By Lauren LaRocca

Photography by Joanna Tillman

GameChangers 2022

Marissa Jachman admits sexual violence wasn’t her main focus—and certainly didn’t think it would become her life’s work—until she witnessed its effects on her cousin, Erin Levitas.

Levitas was raped while college-aged. The traumatic event was life changing. In the aftermath, Levitas decided to attend law school and pursue a career in sexual assault prevention and survivor support. Sadly, she passed away from a rare cancer at the age of 22 and was never able to fulfill her calling. But the advocacy and awareness she started took on a new life with the creation of the Erin Levitas Foundation after her death.

Jachman had worked in the nonprofit sector since 2008 at organizations including Hillel at the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech, and the American Red Cross. She worked for the foundation after her day job, often staying late into the night. Eventually, she became so invested in the work and the foundation’s mission that she knew she wanted to give it all her attention. She quickly became the foundation’s executive director.

“[Sexual assault] really wasn’t on my radar,” says Jachman, the mother of two young boys. “But after learning about Erin’s experience, and that her experience was quite common, I realized there’s so much need for sexual assault prevention. It’s one of those things where once you learn about it, you’re like, why doesn’t everybody know this?

“It seems so changeable,” she concludes.

There are 463,634 victims of rape and sexual assault aged 12 or above each year in the United States, according to RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network), the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, and females ages 16–19 are four times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists youth interventions such as better social-emotional education and teaching healthy dating skills to adolescents as simple yet effective preventative measures.

Jachman found herself asking questions like: Why isn’t sexual assault prevention taught in school? Why don’t we start early with pediatricians? Why don’t more parents know this information? Because programs were already in existence to support survivors of sexual assault, the Erin Levitas Foundation began with the distinct mission to prevent sexual assault before it ever starts.

“We are not just focused on survivors but reducing the number of people who could become perpetrators—people who maybe didn’t recognize that something was not okay.”

Because sexual harassment often starts in middle school—nearly half of middle school-age kids report being sexually harassed—the foundation focuses primarily on that demographic. Sexual harassment in middle school is a precursor behavior that can escalate to sexual assault and rape by high school. “By high school, it can be too late,” Jachman points out.

The foundation’s “ERIN Talk” educational curriculum, created in partnership with the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) Francis King Carey School of Law, teaches middle schoolers boundaries, communication, and safe use of social media and technology. The goal is to support healthy attitudes and reduce behaviors that can be early signs of sexual harassment, such as lewd comments, unwanted touching, gender- or sexuality-based slurs, unwanted and repeated requests for dates, and inappropriate texting.

Additionally, social work students from UMB (like the law students, overseen by the foundation and university), speak in schools on a range of topics including how to communicate with family and friends and conduct group exercises to try to develop empathy. Because the subject is sensitive—and often the impetus for students to share the experiences they’ve had—UMB students are trained to handle situations and questions with care and expertise. The curriculum covers seven sessions, which gives kids time to integrate what they’ve learned and question UMB students on subsequent visits.

Jachman also is working with UMB to create Parent Talk, which will cover issues like the safe use of social media and technology, and Teacher Talk, which will focus on identifying sexual harassment, responding to it in a healthy way, and how to support prevention. Teacher Talk started its second pilot program this summer and is expected to launch officially by the end of the year.

“There’s so much to teach families, schools, society…and we trickle all of that content into our newsletters and social media, too,” Jachman says.

Most recently, the Erin Levitas Foundation has widened the demographic it reaches by educating even younger children through its new book, Every Body Talk, co-authored by Jachman and Matthew Mittleman. The picture book, recommended for children through age 8, teaches boundaries and body safety. But Jachman says adults can learn from it, too. She explains that it is a conversation starter for all ages. Mittleman met Jachman  hrough his wife and pitched the idea of a children’s book to the foundation. “She’s dynamite,” he says of Jachman. “There’s just some magnetic force that she has that makes you want to work with her. She lives and breathes and believes in the work.”

Creating the book, which is bolstered by the latest research about preventing sexual assault by learning to recognize and respect your own and other people’s boundaries, took about two years. Now Mittleman reads it to his 6-year-old daughter.

