Human Trafficking

City Safari: Philadelphia Angel Of The Dawn Heals Victims Of Human Trafficking

Sister Kathleen Coll, SSJ
Wed, Sep 09, 2020
By Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor

Sister Kathleen Coll, SSJ, has been in religious life for several decades. She has been an inner-city teaching sister in Baltimore and Philadelphia and has worked as the Social Justice Coordinator for the Sisters of Saint Joseph. Her social justice work was the springboard for her work against human sexual trafficking.

During a recent phone interview with Sister Coll, I asked her if there was any part of the social justice world that felt out of alignment with her primary vocation as a Catholic nun. (The word ‘nun’ here may be a misnomer because generally nuns wear traditional habits while ‘Sisters” tend to lean towards secular clothing or heavily modified habits. Sister Coll belongs to the latter category).

"The issues that I worked on came out of official Catholic Social teachings,” Sister Coll said. "I didn’t feel that it was radical work. It felt like this was who I am. It was work I did on certain issues and that I tried to update our sisters on, like the death penalty, human rights and then human trafficking when that began to surface.”

As a board member of the US Catholic Sisters Against Human Trafficking and a member of Talitha Kum, an international group of nuns and sisters who work against human trafficking, Sister Coll was able to meet Pope Francis in 2019 during Talitha Kum’s tenth anniversary conference in Rome.

The conference included a general meeting with the pontiff that Sister Coll assumed would be more ‘greet from a distance’ experience than an up close and personal meeting. Nevertheless, in a surprise turnaround the meeting found her exchanging a few words and shaking hands with Pope Francis, thanks to a translator nun who stood at the pope’s side.

In September, 2018, Sister Coll was awarded the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifical, the highest honor a pope can bestow on an individual. That award ceremony took place in the Cathedral Basilica of SS Peter and Paul with then Archbishop Chaput presiding.

Sister Coll was honored by Pope Francis for her role as mastermind behind the founding of the Philadelphia-based Dawn’s Place, founded in 2006. Dawn’s Place is a year-long therapeutic program offering housing, trauma-informed recovery services and vocational training to normalize the lives of women survivors of commercial sexual exploitation or sex trafficking.

Sister Coll’s work with Dawn’s Place takes place under the radar, so it’s unlikely you’ll find photos of her on the jobin the pages of CatholicPhilly,com. Not only is her work not highly publicized but the physical location of Dawn’s Place is not advertised.

The reason for that secrecy, Sister Coll explained, has to do with the fact that the women coming out of that life are the victims of trauma.

"One important part of work with women who have been trafficked or sexually exploited, is that for people who were victims of trauma, safety is extremely important,” Sister Coll said. "To be in a place where they can feel safe in that the address [of Dawn’s Place] is not publicized is important because you never know who may be looking for them. Many shelters in fact and facilities for trafficked people would be confidential.”

The subject of human sexual trafficking is sometimes reported in a highly sensationalistic way. Search the Web and you’ll find videos explaining the existence of underground tunnels where human sexual traffickers transport women and children from one point to another. Other Internet narratives implicate Hollywood celebrities as having a connection to these tunnels. A sense of mystery pervades this dark underworld, but how much of it is true?

"Human trafficking has been around a long time. There has been awareness raised around it at the end of the 1900s. At least that’s when I became aware of it,” Sister Coll said.

Sister Coll has no opinion about the existence of underground tunnels but she did say that human trafficking is a global epidemic.

Caring for the victims of human sexual trafficking is something that seems to come naturally for her, although she admits that when she was the Justice Coordinator for the Sisters of Saint Joseph she tended to think of sex trafficking as happening only in foreign countries, or the bringing of women from foreign countries to the United States, or Americans going over to foreign and third world countries and using women.

The umbrella term, human trafficking, has expanded in recent years to include labor trafficking, child organ trafficking and child bride trafficking. Allyss Flores in ‘Trafficking Awareness,’ states that organ trafficking is underreported but no less widespread.

Flores writes that sometimes an organ trafficker will kidnap someone by physical force or coercion and before the victim realizes what's happening, "they wake up in a bathtub with poorly done stitches on their side. They find out later that they are short a kidney.”

Sister Coll’s work at Dawn’s Place is with women 18 years old and older who have survived commercial sex exploitation or sex trafficking. Survival, in this case, almost always means bearing the brunt of psychological scars and then being able to go forward in life in spite of them.

"The majority of the women we have here were sexually abused as children by family members or friends of the family,” Sister Coll said. "They were afraid to tell an adult about it or the adult told them to keep quiet, or in some way the adult worked continuously to put them down. These children then pushed the trauma back down inside them.”

