I'm Hermene Hartman with Indigo Studio.

And today we talk about a subject this tough took me out of my comfort zone.

Sex trafficking.

It's a form of modern day slavery.

It's serious.

It affects women negatively.

Young women and girls.

Human trafficking occurs when a trafficker exploits Human trafficking occurs when a trafficker exploits an individual through fraud force and even bullying to put them on the street for sex works.

It's a taboo subject, but it's happening.

And usually it's happening to young women right before our very eyes as they are kidnaped in our communities.

Well, today we're going to talk to somebody who knows about this.

She's raw, she's powerful, she's fierce, she's inspirational, she's remarkable, and she's honest.

But most of all, she's a survivor.

Brenda myers Powell, she's the co founder, executive director of the Dreamcatcher Foundation.

And what they do is they fight human trafficking in Chicago.

Well, she herself beat the odds and now she's helping others to do the same.

Join me in a powerful, frank, honest conversation.

Cozy.

ConversationsDrop the knowledge, thats for real.

Funding for this program was provided by Community Trust, the Field Foundation, Commonwealth Edison, Blue Cross, Blue Shield and the Illinois State Lottery.

Join me with Brenda Powell.

And we're going to talk about sex trafficking.

Brenda, welcome to the show.

Thank you for inviting me.

I have been a fan of yours for many, many years.

So thank you.

So you have given me so much medicine and so much information that I can take back to women in our community.

And I thank you for that.

Thank you.

Thank you for saying that.

Okay.

Let's let's talk about you.

So you were a prostitute for 25 years?

Yes, ma'am.

Okay.

Let's go from the corner to the hotel.

Grandma says, do what those ladies do.

And you liked.

Shiny.

She says, sit in the window.

They live in an area where prostitutes worked up and down the street.

She used to watch these ladies all the time, but these ladies looked kind of shiny.

And all she ever wanted to be was shiny.

She never wanted anything else.

And she asked her grandmother one day, What do those women do?

And she said, Well, those women get in cars and take off their panties and men give them money.

She put a little dress on and hello, cheap shoes.

And she went down to an area where she knew where prostitutes worked.

And she got into the car with her first customer.

Go back to that and tell me how this starts with you.

And I want to end up on how it ends with you.

This is what I looked at in your documentary.

And I want to talk about your very first experience with a John and a pimp.

Well, thank you for the interest in for looking at the story.

My mother died when I was six months old, and I was floating through the care of my grandmother.

My mother was a 16 year old girl, and she died when I was six months old.

So when you were born, she was 16.

And she died six months later.

And not really sure.

I'm thinking she died of an aneurysm, but I never really knew.

But I know she.

It was not.

It was not natural causes, but I was left to take care of my grandmother, who was a really beautiful, wonderful, strong black woman.

She had a drinking problem.

So it was like living with two different people.

Jekyll and Hyde, the.

One who drank, and the one that made me fry our paths and reared me to funny papers and would die for me at any moment.

You know, it was traumatizing because it was kind of hard to live with someone like that.

Sometimes we, you know, your parents only give you what they have been given.

And she gave me the best of what she had.

And I didn't understand it as a child.

But I think that most of them most of the time I was with my grandmother.

She was trying to to prepare me for life because she didn't think she was going to be here long.

So she was rushing a lot of stuff.

She was hard core and she was trying to make me tough.

You know, normally you could say abuse, but I look at it a little bit different.

I guess she she needed she thought she needed to be a little harsh.

But one of the things that happe she used to have drinking partners drink, and people come in the house.

Sometimes it was a relative, but I was in a house full of adults and I'll get molested but started at the age of four or five that I remember.

Well, one of your grandmother's friends.

Drinking it was actually one of my uncle's friends.

And it was a knee, right?

It was a knee ride.

A simple knee ride.

I got a knee ride.

And she had told me as a little girl, stay off everybody's lap.

You know, she said, stop, you're hopping in everybody's lap.

You know, how do you tell your little girls that?

But we kids, we love the little bouncy, bouncy.

Right.

So you were molested five years old.

Four or five years old.

And I will never forget it.

I got on his lap and he gave me a knee ride and he slid his hand up under into my panties.

How did you get into prostitution?

We we had moved into our area, and when I was nine years old, where prostitutes worked right in front of our house and I used to look out the window and I said to my grandmother, Well, I watched those ladies because I was a keychain kid, you know, when they had babysitters there.

And I should look out the window and watch the women with the shiny dresses and and the hair.

And I wanted to be Diana Ross and not the Supremes.

And these women emulated that know they were attractive and beautiful and they were getting in these cars.

And I asked my grandmother one day, what are they doing?

Why did they get?

And she said, they take the panties of women and give them money.

