Guest Blog: Becca's Reflection for Human Trafficking Awareness Month

Thistle Farmer and Graduate Kristin, Rev. Frannie Kieschnick and I were selling products after a huge church service in California. A young woman walked up close to Kristin and with a high-pitched, harsh edge in her voice demanded to know why on the Thistle Farms website we used trafficking and prostitution in our language. "You know sex work is the best women can do sometimes to care for their children,” she said.

I stepped between the young woman and Kristin, asked her what her name was and why she was being so aggressive. We exchanged a few sentences, and I told her how, in my thirty plus years walking alongside women survivors, I had not met one who had not been raped.

How do you define that as work? And what do you think, if that was her “best choice,” her other options were? Why be offended about the label instead of feeling outraged at the systems and circumstances and injustices that made this her only choice?

We continued the conversation for another minute, but I realized she had already written me off as a bad guy because I wasn't using the language she deemed acceptable for a feminist. I decided to wish her well and went back to the table with Kristin and Frannie.

Of course, I have thought about the conversation a million times since and of many other responses I could have offered.

I could have tried to explain that there is a vast chasm between academic and theological notions, and the reality of how people actually live and work in this world. I wish I had offered a listening ear to hear what her back story was that made her feel so angry with Kristin, who has probably survived more than most people I have ever met.

I would have liked to explain that zero percent of women who have graduated from the Thistle Farms Residential Program and stayed clean had “chose” to use their bodies as commodities and cede their power to dangerous people. I would have also liked to have invited her to Nashville to see the magic of women living and working in a trauma-informed space, taking their rightful place as the healers of the wider world. But I didn’t.

I didn’t do any of it, because I was feeling a bit defensive and angry myself. And isn’t that a huge part of the problem and rift? We get defensive and write each other off as enemies before we find out that there is a kinship in the passion we feel.

There is comradery in cheering for the actual women who have survived and are making their way. There is love as we realize we both come wounded and want to be heard.

That is what I wish for Human Trafficking Awareness Month: That we remember there is comradery, kinship, and love in working together for the freedom of the next woman who “chooses” a life free from drugs, cohesion, and violence.