Sexual exploitation is becoming a well-known issue. Rape and sexual assault cases in our society are rising at an alarming rate, and to combat such crimes, we must encourage people to increase awareness and concern, particularly among women. What will it take to end exploitation in the sex industry?
In this week’s episode of Action Antidote, Rev. Bonnie Gatchell joins us to enlighten us and provide hope to those women trapped in the snares of exploitation, as well as to raise awareness of the issue. Rev. Bonnie Gatchell is the Director and Co-Founder of Route One Ministry, a ministry that serves women who have been sexually abused by the sex industry.
Her mission is to provide the church with a theological framework as well as practical means to better serve, receive, and care for women who have experienced domestic abuse, sexual exploitation, and gender-based violence in all of its forms.
Tune in to this episode to find more!
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Preventing and Responding to Sexual Exploitation, Violence, and Harassment with Rev. Bonnie Gatchell
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the problems that keeps a lot of people settling for less and less than what they really want and really deserve out of life is this feeling of disempowerment, and disempowerment can come in so many different forms we can identify it in our own lives and we can identify in others. My guest today, Bonnie Gatchell, has found a way to not only empower herself to solve some of our biggest problems but also empower some others that are really, really in need, really in a place of some genuine disempowerment with her organization, Route One Ministry.
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Bonnie, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much, Stephen. I appreciate you having me.
Yeah, I really appreciate you coming on. So, Route One Ministries, you help women who were tricked into the sex industry. Can you please explain to us, first of all, how it is that this happens to the people that it ends up happening to?
That’s a great question and I even like the wording that you used with “tricks,” kind of the quotes around it. So I think the misunderstanding about women who are working in the sex industry, maybe strip clubs or in prostitution, I think particularly around strip clubs and then maybe even pornography is this belief that they choose to be there or there’s a lot of freedom in being there, that they are sufficiently financially backed up by being there, supplying for, but the truth is, the average age of entry here in the United States is 12 years old.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. I think that’s a great response that you said, “Oh, wow,” and I think a lot of people don’t realize that. I think the other thing for Route One, when we think about women being sexually exploited, I think no little girl wants to be a stripper when she grows up so if we think from that premise, no little girl wants to be a stripper when she grows up or a woman in prostitution, then we have to ask the question what has brought this woman here, and there’s a lot of different reasons for each woman but the biggest driving factor is some source of poverty. Maybe it’s financial poverty or emotional poverty or spiritual poverty, I think a lack of education, so some kind of brokenness that has happened in their life, trauma that has happened in their life that has brought them to a place of being exploited. And I think, directly, some women have even been manipulated through force, fraud, or coercion, and then forced to work in the strip clubs and they’re given a fake name and a fake identity and fake background story for the sake of their clients and to protect the men and women who are essentially pimping them out and trafficking them.
So, you said the average age of entry is 12 years old. What is a genuine story or a typical story of a 12-year-old? Because, I don’t know, that just seems really bizarre to me, in essence, and no one really can make that good of decisions for the rest of their lives when they’re 12.
Right, exactly, Stephen. Exactly. You’ve hit the nail on the head that’s important for people to realize. So, unfortunately, a pretty classic story is a lot of women are pimped out or trafficked by someone in their family or in their community. So, I think, on average, the Department of Justice would say that women from inner city backgrounds or urban backgrounds are actually trafficked by a mom, dad, or stepdad. That’s a pretty big, alarming thing to think about. So, for us, for example, I have a woman, we’ll call her Sally, just for the sake of it’s not my story to tell, and we first met her when she was 21 years old and she was working in prostitution and she had already been working in prostitution for some time and when we talked with her and I heard more about her story, how she doesn’t keep the money at night, it goes to this boyfriend of hers who’s a friend of the family, I said to her, “Oh, you’ve been trafficked,” and she said, “No, I haven’t been trafficked. That’s not what this is. This is just what my family does.” And then she went on to tell me months later, after we got to it more than when she was 13, her mom said, “Hey, you know, pack your bags, we’re gonna go on a vacation,” and she was super excited because they had never been on a vacation as a family. This is in Boston, Mass. They drove to another city that’s about an hour and a half outside of Boston, they got a hotel, and mom said, “I’ll be right back, I’m gonna go get ice from the machine,” and when mom was gone, this man came in and raped this 13-year-old girl and, at the end of the day, more men came into the room and so it wasn’t accidental, it’s her mom who had set that up. And so, from there, now, this 13-year-old is trapped in a place of a place of prostitution, including working in the strip clubs.
