he phrase “the new normal” has been thrown around since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and as America struggles to define—and design—what that is exactly, colleges are paving the way for what it might look like.

After the chaos and uncertainty of 2020, colleges and universities throughout the Baltimore region began to find their groove as they moved into the 2021-2022 school year. Coronavirus safety committees had been erected, new mandates put in place, safety protocols implemented—everything from vaccine requirements to temperature checks to quarantine procedures and wastewater testing that can pinpoint a COVID infection before anyone is symptomatic.

By some counts, colleges may very well be the safest places to live and work.

“Just following simple rules of wearing face masks and social distancing, using wastewater management and testing when we need to, we have, in many ways, been able to return to normal life,” says Goucher College President Kent Devereaux. “Full athletics, student clubs, dining in the dining hall, use of the library—everything that you’d normally have, we’ve been able to return to.”

Despite the challenges and anxieties faced by students, staff, and faculty alike, some unexpected silver linings have emerged.

“It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

The widespread adoption of technology across college campuses has proven to provide more flexibility, efficiency, and innovation—and even accessibility, in some cases. Counseling sessions, for example, began to be conducted remotely during the pandemic and many students found that they preferred it to in-person sessions. Students who cannot, for whatever reason, make it to an in-person class can now study from anywhere.

Challenging times, combined with advances in technology and the general acceptance of it, have also brought more cooperation and collaboration among schools. It’s becoming more common, for example, for schools that offer complementary programs to partner with one another to offer students an educational pathway to continue studies in their chosen areas. That may mean a discounted tuition rate, a transfer of class credits, or an internship through a partner school.

Maybe most importantly though, schools, at their best, foster an environment where students are supported, expand who they are, and connect with like-minded people. At a time when gathering together is not always safe, being in a community has become even more precious, and students have found new ways to connect.

OCA Mocha, a coffeehouse in Arbutus founded by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) students, is one example of how effective a gathering place can be at a time when people are craving human connection. What started as a class assignment—to design a community center of some sort—has become a gathering place not just for UMBC students and alumni, but the Arbutus community at large.

“We’ve heard a lot of stories from people who are extremely grateful to have this space,” says Michael Berardi, UMBC class of 2019 and co-founder and general manager of OCA Mocha, which stands for Opportunities for Community Alliances. The coffee shop includes a stage, a community room, and an art gallery, employs UMBC students and alumni, and provides internship opportunities for current UMBC students.

“We have local groups and organizations that meet regularly in our community space and are grateful to not have to meet in someone’s living room or church basement,” says Berardi. “We see a lot of connections being made. It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

We checked in with colleges and universities throughout the region to find out what’s new and what campus life and classes look like, two years into the pandemic.

COPPIN STATE UNIVERSITY
A historically Black institution founded in 1900, Coppin State University is situated in the heart of Baltimore City in the Mondawmin neighborhood. Part of the University System of Maryland in Baltimore, the school offers 32 undergraduate and 11 graduate degrees, along with nine certificate programs and one doctorate degree. It’s been rated No. 4 Best HBCU in the Nation (College Consensus), the Top 5 Best Value Online Program (Online School Center), and No. 17 Best Value in the Nation (College Consensus).

In the summer of 2021, CSU announced its Student Debt Relief Initiative, which clears roughly $1 million in student balances and provided a $1,200 credit to every student enrolled in the fall 2021 semester. CSU also created the Freddie Gray Student Success Scholarship, which is available to graduates of Carver Vocational-Technical High School, where Gray was a student.

Coppin also takes esports (competitive video gaming) seriously. In the fall of 2021, Coppin became the first HBCU to open a building on campus exclusively devoted to esports. The Premier Esports Lab opened in September with a guest appearance from Grammy-nominated artist Cordae.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,383 undergraduates, 341 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $6,809 in-state, $13,334 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 40%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Business, Biology, Education, and Criminal Justice, Rehabilitation Counseling

DICKINSON COLLEGE
Founded in 1783, Dickinson College is a liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with a suburban campus that spans 144 acres. The school offers 41 undergraduate degrees within 17 fields of study.

It’s been rated as one of the best schools in the country for its sustainability efforts, which include an 80-acre, USDA-certified organic farm. Princeton Review rated it No. 2 in the Top 50 Green Colleges, and it was rated No. 2 in Overall Top Performers among baccalaureate institutions in the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s “Sustainable Campus Index” in 2019 and 2020.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,345
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $58,708
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 52%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: International Business, Economics, Political Science & Government, International Relations & National Security, General Psychology

GETTYSBURG COLLEGE
Gettysburg College, a private, liberal arts school, sits on 225 acres adjacent to the historical Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania. Many of the buildings on campus are historically significant, so it’s no wonder that it draws students interested in studying history.

The school offers 65 academic programs, more than 120 campus clubs and organizations, and 800 events on campus each year, plus more than 100 study-abroad opportunities open to students.

Its Majestic Theater serves as a venue for the greater Gettysburg community, hosting national acts as well as performances by the school’s Sunderman Conservatory of Music students.

It’s ranked No. 12 for “students who study the most” by the Princeton Review, which also ranked Gettysburg College’s dining hall No. 9 in the country for best campus food.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,600
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $59,960
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 56%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Political Science, Economics, Health Sciences, Organization and Management Studies, History, Psychology

GOUCHER COLLEGE
A private, liberal arts college in Towson, Goucher College prides itself on its close-knit community.

Goucher was extremely proactive when it came to COVID-19 precautions, being the first in the state to implement wastewater testing, which is able to isolate COVID infections by dorm.

Also of note: The college recently opened two new residence halls as part of the school’s First-Year Village. One hundred percent of Goucher students study abroad, and the school is committed to sustainability.

