Hi, friends. It seems that I’ve somehow (and bizarrely) become the target of a campaign of harassment and defamation by a small but loud group of “anti-CRT,” anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-trans, abusive activists. I’m not going to spend much time defending myself from fabricated claims, but wanted to put this here […]
social justice
21 posts
Highlights from Twitter from today’s presentation on prevention through reducing collective violence at the 2021 Freedom Network USA conference, “Learning to Unlearn: Transforming Anti-Trafficking Work.”
On the Super Bowl, Safety, and SolidarityFinding common ground in a time of crisis … and beyond Every year, around this time, the airwaves in whatever city is hosting the Super Bowl are flooded with public service announcements about sex trafficking. Billboards go up. Police officers receive special training. Media […]
When I first began working in the anti-trafficking movement, I had a decade of experience working as a rape crisis center responder. I was familiar with trauma-informed care, non-judgmental provision of services, and the ways in which victim-blaming, rape culture, and sex-negative messaging impact both survivors and our efforts to […]
Christy Croft, a sex-trafficking survivor and activist, was scrolling through social media in July when they came across a debunked conspiracy theory claiming that the furniture company Wayfair was selling kidnapped children. At the time, hundreds of thousands of people on social media were discussing the falsehood. Croft decided to […]
I was interviewed for this New Republic piece by Melissa Gira Grant on the divide in the human trafficking movement between those who see it as a conservative, anti-sex work, criminal justice movement, and those who understand the human rights underpinnings of any effective anti-violence work. This was not a survivor-led movement […]
This post is an expansion of a post published at the website of the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault. I was at a recent gathering of crisis workers when the topic of conversation switched to self-care. With enthusiasm, each of the attendees began to tell us their favorite activities. […]
There’s this thing that happens to advocates when the world around us burns with injustice and fury and we shift into what we know, the holding-fighting, fierce-eyed, tender-hearted caring that pours out compassion and links lives with survivors, shedding trails of sweetness as it goes. It’s a professional skillset and […]
Seventy-two hours out of every week, I carry a hotline phone. While calls come in waves and some shifts are silent, my everyday and professional lives are peppered with reminders that evil doesn’t just pierce reality through acts of power, control, and violence – it seeps through in discrediting voices […]
Last week, I attended a presentation by a local nonprofit providing batterer intervention programs, anger management, and other classes to help domestic abusers recognize and repair the impacts of their unhealthy patterns. “Before they can even begin to seek compassion for and address their own past traumas that led them […]
So, while I’m not yet an elder, I’m old enough to start thinking about the kind of elder I want to be, and about what it means to hold space as an elder. It means to hold memory, to preserve traditions, to remind us of those who came before, and […]
When the movement first picked up steam a few months ago, I found myself thrilled by the momentum. With each news report declaring a new power player whose reign of manipulation had fallen under the weight of multiple corroborating stories of abuse, I would cheer. “Let ‘em fall like dominoes,” […]