The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children is a growing epidemic in the United States. Sacred Daughters is our national juvenile justice and advocacy program for girls and young women commercially trafficked and/or caught in the net of our criminal justice system due to trafficking. Through our Sacred Daughters program we empower our girl survivors by giving them the opportunity and security to express and unearth their violated lives by expressing themselves through spoken or written words in empowerment workshops. Thus begins the gradual transformation and healing process, which includes formal clinical therapy, to transform the damaged and violated lives of girls to help them recognize and envision a safe, secure life of hope and possible dreams. We also prevent commercial sexual exploitation of children by hosting education workshops and outreach to schools and vulnerable communities to educate youth about the perils and systematic process of luring children to become victims of commercial sexual exploitation.

Our goals are to reduce the number of girls commercially exploited for commercial sex and increase the number of programs available as alternatives to detention that approach girls and young women affected by violence from a gender-specific, trauma informed and strength-based perspective, and to increase leadership and advocacy skills of girls and young women who have been affected by violence.

Our program is conducted/implemented on a 12 month time-frame with the following activities: 1) Conducting leadership and policy training workshops for girls using our girls’ empowerment leadership curriculum. 2) Coaching and training girls to nurture and cultivate their voice as catalysts for change and civic leadership, by transforming their circumstances through advocating for sensible and equitable juvenile justice reform for themselves and their communities. 3) Advocating to support trafficked girls as victims and support programs that are community based, gender responsive, trauma informed and strength-based as an alternative to incarceration for girls at risk of or who become system involved. 4) Seeking sponsorship for our summer Girls leadership program in Washington DC, where girls are recruited in increasing numbers during the summer months when schools are out.

Girls behind bars share narratives of repeated physical and sexual violence. A study on delinquent girls revealed that in California, 81 percent of chronically delinquent girls reported being physically abused and 56 percent were sexually abused. Sexual or physical violence is more central to girls’ journeys to detention than it is for boys. For example, the Oregon Social Learning Study found that while 3 percent of delinquent boys experienced physical abuse, 77.8 percent of the delinquent girls were abused.

Mothers with substance abuse issues are generally victims of sexual and domestic violence. Often, the underlying reasons for addiction among mothers are untreated post-traumatic stress and/or major depression disorders, precipitated by the injuries of sexual and domestic violence.

In most state prisons and local jails, restraints are routinely used on pregnant women when they are in labor and when they deliver their children. Only six states have statutes regulating the use of restraints on pregnant women: California, Illinois, New Mexico, New York, Texas, and Vermont. In the other 44 other states, and the District of Columbia, no such laws exist. This routine use of restraints on pregnant women, particularly on women in labor and giving birth, constitutes a cruel, inhumane and degrading and practice that rarely can be justified in terms of security concerns.

Twenty-five years ago, the presence of women—especially mothers—was an aberration in the criminal justice system. Approximately two-thirds of all women sentenced in federal court were given probation, and women comprised less than five percent of all prisoners. That was before the war on drugs. Since 1986, following the introduction of mandatory sentencing to the federal drug laws in the mid 1980s, and its adoption by many states at about the same time, the number of women in prison has risen 400 percent, according to a recent Department of Justice report, "Survey of State Prison Inmates"; for black women, the figure is 800 percent.

Section 115 of the 1996 federal welfare legislation placed a lifetime ban on TANF, Medicaid, and Food Stamp benefits for convicted drug felons. The lifetime ban denies mothers in treatment and recovery, many of whom were incarcerated as a result of their addiction, the support networks to achieve self-sufficiency and stabilize their families.

On the ten year anniversary of the Adoption and Safe Families Act’s passage, there is considerable reason to evaluate the statue’s impact, especially on the lives of mothers behind bars and their children. The distinct conditions of maternal incarceration, and the challenges of maintaining familial ties during a mother’s sentence, were overlooked by the original architects of ASFA—by their own admission.