Stopping traffic

Editor’s note: Several people interviewed for this story asked that their identities be concealed. The names in this story are fictitious, but their stories are real.

They arrive wearing red T-shirts, the chosen insignia and unmistakable standard of this group of culture crusaders.

In bold capital letters the word “SERVE” is emblazoned on the back. Flooding out of the shuttle van, 10 women tote long-stemmed red roses and small plastic bags filled with shampoos, soaps and other hygienic products. They disappear into a local strip club, where they will greet smiling bouncers and waitresses, rebuff the come-ons of men who’ve been drinking and breeze past nude dancers to make it to the dressing rooms and deliver a simple message: You are not forgotten.

The owner knows who they are and what they represent. He lets them in anyway. The red shirts have never been pushy about their faith. They’re reaching, not lashing, out. A group of them arrived after Gustav ravaged the city’s power grid to deliver food and water right here—to a strip club of all places.

Besides, the girls like the flowers.

The group’s rules are simple. Move quickly. Maintain eye contact with the team. Value these women as human beings. No preaching. No condemnation. Not a single word about human trafficking.

Most of these women are not dancing against their will, but if there is even one secretly living in an abusive situation, tonight is worth it. Tonight she will feel truly loved.

A few men in red shirts stand outside the club in the concrete lot far from the front door. While waiting for the women to emerge from the back entrance, they make small talk with the parking attendants and bouncers. Some they know by name. They hand out batches of sweets made by an elderly lady from Broadmoor Baptist Church who bakes them specifically for this ministry—cookies for strippers.

A handful of teenagers wait in the van and pray.

It’s 10:52 on a Friday night in Baton Rouge. Midnight Outreach is only just beginning. Next the group will visit the prostitutes on Plank Road.

“We just want to be a point of contact if they need anything,” says Marianne, an outreach volunteer. “We want to tell them, ‘You are just as much a daughter of God as we are. You are special.’”

An hour earlier, Marianne, her colleague Jane and a dozen other red shirts gather in a small meeting room at Healing Place Church. Jane introduces everyone to two young women from Texas who are traveling through and looking for opportunities to plug into a church.

“We’re just trying to serve and share some Jesus,” one of them says. The pair volunteered in the Gardere area the day before.

Jane begins by telling the newcomers exactly what Baton Rouge is facing in its fight against human trafficking, an illegal practice largely misunderstood and overlooked in the United States, she says. She talks of human trafficking as a form of modern-day slavery, a slippery slope that can involve men and women of all ages forced into labor or sexual exploitation against their will. Most importantly, she says, it is not just happening in Europe or Asia or Africa. It is happening right here.

Nineteen transvestite prostitutes were arrested in a routine bust last November. In January a suspect was arrested checking out of a Baton Rouge hotel where he allegedly used a 15-year-old runaway for profit after posting online advertisements offering her for sex.

State Rep. Walt Leger, backed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, pushed a bill during the session that would impose lengthy prison terms and stiff fines on anyone convicted of aiding human trafficking.

“The people that other people don’t want to have a lot of contact with, I want to have contact with—drug dealers, prostitutes, gang bangers, whatever,” Marianne says in the middle of a typical Saturday morning homeless outreach at Healing Place’s Dream Center off Florida Boulevard.

Pimps often recruit women from homeless shelters, and Marianne wants to give these people somewhere safer to go. “A lot of people think these women don’t need my help, don’t want my help, they’ve chosen to live this way, but I’ve never met a prostitute that wasn’t abused as a child in some way or became sexually active and got addicted to drugs at an early age,” she says.

More than a dozen homeless Baton Rougeans have arrived this morning for breakfast and a message from the gospel, and Marianne is beaming. Friends call her a bit of a hippy. Steam billows and the unmistakable aromas of a home-cooked breakfast waft out of large tin trays of eggs, sausage and biscuits, but Marianne’s easy smile and unassuming demeanor are the warmest welcome for these people. Not wanting to wait for trafficked women to come to her at the Dream Center, she got involved with Midnight Outreach four years ago.

Healing Place’s efforts are funded partially through TraffickingHOPE, a campaign of Baton Rouge-based nonprofit Cyrus International whose Rescue and Restore Coalition is one of only a dozen such anti-human trafficking groups nationally to receive federal funding.