“It’s not your average nighttime read, but her re- sponse is very cool,” he says. “Sometimes she’ll say a line from the book, and she’s able to set boundaries with her friends, like, ‘Stop—that’s my body and I don’t like that.’ She sounds confident.”

He appreciates that Jachman is being bold enough to tackle an issue that is often addressed after the fact. “Marissa is taking on this hard subject that’s happening everywhere and getting kids at a young age to start to normalize talking about it,” he says. “It’s inspiring.”

As Tyde-Courtney Edwards shifts her feet into first position, she closes her eyes. When she starts to feel familiar emotions creep in—doubt, shame, embarrassment—she glances down at her bare feet on the dance floor and then shuts her eyes again. With practiced precision, she slides her right leg out to the side and slowly peels her heel off the floor until all of the energy in her petite frame is concentrated in her perfectly pointed foot. Her mind is now quiet; there is no room in her thoughts for anything beyond her next movement.

As she eases her foot back into first position to complete her tendu demonstration, she opens her eyes to see 15 women and one man looking back at her expectantly, nervously shuffling into place. She cracks a wide smile and guides her students through their first exercise of the night.

When she calls out her signature line—“Suck in the guts and squeeze the butts!”—and hears laughter echoing around the Mt. Vernon studio, she remembers why it was worth all the work of rebuilding herself. And now, through Ballet After Dark, her ballet-based workshop for sexual and domestic assault survivors, she’s hoping to help others become whole again, too.

“I don’t claim to have all of the answers, but I know some things that worked for me, and they might work for you, too,” she tells the class. “It all started with having to rediscover and re-fall in love with myself.”

“I had to be smart about how I was going to make my dreams happen, but I was getting there.”

Ballet was Edwards’ first love. She started taking classes at the age of 3 and decided to become a professional dancer the day she received her high-school acceptance letter into the dance program at the Baltimore School for the Arts.

At BSA, she worked her way through the rigorous curriculum, finding her strengths in quick, sharp movements at the ballet barre, as well as slow, drawn-out adagio work that always made her feel powerful. She felt captivated by the quiet control she had over her body while mastering a new exercise or combination. During certain sections of class, she often found herself smiling, “because I was so happy,” she says today.

After graduating from the program in 2005, Edwards spent the next several years working temporary jobs around Baltimore to support her frequent trips to Philadelphia and New York City for dance auditions. Between stints as a Baltimore City police cadet, a Comcast salesperson, and a manager at a Westminster doctor’s ofice, Edwards trained with the Peabody Conservatory, the Joffrey Ballet, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She performed in music videos and graced the stage in multiple productions with the Maryland Ballet Theatre in Annapolis.

“Being a freelance dancer was such a hustle and a grind,” she recalls. “I had to be smart about how I was going to make my dreams happen, but I was getting there.”

That hard work would eventually pay off, when by the end of October 2012, Edwards was invited to audition for the renowned Bloc Talent Agency in New York City. She was feeling especially hopeful, as her boyfriend had also just proposed.

But then one night, less than a week before her audition, Edwards was reaching into the trunk of her car outside of her Howard County apartment when an unknown man came up behind her and hit her over the head.

“I went through phases where I wished he would’ve just killed me instead of having to go through this.”

Though she was barely conscious, Edwards felt herself being dragged behind the building and into the woods, where the stranger beat, raped, robbed, urinated on, and spit on her before fleeing the scene. The next time she opened her eyes, there was light peeking through the trees. Her arms were covered in scrapes, and sections of her hair were matted with mud. “The first thing I felt when I came to was shame and embarrassment,” she says.

With Edwards in a state of shock, her mother called an ambulance from that same parking lot to transport her to Howard County General Hospital. She then went to the police department, where she reported the attack and answered hours-worth of questions. She completed a rape kit and submitted all of her belongings—including her coat, tennis shoes, and empty purse—into evidence. But as she moved through each step, she couldn’t shake the grumbling comments she overheard from the officers during her ambulance ride—that they didn’t feel like dealing with all of the paperwork this would mandate, as she recalls.

