If you had told 15-year-old me that in 30 years I’d be a licensed professional counselor working for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, using my personal story to help victims of domestic violence and human trafficking, I would’ve laughed at you. First of all, people where I come from don’t trust law enforcement. Second of all, I spent most of my life sure that God had put me here to be an example of what not to do. Don’t sell your body when you’re in middle school. Don’t have a baby when you are 14. Don’t get in a long-term relationship with your rapist, a guy who beats you so bad your own mother can’t recognize you.
The short version of my story is this: I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in a really bad, dangerous neighborhood. My mother struggled with alcohol. My father was hardly around. A family member molested me when I was 5 years old. Another did the same when I was 9. When I was 10, my older brother was shot and paralyzed. After that, I was often left on my own. I felt lucky that some older girls took me under their wing, letting me stay with them. They made money by throwing parties guys had to pay to come to. What did the guys get for the cover charge? To touch and feel me, who’d been dressed up in lingerie by the older girls. I didn’t know I was being human trafficked. To me, these girls were like older sisters.
When I was 13, I was waiting for these girls, who were upstairs at some house. A drug dealer in the neighborhood came in and said, “You’re gonna give me some of that, or I’m gonna take it.” I didn’t think he was serious. He was serious. He took it, then said I was his girlfriend. I got pregnant. My aunt wanted me to have an abortion. But my mom told me the pregnancy was my fault and my responsibility. So, I had a baby when I was 14.
He started beating me before our daughter was born. He’d keep me in my room so I didn’t have access to a phone to call for help. After he got his rage out on me, he would feel sort of bad. “Look what you made me do,” he’d say, then go buy me chicken soup, along with some witch hazel to put on my black eyes. (It makes the bruises go away faster.) Then he’d be nice for a while. Then I’d try to be “good” by not doing anything to make him mad—like say a word while he was watching a Chicago Bulls basketball game. But those “honeymoon” phases got shorter, and the beatings got more frequent and more violent. He even started shoving a gun at my face.
Now I know that that’s all textbook behavior for a domestic abuser. But back then, I didn’t even think of him as an abuser. I thought of him as all I had. Which was basically true.
When I was 16, he basically kidnapped me, tying me to a heater in some house and beating me for two days straight. He only stopped when he ran out of food. I told him I had a check waiting for me at the grocery store where I worked. He was getting really hungry, so he let me go get the check. The moment my coworkers saw me, they called the police. The police got me to a hospital, but they didn’t arrest him.
At that point, I knew that sooner or later he would kill me, and that the police didn’t care. But I knew what they did care about: drugs. They were always making drug busts in our neighborhood. I called the narcotics squad and told them where they’d find him when he’d have drugs on him. He got arrested and went to jail.
For the next few years, I raised my daughter, worked about every fast-food job in the world, and somehow graduated from high school. When I was 19, I met a guy who was joining the Coast Guard. He asked me to marry him. He wasn’t violent or a drug dealer, and the military sounded like a better future for my daughter and me than anything I was putting together, so I said yes.
We moved to where he was stationed. A lot of people there were racist, so that was bad. But there were good things about the situation, too. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I wasn’t being abused. And it turned out that the military would pay my tuition if I went to college. So, I enrolled in a human services course at one. I learned that I really liked learning. Unfortunately, before I could finish my classes, my husband was thrown out of the Coast Guard, and our relationship ended.
I didn’t have anywhere else to go but back to the South Side of Chicago—soon with three kids [I’d had two with my husband who’d joined the Coast Guard].
The transition was rough, but eventually, I got a steady job at a cell phone store and my own place for my kids and me. Life was pretty good. I just really wished I could go back to school. I wanted my kids to have one person in their family to look up to who’d graduated from college. Then the girl who’d hired me at the cell phone store told me that a university nearby had night classes that I could attend after work. I went straight there and enrolled. (The school set me up with grants and student loans, which, yes, I’m still paying off.) But four years later, I graduated with a major in human services and a minor in psychology.
I got a job as a service coordinator for a large community nonprofit in my old neighborhood. The job was all about helping people, which clearly I felt called to do. But as my 40th birthday approached, that calling got more specific. I started thinking, Whoa, holy crap. You made it through a lot of stuff for real. A lot of pain. What was the point of all that? There had to be one—or at least I had to figure one out. This might sound weird, but what I came to was, I didn’t want to waste my trauma. So, every pain I ever felt, I began to try to connect with purpose. Pretty soon, I decided I wanted to use my story to help people get on top of their own story.
In 2018, I went back to school. I earned a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling in 2022 and got my license. I’d already started my own business, doing women’s empowerment workshops, wellness, life coaching, and public speaking. One place that asked me to come share my story was the social service agency I’d worked at. Someone from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office was there and heard my talk.
Sometime later, I got a call from a commander there. They wanted me to work for the department.
My gut reaction: No way.
But I swear, God Himself pushed me to the headquarters. I went just to talk about a new program that Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart was starting called Victim Support Services. It would work inside the Special Victims Department and be staffed entirely by survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence. Why? Sheriff Dart understood that victims aren’t likely to trust people in uniforms and wearing badges, but they might believe a survivor would be helpful to them—you know, care and not judge.
Also, the department needed people on staff who knew firsthand what human trafficking really looks like and what domestic violence really feels like.
All human trafficking isn’t what we call White Van Syndrome—that is, someone bringing in people from some other country, holding their identity documents, and forcing them into sex slavery. Often, it’s the victims’ own families or people who in some ways really take care of them that push them into that life—like those girls who trafficked me at those parties when I was in middle school. It’s a total mindf-ck.
And so is domestic violence. Because in that case, it’s not just your body that’s being beaten, it’s your mind. In both situations, the trauma bond is real. It works just like an addiction in your brain. On top of everything else, you’re fighting your own brain when you try to leave.
Long story short, I signed up to be a Cook County Sheriff’s Office Victims Support Specialist in January 2022. So I have been at this job for three years, and in that time, I’ve helped hundreds of people get out of situations like the ones I was in when I was young. Our ultimate goal is to get victims into a shelter or working with an advocate who helps them access all the services they need long term. But sometimes shelters and advocates are backed up, so Sheriff Dart has created partnerships with all kinds of businesses to provide interim services so victims can leave the second they are ready—a hotel chain, a cell phone company, a grocery store, a ride service company, etc. It’s an ingenious program. I wish it were replicated all over the country.
My life is good now. Certainly not what I expected, but very good. It took me a long time to trust men, but I’ve been married to a really nice, kind, not violent, very hardworking one for 11 years now. My kids have grown up nicely. And I really have found purpose for my pain and made use of all that trauma I suffered. Just like I promised myself, every single day, I use my story to help other people get on top of theirs.
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