You often talk about this connection between the sex industry and strip clubs and I’ve always thought of the strip club as just a place where a bunch of guys throw out dollars and these women are dancing. I never thought of anything beyond that, any connection to something, I guess, quite a bit shadier than that, to be honest.
Yeah. And, again, I appreciate you bringing that up because that is exactly the story that we’ve been told about strip clubs and it’s exactly what I thought about strip clubs before I got into this work and about women who work there, I assumed that they were college girls just making their way through college or maybe a single mom who needed money to put on the table. But, for me, my story in this work as the founder and director of Route One Ministry started through Christmas baskets and the question was asked, how do we reach women sexually exploited here in Boston, here in the United States, and the answer was given to make baskets and to take it to strippers working on Christmas Eve. And so that resonated with me. We made baskets, together with my church, we made baskets, and I called up a strip club manager and I asked if we could bring them and we did. And when we met the women, the women who worked there had tears in their eyes, they said that this was the only gift they would get that year, they asked for hugs, and so, for me, I realized there was something bigger going on then what I originally thought was happening. And so, long story short, I began to dig around to see how I could connect with women who worked in the clubs on a regular basis and I found an organization in Kentucky, I drove to Kentucky, I went into my first strip club with this organization and I met my first stripper and she was 62 years old and still stripping.
Oh, wow.
Yep, yeah. And she looked 62. She had crow’s feet and C-section scars and so I think, for me, in meeting this woman, this grandmother, I realized that this woman didn’t intend for this to be her life’s work. There was something else keeping her there and she never made the money she needed to escape. So the truth is, women are often spit on in the clubs, they have beer thrown on them. Like we said, the average age of entry is 12. There’s a lot of 14, 15, 16 year olds working in strip clubs with fake IDs, not of their own being there, it’s someone else, a boyfriend or a parent or a trafficker who’s forcing them to be there. Lots of people don’t know that they have to pay to walk through the front door so the women actually pay, like in Boston, the downtown clubs charge $75 just to walk through the front door, the women pay that, right?
Yeah, to get in and then they get the tip, the money for the lap dances and all that.
Yeah. And so they usually don’t make back that money. If there are 8 to 12 women in the strip club and there’s only 6 to 10 clients, like what is the likelihood they’re going to make that money back? And so now they’re in debt and they’re in debt to these strip club managers. 90 percent of women who work in the sex industry have been sexually abused before they turned 18. 70 percent of women who work in the strip clubs are girls who have aged out of the foster care system with just not a direction to go, no high school degree. Yeah, I think those are some pretty alarming statistics and there’s others I could share with you but I think that that helps paint a better picture, a more true picture about what happens in the strip clubs.
And so how did you come to the realization about the extent of this problem? Because you mentioned, just like how I was thinking, okay, it’s just this place where people go have fun, drink a little, and the club’s exploit the customers’ whatever pent-up sexual energy, the things that people usually think of, but then like understanding that, like is this something that you had an inkling of one thing when you were starting? Is this something you learned as you went along? Is this something that you’ve been thinking about or feeling about for quite a while?
No, I did not have an inkling of this when I got into the — so, in fact, I remember — I didn’t remember this until years later after starting this. So we started in 2010 is when we started, we’ve been around for 13 years, but when we started, I hadn’t remembered this but a couple of years later I remembered that I had a friend from college who ended up working in the strip clubs near my college, and I went to school in a fairly conservative world community and she came from a pretty conservative background but there had to have been something there where she got trapped in a pyramid scheme, like selling products.
Oh, yeah.
