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What is a Safe Home | Starting and Supporting a Safe Home - Season 5, Episode 1
39 Plays7 days ago
The U.S. Institute Against Human Trafficking and Kids Not For Sale presents a special new, 4-part episode titled “Starting and Supporting a Safe Home.” In this season, we sit down with Brandy Cristafulli, the Founder and President of LifeRecaptured, a safe home out of Florida that provides shelter, restoration, and healing for trafficked women throughout the United States.
In this season, Brandy shares with us how she began her safe home, how she runs her safe home, and what she has learned along the way. This is extremely insightful for anyone wanting to end human trafficking in America. We can all be educated on where to assist organizations that help victims of human trafficking, but this dives in even deeper. Whether you are wanting to begin a safe home or simply just support, Brandy provides the proper directions for how to do just that. It goes beyond loving and caring - we must be ready to provide a service that may seem unorthodox to some of us, but helps victims restore their lives.
In this episode, we hear Brandy’s story and how she began her safe home. We also discuss what a safe home actually consists of, as some may have a misunderstanding of what establishes a safe home and the services they provide.
These episodes will be released weekly for 4 consecutive Wednesdays - 1/15/2025, 1/22/2025, 1/29/2025, and 2/5/2025. Be sure to subscribe and be alerted when the next episode releases!
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Transcript
Introduction to Safe Homes Series
00:00:12
Speaker
Hey everyone, and thank you for tuning in to our new series titled Starting and Supporting a Safe Home for Traffic Victims in the USA. This series is meant to be an introduction to possibly starting a safe home or simply learning how to support and help grow more safe homes throughout the country.
00:00:28
Speaker
So, whether you are someone or a group that is actively pursuing this mission, or you just want to help know how you can support traffic victims, this is a fantastic introduction to learning about the whole process.
Meet Brandy Crisifoli
00:00:41
Speaker
In this series, we ask Brandy Crisifoli a ton of questions. Brandy started the safe home life recaptured.
00:00:48
Speaker
The safe home is located in East Volusia County, Florida. As you may learn through this series, it's important that we do not disclose the exact location. But if you want to know more about her ministry, you can visit her website at liferecaptured dot.org.
Brandy's Journey and Challenges
00:01:03
Speaker
In the first episode of this series, we have Brandy introduce her story to us involving how she began her journey in helping women who are trafficked and the steps she began to start herself to start their safe home. She also shares a little bit of what she learned along the way in starting this. You see, a large reason we are making this series is to make sure you are ready for this journey. Starting a safe home is not something to be taken lightly. While it's a large need and we want to encourage the growth and launch of many,
00:01:35
Speaker
It's important that you begin with the mentality that this will never be a smooth ministry. You will go through many tests and trials learning along the way. Brandy is able to provide us some of the lessons that she learned along the way that we encourage you to consider.
00:01:51
Speaker
You'll find many thought provoking statements and stories in this series, including who to have on your staff and maybe who to not have on your staff or as volunteers.
Understanding Victims and Challenges
00:02:03
Speaker
Cause as we'll learn some of these good intentions in the ministry can possibly lead to poor help or even hurting the victim even further.
00:02:13
Speaker
Every home and situation are different, but as we learn how traffic victims find their way to a safe home and the common ways that they thrive in brandy situation, that will help you begin this journey or it will help you find the right safe home to support.
00:02:29
Speaker
We are excited for you to join us in this series. So here's my conversation with Brandi. Oh, one more thing to add. You will notice that my voice might sound a little hoarse in this series. In fact, I actually lost my voice the night before the recording, but we didn't want to have to reschedule. So if I sound maybe a little bit weird, that's why. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Brandi.
Personal Motivation and Family Impact
00:02:58
Speaker
Brandi, thank you for taking some time with me to help our viewers and our followers, our abolitionists understand a little bit more about safe homes and how to ultimately possibly build up safe homes or support safe homes, whichever way. but We want to help our viewers understand truly what a safe home is, what that ministry truly consists of for survivors of human trafficking um or victims of human trafficking, I should say, coming into the home. So if you wouldn't mind, just go and share what you do and like what what your safe home is and and not and nonprofit ministry and how you got into it.
00:03:39
Speaker
Well, thank you, Jeremy, first of all, for having me be able to share some of the experiences that I've gone through. um The reason that I chose to do this is because my baby sister was trafficked and she didn't make it.