And I looked at her and I said, I'll probably do that one day because men haven't taken my panties off without my permission in doing things.

And my grandmother didn't know that.

But I remember her saying, and what have you, baby to bits.

And I remember in my mind, in my little mind, I said this would be the best prostitute that I know.

Being the women out there in front of the house that started to do that and made.

Me think to do it, because I understand I was never one with a lot of pain.

I didn't know what to do with it or how to handle it.

Did you tell your grandmother?

No, I never told her.

I didn't tell my grandmother.

Understand?

I had never saw my grandmother lose a fight.

I never.

She had done a lot of damage when she had a fight.

She didn't lose.

You know, I think in the back of my mind, I didn't want to lose my grandmother because I knew she would.

She would hurt me.

Something she found out something like that.

And then as the molesters are very savvy, they have you to think is your fault.

You think it's your fault.

You think it's your fault because you get these messages from your family.

Being a fast little girl.

They already told you not to do it, so you already know you weren't supposed to do that or sit in this man's lap or whatever.

Then you feel guilty.

So when you go out on the street with the shiny women, how old are you?

When I first went on the street, I had had my second baby and I was I hadn't gotten I hadn't made 15.

I was like a few weeks before my 15th birthday and I had my second child because now I understand I was being molested and I was easy.

I was a girl in the community that if the little boy said he like me, I wanted to be loved.

And I was looking for it.

I was looking for some.

Love by you on the street for 25 years.

How did you get out of prostitution?

Well, first of all, 25 years on the streets, I was shot five times.

I've been stabbed over 13 times.

And you say in the film that you have skin.

The skin on your face came off.

What happened?

That was.

That was the end.

That was the end of my prostitution.

I got in a car with a white guy on Madison and Kilpatrick, and I'm thinking white guy Safer.

Well, I'm thinking he's in a mercedes, a nice big Mercedes.

Got a white shirt and a tie on.

I won't have any problem area I used to work in.

I used to pick up my customers and take them down the street to that hotel.

I was standing out here and I was trying to get a drink and a guy came down and when I got in the car with them, he seemed like a nice person.

We pulled around a corner and he handed me $40.

When he handed me the $40, I turned around and looked at him and he started to hit me.

He started to hit me in my head.

I'm trying to get out the car before he moves, but my clothes so I turn this way because I can't fight him.

I'm trying to keep him off me.

So I'm kicking him.

I'm kicking you to keep him off me.

I'm turning my body this way, trying to get the door knob.

I get the door knob, I open the door, I fall out this way.

My feet are still in the car.

He starts the car up.

You start drive off.

When he starts to drive off the with the car, the car drives off, but my clothes snag until the door.

So your car got in the door to door, slammed and got my clothes in it and he's dragging me down the street while he's dragging me.

Of course I get this.

The concrete is scraping is scraped all the flesh off my face.

You're right.

And you're in the side of my face.

So when I.

When my clothes rip and I'm in the middle of the street and I get up, I have no skin on my face and I bleed.

No.

And I get up and kids ride up on a bike and they look at me and they point and I look at them and I say, Am I messed up?

They said, Are you real messed up?

I didn't get it at that time, but she was telling me that I was really messed up, didn't realize I was messed up until later.

Okay, now let's come to today.

Do you work with girls who have been molested early in their lives?

You work with girls who are who who have been molested and kidnaped and forced into prostitution.

Today.

Explain that process, that dynamic.

How does that happen?

It happens so many ways.

First of all, you got to you got to have a young lady that is looking for something.

And most of our girls are.

Looking for these girls.

They start as early as 11 or 12 years old, 11 and 12 years old.

I mean, are those girls kidnaped or those girls who are raped or molested in their homes?

We have a combination of it all.

We have coercion where a person is cohort slowly into it.

We have kidnaping is where you hear about girls missing all the time and you wonder what happened to her.

You don't see her anymore.

If you do see these.

A teen sees.

A young girls, teens, preteens.

You have it where girls initiate, get, get into gangs now and they have a role in the gangs as to what part they play in there.

And that is probably one of the most emerging pieces right now.

Girls have to have double roles in gangs.

Now they have it where they are sexualized and also they have that gangbang persona that they have to play in.

Some of them play both roles in.

This is the girls gangs.

Not just the girl.

There's a role the girls play in the gangs.

She called me and she was crying and she said, I can't do it.

I'm ready to go in.

So I'm going.

I'm going to go get her now because she said she smokes some crack cocaine and she's pregnant.

Remember what happened?

Well, I mean, Chloe, we're working off the Internet and it just takes a toll on you after a while.

It's just like I'm tired of turning deals, and it doesn't seem like anything to go right.

I'm just like, I can't do it no more, though.