Right? This was presented to her as a way out for that. But I specifically remember thinking not highly of her, of how do you get sucked into working in the strip clubs, because that’s what we all think. But what changed my heart, what changed my mind was those first women that we met that Christmas Eve when we came in with the Christmas baskets and they were so relieved to see us that they had tears in their eyes. I think the other place that really changed my mind and changed my life was meeting that 62-year-old, because I think, to hear her story, she came from an abusive home life, her dad was an alcoholic, her mom was heavily depressed, and so when she was 18, she thought, “I’ll just work at the strip club for one summer and I’ll make enough money to get out of this abusive house,” and she never made that money and she never left the strip clubs and her daughter was working at the same clubs. And so I think the strip clubs work hard to trap women, to put the idea of fast cash, instant cash on the table and it’s not actually a real payoff. And so I think there’s also a lot of trauma and abuse that happens in each woman’s life before she gets to the strip clubs and then the strip clubs themselves are places of abuse, women being treated like objects, women being exposed, and so I think that it’s a cycle and it’s really difficult for women to leave. So I think, yeah, my eyes were opened, my heart was changed when I met that 62-year-old woman and heard her story and realized this was never her career choice.
So you heard these stories and saw the tears in those women’s eyes and that’s what made you decide that this was going to become a whole new organization that you’re going to put a good amount of your time, your effort, your energy, like what you have to offer the world into this problem. What would you say is the prerequisite to being open to something like that? Is there something about the openness of your mind, the openness of your heart, how observant of the world you are, that differentiates someone that is going to turn this into a big effort and someone that’s going to be like more along the lines of, “Oh, my God, this is so sad and I’m gonna be really sad about it but I just really don’t feel like I personally can do anything about it”?
Yeah, I think that’s good. So I would say, for me, it also was baby steps, like first I had the conversation with friends over coffee where the question was asked, “How do we reach women sexually exploited?” Make baskets and take it to strippers working on Christmas Eve. So I did that. I thought it would be a one-time thing. And here, I thought, well, how do we connect with these women on a regular basis? But I still didn’t think it would mean going into strip clubs on a regular basis with teams, I just thought, “Let me just explore.” Then I met this woman who had been exploited most of her life and I began to see my heart change and my mind change. Then I also found someone who was already doing this work and learned from her and then, as she began to put the pieces together, like the logistic pieces, then I could see, “Oh, this is something I could do,” and I felt in my person this leap in my spirit, everybody is meant to address this type of thing as directly as Route One is doing it, everybody, you are a gifted podcaster and I’m sure in other spheres of life, a storyteller, each person should step into the gifts that they have to address the hurt of today’s world. That’s what I would say.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, and for those who maybe are hearing this podcast and they’re like, “I do wanna do strip club outreach or reach women in strip clubs,” they can find us on our website, it’s lovedbyrouteone.org and I would love to talk you through how to do that.
I think the other place for any of us who does work with people who are hurting is to make the shift between pitying somebody and seeing ourselves in that person. Share on X
Human beings are all created and have the same background, same DNA. We’re all made in the image of our God and our creator, and I think that it’s easy to pity the homeless person or pity the single mom or the person who works in the strip club, but if you can make that shift to see in your own life your own brokenness, your own places of hurt, I would think, for each one of your listeners and for you and for me, there’s been different times in our life where we’ve needed help.
Yeah, for sure.
This is just offering help to people who need help. And, yeah, so I don’t know if that’s helpful to you.
I think that makes sense in the sense of how any business would work, like regardless of what that business is, if you’re doing it for a purpose that you can see yourself in that so I’ve had a lot of guests on that are coaches, you’re trying to help someone in some form of pain or some form of desire to level up their lives and, say, you’re a business coach, you understand what it was like when you were trying to start your business, you understand what it was like when that was happening the same way at any other type of businesses. So I think this is something that can apply to a lot of people because most people out there who start something up are inspired by something. They’re inspired by something they see in the world and find that they’re fit. Based on seeing the example of what you’ve seen other people working with these women in the strip clubs, you determined that you were suited, you were fit to solve that problem. How did you determine that and what would you recommend to anyone who’s looking at something in their lives or something they observe and deciding, “Okay, am I the right person to address this problem? Is the work that I need to do to address this problem the way it needs to be addressed the work that I was meant to do? Or is this something that although I do feel awful about this, I was maybe meant to tackle something else?”