00:03:55
Speaker
And for my family, we didn't know what trafficking was. We'd only watched it in the movies. We thought it was where someone threw someone in a van and went and put them in a warehouse. We did not know of grooming. And because my baby's sister um really wanted to be with her father, which my father was in and out of hospitals, he just took advantage of that and moved in.
00:04:20
Speaker
not literally into our home, but just in the presence of my family. And there were no signs of grooming her. We didn't see that because we had not been taught or educated what those signs would look like. And we had known this person for 17 years. And he was not out of line. um He did not say sexual things. So We were completely comfortable, but he was grooming her and then he sold her and then she was sold again. Now we did hire a detective, but we never assumed that we would get the word that my baby sister was trafficked. That's what made me start this. We were an angry family.
00:05:06
Speaker
We wanted justice. um My sister was not here to really testify. There was just a little pat on the wrist. And and I began to live with some hate where I just wanted justice for my sister.
00:05:21
Speaker
But I think, Jeremy, what changed that is um I am a believer in Jesus Christ, and I remember getting along saying, i can't I can't do this.
The Calling and Training
00:05:33
Speaker
Either I'm going to had worked with sexually i mean with domestic abuse women for 20 years, and I thought that was what my calling was.
00:05:50
Speaker
But in getting alone, I found that I needed to help other it would also go out and help the world to understand what an epidemic that we're facing.
00:06:08
Speaker
So you asked me about safe houses. Well, I was ready to go, Jeremy. I mean, I felt like, okay, this is my calling. I'm going to go and get started, get a safe house, and I'm going to rescue every boy and girl that I can find.
00:06:24
Speaker
I was invited to a conference by an organization and
00:06:40
Speaker
So when we went there, my husband and I, we listened to all of those positive testimonies. These women who had lost their lives, almost, who still had chains that were in their mind, have been taken away, and through the help of this ministry that they had gone to, and having the resources that those survivors needed, they were able to become psychologists to become artists and to become a human being again. So that made my heart start pumping. I was ready to go right then. I said, this is my calling. I'm going to go home and I'm going to start this immediately. And I remember the founders standing up and saying, how many in here have had training and only to raise their hand? Well, how many of you
00:07:34
Speaker
have been connected to law enforcement. And I don't remember how many raised their hand. And he said, please don't go back home and try to get this started with a safe house because you will hurt the boys and girls rather than help them. So Jeremy, I came back and with the okay of my husband. I quit my job and I went and trained for four and a half years. So you spent four and a half years training, but before,
00:08:03
Speaker
That happened when you were at that conference, if you would.
Starting a Safe Home: Learning and Experience
00:08:07
Speaker
um What made you think, I want to start a safe home? Like, you you you experienced um what it was like being on the other side of of a family member being trafficked, and you wanted justice, or ultimately what you wanted to do was keep that from it from happening. Why did you feel a safe home was your calling in that situation? Well, that's a good question, because I would have never even thought of a safe home until I went to this conference. OK.
00:08:32
Speaker
In hearing how they operated to be able to be successful, there were a lot of things that we learned about, you know, safe homes and the violence of slavery, sexual slavery. And of course, you're taking all the notes and you're wanting to be able to do the same thing if they've got a 92 percent success rate. That's the only way we knew about it, Jeremy. I didn't know there were safe homes.
00:08:56
Speaker
I didn't know there was such a thing as that because I didn't even know anything about, you know, human trafficking until it happened to my sister. So what did you learn there at about the safe homes? Well, I will tell you that it was an eye opener for me and it was life changing. When you go into these safe homes and you're allowed to stay and they make sure you have a background check and why do you want to do this? I mean, they're not going to just bring someone in.
00:09:23
Speaker
and being in that safe home and seeing these girls and being able to experience their hurt, but also what the safe home was doing for them, what it was giving to them. All I did was sit silently for the first year and watch.
00:09:42
Speaker
I really was not allowed to say anything. It was just to be able to observe. I mean, I even got to go into the counseling sessions and watch how they would bring them back to those times of things that happened to them, that triggered them, that was still triggering them at the time I was there so they could help them. It's so deep, Jeremy. there's Having a safe home is not just a home for hospitality.
Sting Operations and Realizations
00:10:08
Speaker
It's where you have to train for even how your house is set up and then the way your curtains are. You don't just go in and put up ordinary curtains. You don't just go in and get a house and put the furniture in it. Everything is so It needs to be exactly a safe and secure place for these trafficking survivors. And in staying there, I got to go on sting operations. I i got to see things that I never wanted to see. I got to see little girls that were being rescued.
