The Liberator Awards

My students and I drove over to Columbus, Ohio to attend the Liberator Awards sponsored by the SOAP Project. We enjoyed getting dressed up and it was such an honor to be a Liberator Finalist for Student Group of the year! We got to meet many survivors and social service providers combatting human trafficking and it was an inspirational and educational night. We are able to hear from and meet people from around the United States working on human trafficking. 

Two of the people at our table worked at the Tim Tebow Foundation. They worked in a Her Song Safehouse in Columbus and it was very interesting to talk to them about their work and the foundation. The foundation supports eight safe houses in four cities in Tennessee, Florida, and Ohio. The safe houses provide "long-term residential care and trauma-informed programming to help survivors heal and become self-sufficient. While Her Song helps survivors coming out of trafficking situations with immediate physical needs like a home, the program offers much more. Through a holistic approach, skilled and compassionate staff members guide each woman on her journey to healing and freedom." They introduced us to survivors in their program and it was so amazing to be able to learn more about their journeys.

We also sat with two local survivors of sex trafficking from Columbus. We learned about their stories and it was very interesting to talk to them about legislation in the federal and Illinois legislature. We talked about expungement and vacatur statutes. One of the ladies told us she had been arrested so many times that it has taken years and lawyers had to go county by county to expunge her criminal convictions (mostly for prostitution). Since many of the arrests happened on the local level there is no statewide or federal mechanism to expunge records so it is quite a tedious process. Here is more information from the Polaris Project on federal efforts to provide a pathway for federally criminalized trafficking survivors to clear their records with The Trafficking Survivors Relief Act of 2022. Clearly we need legislation on the state level in every state too! 

We also talked to them about the full decriminalization legislation in the Illinois Senate. They both said that they were against full decriminalization. They told us that getting arrested and serving time in prison were the best things for them and allowed them to escape their trafficker and also get sober. It was an enlightening discussion that shed light on how some survivors feel about full decriminalization and echoes thoughts I have heard elsewhere. The bill SB2391 Sex Workers Safe Act was never assigned to a committee in Illinois so it doesn't look like it will pass this session. Either way I am thankful for the local survivors for providing their perspectives on the policy. There is a lot of rhetoric on being survivor informed with sex work and by talking to survivors I always learn just how split the movement is on their policy preferences.

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