I can't.

I'm tired.

I get sick when I go in there and train these dates because her dad was So you told me I just had to leave in know, I just relapsed last night.

I was doing good, doing really good.

And it just took a toll on me.

And I went to go see a friend and I was smoking weed and I've already was using crack before I got pregnant.

So it wasn't like.

In there is the boyfriend type, the guys who, you know, cause two girls by being the boyfriend at first and treating them pretty well until they dropped the bomb about what they really want from them.

And that's to make them prostitutes.

And lately I've been having a lot of cases of issues where they come straight from the family traffic drive, traffic straight out their family by a parent.

A parent putting the kid into a prostitution mode.

A parent trafficking their child from as early as five, four and for four and five years.

I'm a prostitute, five years old, a parent.

Wait a minute.

Now, let me get this right.

I'll show you over a four and five year old child sexualized or sold for sex.

I remember when I was in fourth grade, my mother sold me and my little sister To the drug dealers.

Okay.

One of the things from your documentary, these girls were broken.

They were just so broken.

And your development and your training works with them to build them up, to develop them, to say, yes you can, to say you can do something different and to pull them literally.

You're pulling them in another direction.

Tell me about dream catchers.

You on the street.

You personally.

You're on the street, right?

Yeah.

Tell me about that dynamic.

How does that work for you?

Well, first of all, our our organization, the biggest benefit of it is that it's survivor led and we hire survivors.

When we go out there on the street, our our team, we already know the culture of things out there.

We've already been there.

We came from that culture.

We don't have to learn about it.

We already know, you know, we get educated in a whole lot of different things, but we know our targeted population because we are our targeted population.

So we don't have to ask the questions that someone else would have to ask.

It's never been there like where, you know.

How do you identify how.

You get there?

What what are you what do you need?

We already know that because we've been there.

So we go out there pretty well equipped.

And when we go out there, we go out there and we do something because it's not.

The programs that save lives is the relationships that save lives.

We build relationships with these ladies so that they can understand who we are and begin to trust us.

And then I do something that I wish somebody would have done to me.

I had great ideas.

I show them, See something?

Girls don't even know that they're victims.

I used to think for a long time that because I wasn't standing on the corners, that I wasn't a prostitute.

I was a woman living on the streets of our.

I'm 20 now.

What is a child to do early, love?

No, I'm a town.

I have no guidance, no help.

At the age of 11, I was sexually molested a lot.

I was molested to the point that I thought it was okay.

My mother, who wasn't always in my life, will have that.

I will go without seeing my mother.

And we slept in cars.

We slept in abandoned buildings.

I remember when I was in fourth grade, my mother saw me and my little sister sort of jogged in.

The hardest thing for me to do is to make them understand that they're being hurt, they're being harmed, that they are a victim.

Now, you have classes.

You have classes where you bring the girls together to talk about what their.

Experiences.

Should be.

And from there you just kind of guide them one by one.

Give me a success story.

Tell me a success story.

my God.

We have several.

We have Tamika, who you saw who didn't like her mother, who is now going to school for accounting.

She is a Sienna and her mother, she has a baby now.

Her mother takes care of her of her baby.

They're their Kool-Aid and Kool-Aid right now.

Her and her mom have a relationship.

And it's beautiful because we if you saw in the film I just happened to meet I talked to her mom.

That was relationship building, because I knew that there.

Okay, what what what daughter doesn't really have a lot of issues with their mom at teenagers And then you traffic you know and you heard what her mom said under her mindset, her mom had to allowed to meet to have a mindset.

You know what I'm saying?

You've got two daughters of your own.

I have three daughters.

Three daughters and one you bring into the class.

And she is a psychologist now.

She's she's a doctor.

Psychology.

What what's your story with your children, with your three girls?

What's my story was my three children is that I was in the streets and I actually abandoned my two girls at one time.

You left them with home.

I left them with since I left them with some girlfriends in New Orleans when I was I was a stripper in New Orleans and I was on drugs and and I left him in New Orleans.

And but thank God I had a I had an aunt, her name on Josie, who tried to help raise me Aunt Josie, who helped raise who raised my daughters enabled.

And they prayed for me the whole time.

They prayed for me while I was out there on the streets.

Then I had another baby in California.

And your third.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When I was under my when I was going through my addiction, while I was away from my other two girls, I had a baby in California that I had there in California that I was I was so I was so far gone.

Crack cocaine, Hermene.

That I forgot when I had the baby, you know, -who raised her?

Your girlfriend.

Know who.

She was?

She was adopted out of the hospital.

the prayers that I used to pray even when I was on drugs, that she would not do a day in the system.

And God answered that prayer.

A nurse adopted her straight out the hospital.

