When Grizelda Grootboom meets a victim of human trafficking, she sees hope. It's not that she's naïve about the pain of that person's struggle. But she knows restoration is possible. 

Watch Grizelda's interview with News24, as posted to the National Freedom Network.

When she woke up, three men came into the room, tied her up and raped her. After the shock and confusion subsided, Grizelda realized her friend had sold her into human trafficking. For two weeks, never eating or leaving the house, Grizelda was raped repeatedly.

After two weeks, the traffickers replaced Grizelda with a new girl. As she was being kicked out of the house, Grizelda heard screams from the bedroom.

"The sound of her voice screaming - I could understand she had never been sexually abused," she said. "You could hear it in her voice and the crying and everything, and you could hear that she was young. And oh, gosh."

Grizelda wanted to block it all out - the anger toward her friend, the pain of sexual abuse, the craving for drugs. Trusting no one, she turned back to the life she knew and began to work in Johannesburg as a prostitute.

"I really didn't want to feel anything, I really didn't want to think anything," she said. "I had to go and look for the next fix, and that's what I did."

At age 26 Grizelda became pregnant. Her pimp forced her to get an abortion. "That was the turning point of everything," she said. That night, Grizelda's pimp told her to get back to work and use sponges to stop the bleeding from the abortion.

She refused. "I thought, you can go ahead and kill me, do whatever you like, because the feeling I have right now, it doesn't make a difference, " Grizelda said. "I said, 'I'm done.' ... And they beat me senseless."

She woke up in a hospital bed with a nun praying over her. Grizelda yelled at God, "Why are you keeping me alive? I don't understand." God has a reason, the nun told her. She helped Grizelda get into a shelter - the first of many shelters and many steps toward healing.

"It was a very, very heavy journey to change because there was an addiction, there were all these things in me," she said. "It wasn't just the drugs. It was the pain. It was the anger. There were all these things." When she needed to make money and was tempted to turn back to her familiar life, she turned to God and told him that she couldn't change without his help. Through Christ, Grizelda said, she found renewal and freedom from shame.

"I think that's the thing that makes me feel good to wake up every day and say, I'm out here for a purpose and out here to do something," Grizelda said. "And I'm still working on that change, it's still a process."    

Grizelda is now 34. She is writing a book and works at Embrace Dignity in South Africa, an organization that supports survivors of the sex trade and of prostitution. She is raising her 6-year-old son and has reconciled her relationship with her mother. "God has restored some peace and joy there, too," she said. "It's been wonderful."

Grizelda still carries scars from her past. She still sleeps with the lights on. But she uses her experiences to support other victims. "I really pray for those individuals to stay strong, and for their hands and feet to be anointed to serve," she said.

The most valuable thing a church can do for victims is to pray over them in love and don't expect them to change quickly, she said. She experienced that kind of support at a recent anti-trafficking conference in South Africa. "It was amazing what they did," she said. "They just came down and prayed for me. And they didn't say 'deliver' - they said 'restore.'"