Investigative Reporting, Fall 2015
Sacrifice: From Service to Citizen
One in 10 veterans ages 18-34 lives at or below the poverty level
Keegan D’Alfonso is a 25-year-old freshman at Cedarville University. He works once a month at a nearby Speedway gas station and studies journalism full time. Though he works a low-paying job, D’Alfonso will pay nothing for his degree, nor will he pay much for healthcare and housing in the next few years.
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Advanced Reporting for Print, Fall 2013
Moved By a Story
A copy of the January 2007 issue of Christianity Today had lay untouched in his briefcase for nearly a year before David Butgereit decided to read the cover story. Titled “Red Light Rescue,” it began: When Moon was 12 weeks old, her birth mother sold her to a local Burmese woman, who raised her like a slave… When Moon turned 13, [a] woman sold Moon's virginity to a Western businessman in Thailand.
“Once I did read the story, I just lost it,” said Butgereit, an anti-trafficking advocate and a Cedarville University assistant professor of nursing. “A month later I was in Thailand, having contacted the people [from] the main organization [mentioned]. A story moved me.” In the six years since that first trip to Southeast Asia, Butgereit’s involvement with organizations rescuing at-risk and trafficked girls in that part of the world has varied from full-time to volunteer work with organizations, such as The Garden of Hope, The Blind Project, Night Light Bangkok, and Grace Refuge Outreach Worldwide (G.R.O.W.). G.R.O.W. has been chosen by Cedarville’s student government philanthropy committee as the ministry which the student body is supporting during the 2013-14 academic year. Butgereit has been instrumental in connecting the philanthropy committee with Faa, the founder of G.R.O.W., said philanthropy committee director Hilary Murphy. “[What SGA is doing with G.R.O.W.] is kind of my mission this year,” Butgereit said. “It’s kind of neat to have a clear picture, just to say, ‘OK, I’m here at Cedarville for this, this year.’” Butgereit said he was hesitant to accept the teaching position at Cedarville, which he was offered in 2009, because his passion is helping women in Southeast Asia rather than teaching. Nevertheless, he said the organizations and the girls he helps are a part of him every day. “I’m trying to get some study abroad programs going in Southeast Asia specifically, so I can just kind of continue tying in passions of what I want to be doing with things that buy milk for the children,” Butgereit said. He explained that his family tried to do full-time missions in 2008, but because of the beginning recession and financial dishonesty in the missions’ organization itself, Butgereit received no monetary support. He said he recalls it as a tough time for his family, but a time in which he realized that he enjoys helping others in need. “I don’t like asking [people] to buy my milk,” Butgereit said. “To buy other people’s milk, I’ll ask people that all day.” Butgereit’s college “buddy” and fellow university employee, Dave Hoecke, said Butgereit’s desire to reach out to those in need goes back to around 1987 when he began college. Hoecke said he believes Butgereit was a team leader of the Christian ministries team, Open Air, which was a group of students who witnessed to the homeless in urban areas, namely Cincinnati. |
“He’s just very intentional about not only just people in general, whether it’s here or overseas, but he is very intentional just trying to help those who are wrestling with life,” said Cedarville’s Dean of Women, Becky Stowers, who attends the same church as Butgereit.
