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Lici
Carmichael
Delicia Carmichael was fifteen years old when her trafficker coerced her into an act that would define her life in the eyes of the justice system — but not in her own. The sentence was twenty years. She was a child who had never known a safe home, who had been moved through thirty-five foster placements, who had been arrested six times before her fourteenth birthday without a single adult stopping to ask who was hurting her. The justice system saw a conviction. It missed everything else.
Lici has spent her incarceration refusing to let that be the whole story becoming an advocate, a storyteller, and a witness to what gets lost when the people most affected by a system are the last ones asked to speak.
Lici’s story is not a single act. It is not a sentence. It is, in her own words, still being written — resilient, compassionate, and unfinished.
“My writing is my voice. When I speak I’m not heard. To read this is your choice. It’s nothing forced. I’ve been shut down and silenced my whole life. Now I will use my voice to fight.”
— Lici Carmichael
from her original poem: My Writing Is My Voice
“Most sex trafficking victims in the U.S. are trafficked by someone they know, often an employer, family member, or intimate partner.”
Source: Polaris Project, National Human Trafficking Hotline Data Analysis (2021).
It is a story of a young woman who decided, in a cell, that if they could lock up her body they could not lock up her truth. She began to write — first in fragments, pieces of pain she was too afraid to say out loud, then in poetry that made people stop and listen differently. She became known as “the little reporter” — an advocate, a witness, a voice for girls whose circumstances courts are not designed to see.
Photo credit: Tamir Kalifa for HuffPost