Most recently, Goucher has begun exciting partnerships with other schools, such as Johns Hopkins University, Loyola University, and more to come, to provide a pathway for students to continue their education beyond Goucher. For instance, their 4+1 MBA Program allows students to earn an advanced business degree through Loyola via a “Fast Track” admission process, and at a 15% discount on tuition.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,100
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $48,000
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 79%
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Psychology, International Relations, Economics, Political Science, Business Administration

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Johns Hopkins University (JHU) offers nine academic divisions and hundreds of courses of study, with campuses spread throughout Baltimore, including the Peabody Institute, a music and dance conservatory in Mount Vernon. Its main Homewood campus is located on North Charles Street.

The prestigious, world-renowned university has a strong reputation for its public health and medical studies and has been compared to Ivy League schools.

One of its points of pride is its financial aid program, which covers 100% of calculated need for every admitted student, without loans. This means JHU works with families to calculate what they can afford to contribute toward the total cost of attendance—including meals, books, travel, and other expenses—and JHU covers the rest with grants that don’t need to be repaid.

This school year, JHU added two new minors: Latin American Studies and Writing Seminars.

It also announced new efforts this year to move toward a broader, more flexible undergraduate educational experience that will include a required first-year seminar and the streamlining of major requirements to allow for greater intellectual exploration.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,333 undergraduates, 22,559 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 6:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $56,313 for Peabody Institute, $58,720 for the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 9%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer Science, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Neuroscience, Economics, Public Health Studies, International Studies

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY
This private, Jesuit institution offers undergraduate and graduate programs on a beautiful urban campus in northern Baltimore City. Education at Loyola is based in the Jesuit tradition of scholarship cura personalis, or care for the whole person. Loyola is known for its academic rigor while helping students lead purposeful lives. Seventy percent of students study abroad. It currently ranks fourth in best universities in the North region according to U.S. News & World Report.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,787 undergraduates, 1,353 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 12:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $53,430
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 80%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Journalism, Social Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Psychology, English Language and Literature, Engineering and Education.

McDANIEL COLLEGE
McDaniel College sits in a bucolic setting near Westminster in Carroll County. The private, four-year liberal arts college offers more than 70 undergraduate programs of study and more than 20 graduate programs. McDaniel’s most recent addition to its curriculum is a National Security Fellows Program that provides students with knowledge, skills, and experience in national security as well as the ability to specialize in an area of interest, such as interstate conflict, intrastate political violence, cybersecurity, ethics, and human rights.

Also new this year, McDaniel appointed an inaugural associate provost for equity and belonging who provides vision and leadership to the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and works in collaboration with the provost to co-lead the college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion administrative committee, and guides the Bias Education Response Support Team.

The school also launched a new STEM Center to serve as a physical hub to support students studying the sciences. It hosts workshops and other events while also supplying online and hybrid support.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,757 undergraduates, 1,324 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $46,336
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Kinesiology, Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Political Science, International Studies

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The largest of Maryland’s HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), Morgan is a public institution founded in 1867. It is situated in northeast Baltimore. As a Carnegie-classified high research (R2) institution, Morgan provides instruction to a multiethnic, multiracial, multinational student body and offers more than 140 academic programs at undergraduate and graduate levels. As Maryland’s Preeminent Public Urban Research University, Morgan fulfills its mission to address the needs and challenges of the modern urban environment through intense community level study and pioneering solutions.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,270 undergraduates, 1,364 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 15:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $8,008 for in-state and $18,480 for out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 73%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Civil Engineering, Communications Engineering, Business Administration and Management, Social Work, Biology/Biological Sciences, Architecture, Finance, Psychology, Sociology

NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY
A private, Catholic liberal arts university in northern Baltimore, Notre Dame of Maryland University offers programs from undergraduate through PhD, as well as Maryland’s only women’s college. It recently launched the first master’s of art degree in Art Therapy program in the state.
The beautiful, wooded campus is just steps from the bustling downtown Baltimore culture. With values rooted in Catholicism, the school focuses on service to others and social responsibility.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 783
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 7:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $39,675
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 88%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Education, Biology, Art Therapy, Pharmacy

TOWSON UNIVERSITY
One of the largest public universities in the state, Towson University offers more than 60 undergraduate majors and continues to draw students from other states, though it remains part of the University System of Maryland.

Its campus continues to expand, with a huge new dining hall, a 23,000-foot recreation and fitness facility with an indoor swimming pool, and its 5,200-seat arena for sporting events and concerts. In 2021, it opened its new Science Complex, the largest academic building on campus at 320,000 square feet.

In September, Towson opened its StarTUp at the Armory, a space for startups and new businesses to engage with the broader community and larger businesses. It serves as a home to Towson’s entrepreneurship programs, as well as student competitions and events.

While Towson remains the largest supplier of medical professionals and educators in the state, the university has also built a strong reputation for its College of Fine Arts and Communication, as well as its Asian Arts & Culture Center, both of which bring students into the wider community and the Baltimore community to Towson for enriching performing arts, music, and visual art programs.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 17,907 undergraduates, 2,949 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 16:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $7,100 in-state, $22,152 out-of-state
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business Administration, Education, Nursing, Exercise Science, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, Biology, Computer Science, Information Technology

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE
University of Maryland, Baltimore is Maryland’s only public health, law, and human services university. Located in downtown Baltimore, it offers 86 degree and certificate programs through its six nationally ranked professional schools—dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work—and an interdisciplinary graduate school.

The school’s 14-acre BioPark is Baltimore’s biggest biotechnology cluster, employing 1,000 people, and remains on the cutting edge of new drugs, treatments, and medical devices.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 7,244
• ANNUAL TUITION: Varies by school
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Medicine, Law, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Social Work

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE COUNTY
University of Maryland, Baltimore County educates a campus of more than 10,000 students in programs spanning the arts, engineering, information technology, humanities, sciences, preprofessional studies, and social sciences. Located on the edge of Baltimore County, it allows easy access into the city and all the conveniences of suburban life and housing. It also offers plenty of opportunities for study abroad.