For me, I knew I was the right, I just — this isn’t going to be very succinct or very like tangible but, for me, I knew I was the right person just in that moment, in that dressing room meeting that woman who was 62 years old. I remember, for me, being like, “This is what I wanna do. I wanna come into clubs like this and connect with women like this.” I think, as the journey began, questions that I asked myself are what are the skills that I already have that would be helpful here and what are the skills that I need to be helpful here, and then I think a better question, which I wouldn’t have asked 13 years ago but I would ask now, is do I even have the ability to obtain the skills needed to reach this particular people group in this way, because maybe I don’t. We’re not all wired the same way. Budgeting is not my thing, like I hire someone else —
Accountants and stuff, yeah.
Exactly. Bookkeepers to watch our books for us. And I do that for various reasons. One, all that data gets lost to me and, two, it helps keep me out of jail because they look at our books fairly and see what’s happening. And so I would never take a paying job or even a volunteer job as a bookkeeper, because that’s outside —
Yeah, just not what you naturally feel and do well, yeah.
Right, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t start this where I had my master’s degree, master of divinity from Gordon-Conwell so I have some theological training. I have pastoral care training. I also have my own history in growing up in a family of poverty and those type of things that wire me to be more aware and more observant to the things around me. The things I needed to learn was trauma. What is trauma? How does it affect our lives? But that’s a reachable thing. I took some classes, I sat in some small groups, I read books, and so I think that’s the question for your listeners I think you’re trying to get out of here is asking themselves what is the hurt in the world that I’m trying to address, best person to address it, and if I’m not, can I learn the skill to get me there?
And I think about this when I think of, say, Clifton StrengthsFinder test where you take that assessment and you realize that all those are things that you’re naturally strong at and even if you haven’t worked on those skills, you have the potential to work on those skills, you have the potential to become something but there are some things that we’re just not necessarily strong at, for one reason or another, and just weren’t meant to do.
Right. Yeah, like I can learn how to be a better listener, I can learn from Brené Brown how to be more empathetic, I can learn how to be a better leader from Bill Gates, those are things I’m capable of learning. As an example to me, I don’t know if it’s capable for me to learn all the data and details needed to be a good bookkeeper —
Yeah, for sure.
— so if that’s true, for someone who’s listening, who says, “I would really like to address or help walk beside people who are homeless or women who work in the strip clubs or single moms,” whatever it might be, whatever that might be, or help everyday people learn how to tell their story better to bring thinking in their lives and in other people’s lives, again, just because you’re missing some of the skills to get there doesn’t mean don’t do it, but maybe ask yourself, “Can I learn these things?” And, for me, running a nonprofit, we have to have accurate books so I didn’t give up, I didn’t not start a nonprofit because I don’t know how to keep books, I hired someone to do that part of the organization. So that’s another idea for anyone who might be listening and think, “Well, the work I would wanna do with mean being a really good listener or really good at trauma, effective trauma care, but I don’t know that.” Well, then, maybe hire someone who could be really good at effective trauma care. Maybe talk to a few social workers and see and hear some of the stories that walked through their doors.
Make yourself aware of the practical resources in your area. Share on X
What food banks do you know about? What homeless shelters do you know about? What AA groups, self-help groups? Are you aware of the effects of pornography on people’s minds and hearts and decisions? So just —
Wow, that’s a whole another topic —
A whole another topic, we’ll need a different podcast.
Oh, my gosh, yeah.
But as you ask the question, hey, if there’s someone who wants to start this type of work or similar, those are my practical tips. And then speak to the people in your community who are already doing this type of work. Try not to step on their toes.
If anything, it feels to me like the kind of situation where it’s like, okay, you don’t want to step on their toes but this is such a gigantic mission, given the relative unawareness, my unawareness, a lot of other people’s unawareness, that if someone’s really trying to make a difference, make an impact, they’d be happy to show someone else, you’re going to go back to Boston and you’re going to do the same work there and then if someone from Philadelphia were to come up to you and say, “Hey, I’d like to bring this to Philadelphia,” I’m sure you’d be more than happy to say, “Oh, yeah,” because I’m sure I can affect the strip clubs here but I’m sure there’s tons of women in strip clubs in Philadelphia that would really benefit from someone coming and showing up and helping them feel a bit more empowered.
Absolutely. I think that is how I started. I dug around and I found this woman in Kentucky who welcomed me not just to show me the ropes but I stayed in her house.
Oh, wow, yeah.
