
What I've Been Through Is Not Who I Am
Katrina grows up a good student in a middle-class home before a trafficker manipulates and sells her for sex, and her story carries this short documentary from Atlanta to New York and back to Atlanta again. The film uses her account of exploitation and recovery to examine commercial sexual exploitation of children in the United States, a form of abuse the film argues happens in every city regardless of income or background. Interviews with juvenile justice officials, law enforcement, advocates, and service providers describe how victims are often arrested and prosecuted as offenders rather than treated as survivors, and they point to legislative reforms and restorative justice programs designed to change that pattern. Katrina's own trajectory, from desperation through recovery to stability, anchors the systemic material and gives the experts' claims a face. The film closes on her challenge to see exploited children by their humanity and potential rather than their past, framing that shift as the reform still needed in how the system responds to trauma.