Unconditional love
Canine companions help former victims of sex trafficking find confidence
With a calmer, gentler demeanor than you might expect from a dog of eight-and-a-half months, Camo the Labrador/Catahoula Leopard Dog mix strolls through the room. He stretches out on the floor, patiently waiting, watching the door with his whiskey-brown eyes. His companion is returning soon.
When Jessie (Editor’s note: Names of Hope House residents have been changed to protect their identities), a young woman sporting a lime-green manicure and an LSU shirt, finally arrives, Camo comes to life. As he wags his tail and climbs halfway into her lap, it’s clear he has bonded with Jessie over the past several months. She’s the only person on campus that Camo really obeys.
Camo and Jessie live in a pocket of buildings on a 32-acre clearing in south Louisiana, hidden deep in the woods and protected by a heavy iron gate. This is Hope House, a safe house and rehabilitation center for victims of sex trafficking.
|
|
Joe Tullier and his wife Cami, the leaders of Hope House, took Camo and his littermates in as puppies when they wandered onto the property in early 2014. A retired U.S. Marine who spent years training K-9s for the military, Joe Tullier saw an opportunity with these spirited but sweet pups. He and his team now call them the Hope Hounds.
“The idea with the Hope Hounds is that these girls don’t know what unconditional love is. They know, ‘This, for this amount of money.’ They don’t understand that people will love them just to love them,” Tullier says. “So what the dogs provide is a type of unconditional love that they don’t know.”
Most of these women are taken into the multibillion-dollar sex trafficking industry around the age of 12, and 99% don’t make it out. The average lifespan of a trafficking victim after entering the system is only eight to nine years. As a port city, Baton Rouge operates as a hub for many trafficking channels, a dark and often unnoticed side of the city.
Many of the women who find their way out of the industry have narrowly escaped death, and most struggle to adjust after suffering years of abuse, rape and torture—being treated like a commodity.
As Tullier leads a tour of the campus, he recounts the story of a resident who once had layers of pink polish caked onto her fingernails over and over for years at the demand of her pimp. After she arrived at Hope House, a female staffer took the resident on an outing to a nail salon, where it took an hour to soak off the years of polish. The resident immediately chose a bright blue polish to replace it, a color as far from pink as she could get.
“[The resident] told the staffer … that she felt like she was finally stripping off all the layers of bad things in her life and starting over clean,” Tullier says.
The United States offers only a handful of beds nationwide for victims of human trafficking like these, and 14 of them are here at Hope House. Since officially opening in September 2013, the facility has been a temporary home to more than 50 women from all over the country.
Here they’ll find cabins with crisp, clean bedrooms, bright linens and a shower with a luxurious rainfall showerhead. They’ll find a pond stocked by donations from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, a community garden built by a Maryland dance team, a mock boutique decorated and stocked by a Houston women’s group, and a recreation center tiled by local Mary Kay sales reps.
Here they’ll find a welcoming, patient staff that allows them the freedom to find their own path. And they’ll find the Hope Hounds.
The residents work with the dogs—Camo, Mason and Hope—several times a week, practicing training exercises. Many of the residents who pass through Hope House, Tullier says, are women who have never been allowed to make decisions or bear responsibilities. In training the dogs, they can hone those skills.
But beyond responsibility, the residents have found comfort and confidence in the Hope Hounds. Some bring a dog along to counseling sessions and feel more secure reliving trauma from their past with a furry companion at their side. For others, fears of being hunted down again are quelled by a dog’s protective presence.
“Camo convinced me to stay,” Jessie says. “He’s my reason. He’s definitely my baby.”
When Camo was bitten by a poisonous snake, Jessie kept him in her cabin and stayed up with him for two nights, anxiously and diligently nursing him back to health. Afterward she confided to Tullier that for the first time, she felt the pull of a maternal instinct.
“She didn’t think she had motherly instincts. She thought there was no way she could possibly have that, until she had Camo,” Tullier says.
Another resident, Melissa, says the dogs have helped her understand herself better. Mason, the smallest and darkest of the three, spends more time on his own than the others do. Melissa knows what it’s like to feel different and excluded from the world around her. For a girl who spent years trying to find her own identity, watching Mason interact with his siblings is like looking at a kindred spirit.
“Each one of them has their own different personality,” Melissa says. “Mason is the one who is kind of lonesome, so I like to give him a little more affection than usual.”
Tullier and the residents have already begun training the dogs in therapy capacities like sitting close to their companions in stressful situations, and they plan to continue teaching them to detect and help stop anxiety attacks. Recently Tullier started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for costs like the 80 pounds of food the dogs consume each month and an agility course he plans to build.
As the dogs grow older, Tullier says, the residents will grow bolder in taking back their lives and raising their voices for fellow victims. And the care they receive at Hope House will help them get there.
“You want to see progress. You want to see success and growth,” Tullier says. “They’re with these dogs a lot. They feel comfortable in a place that they wouldn’t [otherwise] be comfortable in. Because talking about this stuff is not easy, but if they have their best friend and their buddy right next to them, they have a sense that everything’s going to be OK. And that confidence grows.”
ONLINE:
For more about the Hope House or its mother program, Trafficking Hope, visit hopehousela.com or traffickinghope.org.
|
|
|
