Kate Price Internationally Recognized Child Sex Trafficking Expert, Lecturer, Author

Kate Price is an associate research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women, a research institute where she studies family-controlled commercial sexual exploitation of children and state-level child sex trafficking policy. She is also the author of This Happened to Me: A Reckoning, a harrowing, powerful memoir of survival and resilience.

In This Happened to Me, Price describes how she broke free from familial cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, mental illness, and abuse, leaving her small, central Pennsylvania hometown behind and creating a purpose-driven life and family, on her own terms. But despite escaping this dark world, it kept a firm grip on her. Overcome with unexplainable grief and sadness as a young adult living in Boston, Price sought out trauma specialist Dr Bessel van der Kolk, to help unpack her past through EDMR therapy. Together, they discovered that Price’s father had abused and trafficked her as a child and Price’s story was featured in van der Kolk’s bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score.

Over the course of 10 years, Price returned to the Appalachian community she grew up in searching for confirmation and proof that her memories and flashbacks had happened. With the help of a trusted journalist and many trips to the hometown Price thought she had left forever, the two found the evidence they had fought hard for. From victim to advocate, from fearful child to empowered adult, and from despair to triumph, This Happened to Me is a story of astonishing resilience and breathtaking determination.

Price is an advisor for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Global Platform for Child Exploitation Policy and Child Sex Trafficking Expert Working Group, and an alumni scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center. She is the recipient of a My Life, My Choice Beacon of Light Award, a Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize medal, a Mariam K. Chamberlain Dissertation Award from the International Centers for Research on Women, and an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship.

As an internationally recognized child sex trafficking expert and lecturer, Price has influenced the passage of state-level children’s human rights legislation and United Nations policy. In her keynote talks, Price draws on her own experiences and studies to speak about the reality of child sex trafficking, intergenerational trauma, and cyclical poverty, while also addressing the resources and services needed to ensure that communities can adequately protect children.

Price received her MA in gender/cultural studies from Simmons College and earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She lives in Massachusetts with her family.