In the fall of 2021, UMBC opened the Center for Well-Being, a new two-story complex that houses Retriever Integrated Health, Student Conduct and Community Standards, and i3b’s Gathering Space for Spiritual Well-Being. UMBC’s already significant NASA partnerships have continued to grow. In October, NASA announced a major award of $72 million over three years for the new Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research II center. UMBC is leading the national consortium and will receive over $38 million. The GESTAR II consortium will support over 120 researchers, creating extensive opportunities for breakthroughs in Earth and atmospheric science research, and providing major opportunities for students to conduct research and be mentored by NASA scientists and engineers.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 13,638
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 17:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $12,280 in-state, $28,470 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, Visual and Performing Arts

 

Cited tuition costs exclude room and board and books.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the whole country has gotten to know Dr. Leana Wen, one of CNN’s top medical analysts. Baltimoreans, of course, were already well acquainted with the articulate, data-driven, compassionate former city health commissioner.

Wen oversaw the B’more Healthy Babies initiative, which dramatically reduced infant mortality, and successfully fought to make naloxone—the opioid overdose reversal medication—available over the counter for city residents. Some may also know of her immigrant family’s hardships, but few likely have an appreciation for just how much she overcame.

In Lifelines, Wen shares her personal story and struggles in forthright detail and connects the dots of her public health approach to treating much of what ails this country.

The most compelling parts of your book are your family’s financial and personal struggles during your childhood. Public housing, food stamps, school lunch programs, and state university grants all factor into your story.
I hadn’t intended to [write about that]. I’d initially pitched the book as a way to tell positive stories about public health and Baltimore. In writing the book, I recognized that my story is a story of public health successes, too. There are other stories I shared for specific reasons; for example, my mother’s misdiagnosis, then eventual diagnosis with breast cancer, because I learned a lot of lessons about what it means to be a patient advocate.

You also share intimate accounts of your own physical and mental health experiences, in particular as a woman and mother.
I talk about things like my struggle with infertility, post-partum depression, and growing up with a severe speech impediment because those were such deep sources of stigma, fear, and shame for me. In telling my story, I wanted to help others break down their stigma, fear, and shame with these issues, and whatever else might be challenging sources of concern in their lives. I also share a lot of stories about my mother because being a working mother myself, the idea of work-life balance is something I think about a lot.

How do you define public health?
Here’s the issue with public health. It’s hard to define because it is often what happens when you have prevented something from occurring. There is no face of public health because it usually is successful when it is invisible. We have the face of a child who was lead poisoned, but what about the home remediation that was done to prevent a child from getting lead poisoned? I see public health as addressing all the elements of health and well-being. The elements of housing as health care. The food that we eat. Public health can be a powerful tool to level the field of inequality.

You were fairly young when you were selected by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to lead the City Health Department.
I was 31, but let me point out that Dr. Joshua Sharfstein and Dr. Peter Beilenson were both in their 30s when they were selected. I think we have a history in Baltimore of selecting individuals who have a bold vision and track record from an early age of not being afraid of difficult challenges.

You say at one point in the book that public health requires public trust.
I am very concerned about how public health has become a pawn in partisan politics. Even the idea of people going door-to-door to educate on mask wearing and vaccines somehow has been misunderstood as an attempt to take away people’s guns. How did that happen? Or look at Tennessee, not only has the state health department been asked to stop outreach to adolescents about the COVID vaccines, they’ve been asked to stop outreach about vaccines in general, including messaging about measles and polio vaccines. This [lack of trust] is a serious threat to public health.

In 2018, as an associate public health professor at Morgan State University, Lawrence Brown was honored with the Open Society Institute-Baltimore’s “Bold Thinker” award for sparking discussion around the city’s racial segregation. The same year, The Root named him to its annual list of the most influential African Americans ages 25 to 45.

After serving as a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the West Memphis native returns to Morgan this year to launch the school’s Center for Urban Health Equity. Brown’s new role coincides with the release of The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the political and economic forces behind Baltimore’s bifurcated white and Black neighborhoods, and the modern-day segregation at the center of so much of the city’s inequity.

In 2015, you coined the term “The Black Butterfly” to describe the geography of East and West Baltimore. How did that term originate?
I had been teaching undergraduates about the segregation of space in the city and was trying to think of ways to get people to understand the concept. It was something the undergraduates—18, 19, 20 years old—could hang their hat on. The Black Butterfly is half a term of art and half of social science. [The street artist] Nether picked up on it and used it in a mural and [painter] Chris Wilson has used it in his work. The research in the book kind of came later, after others had already run with it.

This book is not directly focused on the struggle for voting rights or even of-the-moment concerns about the need for police reform. It’s a story of systemic racism in the built environment—infrastructure, housing, and neighborhoods.
I sum up the book in one sentence—you can’t make Black lives matter if you don’t make Black neighborhoods matter. There is a lot of activism and advocacy around Black lives and police violence. I wanted to expand the scope and say we shouldn’t just care about Black lives when they die at the hands of police, but we should care about all of the factors that lead up to early Black deaths . . . [including] health inequality. For every one of those [violent incidents], there’s 10,000 children, like Freddie Gray and Korryn Gaines, who are poisoned by lead. There’s people who die of asthma, HIV, or now COVID. If we’re saying Black Lives Matter, we have to care about Black neighborhoods, because that’s where Black people live.

In Baltimore, it seems the protests around the Port Covington tax increment financing (TIF) plan signaled a breakthrough moment in terms of how city government and public dollars foster segregation and inequality.
Port Covington was a turning point, in terms of organizing. There were marches and protests around the death of Freddie Gray. Now, there was organizing over a TIF. We had like 800 people come out to City Council work-group meetings at the War Memorial building that summer. It was 2016, the year after the Uprising, and here the city was giving a massive $660-million TIF to this billionaire at the corner of the “White L.” The public awareness [and outcry] was a tremendous step forward.