Then guess what?

The nurse name was?

Brenda.

My name?

Brenda.

Her name Bernard, a nurse.

And now and I remember when I left the hospital, I told I said to the kid, That's all I can give you is my name.

And I gave her my name, Brenda.

So her name was never changed.

I'm getting ready to enter into a.

To another hot zone.

we have one kid here with just condoms and a granola bar.

Such a girl.

My, you know.

So I got anything to eat up there, and we'll give her a granola bar if she tells us like, I'm hungry.

I used to try to like, you know, to get off the streets.

But, you know, I don't like.

You aint got no help!

How can you go get off the streets I've been on the streets and I had no help.

I didn't get off the streets until I had some help We will be your family.

I know I'm not going to save everybody, but if I say one woman, I did my job.

So how did Dream catches for you come about?

How did you start Dream Kitchen?

Well, actually, Stephanie Daniels Wilson started Dream Catchers.

My partner I met Stephanie and I met in treatment.

We were at Women's Treatment Center.

She was a high powered college graduate in the drug program.

And I've never seen no, you know, I was a prostitute.

And I kept looking at her walk around as how you get here.

You know, you from Hyde Park, Are you a college graduate?

What are you doing here?

And she used to laugh and she used to listen to my stories, my prostitute stories.

And plus my face was disfigured.

Remember I told you about my face?

And she said, That's terrible.

And she just and then she she came to me the next day because I could do a little hair.

Right.

And she said, Stop doing of girls here.

I didn't like you, you, my friend.

And from then on we've been friends.

And so over 20 something years ago, so you Stephanie came and.

Stephanie with her.

Right!

Stephanie got her master's.

We were both we best friends now because we didn't we got out of treatment.

We got an apartment together.

We didn't live together.

We didn't get all kinds of things.

You know, we're best friends.

She went back to get her master's and she had her experience of wanting to do something for the community.

I'm already doing human trafficking everywhere, all over the city of Chicago.

Women, girls out of him.

Yes.

Pulling girls.

I'm working every for Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

I'm starting stuff going down to Springfield lobbying.

And she knew this was she wanted to start something to help our girls because she saw them pushing buggies with babies in them way too early.

I said, No, let's do human trafficking.

She said, Let me check it out.

But she went and got her master's and she came back.

She said, Let's do this.

How are you funded?

How stream catchers funded.

Dream catchers, privately funded?

We don't have state, federal, state or federal funding because that way we don't have to worry about doing numbers.

Our girls are not numbers.

You once you become a dream, catch a girl, you can always get services from dream catcher.

You don't have to age out at 18, you don't age out at a certain age and we can't service you anymore because it's it's against the principles of the contract or the federal funding we're getting.

And we find that to be a lot in a lot of organizations.

Girls age out and they can't get the services anymore and it's way too soon before they get it.

Some of our girls make mistakes three or four times, and it takes four or five years before they the light bulb comes on as rosebuds know, to bloom in early May, just hateing those loves and cures you can bet my mind.

A sure.

I be loving you always So one of the things I noticed in the in the documentary with your program is you really recognize and treat these girls individually.

It's not a group process.

It's not a okay, here's the formula one, two, three.

You really deal with them where they are.

That's right.

As individuals to take them to the next steps.

Exactly.

To to to say.

A visual, you're not now it's not a pay business.

No cookie cutter.

I know I can be better in a Dream Catcher foundation.

We mentor.

You know, I'm saying we get support, we walk with the ladies and so they can learn how to walk themselves.

We're one of the organizations that uses real survivors.

You're you're your own person.

And I want you to be an individual to understand who you are.

You are a person, you're woman, you're who you are in your great.

And how do I bring that to you If I'm looking at you as a whole group, I got to bring out that individuality makes you special.

And then you tell them to have a dream and go catch their dream.

Catch that dream catcher.

That's beautiful.

Brenda, you've been like me.

You've knocked me up my chair.

You've taken me off my comfort zone.

And congratulations to you.

This is your ministry.

It's a good work and it's a hard work.

When I got through looking at the documentary, I was I was in tears.

I'd never seen anything like that before.

And thanks for doing what you're doing.

You saved some girls, and I never knew anything like this existed.

Thank you, man.

Thank you, too, for doing what you do for our community.

boy.

Thank you for joining us tonight with Ndigo Studio.

Precious conversation with Brenda Myers, Powell.

talking about dream catchers.

I can't imagine.

I cannot imagine.

How you I'm Sorry!

For more information about this show, visit or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Funding for this program was provided by Community Trust, the Field Foundation, Commonwealth Edison, Blue Cross, Blue Shield and the Illinois State Lottery.

Blue Cross, Blue Shield and the Illinois State Lottery.

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