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Attorney Julie Wade to launch Tharros Place to aid young victims of human trafficking

Savannah Morning News - 1/25/2022

Jan. 25—During the five years when Julie Wade served as executive director of Park Place Outreach, a nonprofit organization providing shelter, programs, and educational support to homeless youth ages 11 through 17, it wasn't uncommon for her to come across potential human trafficking situations.

As an example, one "typical situation," Wade said, would involve a previously homeless 14-year-old girl in Savannah who would live with a 35-year-old boyfriend. That boyfriend would shower her with gifts, such as cell phones and clothes, and, in exchange, she slept with him and his friends.

"She doesn't see herself as a victim of human trafficking, but that's exactly what that is, because that's not an equal relationship," said Wade. "There's clearly a situation of power and control there."

What Wade didn't come across, however, was that and similar situations being met with the kind of community infrastructure, particularly housing, to help the girl get out of the cycle of exploitation.

On Dec. 31, 2021, Wade announced via Facebook post that she was resigning from Park Place Outreach, returning to her previous career as an attorney, and planning to open Tharros Place, a 12-bedroom facility "to address the lack of services for human trafficking in Savannah." Tharros translates to courage in Greek.

"We thought courage was a strong and powerful word to describe the nature of the work we will be doing with the girls," Wade said.

With stable housing, trafficked girls would live at the shelter for at least a month and be provided wraparound services.

"Sheltering and treating those young people is different from a typical teenager in crisis," said Wade. "They just have very different needs. And there's been task forces and subcommittees and meetings for years on the need for a shelter specific for these young people. Because there's really been no place locally that we've been able to care for these young people."

Safe housing for youth at-risk for sex trafficking is a problem across Georgia and particularly in Savannah, said Kathleen Cleveland-Kennedy, statewide care coordinator for Children's Advocacy Centers of Georgia'sCommercial Sexual Exploitation (CSEC) Response Team. The CSEC serves as a central point of contact for children and the agencies that support them.

Compared to communities of similar size and population, Savannah has an acute sex trafficking problem, said Cleveland-Kennedy, largely because of the ports, the I-95 corridor and the tourism industry, in addition to relatively close proximity to major sex trafficking hubs, such as Miami, Atlanta and Tampa.

While response teams like CSEC have improved identifying victims and suspects involved in sex trafficking, said Cleveland-Kennedy, "developing those services and the infrastructure to be able to serve those youth," lags further and further behind.

Since Children's Advocacy Centers received a state Criminal Justice Coordinating Council grant to begin its work in Savannah in October 2020, the organization has served 19 youth at-risk of commercial sexual exploitation, including 17 females and two males, seven of whom were between the ages of 12 and 14, and 12 of whom were between the ages of 15 and 17.

Cleveland-Kennedy has spotted a few trends regarding the different forms of sexual trafficking that occurs in Savannah.

One is trafficker-facilitated, when a trafficker, otherwise known as a "pimp," lures young adults into committing sexual acts for them in exchange for valuables, such as food, money, shelter, drugs.

A subgroup of the trafficker-facilitated category, which remains hard to grasp because of the general lack of knowledge of how gangs operate, is gang-affiliated trafficcking, whereby a youth who has ties to a gang recruits vulnerable youth for pimping to make money for the gang or as part of their initiation into the gang.

Another form of trafficking that Cleveland-Kennedy said is prevalent in Savannah is technology-facilitated or internet-facilitated CSEC, when individuals send explicit content — images or video — over the internet, usually through social media such as Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and adult websites such as OnlyFans, in exchange for money, usually sent through CashApp or Venmo, which subsequently can lead to sexual encounters.

After CSEC receives a referral, which usually comes from the Department of Family and Children Services (DFCS), law enforcement agencies, and the Department of Juvenile Justice, CAC evaluates the case and determines whether or not a victim is involved in sex trafficking, then works to provide safe housing and wraparound services to the victim.

If a child is trafficked in Savannah, that child would be placed in other parts of the state into CSEC-designated placements, including the Department of Juvenile Justice or Department of Family and Children Services in Atlanta, West Georgia, or Middle Georgia.

Through her work as an attorney and school board member, Wade is acutely aware of the barriers victims of sex trafficking face after escaping the cycle.

In 2007, Wade worked as a criminal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's Office on child exploitation cases, where she would encounter horror stories involving child pornography, which were the most prevelant. To catch perpetrators, Wade said, undercover police officers would pase as a young person online, exchange message with an older man, then meet up with the offender to arrest him.

From 2011 through 2020, Wade served as the elected District 1 representative for the Savannah-Chatham County Public School System'sBoard of Education.

Once she hung her own shingle in 2008 as the founder of Wade Law Firm, she provided legal services in federal civil, criminal and appellate cases, sometimes representing perpetrators of sex trafficking as well as drug dealers.

"When you work for the government, you prosecute, and when you're not in the government, you're defending the people that are being charged by the government," said Wade. "Everyone is entitled to a good defense."

She said she say the "seedy underbelly" of society in the court system, but also witnessed that suspects and victims often shared similar backstories. "They grew up in poverty. They didn't complete their education. They may have had an unstable household. They may not have felt that they could make a living wage through legitimate work in Savannah. They couldn't access the things that a lot of others could access because of systemic barriers beyond their control."

Tired of seeing similar cases over-and-over and a "failure of social systems," Wade joined Park Place Outreach in 2017 as executive director. During that time, she stumbled on a startling statistic: According to Covenant House, a nonprofit that offers 50,000 homeless, runaway, and trafficked youth annually housing and supportive services, within 36 to 78 hours after being homeless, girls will be approached by someone about sex.

Her experience led her to realize a shelter for victims ensnared in the Savannah sex trafficking system was necessary. "Having the shelter addresses the lack of services, and it also gives our community kind of a central place to help address all these issues. .. there's lots of committees and talk, but this will kind of be the focus, so I think we'll be able to do some training and awareness and education also."

Shortly after leaving Park Place Outreach and announcing her new venture, Wade received some unexpected seed money to develop Tharros Place. She'll use the funds to match other donations as she seeks a "long-term funding source," mainly through donors as well as state and federal grants.

"My job is to just bring it all to life and get it up and running," explained Wade, who continues to help Park Place Outreach transition under new leadership as she builds her business consulting with nonprofits on legal, governance and compliance issues. "I'll probably hand it off to someone to kind of run the day-to-day operations, but I'm sort of the startup."

For now, Tharros Place, said Wade, is "nothing more than a piece of paper." Moving forward, Wade is in the process of applying for the fledgling organization's 501c3 nonprofit status and working on obtaining licensing, which will be through Georgia'sDepartment of Human Services. Once all the paperwork is approved, Wade will host fundraising opportunities and hire a staff of two to three people.

The biggest challenge, she said, is identifying a "safe and secure" facility. "These are very vulnerable young people, and you want to make sure if you're bringing them into care that it is trauma-informed care, compassionate care, safe and secure."

Drew Favakeh is the public safety and public health reporter for Savannah Morning News. You can reach him at AFavakeh@savannahnow.com.

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