One of the most enlightening parts of the book is the look back at The Sun’s vociferous support of housing segregation.
The impetus for many white homeowner’s associations was the “Negro Invasion” [a characterization in the Baltimore Sun]. That was the rhetoric that was weaponized.

It was not the first time “Wendy” had run away and not come home. The quiet 15-year-old from Prince William County, Virginia, chafed under the strict control of her single mom. She had lived previously in Maryland and had friends in Washington, D.C., who would help her get by for short periods.

Melvin Douglas approached her as a friend, too—a potential boyfriend even. She’d met him twice before, briefly, a few weeks earlier on the streets of D.C. The third time that the 31-year-old Douglas spotted her, they talked more. He offered to buy her a meal and a place to stay. He paid to get her nails and hair done, made her feel special, and told her that he cared about her.

Ten months later, in early 2012, Wendy’s photograph popped up on Cpl. Chris Heid’s computer. She was still missing. Heid had just begun working with the Maryland State Police’s Child Recovery Unit. “She looked like any schoolgirl,” he says of the image of Wendy distributed by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. He asked the Prince William Police Department if they minded if he looked into the case.

Digging through the girl’s old social media accounts, Heid came across a phone number on Facebook. It had been out-of-service for months, but running that number through Google he saw that it was associated with an outdated ad under “escorts” on Backpage.com—the Craigslist-like website of choice in the sex trade. Reaching out to administrators at Backpage (a notorious operation that has collaborated with police, at least in part, to protect itself from allegations of abetting prostitution and trafficking), Heid learned that the purchaser of that seven-month-old ad—who wasn’t Wendy—was linked to another, more recent Backpage ad, which was advertising a girl-for-hire in College Park.

Heid dialed the number and a young female voice answered. He asked if she had any time available. He asked how much a “short stay” cost. He asked where she was. At a hotel?

“She said, ‘Yes, College Park, near the school,’” Heid recalls. Presuming the young voice belonged to Wendy, Heid alerted the FBI task force and drove down there.

Heid called again when he got to College Park. The girl told him she was at the Quality Inn, as he’d guessed, and gave him her room number. With FBI agents hidden in position at the hotel, Heid, wearing a hoodie and jeans and sitting in an unmarked car, watched a man and another woman leave her room.

“I knocked and identified myself when I entered,” Heid recalls. “I told her I knew who she was and how old she was. She denied everything, including her real name. She’s like, ‘No, I’m not her. I’m not that girl.’

“But when I tell her the FBI has already grabbed the other girl and the guy, her entire demeanor shifted. She wasn’t scared anymore. She became polite. She became a kid again. She said she needed help; that she didn’t know how to get out.”

The grooming process had lasted about three months, Heid continues. “It’s always different, but it always lasts just until the exact moment the girl feels comfortable. Then it’s: ‘You gotta pay me back for all this. You owe me.’

“At first, she had thought she was his girlfriend. She had one tattoo—Melvin, the name of her pimp. He took all the money she earned. Later, he told her the only way she was getting out was in a body bag.”

That Heid was able to locate and recover a 15-year-old runaway and trafficking survivor so quickly is unusual. More unusual is that law enforcement officials elicited a guilty plea in federal court from Douglas. What is common in Maryland, however, is the sex trafficking of women and minors. In 2014, 396 survivors of human trafficking came in contact with the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force. Of those, 381 were victims of sex trafficking, including 364 girls and women.

“We are talking about 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds who are being sexually assaulted, raped, up to 20 times a day.”

In fact, the number of survivors identified by the state trafficking task force nearly doubled from 2013 to 2014, which doesn’t so much as indicate a skyrocketing number of victims as it does the degree to which the ongoing crisis has been hidden in plain sight. “The number of survivors coming in contact, in one way or another, with the victims’ services committee of the state human trafficking task force most likely is a fraction of the actual trafficking victims,” says Amelia Rubenstein, a researcher with the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work.

The data also reveal that those being sexually trafficked in Maryland are not who we might imagine.

The overwhelmingly majority of these survivors are not undocumented immigrants, for example. Nor are the majority chronic substance abusers. All but eight of the sex trafficking survivors in 2014 who came in contact with the state trafficking task force were U.S. citizens. Of those who reported their age, 56 percent were 17 or younger.

“Maryland is a hot spot of trafficking. It’s that simple,” says Maryland State Police Sgt. Deborah Flory, who oversees the agency’s two-person Child Recovery Unit. “That’s because of I-95, I-70, and BWI Airport, and the mix of wealth and poverty, which is one of the things that makes young women vulnerable.” Traffickers, aka pimps, are familiar with the laws in each state and know there are weaker penalties in Maryland than elsewhere, including the possibility of a misdemeanor charge for trafficking someone age 18 or older, Flory says. “We talk to them. They’re not dumb and they’re not worried. Some of them will wait until a girl turns 18,” Heid adds. “They can make more money than dealing drugs—$200,000 a year off of one girl—and it’s easier because they don’t have to re-up with cocaine or heroin. They sell the same ‘product’ over and over again.”

In 2016, Maryland ranked fourth among the top states per capita in trafficking cases, trailing Nevada, California, and Ohio, according to the National Human Trafficking Hotline.

---

Cpl. Chris Heid, an undercover officer with the Maryland State Police, leads a sting operation in Baltimore County looking for minors and women, such as this 20-something mother of two, who are being exploited by sex traffickers. Working with Sgt. Deborah Flory in the state police’s two-person Child Recovery Unit, Heid seeks to recover missing and underage victims and direct adult women to local resources, such as TurnAround, a local sexual assault/domestic violence with a trafficking survivors program. He and Flory also gather information related to traffickers, in hopes of making arresting and charging pimps.