The buried hurt and pain had the effect of causing many of these children to leave home as soon as they were able, Sister Coll explained. "So they’re out on the street and it’s not long before they are picked up by a pimp who begins as a fatherly or romantic figure who then brings them to the arena of trafficking,”

The psychological problems that plague these women are deep, especially when compounded with drug and alcohol addictions, which is more often the case than not.

"Many of the women are addicted to drugs and alcohol and they are working against that. And just as addicts, as they say, ‘fall off the wagon,’ we do have women who go back to the life. We don’t have locks on the door from the inside so they can always leave.”

The women who do leave the program early often leave because of their addiction. "In most cases the trafficker has provided drugs for them so the women know where they can find them,” Sister Coll said.

Dawn’s Place does not do addiction counseling but women who need help in this area are sent to another facility.
The women involved in sex trafficking come from many different neighborhoods and social backgrounds. They may hail from Bryn Mawr, Chestnut Hill, Kensington or Bridesburg, so there’s no specific geographical profile.

"We have a number of women from the suburbs, and over the years we have had about 20 foreign born or international women here. Right now we have one woman who has been in the US for a long time but the rest are US citizens. Dawn’s Place currently has six women enrolled in the program and one woman in the after program.”

The programs at Dawn’s Place encourage women to accept independence. As both a shelter and a full time therapeutic program, Dawn’s Place also offers an after program where there is a continuation of trauma therapy."Trauma doesn’t go away in a year, so we offer it if they want it,” Sister Coll said.

Sister Coll finds it unbelievable that so many women will accept a lifestyle that casts them as a pawn for sex traffickers. She mentions poverty and joblessness as two inducements to this form of bondage although she says that each case is different, and that the women in the United States who consent to this way of life do so for reasons that are slightly different than women from third world countries.
"Human sexual trafficking is going on right under our noses and we don’t even recognize it,” she said, adding that it is impossible to estimate how many women might be involved in this lifestyle.

"These women have had their human rights taken away from them, and this life is being forced on them.”

When she spoke to Pope Francis in 2018 she told the pope about Dawn’s Place and then asked for his prayers.

The papal award in 2018 heralded many other public speaking opportunities for the human trafficking activist, although Sister Coll said that she was always making the speaking rounds extolling the good works of Dawn’s Place.

"All the women I’ve met so far have been very grateful for Dawn’s Place, even if they left us. Even women in prison tell other women in prison that Dawn’s Place was the only place where they felt that they were loved.”

How do women trapped in the sex trafficking underworld find out about Dawn’s Place?

Sister Coll told me that Dawn’s Place staff members sometimes go over to Kensington Avenue, a well known sexual marketplace, and contact the women working under the Frankford Market El.

"We have two full time staff members who are graduates of our program. Both of them came to use from Kensington Avenue by way of the jails.” Sister Coll said that even women who have dropped out of the program retain good memories of it and pass on the good word to the inmates in women’s prisons.

I could not help asking Sister Coll about the sex worker rights movement spreading in different cities, where open demonstrations calling for the decriminalization of prostitution, like Center City’s infamous Slut March, where participant sex workers and their supporters announce how proud they are to be able to sell their bodies for sex while making it known that they do not see themselves as victims at all.

Sister Coll’s attitude regarding the proud sex workers was non-judgmental but nevertheless pointed.

"People believe that everyone who has been a victim and survived commercial sex exploitation has wanted it, has wanted to be a victim. Sex workers would fight against any laws against trafficking or sex work so in that way they are working against us.”

Dawn’s Place, as a physical facility, opened in 2009 when a religious congregation no longer in existence donated their house to the program.

"It took two years and we had no money but after two years we opened and our first group of women numbered about five. One was from Central America who was brought to us from ICE.”

Sister Coll, who lives in a convent with four others sisters and where her days are spent in work, prayer and meditation, adds that Dawn’s Place is not supported by the government and depends entirely on donations.

"I’m always saying to folks, we do not get government funding. We exist on donations, appeals and foundations. We struggle financially, but it’s an important struggle.”
(Contributions to Dawn’s Place may be made through (www.ahomefordawn.org.)

Some Thoughts About Abortion

City Safari: A Sea Of Red Flags - Some Thoughts About Abortion

Thu, Sep 03, 2020
By Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor

Abortion, some say, is not an area where a man should have any say. At least that was the old feminist manifesto in the late 1970s and 1980s.

If I had to count the number of therapeutic abortions I’ve witnessed in my life that number would be in the hundreds. I observed most of these abortions in the 1970s when I worked in a Boston operating room in lieu of Vietnam War era military service.

Therapeutic abortions were very common in Massachusetts and Boston at that time. They called them ‘TA’s’ and they were as common as appendectomies and took about as long.

