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.)