---

On the one hand, a growing effort by advocates for survivors, including survivors themselves, to educate the public, law enforcement, and elected officials has started to bring attention to local human trafficking. On the other, little has been done to establish consistent human trafficking training for law enforcement agencies, or assist survivors.

Shockingly, there remains no established statewide protocol for handling juvenile survivors, who, to the incredulity of advocates, can still be criminally charged with prostitution in the state of Maryland.

“We are talking about 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds who are being sexually assaulted, raped, up to 20 times a day,” says Amanda Rodriquez, a former Baltimore County prosecutor who now oversees the sex trafficking program at TurnAround, a nonprofit sexual assault/domestic violence intervention center with offices in Towson, Rosedale, and Baltimore City. More than half of the 200 to 225 trafficking survivors TurnAround sees each year are minors. The youngest person currently in their program is 11 years old. “In any other circumstance, a 50-year-old having sex with a 15-year-old would face statutory rape charges. Yet, in Maryland, we’re still holding the threat of incarceration over these girls.”

Rodriguez used to oversee human trafficking charges for the Baltimore County state’s attorney’s office, handling between 20 and 30 cases a year. It was her contact with victims of the traffickers who she was trying to lock up that eventually led to a career switch, working with survivors.

“It was a hard decision. I wasn’t looking to give up being an attorney and it’s important to go after the bad guys,” she says. One young woman in particular made a lasting impression—a 19-year-old single mother, struggling to keep herself and her son in their apartment. “I realized that could’ve been me or anyone else in her shoes,” Rodriguez says. “She was just vulnerable.” That young woman met the man who became her pimp at a bus stop, waiting for a ride home from work. He was filling up his silver Dodge Charger at a gas station across the street.

He saw her and walked over to introduce himself. To flirt. He told her that he had seen her looking at him while he was standing next to his car. She hadn’t been, but now that he was standing in front of her she did think he was cute. Looking across the street, she thought his car was cute, too.

He told her his name was Cartier, like the French jewelry company. Handsome, older, confident, he said he wanted to get to know her. She gave him her phone number and he texted her later. He asked if she had any pictures of herself and asked if she had any kids.

The cute guy with the cute car and the exotic name turned out to be 32-year-old Bennie Veasey. Not long after meeting “Tori,” he drove her and another woman from Ohio to the Sheraton Baltimore North hotel in Towson, coercing her to have sex with men and forcing her to hand over all the money.

Busted in a Baltimore County sting operation, Veasey was using the money to pay off lawyers’ fees stemming from a rape charge. He had also previously been indicted on rape, gun, and kidnapping charges involving a woman he’d met on an online dating chat line. “I spent a lot of time with the young woman who had the courage to testify against him,” Rodriguez says. “She had loved him and he had no regard for her. She talked about her dreams and her dreams for her son, and I got to know her as a human being.”

---

---

In some ways, Rodriguez’s career switch is representative of a change in focus that she and other advocates envision toward a public health approach that supports survivors of trafficking and prostitution. “A less shaming and a more survivor-centered paradigm,” says Rodriguez. “We’ve seen the shift in the approach to HIV, drug addiction. It’s more effective than incarceration.”

Although not every woman involved in the sex trade is trafficked, nearly every woman involved in prostitution was trafficked at one point or another. It’s worth keeping in mind that traffickers target not just teenagers, but children in their pre-teens. Children in foster care, children who have run away, and those who have been sexually abused previously are the most likely to be exploited.

In the U.S., an estimated 450,000 children run away each year. It’s also estimated that one in three of those teens will be lured toward prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home. Translated, that means that about 150,000 children are pulled into prostitution each year.

Twenty-seven-year-old Morgan State University student Withelma Ortiz Walker Pettigrew, who goes by “T,” grew up in Oakland, California, where she spent her first 18 years in the foster care system. For seven years, starting at age 10, she was victimized by sex traffickers on the street, in strip clubs, and in massage parlors. (Her story could’ve just as easily begun in Baltimore City, which produces the largest number of sex trafficking victims in the state by far. “I call Baltimore the Oakland of the East,” she says.)

Pettigrew spent her 17th birthday in a detention center, which she describes as another form of trauma. She also expresses frustration that she and her pimp, two individuals of color, were the targets of law enforcement and not the buyers, who were adults, primarily white, and would pay more for an underage girl.

She’s become a leading national advocate for survivors, testifying before Congress along with Cpl. Heid, offering ideas to improve the child-welfare system, pushing for victim assistance, and demanding that survivors help inform policies, training, and protocols going forward.

“First, there is an exodus of children from the Baltimore City child welfare system every year, including runaways [more than 3,000 overall in the city each year], and most people aren’t really concerned as long as they keep getting their checks,” Pettigrew says. “Poverty and homelessness are already an issue in the city and young people are easy prey. They end up getting pushed from one system into another—the juvenile justice system.”

Officials are quick to note that juveniles are rarely charged with prostitution anymore in the state. Minors do, however, end up in the juvenile system for other charges, often related to their victimization by trafficking. In 2012, four of Maryland’s seven juvenile detention centers began screening for victims of trafficking, and since then those detention centers have identified 103 trafficking survivors (97 girls and six boys). Those youths meet with behavior counseling staff, and depending on the nature of their offense, some may be diverted to a county social services department and linked with nonprofit providers and trauma-informed counselors. But there remains no specialized residential program in the state system for young trafficking survivors.

“At first, it’s hard to break the brainwashing that a survivor has experienced,” says Pettigrew, who spoke at a Johns Hopkins University human trafficking forum with Elizabeth Smart, a junior high school kidnapping victim in Utah several years ago. Part of recovery from brainwashing is severing the Stockholm Syndrome-like symptoms—victims often develop an attachment to their traffickers, and refuse to testify in court against their pimps. The other part, of course, is trying to rebuild—or build for the first time—self-esteem.

