At Waite Park shelter, survivors of sex trafficking find refuge, hope for new life

It's a home a lot like any other in this St. Cloud suburb. Big windows shine light into a cozy living room with comfy sofas. There's a spacious kitchen, and a pot of marinara sauce bubbling on the stove.

But the people who live in this peaceful setting have faced horrors that most people couldn't imagine.

This is Terebinth Refuge, Minnesota's first shelter for adult survivors of sexual exploitation. They are here to escape sex trafficking — and finding a safe place to stay is their first step toward building a new life.

The shelter opened in April in Waite Park, just west of St. Cloud, with room for two residents. Since then, it has served seven women ranging in age from 21 to 44. It has a waiting list, and staffers field calls from all over the state. They're now expanding to add eight more beds.

Executive director Cynthia "CeCe" Terlouw moved to the St. Cloud area and founded the shelter because it's a service lacking in Minnesota, where most programs focus on young victims of trafficking. She had previously run a program for at-risk and exploited girls at Heartland Girls' Ranch in Benson, Minn.

With easy access to the interstate and the Bakken oil fields, the St. Cloud area has become a "training ground" for traffickers from the Twin Cities, said Jason Thompson, an investigator for the Central Minnesota Human Trafficking Task Force and the Waite Park Police Department.

"If they can find a girl and they can bring her to a remote place where she doesn't know anything, she can't run away because she doesn't know where she is," Thompson said.

A place of rest and growth

Terlouw started Terebinth Refuge with help from a grant from Minnesota's Safe Harbor program and community donations. The current shelter is in a house leased for two years from the city of Waite Park, but eventually, Terlouw wants to move to a permanent location with two houses, one for emergency shelter and one for transitional beds.

She named her shelter for the terebinth, a broad, leafy tree related to the pistachio that's mentioned in the Old Testament. Terlouw says it's a symbol of resilience, strength, rest and growth.

"You want it to be refuge, and you want it to be peace," she said. "You want it to be a place where they're learning and growing and can feel cared about and nurtured."

When women arrive at the shelter, they're often exhausted, and sleep for days, Terlouw said. They often require medical and substance abuse treatment and counseling to deal with the trauma they've experienced.

Survivors frequently turn to alcohol and drugs as a way to endure being victimized repeatedly, Terlouw said. Survivors often have criminal records, because they've been forced to steal or commit other crimes to meet the quota their trafficker demands.

And after years of trauma and abuse, Terlouw said, survivors lack an education, job history and most importantly, self worth.

"There are just so many barriers that they can't even fathom by the time they're an adult woman that they could get out of this," she said. "They're being told, 'This is all you're good for.' So they really can't imagine leaving this life."

Slowly, over time, the staff at Terebinth Refuge starts to help the women see themselves as a person again, with hopes and dreams.

"Very rarely is there something in their mind that they've dreamed about, at least at this point in their life," Terlouw said. "Maybe when they were little girls. But it's been stripped out of them, and they can't even fathom that they can get out of this and have a healthy life."

The staff helps survivors learn basic living skills, like doing laundry and keeping a schedule — skills they never learned if they were trafficked from a young age. They help them plan to go back to school or find a job, and imagine a future outside of trafficking.

"They start to recognize there is hope. They can move forward," Terlouw said.

Removing dependency

Leaving the control of a trafficker can be a process. Survivors are often dependent on traffickers for housing, food and protection, Terlouw said. They might even have feelings of attachment toward their trafficker despite the abuse.

Sometimes, that means a survivor will come and go from the shelter several times before making a permanent break.

Program manager Lana Kozak recalled one woman who drove herself to the shelter, but couldn't get out of the car.

"She said, 'I just, I can't do this to him. I would be hurting him and betraying him,'" Kozak said. "She was about ready to leave. But we talked a little bit about maybe not doing this for him, but doing it for herself. And that empowered her a little bit to go up to that door."

Terlouw declined to allow interviews of the women living at Terebinth Refuge, citing the recent trauma they've endured.

But one staff member has a deep understanding of what the survivors she works with have been through.

Eleana said she was the 13-year-old child of an alcoholic and addict when she was befriended by a trafficker. She asked that her last name not be used because she doesn't routinely speak publicly about her past.

"They gave me money," she said. "Now I see the stages of the grooming process that they led me through."

After persuading her to go out of town with him, she said, Eleana's trafficker told her she would never see her mom or her family again. He was part of a Minneapolis family that operated a juvenile prostitution ring in the late 1990s.

Eleana was trafficked until she was 19, enduring physical abuse and other horrors. When she got out of the cycle, she testified against her trafficker, who received a lengthy prison sentence.

At the time, there weren't many support services for survivors, Eleana said. But eventually, she got a job and went to college. She's now working on her second master's degree, she said.

Now she's a survivor advocate at Terebinth Refuge. She said her experiences help her relate to what the women are going through.

"I'm just trying to lead them in the direction that helped me and support them and meet them where they're at," she said. "Because I know that if you don't meet a survivor where they're at, they're not going to get where they need to be."

The staff at Terebinth Refuge say public attitudes toward trafficking victims are changing. That's in part due to Minnesota's Safe Harbor law, passed in 2011, which ensures that sexually exploited youth are treated as victims, not criminals engaging in prostitution.

More people now understand that women and girls who are being trafficked aren't in this life by choice, Kozak said.

"These survivors are able to say it without being treated as criminals," she said. "Now, they're being treated as how they should be — survivors of horrific trauma."