Kate Price is now an academic, but it was at six that she conducted her first piece of research, leaning into the cab of her father’s truck and pressing the side button of his CB radio, the black plastic hot from the sun. She spoke the name she’d heard into it, “Chicken Plucker”, and a man’s voice replied. It was her first proof that the name she’d somehow associated with being taken from her bed in the middle of the night was attached to a real person, and that perhaps he would have answers. Then her father caught her and she was too terrified to try to contact him again.

Five decades on, Price has written This Happened To Me, a memoir that reads, in part, like a detective story, piecing together clues to create a picture of the horror that had been done to her as a child, as well as her path to healing. When we speak over Zoom, Price is in her office at Wellesley College, the women’s college in Massachusetts, where she researches commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) – a world away from the rural Pennsylvania town where she grew up. For as long as she can remember, Price was sexually abused by her father until she was about 12, and he left the family. What she didn’t discover until she was an adult was that he had also been drugging her and, in the middle of the night, “selling” her to men.

The book, she says, “really poured out of me”. If it was difficult to write about an almost unimaginable crime, she points out this is what she does as a career. “I research child sex trafficking. I haven’t been trafficked in about 40 years – not to say that I’m healed completely, but this is a subject matter [I work on] all of the time.”

Price is also used to talking about her own experience as part of her work, and has had decades of therapy, including taking part in the pioneering trauma treatment by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk in the early 90s; Kolk included Price as a case study in his bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score. He was the one who first told her that her PTSD would be a lifelong condition to manage, and she does, with therapy, exercise, sleep and nutrition, as well as a steady, loving marriage. “I’m lucky to have the resources,” she says. “It’s a ton of privilege that goes into it.”

Much of Price’s book is based on the decade-long investigation she worked on with the journalist Janelle Nanos, which became a 2022 piece for the Boston Globe. “In the same way that I was able to thrive in school, I could compartmentalise, thinking this is a research project. Yes, it’s my life, but …” She doesn’t finish the thought. “I would say, actually, it was incredibly healing. My sister and I had these incredible conversations that we’d never had, that started when I was working on the article, but continued as I was working on the book. That was happy emotion, quite the opposite of this gut-wrenching stuff.”

Growing up, Price witnessed the violence of their father against her older sister. Her sister, who was constantly compared unfavourably to Price, appeared to hate her. In the course of her research, Price would find out her sister had also been trafficked by their father. Price also endured their father’s physical violence; she remembers being four and hiding in cupboards when he came home from his job as an electrician, wishing it would open into Narnia, before being beaten by him. When she was six, in a rage, he carved an X on her arm with his penknife, telling her she belonged to him, then threw her down the stairs into the basement.

“I knew something was wrong,” she says, but adds that she had no understanding or other frame of reference to know this was not normal. But her world started to open up: at the birthday party of a friend from her swimming team, Price discovered a home filled with books and art, where the family seemed to like one another and the children were treated with respect. “To even know that a family could be happy,” she marvels. Price vowed that one day she would create that life for herself, and she was smart enough to know that, for her, it would come through education.

The abuse continued until Price was 12 and their father left the family for a young woman he had started an affair with. As a teenager, Price took an overdose of pills (antibiotics, it turned out, so they didn’t harm her). She was desperately unhappy, unsure why she couldn’t form close relationships or make good choices in boyfriends (one was emotionally and sexually abusive). As an older teen, driving past an adult cinema and rest area by the interstate, Price would tense up but not know why. “I was just so focused on going to college, on getting out of there. Even as I had these responses, it was like, push it away, I’ll deal with that later. Our brains are hardwired for survival and that was very much me.”

Price did get away, collecting degrees (she would get a doctorate for her research on the criminalisation of child sex trafficking victims) while supporting herself with admin jobs and working in bookshops. She was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and working as an assistant to the dean at Radcliffe, the Harvard women’s college, when she started seeing a therapist. Her mother had recently died, and she was grieving, but she was also unhappy and lonely, unable to make friends and living in an intellectual city that seemed alien to her rural childhood. She was also aware that her trauma went deeper. The therapist, worried she wasn’t making much progress, referred Price to Van der Kolk.

During one of their sessions, Price told him her father had sexually abused her, the first time she had told anyone. What was it like to finally tell someone? “Honestly, for me it was such a relief to have an older man in my life who I trusted. I had never had that before.” This, along with being more settled at work and studying, and her father now living hundreds of miles away in Florida, meant she felt more secure than ever. “I was creating my own life, then it was like [my brain said], OK, you’re safe, you’re ready to feel the full brunt of all of this.”