Well, like then she met with me the next morning, she gave me for free a handful of resources from a book called Scars and Stilettos, which is written by a woman named Harmony Dust who’s an ex-dancer, has an organization like mine but in California. Absolutely. If there is someone who, and I’ve done this before, who would call me up and say, “I wanna know how to do this type of work in Philadelphia, in Dallas,” in wherever it might be, I’d be happy to talk them through how to do it because there are currently American women being exploited on American soil and it happens right in front of us every day. We drive past strip clubs on our way to work, on our way to the grocery store, and so there’s a real opportunity to reach those women for anyone who might be willing to learn. Yeah.
Yeah, sounds like a really tough problem and it also sounds like, even though there’s that practical component of, “Can I be the right person? Can I learn the right skills?” there’s a component of it that’s very much this feeling that you had when you had some of these encounters, when you had some of these meetings where you just felt like, “Okay, I need to do more of this, I need to do more of this work,” and it’s part of like that trust your gut or trust your heart, whichever. So, do you feel like encountering those feelings could ever lead someone wrong, whatever they’re doing? Do you feel like there’s ever a point where you get a feeling about something but it ends up being a little bit phony? And I think about some of the divisive stuff that’s going on right now in just like Twitter discourse or whatever else.
Yep. Absolutely, of course. I think all of us have desire to be in relationship and I don’t know if everybody on the planet has a desire to help others but I think, yeah, exactly. People get an idea and that’s why I say research the organizations that are around you, food banks, shelters, the Salvation Army, places that are already doing this work, meaning any type of service work.
Yeah. I mean, definition of work and be loose, but, yeah, for sure.
So that you don’t cause more harm.
Yeah.
Well, to offer help. And then I think the other bit of advice is the one I said earlier, is like you have to think about your own trauma in your own life first. There’s nobody on this side of eternity, on this side of death or whatever, this world is fallen and broken and we’ve all experienced trauma. It might be a lowercase t or a capital T.
They always talk about the airplane thing where you’re supposed to secure your own mask before you can help anyone else because you really can’t help anyone else until you have secured your own mask so until you’ve addressed or acknowledged your own trauma, whatever it is and it shows up in different forms for different people.
Yeah, I think that’s a great analogy for two reasons. Dan Allender, who is a trauma therapist out in Seattle who’s written tons of book on it would say that you can only take someone as far as you’ve gone yourself. Recently, I hiked the Acadia National Park in Maine, a mountain that I was a little bit nervous about doing because it was a pretty high, it was 1,200 feet, I guess, out in Colorado, that’s nothing but —
Yeah, yeah.
— here in New England, that’s a big deal, but I was out there alone as well so I was really nervous about doing it and almost talked myself out of it at several points until I came across other hikers who had already done that hill, had already done that mountain and coming off and they said pretty encouragingly, “Oh, yeah, you got this.”
And you said the message of “You got this” because that sounds like the message that you’re bringing to these strippers that may not even totally be aware of what their circumstances, not even aware that they were exploited by their own parents in some of these situations, which, by the way, I don’t want to diminish that it’s immensely sad just to think about what parent would do that to their own daughter, to their own child in any way, but, obviously, I don’t know their situation and I don’t really understand, but you’re saying to these women, “You’ve got this,” what does that often help them to achieve? What does that transformation look like when you start working with those that are in the sex industry?
We try to be as non-intrusive as possible. I think a lot of times, again, I have to think about my own privilege when I walk into a room and not being the person with all the answers but being the person who can listen. So I think that’s the first step for the women who work in the clubs is they haven’t had a lot of people listening to their lives, to hear what trauma they’ve been through, what they faced. Tricia Grant is a survivor of trafficking and particularly trafficked in the strip clubs and is on our board of directors and she says in the time that she was trafficked, she was dying for somebody just to hear her story, just to hear what’s going on with her, and nobody was asking. So I think it does a lot for the women that we work with in the clubs just to have us show up and try to show up and be consistent and to hear their story, to ask about their story, to care about their story. I know what it’s like when I call up a friend and they will just listen to my day, such a gift, and so to think like the women who work in strip clubs, it’s not just that they haven’t had good choices, they’ve literally had goodness withheld from them, and so when we show up and we show up consistently with ears to hear what they have to say and eyes to see what they’ve been through, that brings them hope. That brings them a new introduction of there could be something else, there could be another way of living. And then the next week, we come back and we bring back a little bit more hope. And so as the women see more hope in their lives or hear more hope or hear that there is people who care about us, I think that helps push their internal buttons to be something different, to be brave and to consider, “My life could be different,” because, if you think about it, if they were exploited as early as 12, 13, 14, those are formative years. Now, you’re 21, 23, 26, 30 and still working in the strip club, that’s a lot of your life in hopelessness, a lot of life in darkness, a lot of life of things being taken from you, opportunities being withheld from you, and so when we come in and we connect with them and hear their stories and then speak truth back to them, “You are a good person. You’re so talented. There are opportunities for you.”
