Educator’s Skills Aid Effort to Expose ‘Hidden’ Crime
January 20, 2005 | Read Time: 6 minutes
I grew up in a large family in Cumberland, Md., and went to Catholic schools. My teachers were the School Sisters of Notre Dame, and it was the holiness and goodness of these women that led me to become a
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School Sister after a couple of years at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. I did not join the order, which at that time was made up primarily of teachers, because I wanted to teach, but because I was so impressed with the spirituality of the women I met who happened to be teachers. But now that I look back, I suspect that teaching was absolutely what I was meant to do.
The driving forces in my life have always been focused around the opportunity to learn, around spirituality, and around a desire to help those who are poor and frightened. Being an English major in college taught me how to write and think, and certainly literature has fed my spirituality and deepened my compassion.
After teaching elementary school for a number of years, and receiving master’s degrees in English at Villanova University and creative writing at the Johns Hopkins University, I moved to Chicago in the mid-1970s to work with women who were novices in our religious community. At the same time, I was approached by Margaret Ellen Traxler, a wonderful activist in our order who participated in the first civil-rights march in Selma, Ala., about working with women who were incarcerated. These women were held at the Cook County Jail, and although I had some reservations, I agreed to teach a poetry workshop once a week for six weeks. Those six weeks ended up stretching for 25 years.
One of the things that struck me about the women in Illinois was that most of them were mothers. Because they were in jail and had not been convicted, their lives were on hold. If you are a mother in jail, your children are with whoever will take them, and if you are convicted, the courts will then make the decision about your children. These women were dealing with much uncertainty and lots of anguish, and were very fearful about what would happen to their children. Sometimes family members would bring their children to visit, but other times the family was so angry with the mother, no one would visit.
I remember whenever there was a snowstorm these women would flock to the television in the day room to see whether the schools were closing. They were concerned about how their kids would get home from school or if there would be anyone to take care of them if the schools were closed for several days.
Eventually I returned to Baltimore as a faculty member of the College of Notre Dame. In Baltimore, I worked with men who were in prison, teaching a course about writing the personal essay. One thing I learned from the men who were facing long-term prison sentences was that the more serious criminals were also the most serious students.
But finally, in 2002, I decided to quit teaching. While I loved the students and the college, I was persuaded from within that it was time to move on.
At that same time, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops received a $1-million, three-year grant from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement to create educational and outreach programs regarding the trafficking of men, women, and children. Trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or coercion in labor and sexual exploitation for commercial purposes. I applied for the job and was hired.
Suddenly I had to learn about a hidden crime, but I’d pretty much spent my life learning and studying new things. Yet the other individuals working in this field are new to it, so we’re all learning together.
When my students in the English department became apprehensive about job possibilities, I told them repeatedly that if they could read, write, think, and speak, they could do anything. When I took this job, I discovered that, indeed, the ability to read well, to write clearly, to think critically, and speak fluently and intelligently were invaluable assets that I carried over from my teaching into this work.
No one knows for sure how much trafficking there is, but the most reliable data we have comes from the U.S. Department of State. In 2004, the State Department said that about 15,000 people in the United States alone were being held as slaves — yet, two years previous, it had put that number at about 50,000. The State Department keeps refining its methodology and, therefore, revising its numbers. Nevertheless, given the nature of the crime, no estimate can be certain.
We’re working very hard to educate the public about how to recognize the signs of trafficking and how to identify these victims. For instance, this past October we held a daylong seminar on trafficking, and I’ve spoken to the deans of the Catholic schools of nursing. Health-care people are crucial in reaching these men and women, as are social workers and pastoral-care people.
It’s so important to have a public that is educated about trafficking: The prosecutors who are trying to send people to prison really need the public to understand and believe that this problem truly exists. Law enforcement needs to be able to work in the context of an educated public that will provide tips and leads and report suspicious activity.
Human trafficking is about sexual exploitation for commercial purposes and about forced labor. The public may sometimes marginalize those who have been victimized by sexual exploitation, but rarely those who have been victimized by labor. In general, victims of trafficking are treated with appropriate respect.
But prisoners are a different story. Many people believe that a convicted criminal is a bad person. My experience is that most convicts are good people who did bad things. Yet, there is a public perception of prisoners that excludes compassion, understanding, and even common sense. Most prisoners are going to return to us, and I hope we will bring them back better than they were when they went in.
Two things I’ve learned over the years from my students — both in college and in prison — and shared steadily with them: Nothing is pure, and grace is everywhere. Good and evil are not always as clearly distinguishable as we think. Each of us live with and in and out of contradiction. Everything is salvageable. There is nothing we cannot learn from.