Smart told the Hopkins audience that she will never blame someone who doesn’t flee from traffickers or contact police because she knows how it feels to be scared and traumatized and to feel badly about yourself.

“She said you feel like a used piece of bubble gum that someone has discarded,” Pettigrew continues. “And who picks up a used piece of bubble gum off the ground?”

The most pressing legislative issue, Pettigrew says, is providing immunity to trafficked youths under 18. After that, advocates want to see the establishment of a statewide referral protocol, envisioning a single point of entry and the assignment of a case manager for trafficking survivors.

Beyond that there remains a range of steps Maryland could take to prevent trafficking and support survivors, including mandating consistent, survivor-informed awareness campaigns for schools and training for law enforcement. (The recent Department of Justice investigation into the Baltimore Police Department was scathing in regard to the department’s treatment of women making sexual assault complaints and alleged prostitutes.)

“. . . You feel like a used piece of bubble gum that someone has discarded. And who picks up a used piece of bubble gum off the street?”

University of Baltimore professor Jessica Emerson, who founded the school’s new Human Trafficking Prevention Project, works directly with survivors and women with prostitution convictions, trying to get their records expunged. She’s one of many advocates calling for stronger vacatur laws. “Right now women are required to get approval from the local State’s Attorney’s Office that prosecuted them before their convictions can be removed,” Emerson says. “There are just too many hoops to go through. These charges hinder efforts at finding housing and jobs, and can lead back to prostitution or other criminal activity.”

Her own criminal record, Pettigrew says, added hurdles to the college application process. She would like to see trafficking hotline numbers and awareness ads placed in more public spaces, such as bus stops and strip clubs, and pushed via social media.

Nearly all of these recommendations, in fact, were brought forth by the Maryland Safe Harbor Workgroup in its 2015 and 2016 reports. Montgomery County state Sen. Susan Lee, one of the workgroup members, has introduced several bills in the current General Assembly—including one that mandates awareness training for law enforcement—but she remains skeptical that substantial progress will be made in the 2017 session.

“I’ve been in meetings with legislators, my male colleagues, down in Annapolis, and some of them have told me there is no such thing as human trafficking,” says Lee, her voice shaking in disbelief. “They think all these girls and women just choose to do this. Or, they believe it is not a problem in their district—so, why create unnecessary laws?”

Lee added that at a recent hearing one survivor testified that she’d been confronted five times by local police while she was being trafficked and each time they treated her terribly. “She said the police were not on her side and she had no way of escaping her trafficker.”

In the absence of successful state legislation and with Maryland ranking among the worst in terms of survivor assistance, according to a comprehensive 2014 study, several counties have tried to pick up the ball. Howard, Montgomery, and Prince George’s counties have each established their own human trafficking task forces. Howard County has also created its own asset forfeiture law aimed at establishing a victim’s assistance fund. Prince George’s County has passed legislation prohibiting hourly room rentals and requiring awareness training for motel and hotel employees. Prince George’s and Montgomery counties also now require licensing for massage parlors.

Baltimore City and Baltimore County state delegates and senators have not been leaders on the issue, according to local advocates. The Baltimore County Council has not created a specialized task force like other jurisdictions, nor has the Baltimore City Council.

In 2015, the Baltimore City Council did pass a law prohibiting hotels and motels from renting out sleeping accommodations for less than half a day and also requiring that city hotels and motels employees receive training on how to spot trafficking. But the deadline for completing that training passed in August 2016, and the Baltimore City Housing Department was unable to confirm at press time whether a single hotel or motel had complied.

On one potentially positive note, Gov. Larry Hogan has proposed legislation to close a loophole and further define child sexual abuse to include sex trafficking.

Jeanne Allert, founder and director of The Samaritan Women in Baltimore City, a private residential treatment center that receives survivors of sex trafficking from across the country, readily acknowledges that the issue is complex and that the problem can’t be fully addressed with one or two pieces of legislation, an executive order, or a single new policy.

But she says that should not prevent elected officials from learning the facts around trafficking and helping survivors get on their feet.

She also makes it clear that young women come to her program from every demographic. If an estimated 60 percent have been in the foster care system, it also means that 40 percent have not.

“We have girls whose parents are worth millions and bought them BMWs, and girls from abject poverty from Appalachia,” Allert says. “The commonality is that they all had something that made them vulnerable. Sexual abuse, alcohol or substance abuse in the home, which speaks to instability—these aren’t related to income. Every story is different. There is this myth of the perfect victim and there isn’t one when it comes to trafficking.”

Denene Yates, executive director of the Curtis Bay-based Safe House of Hope, which places exploited young women with private families, admits that this population of survivors isn’t exactly the easiest to work with. “These girls face a host of issues and complex traumas that take years to overcome,” she says. “We had a 15-year-old girl who stayed with us [Yates is married with children] and she said she had never sat down with family for dinner before.”

It’s not unlike the domestic violence issue and the way society used to—and still does, in many cases—blame women for not leaving, Allert says. “Well, these are often children and teenagers, and so you can imagine their decision-making process is even more affected. At a certain point, trafficking survivors believe that the person trafficking them was the only person who cared about them.”

Trafficking survivors need housing, therapy, education, and work force training, and they need to build self-esteem, Allert says. “They need to learn how to live as adults in the regular world,” she says.

“There are those who don’t think twice about these girls and who call prostitution ‘the world’s oldest profession,’” Allert says. “Other people call it what it really is, ‘the world’s oldest oppression.’”

It’s late August and Dr. Leana Wen is standing underneath the soaring dome of City Hall, a bank of cameras pointed at her as she leads a news conference to mark National Overdose Awareness Day.

