If you're in Nashville right now, women, some as young as nine years old, are currently being trafficked for sex within fifteen miles of wherever you are. Human trafficking isn't a problem unique to Nashville. Trafficking cases have been reported in over 85% of Tennessee counties including many rural areas over the past twenty-four months alone. "Its everywhere," said one recovered prostitute and drug addict named Rita. "It's in every single city even smaller places like Galatin. In every city, there are these spots where you have a whole lot of [prostitutes]. It was all the same everywhere I went," she told me when I met her at Thistle Farms, a Nashville based social enterprise run by the women of Magdalene, a residential program for women who have survived lives of prostitution and addiction.
A 2012 graduate of the rehabilitation program Magdalene House, Rita had a sweet, soothing voice and dimples that do not reveal her traumatic past. She spent three decades living largely on the streets of Nashville and riding around the country on eighteen-wheel trucks with truckers who gave give her "dope" in exchange for her company. "Now, I'm the receptionist slash everything here," she said referring to Magdalene House. "Women call me all the time and I don't know what to say to them because I know we have an a hundred and fifty person wait list. I pray that they find somewhere that will keep them safe. There is no safety out there on the street. Everyone is a dog. It's a doggy doggy world out there. All you know is get or be got and it's the same everywhere you go."
After over three decades spent "walking the streets," "turning a trick," and "getting high," Rita finally decided to check herself into a mental health center located right here in Nashville. "I had like three different tricks and I got tricked three different times," Rita said of the fateful night she chose to make a change. "One time I got moth balls, one time I got aspirin and one time I got coke. So I was like, forget this. I'm done. I packed my little bag. I got on the MTA and I started riding. I was familiar with Herman Street and I knew there was an inpatient treatment center there and I went to see if I could get myself in. It had to be about 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning and they weren't even open yet so I sat there and I sat there and I sat there. And I was like, someone is going to have to help me today because I'm too damn old to be trying to turn tricks. I'm too old for that kind of madness."
"[This center] had a 28-day program," Rita said. "Mind you, I've been getting high for more than 28 years. So I was like, what am I going to do. I knew if I went back to where I came from, I'd be getting high... might not be high after a day, might not be high the next month--but I'd be getting high in at least three months because that's what I knew. That's what I thought was life. Dope was my husband and dope was my kids."
After two weeks in rehabilitation wondering where life would take her after the twenty-eight day program ended, Rita found out about Magdalene, a residential program for former prostitutes recovering from traumatic pasts. For the next two weeks, she called Magdalene on a daily basis checking if they had any openings. Only three days before she would have to leave, Rita finally found out that Magdalene House had a bed for her. She says of that one precious moment, "I thought there is a God again because before I was thinking there is no God no more until I realized that he was always there. I left him."
Magdalene is an unusual program because, unlike many others, it is totally free. Many other recovery programs burden residents with fees that they can't possibly afford. As Rita explained, "There are some women who have 250 to 300 arrests on their record so they can't get hired. If the women have to pay, there's almost no way out. Almost no way." The devastating cycle continues for countless women who slid down a slippery slope and struggle to rise from the debris at the bottom of the pit. As the founder of Magdalene and Thistle Farms, the Reverend Becca Stevens told NPR in April 2011, "No one went to the streets by themselves. It took a lot of failed systems and a lot of brokenness to get them there and it's crazy to think that they're going to get out by themselves. It takes a community to get them out."
At Magdalene, countless therapists, doctors and volunteers are currently working with twenty-eight residents to help them recover successfully. Every day, residents discuss their past. They talk. They tell stories and they relearn the things that slid away from them when they hit rock bottom. "They teach you on a table where to put your fork and spoon, and I knew that because my mother-in-law had dinner parties," Rita said. "But, I'd totally forgotten because my brains were so fried and now all this was beginning to come back to me and I was like yeah. And then I remembered how it was with my kids. And I was like how did I miss this; how did I live in the other world in place of this." Tears clouded her eyes for the first time throughout our interview. "My daughter was ten and my son was 8 when I left them and I didn't hook back up with them until 2009 and she's 31 now. You do the math."
Since coming to Magdalene in 2009, Rita has reunited with her son and daughter. She's watching her grandson, Marquel grow up and she says she wouldn't have even met him if Magdalene House hadn't rescued her from a life of addiction and prostitution. "Knowing me, I'd be dead by now," Rita said. Instead, she's dedicating the rest of her life to helping other women on their path to recovery.
Around the country, other cities are starting programs like Magdalene. Seventy-five percent of Magdalene women recover for the long term while eighty percent of prostitutes sent to prison return to the streets. "I figure if I can talk to you or someone else, then I figure there's something that can be done about it because its one of the oldest professions," Rita said.
As Becca Stephens told NPR, "I've never met a woman off the streets of Nashville who chose prostitution as her preferred career." Right here in Nashville, our neighbors are trading their bodies for the substance that feeds their addictions. They didn't choose the life they life lead and they don't have to keep spiraling. Let's help them out.