The night that she experienced her first full flashbacks of being raped by men other than her father, at a rest area by the interstate, she had to go to hospital, suicidal. “This is information I had been trying to unlock, at that point, for a couple of years,” she says. “It was like seeing a slideshow, and it was about 100 perpetrators, and I can close my eyes right now and still see it, and it was absolutely overwhelming and terrifying.” She saw Van der Kolk the next day, and would do for many years. It was also the start of “learning how to be a human being”. She couldn’t feel emotions, and remembers buying cassette tapes teaching her to tap into them. “I was numb. I had been completely dehumanised by my father. He had beaten out any sense of agency or humanity in me.”

One of the hardest things, she says, “that was so difficult to square, was just how purposeful it was”. That her father had drugged her, and allowed men to rape her for money. Emboldened, she called him – not quite brave enough to tell him she’d remembered she had been trafficked, but she did confront him about the sexual abuse. He exploded, and told her never to contact him again. “I was understanding the totality of everything that had happened to me, and I was finally more angry at him than I was scared,” she says. “By this time, I had been doing work for three, four years, and I just couldn’t live the lie any more.”

Up until that point, she still had contact with her father – there were occasional phone calls, and once she even stayed with him for several days. Although she didn’t know the full extent of his abuse, she knew he had repeatedly raped her as a child. How could she be around him? “That is Appalachia, it’s always family first. That had been ingrained in me, and I just went along with being a good girl.” She had seen it with her own mother who had been treated horribly by her family, but remained dutiful (she would also find out her mother had been sexually abused by her own father). Price, when around her father, was still in “survival mode” she says. “How to appease him, how to take the temperature of his moods.” Until the full realisation became too much. “I was sick of the falsity, and I was sick of being his puppet. I realised that I was colluding at that point – by going along with his game, that I was part of his narrative. He got to say he had talked to me or seen me, like we had this great loving relationship. Forget that, I’m done.”

Price never spoke to her father again, but Nanos, the Boston Globe journalist did, in 2022 (again, he angrily denied everything). By the time Price met Nanos, and they began working together on the story, she was an influential researcher of commercial child sexual exploitation – what we used to call, appallingly, “child prostitution”, and was happily married to a renowned sports journalist, with a son.

During the long years of researching that story, other family members and people who knew the family disputed Price’s experiences. “I wasn’t surprised,” she says. “I did not do the article or write this book to repair any family or former friend relationships. I feel compassion for my family, because if they were to actually acknowledge that my father had abused and trafficked me, they would have to reconcile that they’d been duped their entire lives by him. And they would also have to confront that maybe they themselves, or their children, had been sexually abused, either by my father or someone else.” She knew what had happened, but she wanted to know who else knew.

Devastatingly, Price discovered her mother had known. They had been close, and Price loved her mother. She doesn’t have answers, but the way she talks now, rationalising her mother’s decision to stay, is calm. Talking to her mother’s best friend, who revealed the truth, Price thinks her mother was terrified of losing them – either taken away as children, or through estrangement as young adults had she confessed. “As a mother, it is certainly not the choice I would make, and at the same time, I say that as a middle-class woman who has choices. My mother was an uneducated woman and trapped in an abusive relationship. So we sit at very different places.” Is she not angry with her? “Of course. She threw us to the wolves. As a non-offending family member, she was part of the collusion.”

If she has reached a degree of forgiveness, or at least understanding, for her mother, extending the same to her father has not been necessary for her ongoing recovery. She found out he’d died a few months ago, and wasn’t sad. “I’m just grateful that he’s not here any longer so he can’t hurt anyone else.”

Price never attempted to bring her father to justice. “When we look at the statistics, and this is not for trafficking, but child sexual abuse in the United States, less than 10% of reported perpetrators are convicted. We don’t have a culture that serves and supports survivors and victims. I knew what a defence attorney would do to me, completely rip me apart.” We need, she says, to “believe and support survivors, because that blaming and shaming of victims and survivors is empowering perpetrators to keep going”.

Since the article, and now with the book, other survivors contact Price. It isn’t difficult, she’s grateful, she says. “I’m honoured that people want to share their stories with me and that people feel some sense of validation, being seen. As we know, so many survivors take their own lives.” She points to Virginia Giuffre, who was trafficked and abused by Jeffrey Epstein, and died by suicide in April. “She was one of the most strong, outspoken survivors I’d ever seen. But then to take her own life, it sadly is a story I know all too well. So I’m grateful that I can be here, to provide research that validates other people’s experience, particularly for familial survivors who have been told by their families, like me, that they’re crazy, that they’re making this up. To be able to say, actually, here’s somebody who got the proof. This really does happen.”