By the time Edwards learned that her case was being handled as a robbery, the rest of her life had already started to unravel: her family expected her to move on within a matter of days; her fiancé stopped returning her calls. Shortly thereafter, she discovered she was pregnant as a result of the rape and had an abortion, crying to herself on the way home alone. The police department’s robbery detectives didn’t respond to her requests for updates on the case, leaving her overwhelmed with anger—both at them and with herself. She started drinking heavily and using drugs as means of coping with her trauma, and that winter, she hit her breaking point and checked herself into the psychiatric ward of the Howard County General Hospital.

After two weeks, she moved back into her mother’s home and spent the next eight months dealing with depression and agoraphobia, which developed after the attack. Terrified to leave the house, she avoided mirrors, showering, and any form of physical contact. “I went through phases where I wished that he would’ve just killed me instead of having to go through this,” she says. “That was very, very tough.”

Eventually, with a recommendation from a Howard County General nurse, Edwards started visiting TurnAround Inc., a counseling and service provider in Towson for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Working with a counselor there, along with weekly one-on-one and group therapy sessions, helped her navigate her emotions in a way she had not yet been able to. But Edwards still felt distant from her own body. She had dedicated her life to learning how to control her form through every leap, turn, and stretch, but the abuse and its aftermath broke the connection.

Finally determined to reclaim her body—and life—she stepped back into the dance studio for the first time since the attack. “I thought getting back into the studio would cure me,” she says. “I needed something to think about and focus on other than what
happened to me.”

Her worries about having to answer questions from classmates about her hiatus faded away once the music started. “When you’re in the studio, it’s okay to be so focused that you don’t talk to anyone,” she says. “Everyone is just there to dance, and I needed to feel that again.”

She gradually increased her studio time to multiple classes per week, slowly but surely relearning how to let people into her personal space, allowing her teachers to correct her hips during a battement kick or adjust her arm in an arabesque.

“Ballet was the only thing I could do outside of traditional therapy that made me feel like I was on the way to becoming myself again,” she says. “Getting stronger through the physical movement of dance therapy is what saved me.”

Years into her healing process, Edwards still found herself frustrated by the lack of recovery resources for trauma survivors. Therapy had helped her mental health, and ballet had improved her physical well-being, but she felt a desire to create a new alternative practice—one that would strengthen survivors through a mix of physical, mental, and spiritual healing.

“I knew I could use ballet as a tool of empowerment when it came to restoring feelings of grace and elegance in women who had suffered horrible traumas,” she says. “There are people who prefer to move rather than talk, and I understood that.”

So in May 2015, Edwards launched Ballet After Dark, a ballet-based fitness program that includes a self-care workshop for sexual and domestic assault survivors called “Reprocess. Rebuild. Reclaim Your Life.” The three-hour program begins with physical fundamentals, focusing on strength training and gentle ballet movements for any body type, skill level, or gender. (While the workshops are predominantly made up of women, male participants are welcome, too.) Edwards and a licensed mental health professional then lead the class through empowerment exercises such as daily mantras and self-care techniques, and facilitate open discussions about therapy and personal healing journeys. The workshop closes with a guided meditation for attendees to incorporate into their everyday lives.

“As women, we tend to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders, and we often forget to create spaces for ourselves,” Edwards says. “We need more opportunities to escape from reality and have conversations that don’t revolve around pain.”

Since the first class nearly four years ago, Ballet After Dark has gained a loyal following of both trauma survivors and aspiring dancers looking for an intimidation-free way to learn ballet. After an overwhelming number of requests to bring the restorative workshop to other states, Edwards will take her program on the road this spring to one-day events in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Chicago.

The practice has also caught the attention of independent filmmakers Ayana Barber and Brittany Fennell, who have created a documentary about Ballet After Dark that will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival this April. The film was selected as one of the first projects produced by The Queen Collective, an initiative by Procter & Gamble and actress Queen Latifah’s production company, Flavor Unit.

While she’s humbled by the program’s popularity, Edwards’ motivation comes from her students, like Maria Roxbury, who has been a regular since the inaugural workshop.

Roxbury says she discovered the program while she was caretaking for her mother-in-law and needed an outlet to focus on herself. She left her first class feeling empowered, and over time, she wrote a poem to thank Edwards, who hung it on her refrigerator as a reminder of her purpose.