As Baltimore’s health commissioner, substance abuse and addiction are among her top priorities, not to mention issues of national importance. Last year, more Baltimoreans died from overdoses (393) than from homicides (344). So she’s here—flanked by Senator Ben Cardin, Congressman John Sarbanes, Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, Fire Chief Niles Ford, and others—to sound the alarm about the nation’s opioid overdose epidemic and tout the city’s innovative response to the crisis.

There’s much to tout. In October 2015, Wen became the first health commissioner in Maryland to issue a blanket prescription allowing all Baltimoreans to obtain naloxone, a medication that can reverse an in-progress opioid overdose. The bold move attracted national attention and helped earn her a spot on a panel with President Barack Obama at the National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit in March.

The city Health Department is working now to train people to administer the remedy, and Wen makes sure to highlight the initiative’s progress in her remarks.

“We all trained over 14,000 people as of last month. Fourteen thousand people on how to save a life from overdose,” she reiterates, her voice echoing off the marble floors and columns of the chamber.

“Even more exciting than that,” she continues, “we have saved . . . 400 residents and citizens from overdose. Four hundred individuals who, otherwise, would have died.”

After her remarks, Sen. Cardin speaks, then Rep. Sarbanes, Commissioner Davis, and Chief Ford, each one singling out Wen’s leadership for special praise. Finally, as the last speaker—Kathy Westcoat of Behavioral Health System Baltimore—is coming to the microphone, two of Wen’s staffers—public information officer Sean Naron and communications director Michelle Mendes—catch their boss’s eye. She gives them a quizzical look and hurries over to them. After some hushed discussion, Wen and her staff slip away down a hallway, a camera crew trailing behind.

It all looks rather curious. Has she just been warned of a bioterrorism attack? A suspected case of Ebola or Zika? Maybe there has been an emergency and she has to go door-to-door, checking that residents have sufficient supplies of their vital medications, like she did last year after the riots? Wen’s purview as health commissioner is so vast that any of these scenarios are possible.

But it is nothing so dire—in fact, it’s good news. Turns out, the Food and Drug Administration has agreed to put black box warnings on benzodiazepines, a class of drugs commonly used to treat anxiety, and opioid painkillers, warning of the potentially fatal effects of mixing them. Earlier this year, Wen led a coalition of public health officials asking the FDA to add its sternest warning label to the drugs. Now that FDA Commissioner Robert Califf has agreed, he wants Wen to sit in on the conference call to reporters. And the camera crew is catching it all for a documentary about millennials making a difference.

Such is life for the 33-year-old Wen, Baltimore’s youngest-ever health commissioner and perhaps the nation’s brightest light in the field of public health.

“She’s a whippersnapper,” jokes Peter Beilenson, the city’s health commissioner from 1992 to 2005. “She’s very much a go-getter and a dynamo, and the city desperately needs that.”

Even before she was appointed in January 2015 to lead the city’s 1,000-employee-strong Health Department, Wen was something of a media darling. She gave frequent TED Talks. She wrote a critically acclaimed book (When Doctors Don’t Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests) partly inspired by her time as a caregiver during her mother’s eight-year battle with breast cancer. And she was a regular commentator on medical issues for print, online, radio, and TV outlets.

But after the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray exposed the racial and socio-economic disparities in the city, Wen became—both locally and nationally—an even more influential figure, someone who could explain to believers and skeptics alike why the fissures in our society exist, how they got so big, and what we could do about them.

“After the unrest, we saw [an] opportunity to address these longstanding issues,” Wen says, sitting in her tidy office at the Health Department’s Jonestown headquarters one late summer morning. “It happened because of systemic racism, because of structural inequities, because of our policies of mass incarceration and discrimination—and all of those issues we believe are tied to health.”

This is a central tenant of public health: everything is connected. As the self-described “chief marketer for health in the city,” Wen spends a lot of her time helping people make those connections.

“We can’t talk about health without speaking about education and at the same time we can’t talk about education without speaking about glasses for our children and healthy babies and lead poisoning,” she says, now on a roll. “And then we can’t talk about violence without talking about addiction and mental health. . . . Whatever issue people care about, we then bring it back to why this is a public health issue.”

“She’s very much a go-getter and a dynamo, and the city desperately needs that.”

Wen was born in Shanghai, China, in January 1983. Her parents were political dissidents. She was 8 years old when they were granted political asylum in the U.S., settling first in Utah, and then, later, in a series of low-income communities in Southern California. There, she witnessed firsthand how poverty contributes to poor health.

“I saw neighbors go for years without access to care for their diabetes and then end up dying from it,” she recalls. “I saw children die from asthma, from other preventable illnesses, because they didn’t have access to health care for any number of reasons, whether it was cost or fear or stigma.”

Wen resolved to become a doctor, so she could address these glaring inequities. There was only one problem.

“I just didn’t know that I could make it,” she says. “I mean it sounded totally nuts to want to be a doctor when you don’t even know a doctor!”

In many ways, the deck was stacked against her: She was an immigrant. Her family was poor. And she suffered a severe stutter that still occasionally interrupts her otherwise perfect diction.

But Wen is not one to take no for an answer. Behind her impeccable manners, self-deprecating sense of humor, and sweet, dimpled smile, there is a formidable steeliness.

“I come from a family of fighters,” she says. “My father was imprisoned in China for years for speaking out against the government. . . . My grandparents were also activists. I come from a family that has a tradition of saying we cannot sit back and watch things happen to us. . . . We believe in shaping the course of our own future and of fighting every step of the way—for the right things.”

This being the family’s tradition, Wen applied her considerable intellect and, working longer and harder than most would dare, achieved. In 1996, at age 13, she enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, graduating five years later with a degree in biochemistry (summa cum laude, thank you very much). From there, she went to med school at Washington University in St. Louis.

Reading Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life, helped with her next step.