So she wrote a little bit of her story in the clubs and it was published in the local newspaper and she got paid for it and that was a game changer for her. She’s like, “I got paid to do something I love.” So then she wrote more and then that got published and then she felt that even bigger, “I got paid even more money to do something I love,” and so just like the hope sets in and then a new sense of value sets in so now they’re on a new motion, versus the cycle of depression and shame and abuse, they’re now on a cycle of hope and growth and being brave and hope and more opportunities to be brave.
If someone is sex trafficked starting at the age of 12, where are they going to, especially the one you said was her own mom, that’s like your first initial influence, your first initial guide in life is almost always going to be your parents, so it’s like where is that empowerment going to be? You just almost accept it. So the idea of feeling, “Oh, wait, I can do something different. I can think about what I wanna do,” or at least think about something that’s, I don’t know, less coerced in a way, something to say okay, “Like maybe I don’t love bookkeeping but it’s something that businesses need and would feel something I could be proud of,” or something along those lines.
Yeah, no, and I think you’re right. Coerce is the right word there. That’s one of the three ways. So when we think about trafficking, we often think about people tied to radiators or people being stolen from their home from this country or that country or this part of the US to another part of us and that happens. Those things happen.
For sure.
In large, the way women get stuck in trafficking is through force, fraud, or coercion. People have coerced them into doing this work and then there’s the allure of always you could make more money but it’s not actually attainable. And so like the woman I just talked to you about, her name is Rachel Moran, and she eventually left the sex industry and now as a social worker and she wrote a book called Paid For. It’s very blunt about what happens in strip clubs, it’s very blunt about what happens in her life, just that initial kernel of a new way of living, a new way of thinking about life.
Now, I need to ask this, do you ever get any pushback from the strip clubs themselves, from the owners that if they don’t want you coming in and telling these women, “Hey, you don’t need this,” because it eventually mean some of them leaving?
Well, the owners are hardly ever there so we’ve hardly ever met the owners. Managers, yeah, I mean, we’ve had managers tell us no. There’s clubs that we’ve been in for four years pretty consistently making headway, building relationships, and then they get a new manager and he straight up met me at the door, he knew we came every Monday, he was waiting for me and he said, “No, we just decided we don’t want you to come in anymore.” So, yeah, we get some nos. We try to get into clubs by bringing little gifts so we have little gifts that say, “You are treasured,” like one bottle of nail polish or a candle or a little bottle of lotion and each and every woman gets a gift that says, “You are treasured,” and that usually is a good way to allow the bouncers to see that we’re not doing something harmful. Also, to get to build a relationship with the women. Yeah, I think strip club managers are weird. Just like the rest of us, they’re multi layered. We’ll call strip clubs up to bring gifts on Christmas, Christmas Eve, clubs that we’re not normally in and I’ve heard strip club managers say, “Oh, I think this is great. I just sometimes look at these women and have pity for them,” or, “I think it’s good that you wanna bring light to these women,” and so I think that’s really interesting because you’re the one selling the women.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. So it’s just we are — humans are complicated.
When these women get out of the strip club and find their new path, find a new journey, do you keep in touch with them going forward throughout life? Do you get regular messages and stuff like that?