00:10:40
Speaker
because there were low-income motels with high-end cars, and being able to observe that you can't put a face to human trafficking, to the predators, because those people that were trafficking those little girls were teachers, some of them. Some of them had ordinary businesses where they never had a record, but yet they were in there taking the life of a little girl. Those girls were from the age of four to nine.
00:11:10
Speaker
that changed my life. That was when I said, this is what I'm going to do until the day that I can't take another breath. I'm not going to see little children violated. And I sit and be emotional, but I don't do anything. And what I learned at that safe house, Jeremy is It's good to be able to have awareness and prevention. That's vitally important. But I heard those girls say, nobody heard us. Nobody even knew we existed. We'd go and see signs and truck stops at airports, but nobody, we didn't have a place to go.
00:11:49
Speaker
You know, they don't feel that they can go anywhere because it's not really um in some of the areas that the girls will be in traffic. There are no safe homes. So they feel that there's no hope. But I learned from training that we can make that hope happen for them. If we open the safe homes but we're trained,
00:12:08
Speaker
and we have the essential resources for that safe home, then these girls and boys can have a change in their life and we can help them to integrate back into society, but it's not it's not easy. But that's how it started for me to want to get the safe homeless being trained and understanding that having a safe home, you better have boundaries. You better have the caretakers that you need. Because if you don't have the right caretakers and they come in and want to befriend you, like me, I had a heart for it. But I had to be trained in how to have the right boundaries for these girls. They have lived in another world than you and I are used to.
00:12:52
Speaker
And you have to love them, but you can't let them manipulate you. So there's so many things to understanding the branches of human trafficking. And when you have a safe home, what you need to do for that, that if a person goes out and just decides they want a safe home, I don't think that that safe home will ever offer success to those survivors unless they have been properly trained and have a heart and have made a decision that they're going to pay the price and there is a price to pay for working with human trafficking survivors.
The Importance of Safe Homes
00:13:27
Speaker
I want to get into exactly how you are given referrals to even take in survivors or victims and that and and into your safe home. But to back up a little bit, how many understand if there is no safe home, where do victims go? They don't go.
00:13:46
Speaker
They get just thrown back into the system or keep being sold all over again. They don't feel from talking to them that they have any way to escape or any place to go because their traffickers are telling them, no one cares about you. And if you go, I will find you and you will pay the price or either your family will.
00:14:05
Speaker
So with that fear, they don't know that there's a safe home. But if they go online and somehow they feel that they can find someplace that they want to go to, you better be ready for them. We've had calls like that where people want to escape. And you say, well, how do they have cell phones? There's levels that human trafficking work with their survivors. And if they call us, we better be lined up and ready with our security team. That's another thing, Jeremy.
00:14:33
Speaker
I didn't know you had to have a security team. I knew you had to work with law enforcement, but I didn't even know what level I was going to be working with law enforcement. I had to go and sit down and follow the advice of my sheriff, show him respect and submit to him. They're not going to work with you if you have not trained, if you're not serious, because they will look at you and say, not every girl that you're picking up has been trafficked and we will help you know what is real and what is not real in the human trafficking world. And then if we need them to do a sting operation or they need us, we will be there for that. So it's really something where in every area there is a different hill that you have to climb and the education that you need to get is a never ending education.
Collaboration and Operations
00:15:29
Speaker
it changes all the time and that's probably not ah obviously that is for anyone running a safe home or involved in a safe home but including people outside just and involved in this educate constantly educating is important um so ah kind of getting down to like the the nooks and cranny of like a what a safe home is um so talking about kind of the process like once you establish a safe home. And we'll get into a little bit more of that, right? But let me understand like that how exactly a safe home runs. um Is it with a law enforcement? Do you get funding from the state? And then, you know, you work together, you know, if someone, a sting operation is hat happens, they have a victim and then they go to you. I'm guessing if they don't have a safe home to go to, they get arrested. Like how many understand this whole process? okay
00:16:23
Speaker
So when we started off and we had our safe house, we tried to take every class we could through Ashley Moody and through different colleges that would give us certifications. It's not that they really require you to have certain regulations at this point, they may, but we try to stay up to date. So having those certifications, the first thing we did is bring our sheriff out to see our safe home. We wanted to know if the surroundings of our safe home needed to be more fenced in, needed to, whatever it needed. He loved what we were doing. He okayed it and he thought it was great to leave it the way just it is. And then they will have different law enforcement that will circle and make sure that we're okay. That's the first thing.
