Words by Kate Brewer
Photos by Anu Ulziisaikhan
November 14, 2019

Love, No Agenda

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It’s fairly typical for a strip club. Colorful lights, poles, pulsing music and dancers. Then there are the fresh home-baked cookies accompanied by handwritten notes that carry words of warmth, and empowerment. The dancers chat excitedly with the tall, friendly woman with long, dark hair and an intricate sleeve of tattoos who brought them. This is Brooke Carlson. This is strip-club outreach designed to combat sexual exploitation of trafficked individuals. This is Disrupting Traffick.

Even before the cookies, it starts with a premise. An idea so simple, so universal, that it easily slips over our heads:

Every person has intrinsic value.

That’s it. That’s the big idea that drives every decision that Brooke makes as Founder and Executive Director of Disrupting Traffick, an organization created to break the cycle of trafficking by offering trauma-informed resources to those being bought and sold for sex.

“Every single person on our staff is trained in understanding complex trauma and how that pertains to this specific clientele that we’re working with,” Brooke says.

Brooke has worked in the anti-trafficking movement for eight years with over 100 trafficked individuals and learned from a range of excellent organizations around the world. She couldn’t shake the feeling, however, that crisis response was often a band-aid rather than a long-term solution that addressed a person’s needs as a whole. Brooke’s approach – first in Lincoln and Omaha but with aspirations to serve the whole state – is to look at the sex industry in its entirety, to both prevent and respond to trafficking situations.

“The movie [Taken] has done a wonderful job of making my job difficult,” Brooke says with a dry laugh, “where so many people think that trafficking looks like abducting someone and then selling them into some sort of brothel . . . in a faraway place, so having to retrain on what trafficking actually looks like is a big thing.”

Complexity is inevitable for Brooke and her team and they embrace it with the same non-judgmental openness with which they embrace their clients.

“It’s about meeting people where they’re at… without an agenda.”

That absence of agenda is what makes their strip club outreach – one of their key pilot programs – so successful. Not only do the dancers in the clubs look forward to the homemade cookies and hand-written notes from Disrupting Traffick volunteers, but the club owners themselves have welcomed the organization into their establishments.

“When we started doing [this] outreach we met with club owners, came in with an open, no-agenda attitude… just saying ‘we want to bring you cookies.’ We’re not trying to have any message [for the dancers] other than: you’re loved and you’re valued and we want to be there for you.”

Brooke has done strip club outreach all over the world. This approach gives Brooke and her colleagues access to the dancers and builds relationships with the clubs. When club owners say, ‘we don’t want trafficking happening here, we want our girls to succeed,’ Brooke and her team take them at their word. That relationship allows them to organize trainings that bridge the gap between other non-profits, law enforcement, and the clubs.

“So if [the club owners] have somebody who might be applying [for a job] and they suspect something is off, why wouldn’t we want them to call us?”

It’s an idea that seems counter-intuitive at first but ultimately it makes sense. Everything that Disrupting Traffick does is led in part by the first-hand experiences of the survivors on their team. Trust, nuance, and human connection are the foundations of their work.

Roughly 60-90% of individuals working in the sex industry have experienced childhood sexual abuse. In three out of four of those cases, the abuse was perpetuated by someone close to them whom they trusted.

“A lot of them feel very misunderstood, especially their trauma,” Brooke says, pointing out how a better understanding of survivors’ experiences by friends, partners, families and communities is critical to supporting them.

To escape and recover from such trauma also requires a spectrum of services such as housing, counseling, support systems and mentorship. To sustain that recovery it helps to build on the belief that you are loved, seen, and heard.

“They’re valuable because they’re human,” says Brooke emphatically. “That’s it. The end.”

That embrace of humanity is especially key where the concept of “choice” is concerned. It’s an aspect that Brooke says a lot of people struggle with.

“We look at someone who is working as a dancer and think she’s choosing to be there, which is not always the case… it’s important to understand how trauma affects these choices.”

For this reason, Brooke ensures that everyone Disrupting Traffick works with – from partner organizations to therapists to volunteers – are on the same page. It also guides their vision when developing their pilot programs, one of which takes a page straight out of the sharing economy playbook: community housing.

Domestic violence shelters are often the first stop for sex trafficking survivors, but they are also often full. And that’s not the only issue.

“There’s a gap in our country for housing specific for trafficked individuals… [Domestic violence shelters are] not tailored to specific trauma that trafficking comes with. We’ve had girls leave a shelter because they had a flashback and the staff didn’t know how to handle it.”

So Disrupting Traffick decided to innovate: Midwest homes meet Midwest hearts. Their new housing program trains volunteers to open their homes to trafficked individuals, providing a secure and nurturing environment that survivors need to heal while strengthening bonds between people and neighborhoods. It’s still early days but they’re hopeful about the positive impact this can have on the whole community.

“That intentionality goes a long way,” says Brooke. “I often think about what would it look like if we were intentional in lots of different aspects of our lives.”

While there are technologies being developed to help address issues such as sex trafficking, what’s striking about Disrupting Traffick is how utterly human their work is. They combat sexual exploitation not with SWAT teams, Liam Neeson, or apps, but with cookies and handwritten notes, with the warmth you might find in a familial embrace. It is this warmth that radiates the most powerful change.

It starts with a simple premise. A disruptive concept. You are loved.

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