So we have three sites, we’re in three different locations. We’re in Boston, we’re in Springfield, Mass., which is an hour and a half from Boston, and we’re in Worcester, Mass., which is an hour away. So I have different staff members at each of those locations. Anyway, she texted that staff member that was there that she knew from her clubs in Springfield and said, “You know, I want you to know that I’ve got a new job. I’m so grateful for you women coming in. I always thought of you guys as angels and I’m starting to also look at some rehab,” so that was back in June of 2021, I bet, maybe 2020, one of the two, and then just recently, about a month or two ago, she texted the same staff member to say that she did finally secure a new job and she’s been there for a whole year and she’s clean and sober and she got custody of her daughter back and she’s going to church and we have several touch points like that. There’s a lot of women that make touch points like that with us. There are some women that have even come back out and go to the strip clubs with us now that they’re —
Wow. Yeah, they want to pay it forward and help someone else now.
Exactly, yep, they pay it forward. And they can do it in a way that’s better than me because they’ve been there before. We used to have this 70-year-old woman who was a volunteer who had been trafficked in her teens on through her 30s and she would just look at the women, like we would be in the clubs and she would just look at the women and say, “I’ve been here before,” and the women would break and cry on the spot because they’re like, okay, there is hope. Again, that idea. And so, yeah, we stay in touch with some women. A lot of times, the women want anonymity.
Yeah, for sure.
They move from this state to another state and just kind of cut ties with everybody so they can have that fresh start of starting over. But we know they’re out there because, every once in a while, we’ll get a text or a Facebook message saying where they’re at in life and how grateful they are for our times. I don’t know, those moments are really sweet.
Yeah, it sounds amazing and it sounds like kind of brings together your entire reason for doing what you do, not that you should need external validation because there’s something really powerful to be said about not needing that, about just knowing that it’s happening, just knowing that you’re having an impact, like hosting a podcast, it’s going to go through production, be released in a few weeks, and then maybe I’ll get a comment about it, maybe not, but most people listening are probably just streaming it somewhere and having their own impact, sometimes you do have to just trust the process a little bit as well.
Yeah, exactly. That’s right. I have to trust the process. And I think, for me, as a Christian, I also trust that God is leading it and so, yeah, you’re right. And I also — I guess this is what I was trying to say earlier and maybe I didn’t do a good job of it is the women in the clubs, they’re the experts of their own story.
Yeah, for sure.
They need direction, they need to be introduced to hope and goodness that’s been withheld from them, but they have the ability to make the decisions to leave the club with the support of other people, just like you and me. Big decisions I’ve made in my life and I don’t know about you, Stephen, I didn’t make them alone, I made them with the help of a community.
Yeah, and that’s why community is so important and also having the right community and having the right influences.
That’s a good analogy with your podcast is, and with so many people’s podcasts, you are presenting something that’s important to you and that you believe could be important to us as humans, us as Americans, and so I think you owe that and to keep to keep doing it regardless of how much feedback you get is good. Yeah. And I think that’s where you’ve hit the nail on the head, like I know for myself I’ve gotten myself in trouble professionally or whatever it might be when I start to get fixated on the ministry as my identity, that of the work that we do be in what I’m doing to walk beside somebody, to help somebody out of some kind of earnestness and letting that be there. Trust in the process, like you said.
Yeah, definitely. Well, Bonnie, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes telling us all about Route One Ministries and before the podcast, I was corrected because I was calling it route one, I’m originally from Long Island and just kind of talk that way in a way but Route One Ministries about everything you’re doing to, first of all, empower yourself to be able to really make a difference in some of the problems that you’re observing but also be empowering countless others who are stuck in this cycle and trapped. I’d like to put my heart out to everyone that’s in that position, everyone that you’re working with or everyone all over the country, all over the world that’s been somehow tricked and trapped into a place where they never intended to be. If you’re out there listening and you’re in that spot, please find, whether it’s Route One or anyone else, please find the people who are going to give you that positive influence, that message that you can do what you want to do. And I would like to thank everyone listening out there, regardless of your situation and your circumstance, and everyone who’s walking this journey, walking this path toward a life that truly reflects who you are and what you want to see and do in this world.
Cool. Very good. Thank you again for having me. This was great.
Yes, it was wonderful and have a wonderful rest of your day.
You too.
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About Rev. Bonnie J. Gatchell
Rev. Bonnie J. Gatchell is an ordained minister with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. In 2010 she co-founded Route One to serve women sexually exploited by strip clubs. She desires equality for each person. While she loves the local church, she also believes that we have major blindspots around women, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and sexuality. Her desire that each woman working in the sex trade have the resources they need should they desire to exit.
Thank you.