00:17:10
Speaker
The second thing was to build our advocacy program. You have to have a director, and then you have to have advocacy under that um director. Because what's going to happen when you take in your first girl? If you don't have advocates here that change out every six hours, and we like to have two at a time, and the reason for that, Jeremy, is when you bring in a survivor, and I'm going to tell you about our first survivor in a minute,
00:17:37
Speaker
But when you bring in that girl, you have two advocates that can kind of balance each other out because everybody's personal personality is different. But they go through our training. It's very important they go through our training and then they have to watch a certain amount of videos and then we test them on that. Then we do role playing with our former CIA agents in case we have someone that just doesn't have the ability to handle human trafficking survivors. She may love them.
00:18:08
Speaker
And I will tell you about a case that happened because she loved him, but she wasn't keeping within the boundaries. So you have to have those advocacy's here and then you have your directors that are making sure that they're overseeing and not talking to these girls about
First Survivor and Emotional Impact
00:18:25
Speaker
their problems. That only happens in the therapy room. That happens with trauma therapy. So the first girl that we got, believe it or not, Jeremy, I got her from off the street.
00:18:35
Speaker
I had said, OK, I've been trained. Let me see if this is really the way that I should work this. And I actually took her to dinner or to breakfast for over a year that she didn't talk to me.
00:18:49
Speaker
Finally, she admitted what was going on. I didn't have my safe house at that time. I took her to another one. She graduated there and then came back here. She was my first survivor. She finished her education. She's getting ready to be a hygienist. She's got a brand new car. That was my first one. My second one, Jeremy, was a call from a girl that had escaped.
00:19:14
Speaker
And we had a pilot, and she had she had been from here, but taken away to another state. We have a pilot who volunteers and also pays for the gas. We can't afford it. He goes with us. We have one security person. We were able to take her and bring her back here again. But from the time we got her, Jeremy, she was sick from everything she'd gone through. She was with us for a year and three months, and she was probably in our safe house a total of four weeks.
00:19:47
Speaker
And now she's passed away. We were fortunate enough to lead her to Jesus Christ before she died, two weeks before she died. And you know what she said, Jeremy? When she was here in the hospital, our vice president went, and it was her first visit. She covered up her foot, and the girls started crying. It was her family who sold her, Jeremy, her family.
00:20:11
Speaker
And she started crying and she said, I've never had anyone even touch me with tenderness, any anyone that I could trust. And so over that year and three months that she was here, we showed her love and we acted as though it was just going to be healed and she was going to get back into the world, but it didn't happen because of all the drugs and all the things she had been through. Our third girl that we received a call from a lawyer,
00:20:40
Speaker
that said he had a girl that he had rescued through the court system and they actually were going to charge her because she tried to escape and hit him out of the truck and ran over him and so they had put her in jail until they found out she'd been trafficked and then she needed to testify against her trafficker.
00:21:01
Speaker
And so it's it can be through lawyers, it can be through other agencies. Most of our girls either escape and call us because we have a website number that they can call, not the national line, but we have a um ah number.
Challenges of Safe Homes
00:21:15
Speaker
And so we will go in and we will rescue them or either they will be put on the plane to bring here or another agency.
00:21:25
Speaker
I'm just getting ready um to fill our safe house again, because after they graduate, then we have to bring in and another group of girls. There's a waiting list everywhere. And so most of those girls have called other agencies and nobody can take them. But I do an intake, Jeremy, I don't just take them.
00:21:47
Speaker
I have an intake that is about seven pages long and you have two other people with you that are witnesses so that you can ask these girls these questions. We don't judge them. We're not here to judge them. It's just that we're not gonna take someone in once we do a background check. if they're If they have been violent, they're not welcome in the house because we can't handle that. But if they have a record of drugs or theft, that's okay because a lot of times they're made to do that.
00:22:15
Speaker
and they come in the house and we work with the court system to try to see if we can get their record expunged. So you mentioned that you have a waiting list. I'm curious, where are they waiting? A lot of them are waiting just hanging out with friends or having someone, one girl that called me that was waiting to get in and I tried to place her somewhere else. Every place I called Jeremy was full. And so she went out with the wrong person again and I didn't hear from her for six months.