“She has helped put me back on solid ground,” says Roxbury.

“We need more opportunities to . . . have conversations that don’t revolve around pain

From her place at the front of the dance studio, Edwards leads attendees through an end-of-session discussion on how to push through hardships and setbacks as part of the recovery process.

“It’s important for me to have a family, a sisterhood, and a collective of people that I can heal and grow with,” Edwards tells the class, crediting helping other survivors for keeping her afloat. “And that’s why I’m grateful for you all.”

As the workshop ends and classmates shrug on their coats, give goodbye hugs, and head off to their evening plans, Edwards is still full of energy. Smiling to herself, she pulls a black knit sweater over her sports bra and heads out into the lobby to mingle with her regulars.

Spontaneously, they break out in a rendition of the theme song from Living Single, the ’90s sitcom starring Queen Latifah herself. Edwards grooves to the beat as they sing in unison, “Whenever this life gets tough, you gotta fight/with my homegirls standing to my left and my right. . .”

Although her case is still open, Edwards now feels confident that she can dance through whatever the next chapter of her life brings. As another workshop comes to a close, she’s standing tall and unafraid as she walks out into the night.

“I’m still becoming the woman that I’m supposed to be,” she says. “I don’t know who she is yet, but I know I’m on my way.”

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.’”

Your new novel, Any Man, follows the story of a female serial rapist who preys on men. Why did you choose to explore sexual assault and its effects from that angle?
I encourage people to think of this story as means of broadening the conversation about gender and rape culture. To me, men are a part of this conversation, and if you look at the bravery of someone like [actor] Terry Crews, for instance, you’ll see that that is really true. Part of the larger conversation that we need to be having is looking at who exactly is affected by sexual assault.

What message do you want to convey through this story? What do you want readers to learn from it?
I want people to have a better sense of empathy. It’s not just the experience of understanding what people go through; it’s also the experience of wanting to help us change the culture. I think there’s been so much numbness around conversations about sexual assault. We’re in the 37th week of the #MeToo movement; it just happened, and people are acting like we’ve been here for years holding men back. And that’s really disappointing. I would love to really find a way to have larger, more difficult conversations which include looking at our own actions. And by us, I mean women. Looking at how we treat other women, how we treat other genders, all of those types of things.

What does this novel add to the national conversation?
I started working on the book three-and-a-half years ago, and I never could have imagined that it would come out right now in the middle of all of this. I think there was a real sense of fear, a sense that people might not be ready to have these more difficult conversations, and I understand that [the story] can be very jarring and upsetting for some people.

But at the same time, I think if we’re going to talk about huge, fundamental, endemic cultural change, we have to first talk about what inclusivity means. And we have to ask, who are we leaving out of the conversation? Are we leaving trans women out of the conversation? Are we leaving women or men of color out of the conversation? We have to look at who is still being affected and harmed that we are not representing. This [book] is an effort to do that while also saying that this is an indictment of our media culture and the 24/7 news cycle. It’s a way for us to look at that and ask, even when we think we’re being our best allies, are we helping or are we further hurting?

How did you help co-found the Time’s Up movement?
It started with several women, across industries, who were fed up. It was right after the #MeToo movement had broken open and all of us were not only sharing our own stories, but the stories of our mothers and grandmothers and daughters. It was extremely illuminating to see how far-reaching such atrocities go. From a restaurant worker all the way up to some of the biggest movie stars in the world. To know that we were collectively connected through that pain was pretty profound. We all got in a room together and asked each other: What can we do? How can we change things and create direct action so that no woman or man ever has to say #MeToo again?

How has speaking out publicly against sexual assault affected your life?
It comes with its pros and cons. I’m very happy to be able to speak for the pain of a lot of women who don’t feel comfortable or safe enough to talk about some of these things. At the same time, it’s put me in a strange spotlight that I don’t think I ever expected.

You were recently added to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the body that votes on nominees for The Academy Awards. What does that inclusion mean to you?
What I love most about it is that it says that while our business is slow-changing, at least they’re doing it. At least it’s beginning now. Whereas before, it wasn’t even part of a conversation. I think that’s really wonderful. It’s going to be a long, slow road, and it’s going to take a long time for the larger effects of change to really make their marks on society, and certainly in the entertainment business, but I think more inclusion and more equality is always the answer.