Butgereit’s 10-year-old daughter, Lauran, describes her dad as a “kind of missionary.” “He’s a Christian,” she said. “He works kind of in different countries and he likes helping people.” Lauran said she supports her dad’s missionary work by raising money via a lemonade stand, which she has done for the past three years. “I wanted to do something to raise money, but I wanted to do something fun, so I thought of a lemonade stand,” she said. “I called some of my friends to come help. My friends held up a sign that said, ‘This is money to raise for Thailand. We will be going next year.’ I said you could pay any money, I didn’t give a price, and people were giving me like $20, $10 for a cup of lemonade.” Butgereit said his wife, Joanna, also supports him and the organizations with which he works. She does everything from organizing clothes drives to contacting the organizations. “It’s easier to say where she’s stopped,” he said. “She stops at saying, ‘I will go live there.’” However, recently, the four-member Butgereit family traveled to Thailand together. Lauran Butgereit said the family is thinking about going back next year. “To take your whole family on a trip like that, that would show a certain level of commitment to [the ministry] and to the family,” Hoecke said. “To show them the situation and what it is you work with, I think that would speak volumes.” Stowers said Butgereit is setting an example for others to live out their faith by actively helping the girls in Southeast Asia. “It’s one thing to talk about it, but it’s another thing to actually do something,” she said. Butgereit said he realized the small size of his problems when he visited Thailand and met people like Faa who are doing a great amount of good with very few resources. “I have tons of resources, why can’t I throw some of my resources their way?” he said. “I can’t imagine being a female and sleeping in a slum without something to obstruct a drunken or drugged man who wants to rape me. That those things exist, make me want to buck the trend of just consuming and try to help somebody else.” For example, Butgereit said last year he sold his dream guitar – a guitar of the highest quality that a professional musician could desire –to quickly raise funds needed to protect two girls in danger of being sold to other traffickers. His family also owned only one vehicle for a few years, to save on additional transportation costs. “I don’t say that for pride,” he said. “I tell you these things to tell you I’ve got skin in the game.” The money the family saved could then be used to support the organizations helping girls in |
Thailand, because what the organizations really need is money, Butgereit said. He said short-term missions to assist the organizations are impractical because it is costly for a number of people to go to a country and build something that could be built much more inexpensively by a native person.
“Christ kind of summed up what we should be doing in life in two sentences: ‘Love God with everything you have,’ and ‘help others,’” Butgereit said. “It’s pretty simple, and so now I’ve seen people that need help.” “I think we’re pompous and prideful to think we can end [human trafficking],” he said. “I just do think we need to come alongside the indigenous folks. It’s less about the sex trade and sex trafficking and more about poverty and helping people and giving them economic opportunity.” A Professor’s Profile
Family: Married for 17 years to Joanna; two adopted children, daughter, Lauran, 10, & son, Michael, 6 Education: studied nursing at Cedarville from ’87 to ‘97 Teaching Repertoire: Psychiatric Nursing Employment: Began as a Cedarville professor in January 2010 Interests: culture and music; played music professionally for three years Oddest Place Traveled to: Burma, a closed-country in which he was followed by the equivalent of the CIA because he didn’t know that preaching was illegal there, so he offered an “encouraging word” instead Organizations Involved With: The Garden of Hope, G.R.O.W., Night Light Bangkok, & The Blind Project Times Traveled to Thailand: Six |
Awareness an Essential Part of Anti-Trafficking Efforts |
“I wasn’t a runaway. I wasn’t abused at home. I had professional parents, loving siblings, and a privileged lifestyle. Yet I had been a victim of human trafficking. I had been commercially, sexually exploited as a child. I had been a teenage sex slave in the United States.”
This is the last paragraph of the preface to Theresa Flores’ book titled “The Slave Across the Street,” in which she wrote of what it was like to enter the world of sex trafficking as a teenager. While living in an upper-middle class suburb of Detroit, Michigan, Flores was manipulated into becoming a sex slave at age 15. She wrote of the abuse to which she had been subjected, the high school days that had been spent in classes where the abusers were some of her classmates, and the carefree façade she had assumed in order to keep her family safe during this time. “I wished, hoped, someone would care enough to intervene before I ended up dead,” she wrote. Flores, also the founder of the organization Traffickfree, said people will be unable to prevent the acts that happened to her from happening to others unless they are aware that this very thing exists. In fact, human trafficking is a word to which most people have difficulty placing meaning, said Katie Nichols, a senior social work student at Ohio State University and an intern at Doma International, an anti-trafficking focused organization in Columbus, Ohio. She describes it as a “pop word.” “Everyone’s becoming interested in what it is,” Nichols said. According to the Polaris Project, “human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery where people profit from the control and exploitation of others.” Though this issue is often pushed to the confines of a third-world country, more than 200 thousand American children, like Flores once was, are at risk of being manipulated into the sex-trade, childrenatrisk.org said. Nichols said trafficking can happen to children from every socioeconomic status. And Toledo, Ohio, ranks fourth in the nation for the largest amount of rescued domestic minor sex trafficking victims, according to a 2010 report from the Ohio Trafficking in Persons Study Commission. “If people don’t know that it’s happening, how are parents supposed to protect their children?” Flores said. “Awareness is key to prevent them before [they become victims] and really in rescuing them out of it, too.” And spreading awareness is what Flores has devoted her adult life to. She travels eight to sixteen times a month, speaking about human trafficking to big and small crowds all around the country. Flores wrote in her book why she has chosen to tell her story of having been a victim of sex trafficking: “My decision is to share this so that other people will know that human trafficking takes on many forms, happens anywhere, and can happen to any kid.” Flores helped to form an organization known as Saving Our Adolescents from Prosititution, said Kristy Rizzardi, president of the Cedarville University campus chapter of the International Justice Mission. Called S.O.A.P., this organization gives out bars of soap to motels where human trafficking may actually be taking place. The National Human Trafficking Hotline number is printed on each bar of soap. Rizzardi said the organization tries to educate the motel employees about the signs telling that a person is being trafficked. Flores said she estimates that 240 thousand bars of soap were given out to an average |
of 100 motels in the nation last year.