Most of the OR nurses at Tufts New England Medical Center were Irish Catholic. When it came to TA’s most of the nurses did what they had to do despite moral scruples. Unlike any other surgery, when a TA was being performed there was a degree of secrecy surrounding it, so much so that scrub nurses often taped sterile towels over the small windowpanes on the operating room door. It was not uncommon for the OR head nurse to tell everyone under her charge not to go into a certain OR room (where a TV was underway) unless requested to do so by the attending scrub nurse.

An OR orderly floated from operating room to room at the direction of the scrub nurses. A nurse in Room 2 might want you to hold a patient for a spinal tap, while a nurse in room 3 might need you for something else. TA nurses rarely needed you for anything except to give you a specimen jar that held the life that had been taken from the woman on the table. Very often the "remains” were full bodied and shockingly large.

The poor Catholic Irish nurses would sometimes give me a TA "specimen” while holding back a few tears. It was obvious to me then that these women were experiencing waves of guilt.

Only one scrub nurse publicly announced that she would not participate in a TA. She would blurt out quite frequently that TA’s were the taking of a human life. She was not Catholic but Russian Orthodox.

It’s been many years since I’ve worked in an operating room but whenever the abortion issues surfaces, I often think back to my time at Tufts New England Medical Center. I think of all those fetuses, large and small, in jars of thalidomide that I transported to the pathology department. From the pathology lab the jars were then placed inside a special medical dumpster near the hospital parking lot. The medical dumpster was not far from Boston’s Chinatown and a few ruckus Irish bars where the scrub nurses and few game residents would sometimes go for beer after their long shifts.

Today I am certain that both human infants and prenatal human children are actual persons, if only because they have a nature and potential that no other animal on earth possesses. For this reason, they deserve equal protection of the law with other human persons.

When I lived in Center City I would occasionally walk past the protests at Planned Parenthood. In those days I thought that the people protesting and praying publicly were just a bunch of crazy holy rollers fighting a losing battle. I’m not quite sure why, but at the time I viewed these protests as having a negative effect on gay civil rights, and so assumed that most of the protesters would be quick to judge and condemn gays and lesbians. The sight of so many rosaries in the crowd was also stupefying.

When State Rep Brian Sims berated a woman protester praying on the sidewalk in front of Planned Parenthood and told her that what she was doing was "disgusting” and "racist,” I knew that what Sims was feeling was what I used to feel about Planned Parenthood haters. If you’re anti-abortion, you’re surely anti-woman and (ultimately) probably anti-gay. I’m not sure how this sort of programming became a domino game in which one thing necessarily leads to another. Sims went off the wheels in his comments to the Planned Parenthood protester, probably thinking he was coming across as a social justice version of Joan of Arc and, in the end, voters would love him for it. That didn’t happen. Instead, he was criticized by many of his allies on the left. Sims smartly apologized, saying, "I can do better. I will do better, for the women of Pennsylvania.”

Sims, a Democrat, is basically in step with his Party on the abortion issue although Pro Life Democrats do exist. Pro Life Dems, however, find themselves in that awkward position of having to defend themselves to Party loyalists who take a dim view of members who drift on crucial issues. Not so long ago, Pro Life Dems might have been called ‘half-Democrats,’ but in today’s political climate (near total civil war, many say) Democrats who don’t adhere to the full A to Z Party platform are very likely to be condemned as "Trump loving Nazis.”

That’s how bad we’ve gotten as a society when it comes to politics.

Politics is also splitting the Catholic Church, especially when it comes to the issue of abortion.

In the Catholic world, the split between right and left is felt most intensely when the subject is abortion. James Martin, SJ, the editor of the liberal magazine, America,offered a prayer at the opening of the DNC. Martin is famously progressive in his views, which often puts him at odds with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The thin tightrope he has had to walk has made him the whipping boy for Catholic conservatives.
An activist nun who spoke at the DNC, Sister Simone Campbell, was also a speaker at the 2014 DNC. When Sister Campbell was asked if her social justice work included anti-abortion work, the good Sister said, "That is not our issue. That is not it. It’s above my pay grade.”

Discreet Obfuscation like this heralds a sea of small red flags!

One would at least expect a Catholic nun to then go on and say a few words about the sacredness of life, above her pay grade or not.

Conversely, at the RNC, Sister Deirdre ‘Dede’ Byrne, POSC, (in a full traditional habit, by the way, unlike Sister Campbell who was in full secular dress) spoke of the Catholic Church’s commitment to pro-life issues. She also got a bit political, which sent the Left Catholic world into a tailspin. One Villanova theology professor, a certain Massimo Faggioli, was so upset that he announced on social media that Sister ‘Dede’s’ speech made him sick to his stomach