Join Amber Tamblyn on August 1 at Creative Alliance for a reading, book signing, and Q&A session.

*If you have experienced or are experiencing sexual abuse, help is available through the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). Please call 800-656-HOPE (4673) to be connected with a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area. 

**Be aware, this post includes spoilers for the Netflix docu-series The Keepers.

**This post has been updated with new information regarding the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s participation in the documentary, Maskell’s status as a priest following the abuse allegations, and the number of plaintiffs in the 1994 civil suit.   

On April 19, the trailer for the new Netflix documentary series The Keepers was released, and since then a heavy foreboding has hung in the air. What, everyone seems to be wondering, will the seven-part series reveal? Its intersecting subjects—widespread sexual abuse at South Baltimore’s Archbishop Keough High School in the ’60s and ’70s and the 1969 murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a 26-year-old nun, who many say was planning to reveal the abuse—are about as explosive as can be.  

For its part, the Archdiocese of Baltimore spent the week trying to get ahead of what it acknowledges is an unfavorable portrayal in the series. The church is represented in the documentary only through its answers to six written questions submitted by the filmmakers. Archdiocese spokesman Sean Caine admits the archdiocese declined filmmakers’ invitation to appear on camera, but insists that there was no nefarious motivation behind the decision. In fact, he says church officials would have welcomed the opportunity to participate in a more robust written correspondence. “I have my doubts about why they would not have had more questions for us,” Caine said Friday morning, after staying up all night to watch the series. “There was certainly a lot presented in the documentary that warranted additional questions that would have given us an opportunity to provide additional context for it. So I’m disappointed that we were given very few questions. Because, at the end of the day, it’s information you want. It doesn’t have to be on your terms. In other words, if you want to put us on camera to try to embarrass us by asking us questions we can’t answer, [we decline], but we’d be happy to research and get back to you.” Caine notes that The Archdiocese has created a microsite addressing the documentary’s release, which includes a FAQs page and a statement from Archbishop William E. Lori that was sent to the archdiocese’s entire email list earlier this week. 

Meanwhile, others see the documentary as a validation of the victims and those who have worked to tell their stories. On a Facebook group dedicated to solving Sister Cathy’s 47-year-old murder, Cesnik’s sister, Marilyn Cesnik Radakovic, wrote that, “This is a very difficult documentary to watch, but this documentary is about courage, and I hope this display of courage is felt by all that view this.”

In any case, the wait is now over. As of 3:01 a.m. today, The Keepers is available for streaming. Before you watch though, here are some things to know. 

1. This Has Been a Long Time Coming

Though Cesnik’s murder and the abuse scandal at Archbishop Keough have gone decades without the kind of international attention this series brings, these are not unknown events. Cesnik’s disappearance was front page news in November 1969, and made headlines again when her body was recovered from a secluded industrial area in Lansdowne in January 1970. After that, however, the trail seemed to grow cold and her death—from blunt force trauma to the head—was theorized to have been the result of a robbery gone wrong. But her memory lived on with her pupils. Over time, her death became something of an urban legend at the all-girls school, which was renamed Seton-Keough High School in 1988 and will close in June 2017 due to declining enrollment. 

2. The Story Was Kept Alive by a Dedicated Few 

Cesnik’s murder investigation heated up again in the ’90s when two women—both Archbishop Keough alums—brought a $40 million lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Baltimore and a priest named Father A. Joseph Maskell. The suit claimed that the plaintiffs had been subjected to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, and that the church had covered up Maskell’s depravity. Furthermore, the lawsuit alleged that Maskell had been joined in the abuse by other clergy, police officers, a local gynecologist, and at least one politician. The plaintiffs were then known only as Jane Doe and Jane Roe, but the women have subsequently revealed themselves to be Jean Wehner (Doe) and Teresa Lancaster (Roe). Attorneys for Wehner and Lancaster located more than 30 people—both men and women—who were willing to testify against Maskell in the suit. Read more about the lawsuit in the award-winning 1995 Baltimore magazine article “God Only Knows”.  