She said she estimates that some thousand people volunteered in some capacity with the organization. And each one was spreading awareness. “People wanted an action plan of something hands-on that they can do,” Flores said. “This is something that they can do.” Rizzardi said she and the other officers of the campus organization are still brainstorming things that they can do to fight against human trafficking. She said the organization hopes to host speakers from other local anti-trafficking organizations so that students can get a more first-hand account of what is really meant by human trafficking. The organization also plans to engage all of campus in a possible letter writing campaign, a film screening, and a fundraiser. “We’re really going to try to encourage the students to like take it back to their churches — just to be more like ambassadors about it and educated people about it,” Rizzardi said. “There’s a lot of people, either like at our churches people go to here or back home that would really benefit from just the awareness piece that needs to come before the action.” Bethany Barney, the educational specialist and outreach social worker at the Dublin, Ohio, based non-profit organization Gracehaven, said training people in ways that they can take action against trafficking is one of the four components of the organization, which works with sexually exploited and at-risk children. Training is accompanied by awareness, outreach, and a residential component. She said the organization desires to raise awareness that trafficking victims aren’t bad kids, nor are they runaways; they have been manipulated. But those that have been manipulated need help. And Nichols said she believes legal action is one way to cause the trafficking industry to get smaller, but not without the public first changing its thoughts toward human trafficking. She said one common misperception held by the public is that women choose to be prostitutes. “Once you get the public to agree [on] this, it puts a ball into motion,” Nichols said. “If one-thousand people are writing letters about one issue, legislatures are much more willing to take steps in the right direction.” The staff at Doma International not only advocates for anti-trafficking legislation, but they also are giving a voice back to victims, Nichols said, and helping victims feel human again. “I was only a dollar value. A commodity. To know this in my formative teenage years, during the period when a woman defines her worth and identity, proved devastating,” Flores wrote. One way the public can show victims that they are valued as a human is to spread awareness about the very thing that is dehumanizing them, so that one more person can be spared from the enslavement. Nichols said she suggests sitting down with friends and educating each other about human trafficking. “There is always always always something to learn,” she said. Flores said she suggests hosting a movie night at which a documentary about human trafficking is played, selling fair trade items, such as those from the organization Made by Survivors, or helping with a S.O.A.P. outreach in various cities. “This is happening in every zip code,” Flores said. “People really need to be aware of it. We think slavery doesn’t exist, but it does. It just looks different in the United States.” |
The Location of Anti-Trafficking Organizations:
Safe Harbor Houses' Impact is Far-reaching |
Joy Fagan, founder of the Safe Harbor House in Springfield, Ohio, tells the story of how a woman’s journey toward healing has brought change to more than just one life. This woman’s life was changed by her time spent in Safe Harbor’s recovery program, but the change in herself led her daughter to have a relationship with
Christ. As a result, the daughter chose to keep the baby she had considered aborting, and this woman, now a graduate of the recovery program, is helping to raise her grandchildren. “Now she has the opportunity to be redemptive — to be a redemptive force in [her daughters’] lives by God’s grace in hers,” Fagan said. But the change in lives goes beyond this woman’s family. People are spreading a ripple effect — they’re being impacted as much as they’re impacting the at-risk women the ministry works with, said Candace Olley, a social work student at Cedarville University. “People are hearing about how rewarding, about how much others are being impacted — not just the women that are seeking to be healed — and they want to come and get a taste, too,” she said. The ministry of Safe Harbor House has been operating for almost two years but already houses eight women who have been victims of things like substance abuse, domestic violence, and human trafficking. Additionally, there is a waiting list of several women wanting to come to Safe Harbor. The ministry provides the women with transitional housing and a staff that coaches them through their recovery, which typically lasts one year. Margaret Wheeler, a member of the Safe Harbor House board of directors and associate professor of communications at Cedarville, said many of the women have been to several other rehab-type centers, spent time in jail, or been given the choice between going to Safe Harbor House and going to jail. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction reports that nearly one quarter of all Ohio residents incarcerated during the 2013 fiscal year were convicted on drug-related offenses. “Most of the women who come to us are desperate,” Wheeler said. “For many of them, this is their very last hope.” But as people are seeing and hearing the healing journeys of the women Safe Harbor works with, the ripple effect is spreading. “We have mothers that are going to church and they’re quoting Bible verses to their moms together every night for their devotion sharing, and [they’re having] conversations that they never had in their entire lifetime — not only with their kids, but also with parents and grandparents,” Fagan said. “It’s very powerful to watch the miracle that God performs in their lives affecting so many other lives in turn. “We wanted not only to take women out of difficult circumstances to help them heal, but to see these women flourish and be an example to others that, ‘Hey, if we can do it so can you.’” she said. Dee Chapman, a social work student at Cedarville and the previous leader of an exercise program for the Safe Harbor residents, said that despite having gone through so many difficulties in their lives, the women are encouraging others in their recovery. |
“[The women] still have the compassion to look at people that are in what used to be their situation and they’re willing to reach out to them and do everything they can to better the people that will follow in their footsteps,” she said.
“The women are really precious people,” Wheeler said. The neighborhoods around Safe Harbor are also getting a taste of this ripple. Fagan said the community of southwest Springfield, in which Safe Harbor House is located, was a flourishing city a few decades ago, but as two major industrial corporations moved their business elsewhere in the 1950s, addiction of all sorts filled its place. Therefore, the neighborhood surrounding the Safe Harbor House has a large amount of drug dealers. Julie Furj-Kuhn, a member of the Safe Harbor House board of directors and assistant professor of social work at Cedarville, said there is one particular drug dealer living near Safe Harbor that Fagan would pray for regularly. This man is also a husband and a father, but recently he “was caught” for his crimes, leaving his family alone. The family visited Safe Harbor during an open-house it held on September 29 for the ministry’s newly-renovated “step-up” house, a more independent living facility for the recovering women. Kuhn said the wife asked to arrange a weekly meeting with Fagan to reconnect with God. “That is what it’s really all about,” Kuhn said. But the ripple effect doesn’t stop there; it extends to local university students and the staff at Safe Harbor, too. Olley said she was able to build relationships with the women during an internship at Safe Harbor House last year. This made her realize the seriousness of the issues of domestic violence and sex trafficking. “They’re not just numbers, they’re people,” Olley said. “They’re people.” She said her experience at Safe Harbor greatly impacted her spiritual life. “[The women are] fighting so hard because they want to be healed and they want to be more fully human and more fully woman — that’s hard,” Olley said. “But how much it convicts the challenges in me to stick with my healing journey — what I’m going after. What is it that I’m really sticking my heels into it and just getting after --like the work that God is doing in me?” Linda Mortensen, the social services coordinator at the Safe Harbor House, said the ministry has impacted her spiritual life as well. “It has brought so much joy to my personal life and my walk with God,” she said. “There are definitely daily frustrations and challenges, but largely, I go home feeling satisfied like God has a place for me in his kingdom work and this is it — this is where I’m supposed to be.” “It’s changed all of us, and that’s the beauty of it,” Fagan said. “It’s just fun to be in a staff meeting and be able to say to each other, ‘We just feel so privileged to be part of this miracle that God’s doing.’” |