Sidney Ann Ford has been at the forefront of advocacy for women and children trapped in the Baltimores sex trade for 10 years. As executive director of You Are Never Alone (YANA), Ford was instrumental in helping city officials combat a rash of violence against prostitutes that left five women dead in 2008, earning praise from Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld who call her “an invaluable resource” for his department. Ford recently shared with The Examiner how her personal spirituality informs her daily interactions with sex workers, and how she copes with the pain and suffering of the women she helps.
What is your main mission at YANA; how would you summarize what you do?
The mission of YANA is to reach out in love and service to women and children (and men and transgendered persons and even communities) exploited through prostitution. Reaching out in love can mean comforting a young woman who just lost custody of her child due to an uncontrollable addiction; it could be helping law enforcement interview a 12-year-old who was just rescued from a brothel; it might mean hearing the stories of mother grieving the loss of her beloved daughter who was brutally murdered on the streets. It can also mean telling these stories to others in an attempt to bridge the two worlds we often inhabit and generate compassion one for the other.
How does your faith inform your work and how do you draw on your spirituality when working with women?
The sheer inhumanity of acts against our clients (and at times, against us for helping them) makes me look to the God of my understanding for answers on a continual basis. The main theme that plays again and again in my receptive mind is that wherever there is life, there is hope. It is possible to look into the darkest corners of human nature and see the hope in small acts of kindness, in the beginnings of redemption and recovery, in the seeds of change which are often invisible to the naked eye but very apparent when one uses her or his spiritual understanding. Hope, and even joy and love, are everywhere, but you have to remain open to those possibilities and not mired in a self-centered despair.
What role did faith play in your decision to work with sex workers?
I never planned to work with prostituted people; I feel that it was a calling that picked me, in much the same way that others feel led to do a certain thing in the world. The first stirrings for me came more than 12 years ago in a dream, where I heard and felt the words, “you are never alone.” I had no idea what that meant until a few weeks later, when I heard a news report of two women chained in their prostitution customers’ basement. He had starved, beaten and tortured them, and he was a serial killer of prostituted women. However, when he went to work one day — after telling them they would die that evening — they worked themselves free from the wall, ran outside together, still chained, with ball gags in their mouths, and were rescued by a compassionate police officer and community members. Both their enslavement and their rescue created an unquenchable thirst in me to work to rescue others and to bring compassionate help to bear in the process.
Many of the women you help are in extreme pain and under duress. What lessons do you learn from them about dealing with pain?
The women and all of our clients teach me everything, all the time. The only way I know how to help them is by listening to them. They have also taught me how to increase my own strength, which sometimes can only happen by hanging on when you don’t know what else to do, or by asking for help, which was always hard for me. I consider them amongst the wisest people I know and admire them quite a bit for their courage — especially to change from living a life of abuse to breaking free and choosing to heal from a life of pain.
Do you have any advice for people who want to help prostitutes, women, or sex workers?
My advice to anyone seeking to help any vulnerable person is to be still and listen first to your inner voice. It will guide you in the right way to go, if you are able to put aside ego, anxiety and a need for recognition or personal gain. The basis of love, in my view, is listening to others with respect and staying open to what possible ways there are to help. Otherwise, just take good care of yourself and always do the right thing. I’ve learned that if in my eagerness to help I ignore my own needs or push my way through, I can’t be of true help to anyone. It is only by working with vulnerable people and with like-minded others that our faith can be effectively employed to create lasting change for all.