In the mid-’90s, headlines about the lawsuit sparked the interest of two other Keough alumnae, Gemma Hoskins and Abbie Fitzgerald Schaub. Though neither experienced any abuse themselves, they were moved by the stories of the victims and the memory of their late teacher. With help from numerous others, they began conducting their own unofficial investigation. Several years ago, the duo began a public Facebook group, which recently surpassed 1,000 members. They also run a website where people can submit anonymous tips.

These four women—Wehner, Lancaster, Hoskins, and Schaub—will be at the center of The Keeper‘s narrative. 

3. The Lawsuit Was Dismissed, But The Archdiocese of Baltimore Has Since Compensated Victims

The lawsuit was dismissed in 1995 after a judge ruled that the suit had been filed outside the statue of limitations for juvenile abuse cases. (Wehner maintains that she only recovered memories of her abuse in the early ’90s, long after the statute of limitations had expired. Lancaster and many other victims say they always remembered their abuse but were too scared to go public. This spring, Maryland extended, from age 25 to age 38, the length of time victims of childhood abuse have to sue offenders.) Father Maskell was interviewed by police and had his priestly powers revoked by the archdiocese in 1994, but he was never charged with a crime. Before the civil trial could start, however, Maskell quietly moved to Ireland, where he found work as a psychologist, sometimes even treating adolescents. According to the archdiocese’s FAQ, “the Archdiocese learned in 1996 that Maskell was living in Ireland . . . [and] informed authorities in Ireland about Maskell’s history and attempted to contact Maskell in writing on numerous occasions.” Maskell eventually returned to the Baltimore area, where he lived in archdiocese-affiliated facilities until his death in 2001. Beginning in 2002, his name was added to a list of clergy credibly accused of abuse published on the archdiocese’s website. In addition, the Archdiocese acknowledges it has paid “over $97,000 in counseling assistance and over $472,000 in direct financial assistance to those who may [have] been abused by Maskell,” including Lancaster and Wehner.

4. Sister Cathy May Not Be the Only Murder Victim

It seems likely that the series will delve into theories connecting Cesnik’s murder to the death of three other women: 16-year-old Pamela Lynn Conyers, whose body was found in Anne Arundel County in 1970; 16-year-old Grace Elizabeth “Gay” Montanye, whose body was found in 1971 in South Baltimore; and 20-year-old Joyce Malecki, who disappeared just days after Cesnik and whose body was found in Fort Meade. Because Malecki’s body was discovered on federal property, the FBI had jurisdiction over the case. It is unclear, however, if the FBI investigated the case at that time. Maskell knew the Malecki family because they were parishioners at St. Clement Church in Lansdowne, where he lived and ministered for a time in the ’60s and ’70s. With the permission of the Malecki family, Schaub filed a Freedom of Information Request in August of 2014 for all files related to a 1994 FBI/Baltimore County homicide joint task force into Malecki’s death. So far, Schaub has received no files, but did receive a reply from the FBI in April stating, “Your request . . . is . . . still awaiting assignment to a disclosure analyst for processing. The current estimated date of completion for the request is October 2017. However, given our current workload and staffing levels, it may be a very long time before you begin to receive material from this request.”    

5. Maskell’s Body Was Exhumed In February For DNA Testing

In dramatic fashion, news broke on May 4 that Maskell’s body had been exhumed from a Randallstown cemetery in February and that DNA samples had been taken from it that would be compared to physical evidence from Cesnik’s murder scene. Then, this week, barely 48 hours before the premiere of the documentary, test results revealed that Maskell’s DNA did not match DNA found at the crime scene. “For now, we’ve pretty well reached the end of the road when it comes to forensic evidence,” Baltimore County police spokeswoman Elise Armacost told The Sun. “Our best hope for solving this case at this point lies with the people who are still alive. And we hope that someone will be able to come forward with conclusive information about the murder.”

Anyone with information about Cesnik’s murder is encouraged to contact the Baltimore County Police Department’s Homicide Department, Unsolved Case Squad. Information about the murder of Joyce Malecki can be submitted to the FBI’s Baltimore field office.