“I was in medical school and saw these other issues of social determinism—I didn’t even know the term public health at the time. I just knew that I wanted to do something that addressed the root causes of why people got sick,” Wen explains. “So I read Bill Clinton’s book, and I read about his experience as a Rhodes Scholar and how he went to England and met all these other people who got involved with policy and politics. And I was like, ‘Okay! That’s what I should do.’”

So, she did. In 2007, Wen left for a two-year stint as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, England. It was as life-changing as she had hoped.

As a discipline, public health bridges the gap between medical science and public policy. For instance, diagnosing and treating cardiovascular disease is the job of doctors, but public health professionals seek to understand why, for instance, African Americans are about 30 percent more likely to die from heart disease than non-Hispanic whites. What are the cultural, societal, and/or biological factors that cause this? And, just as importantly, how can they be addressed? By necessity, it is complex and very challenging. Wen loved it.

“I believe that public health is the best way for us to level the playing field . . . that it’s a powerful social justice tool that allows us to get at all these other issues,” she says.

Wen’s time in England was life-changing for personal reasons, too.

“I met a lot of my mentors through Rhodes,” she notes. These include former Mayor Kurt Schmoke and former NAACP President Ben Jealous. She also met her husband, South African national Sebastian Walker, who was then working in England.

“My life totally changed as a result of reading a book . . . which sounds totally crazy!” she says with a laugh.

Back in the U.S., Wen started a fellowship at Harvard Medical School during which she worked in the ERs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. While at Mass General, she treated survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings, which left her with nightmares for weeks.

“I am glad I was able to help,” Wen told USA Today at the time. “I wish I could have helped more. But I wish I hadn’t seen it.”

After Boston, she went to Washington, D.C., where she continued as an emergency physician, this time at The George Washington University Hospital. She says she liked the immediacy of ER work, but yearned to address what she calls “the larger picture.”

“This is the job I’ve always wanted,” she says. “I never could have articulated that this is the job I’ve always wanted, but I love the city, I love the people, I love being hands on. I love seeing the outcome of our work in such a visceral way.”

The Baltimore City Health Department has the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating health department in the country and, since its founding in the 1790s, has accrued an almost laughably disparate slate of responsibilities. These include animal control, restaurant inspections, emergency preparedness and response, STD/HIV testing, mother and infant health, youth violence prevention, and, of course, disease management.

Another interesting feature of the department is its funding structure. In contrast to most municipal agencies, only approximately 20 percent of the Health Department’s budget is supplied by the city. The rest comes from state and federal grants, nonprofits, and support from businesses and individuals. This results in a department that Wen says “functions at the pace, and with the principles, of a startup.”

Despite—or maybe because of—these unusual characteristics, the department has a history of attracting dynamic leaders, many of whom have created influential programs that have become national models.

There’s B’more for Healthy Babies, a motherhood preparedness program that has lowered the city’s infant mortality rate by 38 percent since 2009, when it was the nation’s fourth worst. Then there is Safe Streets, which employs community members—some of them ex-offenders—to walk the streets in volatile neighborhoods and “interrupt” escalating confrontations before they can turn violent.

Wen wants to make her mark, too.

In her first 18 months, her priorities have been addiction/mental health, youth health and wellness, and providing care for the most vulnerable/reducing disparities—worthy initiatives certainly, but perhaps lacking a certain unifying vision.

Then, in late August, Wen announced Healthy Baltimore 2020, an ambitious goal to reduce health disparities in the city by 50 percent over the next 10 years. She calls it Baltimore’s “moon shot,” a reference to John F. Kennedy’s 1961 speech declaring his intention to put an American on the moon by the end of the decade.

Wen certainly has her work cut out for her. Despite improvements in recent years, health disparities in Baltimore remain some of the worst in the nation, often breaking down along racial and economic lines.

“One of my predecessors did say to me when taking this job that the only limit to what you can do is your own ability to stay awake,” she says, not really kidding. “It’s challenging when you know that there are so many issues that need to be addressed, and when you know that there’s so much that can be done immediately.”

Paradoxically, after almost two years, Wen now realizes she can probably accomplish more by driving herself—and her staff—just a little bit less.

“We all need to take care of ourselves first and take care of our families first because, otherwise, we’re not able to care for our city,” she says. “And if we’re trying to have Baltimore City be the model of well-being for the country, maybe it’s an important place to start with well-being for ourselves, too.”

To that end, Wen and her husband, who live in Fells Point, have taken up cooking. A former competitive ballroom dancer, she’s also looking to reincorporate dance into her routine.

“I’m trying to do more fun things, things that I really love,” she says, adding that she rejects the term work-life balance because it sets up what, for her, is a false dichotomy.

“I mean, I love my work, and I also live in the community that I serve,” she explains. “It’s such a fluid and dynamic process that it’s difficult to say, ‘This is where my work ends and my life begins.’ Everywhere I go, I see all the residents in Baltimore as my patients, and so, where do you stop?”

Given Wen’s youth and ambition, it is only natural to wonder what will happen if and when Washington calls.

Beilenson, who meets with Wen for breakfast or lunch every few months, vouches for her commitment—with one caveat.

“I also got asked [if I was going to stay] in the first couple years,” says Beilenson, who now runs Evergreen Health, a health insurance startup headquartered in Hampden. “I stayed because I really grew to care about Baltimore, and it’s a great place to be a health commissioner because, frankly, there are so many issues to work on.

“But you know, I also believe in serendipity,” he continues. “I think, certainly, it’s her intention to stay but, for example, if the Clinton administration came calling to have her be head of [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] or [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]—if I were her, I wouldn’t turn it down.”

Wen doesn’t seem all that interested in talking about hypothetical job offers though.

“I am all in on Baltimore,” she affirms. “My family and I have moved here. We are settling here. I think it would be disingenuous to ask other people to invest in the city if I don’t invest in the city. I want everyone else to be all in on Baltimore, so I’m all in on the city, too.”