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How a former Elgin minister wants to help recovering prostitutes

A group of concerned church people, including a priest formerly assigned to Elgin's Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, is raising money to build a "Magdalene House Chicago," where women who had been caught up in prostitution can rebuild normal lives.

"It takes a community to fail these women and it will take a community to heal these women," the Rev. Amity Carrubba told a dinner gathering of retired women last week at St. Hugh of Lincoln Episcopal Church on Elgin's west side. Carrubba pastored the downtown Church of the Redeemer from 2009-2012 and now is assigned to an Episcopal church in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood.

The dinner program drew about 45 women from St. Hugh of Lincoln, Church of the Redeemer and St. James Episcopal Church in West Dundee.

Carrubba and another member of the organizing committee, Rose Cicero from Clarendon Hills, began by presenting some disturbing facts about what they said has been estimated to be 16,000 to 25,00 women involved in prostitution or sex trafficking in the Chicago area:

• Most had been sexually abused by a family member or other trusted adult between ages 7 and 11. Typically, they ran away from home and ended up turning tricks, usually under the thumb of a pimp or trafficker, to earn a living.

• Within 48 hours of leaving home, 80 percent of runaway teens are approached by a sex trafficker.

• Most begin using drugs or drinking heavily by age 13 - "to self-medicate, to mask the pain, to be transported to a place where life is less scary," Carrubba said.

Carrubba and Cicero said the Magdalene House Chicago project is at an early stage. It would be based on a successful operation in Nashville called Thistle Farms. Ten recovering prostitutes would live in a homelike atmosphere for up to two years each after leaving jail and completing a drug/alcohol rehab program.

They would receive help from social workers, lawyers and doctors - even tattoo removers - as they worked to establish a career. Even while living at the house, they would support themselves by working at some kind of "social enterprise."

What that enterprise would be at the Chicago-area house remains undecided. But in Nashville the women grow thistle plants and turn them into body lotions, lip balm and soaps.

"This would be a two-year residency program that gives women time and space to heal physically, mentally and spiritually," Carrubba said. As it is, she said, such women end up in a revolving door of arrests for prostitution and drug offenses. She said they end up "turning tricks" even while undergoing other sorts of rehabilitation because their rap sheets make it impossible for them to find jobs.

"We're very much in the planning phase - setting up a 501-3c and doing a lot of fundraising," Carrubba said.

She said the group hopes to raise $5 million. They estimate that would be enough to buy a large house, remodel it, go into operation about three years from now and keep operating for at least two years.

Temporary shelters like Elgin's Community Crisis Center have live-in "authority figure" staff members. Carrubba said Magdalene House would have a full-time director and social worker but would have an atmosphere more like a home. "Each woman would have her own key to the front door."

The home's location has yet to be determined. But Carrubba and Cicero said it probably will be somewhere in the inner suburbs.

According to a document from the organization, the house would be "theologically informed but not faith-based, with no compulsory religious education or worship." The group will not seek any federal or state money.

Cicero said only about $20,000 has been raised so far. For information or to make a donation, visit magdalene housechicago.org.

The Rev. Amity Carrubba served at Elgin's Episcopal Church of the Redeemer from 2009-2012 and now leads a congregation in Chicago. She wants to open a Magdalene House to help former prostitutes rebuild their lives. COURTESY OF THE REV. AMITY CARRUBBA
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