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Jessa was raised to be a sex slave by her mother and father. They told her she lacked the intelligence to be anything other than a prostitute. While children her age were attending school, Jessa was forced to pose nude for lustful men.
“My earliest memory that I have was being shown pornography of me as a toddler,” Jessa Crisp told CBN. She endured sexual abuse as well as buyers who came to their home exchanging money for time with her body. Instead of dropping her off at Girl Scouts or soccer practice, she was taken to several brothels.
Jessa lived as a veritable prisoner, trafficked by her own parents.
“‘You’re too stupid to do anything but be a prostitute and that’s why you can’t go to school,” they said.
Members of a religious cult, her parents didn’t allow Jessa’s 10 brothers and sisters to go to school either.
Jessa’s perspective of God was filtered through their aberrant theology. “I was taught that God was an angry person. I was afraid to get to know him. I was scared of him in the sense of ‘If I don’t do everything perfect, if I am not perfect, then I’m not going to be okay. I’m not going to be able to get through this and to live.’”
Unbeknownst to Jessa, God was pursuing her, imparting in her heart a yearning for something better.