who’d done her physical and psychological harm. She sold enough of her belongings to afford a small apartment. She landed a restaurant job and went back to school. Then, degree in hand, she became a chemical dependency counselor at a youth detention center in Seattle.

During conversations there, she noticed that girls repeated some of the same words she used to hear on Aurora. She realized “almost every youth I was meeting with was being trafficked.” Gomez wondered who else was picking up on this problem in Seattle and offering services specific to their needs. The answer? “Nobody.”

That is no longer the case. In 2009, Real Escape from the Sex Trade started advocating for sexually exploited people in Seattle. And a year later, Gomez co-founded the Organization for Prostitution Survivors, a Burien-based nonprofit that uses survivors’ firsthand knowledge to address the myriad needs of exploited individuals. Those needs range from emotional to practical, systemic to prosaic: An art therapy workshop to help process trauma. Help with a resume. Direct financial assistance to stave off eviction. A wig for a job interview.

Today the organization belongs to a constellation of nonprofits helping survivors transition to a life beyond Aurora and other tracks. A coalition of them pushed the state Legislature to pass a bill this past spring that will create programs to support those with “lived experience of sex trafficking” across Washington.

But for as much as OPS and other programs offer, they’re still limited by a lack of financial and structural support. Exiting the sex trade is almost never smooth, and, by necessity, almost always speedy; traffickers keep close tabs on the people they sell. Getting put on a waitlist for housing or a detox program, or to see a case manager, doesn’t offer the immediate relief needed. “When they’re ready, we have to be ready,” says Elizabeth Dahl Helendi. “And the resources are not there.”

Helendi is the executive director of Aurora Commons, a one-story safe haven in the thick of Aurora Avenue North. Backyard barbecues hosted by a nearby church seeded the idea for a nonprofit center that provides its unhoused neighbors with basic hygiene items, hot food, a clothing closet, restrooms, haircuts, and, critically, trusted relationships. Clinics with doctors, nurses, and social workers from Harborview Medical Center now operate in a relatively new wing of the building. One of them serves women specifically, offering a nonjudgmental space for female-identifying neighbors, including those engaged in survival street-based sex work.

The center located between a motel and a Taco Bell allows visitors to make a cup of coffee or charge their phones. To feel like they have agency and a space to belong.
But it’s open just four days per week, for three hours a day. And the trafficking outside never stops. As Mary Schmitz, a commercial sexual exploitation community advocate at the Commons, puts it, “it’s an unforgiving street.” Perhaps more unforgiving than ever before.