Survivors of Sexual Exploitation Find Community and Hope at St. Bakhita Catholic Worker

In the late 2010s, Anne Haines began to occasionally join a group called the Franciscan Peacemakers on their pre-dawn lunch deliveries to women on the streets of urban Milwaukee.

“It’s extremely surprising to people how many women are on the streets at five, six in the morning,” Haines said.

Haines was already familiar with the challenges faced by many of the people living in the area where the Franciscan Peacemakers conducted their ministry to trafficked and sexually exploited women. As the Respect Life Director for Urban Ministry for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, she worked on racial justice and incarceration issues in the Amani neighborhood, made famous by the 2016 film titled Milwaukee 53206. The film chronicled the lives of people living in the 53206 zip code, which the film claimed had the highest rate of incarceration of Black men in the nation. The archdiocesan office also did a lot of work helping formerly incarcerated people re-enter society.

But the plight of the women on those streets made a particular impression on her. “Meeting them out on the street…really moved me,” she said. “There’s so many people who are survivors of sexual exploitation, and my heart is really with people who are survivors.

“It just seemed like an area of need,” she continued. “Catholic Workers, what they do is start up when they see a need, and that was something that really resonated with me.”

A Witness to Human Dignity

In 2021, she left her position with the archdiocese to start a Catholic Worker house dedicated to serving these women. The Capuchin Franciscans offered St. Conrad Friary as a home for the new Catholic Worker; the building was originally a convent for the School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND).

In 2022, St. Bakhita Catholic Worker House formally opened its doors to survivors of sexual exploitation, offering a safe space for recovery and healing.

Raised Catholic, Haines had always been curious about the faith. When her older brother entered the seminary while she was in high school, she picked up some of his books about Catholic social teaching and started browsing through them.

“I just became interested in that area of our faith,” she said. “That really excited me.”

It was in those books that she discovered the Catholic Worker Movement. In it, she found a living witness to the principle of respect for the dignity of every human person that is the foundation of Catholic social teaching.

She was hooked. She began volunteering at Casa Maria Catholic Worker, also in Milwaukee, in the 1980s; later, she also visited Catholic Worker communities in Los Angeles, San Antonio, San Francisco and New York City.

But as a single mother with a two-year-old child, she didn’t feel the time was right to join a community. She married, raising six children over the next thirty years. In the meantime, she read dozens of books about the Catholic Worker.

Her interest in Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker ran so deep, her then-17-year-old daughter made a sketch of Dorothy Day for Haines’ birthday.

‘A Community of Women’

Finally, she realized her dream of living in a Catholic Worker community when she opened St. Bakhita House in September of 2022. Beyond providing shelter, the house fosters a sense of belonging among its residents, she said.

“We are a community of women living together and supporting each other,” Haines emphasized.

That sense of community is reinforced through various opportunities for the women, such as weekly Mass, contemplative prayer services, and community meals, all designed to nurture both spiritual and emotional healing.

“(The women) all really expressed a need for a silent retreat, so we’re trying to book that, and hermitages for them, private ones,” Haines said.

The house is named after St. Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese woman born around 1869 and kidnapped as a child. She endured years of brutal slavery before an Italian family bought her and took her to Italy as their “servant.” After an Italian court declared she was free (because slavery was illegal in Italy), she went to live with the Canossian Sisters, eventually joining their ranks.

Asked what she would do if she met her captors, she famously replied, “I would get on my knees and kiss their hand, for without them I would not have met the God that I love so much.”

Now, St. Bakhita is the patron saint of human trafficking and enslaved people. It seemed like the perfect name for the new Catholic Worker house, Haines said: “Pope Benedict called her the patron saint of hope, and that, to me, stuck with me as a reason to have her.”

From the beginning, St. Bakhita House has collaborated with the Franciscan Peacemakers. Besides the lunch distribution, the organization that connects women survivors of sexual exploitation to safe housing, meaningful work and a support network. The organization sponsors trauma-focused support groups to help exploited women heal.

The partnership has allowed the Catholic Worker to provide its guests with a structured support program through the Franciscan Peacemakers, which benefitted from the long-term housing St. Bakhita House is able to provide. Women are allowed to stay at the house for up to two years—a rarity in shelters of this kind, Haines said.

Guests have the opportunity to join the Franciscan Peacemakers’ social enterprise, Peace and All Good, which creates candles, bath bombs, lotions, and similar products.

“They are able to work in that social enterprise and get work skills, soft work skills, and also build up a resume, and save money for when they leave,” Haines said.

Outings and enrichment activities are also part of life in the community, Haines said. On one outing to Navy Pier, the community members went on a boat ride and rode the Ferris wheel. These events, often taken for granted, are profoundly healing for those recovering from trauma.

The support of the wider community has been crucial.

“The parishes have been very, very supportive of us all along,” Haines acknowledged. “We do a lot of education, go out to parishes, teaching about our mission here. Really trying to reach out to people who aren’t usually drawn to the Catholic Worker…people who don’t necessarily think the way I might, or the Worker might.”

Miracles of Generosity and Hope

She is also grateful for the little miracles of people’s generosity to the house.

“God just keeps sending people,” she said. “I wish I would have started writing down when this journey started all the moments where, like, ‘oh we need this,’ and within a day, somebody’s calling, being able to fulfill that need.”

It’s reminiscent of Dorothy Day praying to St. Joseph and receiving “little miracles” just in time, she said.

With so many of the guests dealing with trauma and addiction, it’s not surprising that some of the women relapse into old ways of life. Both the house and the Franciscan Peacemakers’ program enforce safe and healthy boundaries. The guests have a nightly curfew, for instance, and the Peacemakers program has a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy and asks women using on the premises to leave.

“But then they can rewrite a plan and come back, depending on the circumstances,” Haines said. “Addiction is a real hard part of this for a woman.”

Despite being open for only two years, Haines is already collecting stories of recovery and healing. One of the former residents reached out to Haines after she secured her own apartment and job, for example. Another woman saved up enough money to move into her own apartment.

“You can just hear in their voice the excitement and just a different tone than when they came,” Haines said.

Meanwhile, Haines also hopes to spark others’ interest in the Catholic Worker by leading a seven-month “Dorothy Day Deep Dive” for people who want to explore Dorothy Day’s legacy on a deeper level. This year’s experience begins on October 9 under the theme “Patron Saint of Both/And.”