A woman named Anita stands at the crossroads of church outreaches, law enforcement crackdowns and the men, women and children in these situations. She ran a successful clinic and transitional housing program for abuse victims in St. Louis for years before returning to Louisiana in 2006. Now she is working to stiffen penalties on “Johns” who hire prostitutes in the parish.

In January, Anita told the Metro Council that prostitution was largely not by choice and likened it to slavery. She proposed a “Johns’ school” that would require those arrested engaging with a prostitute to attend a daylong class about the ill effects of the sex trade. Similar programs have been implemented in other cities.

If TraffickingHOPE were an arm of the U.S. Marine Corps, Anita would be the Black Ops. Most of her work is done undercover. She meets with women to work out how to safely break free from their abusers.

“Everything is done in a kind of code where a text saying, ‘Hey, whatcha doing?’ really means, ‘I’m still alive,’” Anita says. “I have a lot of hidden connections with law enforcement and code names so that I won’t have to go to court, which I love, because I don’t want any of them to know who I am. I give them the information and let them do their job.”

According to Anita, Baton Rouge must find funding to house victims and work to galvanize the city’s disparate people and agencies into one cohesive effort in the fight against human trafficking.

“The challenge is uniting,” she says. “Instead of saying, ‘You’re the church,’ and, ‘You’re the family mom,’ ‘You’re ICE,’ ‘You’re FBI’ and ‘You’re city police.’ No. We have to all come together and share our information.”

TraffickingHOPE’s informative message has been loud and clear with shock-and-awe billboards and print ads in the past year—images of girls with tape over their mouths, silenced by their abusers—and yet, Pattie, Anita’s Healing Place colleague and herself a survivor of abuse, says it is time to focus on housing.

“Awareness is great for the public, but if I am riding a school bus every day going past a TraffickingHOPE billboard, and I know I’m a slave and have no place to go, that billboard doesn’t help me. Right now we have to tell them, ‘We see you, and we’re sorry. Maybe we’ll see you again,’” Pattie says. “But we need to be able to say, ‘Yes, we see you. Now come with us. This is how you get your life changed.’”

Anita has seen former victims graduate from college and ex-pimps become church regulars, but without housing, recovery is an incredible challenge, she says. She has counseled prostitutes while their pimps wait patiently outside. She has worked with women who hold ordinary day jobs and those who look just like any other student on campus.

In 2009, LSU Law student Natalie LaBorde, who agreed to use her real name, co-founded Tigers Against Trafficking. The group aims to raise awareness at the academic level, recruit student volunteers for TraffickingHOPE and the Dream Center and direct victims to counselors like Anita. With nearly 2,200 members on Facebook, LaBorde’s group has brought documentaries like Call +Response to campus and is pushing for more human trafficking education and discussion in LSU curricula. Recently, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Kansas replicated the Tigers Against Trafficking formula.

“There’s a stronger awareness of the global side of human trafficking, but domestically it is much more hidden and intertwined with the definition of abuse,” LaBorde says. “They’re not wearing signs that say, ‘Trafficked.’ You have to connect with them, find an entry point into their lives, then work on building a trust. We want to meet tangible needs and be encouraging in that.”

Back in the small meeting room at Healing Place Church, Jane winds down her talk to the faithful group of red shirts. It’s almost time to load up the shuttle van and drive to the clubs. The group takes a minute to watch the startling trailer for the Steven Soderbergh-produced human trafficking documentary Playground. The trailer is an unbelievably harrowing mash of sound bytes and images, enough to make anyone hold tight to every young woman, little girl or boy they’ve ever known and never let them go. The room grows solemn. Jane breathes deep. “I told y’all this was intense,” she says.

As a faint rustling of bags and papers seems to cue a departure, Jane pauses. She wants to tell everyone in the room why she committed to Midnight Outreach four years ago.

“I remember the first time I laid a rose on stage, and the girl bent down to pick it up,” Jane says, her voice quivering then holding like a rock. “Our eyes met, and I realized that this was someone’s little girl. My heart was forever broken.”

Jane bows her head and leads the group in prayer.

“Let us pray for safety, for favor and that someone’s life is going to be touched,” she says.

The red shirts reply with a resounding, “Amen.”

Read one victim’s account of how she broke the cycle of abuse by clicking here.

For more information on anti-human trafficking efforts in Baton Rouge and throughout Southeastern Louisiana, log onto traffickinghope.org and tigersagainsttrafficking.com.