00:22:47
Speaker
and then she called me again because she had escaped. She just went from calling me, wanting help, and I couldn't help her, went right back into being victimized again in traffic, got out of it, and called me again, and we were then able to bring her. And to help our audience kind of understand, it and I'm sure most of our audiences listen to our other educational course about ht human trafficking 101 or ah there are other resources that help and someone understand that, like,
00:23:17
Speaker
trafficked trafficked survivor's victims. They are in a life that's hard to get out of because they don't really have another choice. right It seems like this is America, the land of the free. How do you not have a choice? I think if we would put ourselves in those in those shoes, um you mentioned And I just want to briefly talk about this, that a lot of these women have chains in their mind, not necessarily like the movies or something like that, or they're chained to a basement. That's the rare situation. The common situation are chains in their mind. Can you um elaborate on that?
00:23:55
Speaker
Well, so many of them come so traumatized because of what has the drugs has been given to them and the fear that has paralyzed them. And a lot of that comes from them after a period of time not being rescued and their IDs being taken away from them and being isolated. So during that time, they're brainwashed.
00:24:16
Speaker
They're told over and over again, nobody's coming to get you. Nobody cares about you but me and look at you. How would you make it without me? And then if you do try to leave, you're you're going to pay the price of the fear becomes greater and greater. And so in their mind, they feel they have no place to escape to. And for them to even think that they can take on life they They don't feel that they can. The suicide rate of a survivor is seven years. After that, they feel they can't do anything, and a lot of them will just take their lives. And so yes, the chains are there because their brains have been programmed to think they'll never make it, nobody wants them, and there's no place for them to go. But that's not true. But it is part of it is true.
00:25:07
Speaker
Because when they try to find a place in some of these other states, there are no safe homes. I read that there's a claim that there's 200 safe houses in the whole United States. And within those 200 safe houses are very few beds.
00:25:24
Speaker
Girls cannot be lined up like in a dormitory dormitory. They have to have their bedrooms. You have to take them back in where they've slept on the floor, where they've been in motels just servicing up to 30 clients a day.
Transition and Healing Process
00:25:38
Speaker
Now you're taking them into a safe place.
00:25:41
Speaker
Now you're going to help them rest. We have a doctor, a retired doctor. She comes in to see what kind of medications they were on. This is after we detox them. Some of them aren't psychiatric medicine. We don't want them on that. It makes them more like a zombie. So we have this doctor who works with them. We try to do as much natural medicine as we can. And when they come in, they're not allowed to have their cell phones not allowed to have their computers. We check their makeup, it has to be thrown away. and We start with everything new and we don't charge them anything, Jeremy, even if some of them have banking accounts and some of them do. That banking account is for them, but we do guard them and teach them financial
00:26:29
Speaker
ah finances as someone that needs to have known that when they get out into the real world. But we don't touch their money. We're not here to make money. We're here to help lives, to pick up those who have been traumatized. And you talk about places to go, Jeremy. If they go to a shelter, they can be killed because there's not the proper protection.
00:26:52
Speaker
and the confidentiality that they need. If they go to a woman shelter, there are some of those similarities because domestic abuse does carry some of the same things, but it's it's much bigger than that. These girls want to get into a place where they can identify with another person that's gone through the horrific things they've gone through. It brings down their guard.
00:27:17
Speaker
And then they're able to accept trauma therapy. They're able to accept mentorship, helping them with um social relationships. Stage by stage, we have phases, and we help them go through those phases. They know that the moment they come in from the intake, that we're going to help them along the way.
00:27:38
Speaker
to integrate back into society, being able, being powerful, and being able to never be taken for granted or to be used like they were used, they're going to have education.
00:27:52
Speaker
They're going to be, we even teach defense. We have urban defense. It comes in and teaches them physically how to escape from a car. Some of them don't want to do that because it's very, it sends them back. It triggers them. But some of them that are really far in the program are ready to do that so that they can be powerful to do the moves that helps them not be taken. And they feel like nobody's going to push me around again. So we keep trying to expand.
00:28:23
Speaker
and cover our areas of what is gonna help these girls.
00:28:29
Speaker
Thank you for engaging with episode one of our series. In our next episode, we'll be you diving more into Brandi's journey of education and the foundation she began with in starting her safe home. As we heard from Brandi's story, from the moment she wanted to begin the safe home, it took her five years of education before she truly felt ready to begin.
00:28:50
Speaker
That's an important factor as you begin your journey. While the need is now, the true need is that you can establish a safe home for these victims who are coming to you from a very serious life of trauma. So launching this well and having a strong and safe establishment is the first priority. But it doesn't mean you can't start helping and working toward that right now. We look forward to seeing you in our next episode.