Bell: A cry from streets for hearts less cold

God it is so cold out tonight.

It doesn't matter how long I've been housed, off the streets and out of the life of prostitution - the howling of bitter cold winds always kicks up some stuff for me. It's not just cold here; with the wind chill, it's freezing.

I remember so many nights out on the streets without a coat, gloves, hat or scarf. I may have started the night with those things, but little by little over the course of the night and the cars I was in and out of, I'd end up with nothing.

I mattered so little to the men purchasing access to my body in those cars that they didn't bother saying, “Hey it's cold, you forgot your hat.”

I remember it being 10 past 7 p.m. and being so cold, I'd attempt to go to the shelter, hoping they'd have some compassion and let me in.  But that never happened. They'd tell me I had to call the police and be escorted into the shelter. I wasn't going to do it because of fear of violence, harassment or arrest, and they knew that. To them, I wasn’t a person trying to survive the night, I was just another “problem” they could avoid by denying me access to the shelter for one night. I tried hovering in doorways to escape the cold only to be chased out by tenants wielding weapons. I remember very vividly having nowhere to go, forced to sleep in abandoned vehicles surviving off the body heat of strangers.

I remember wanting so badly to have somewhere to go and the systems blaming me for their failure to create safe places for women experiencing homelessness, sexual violence and exploitation. Saying things like "There is shelter if she really wanted it."

Refusing to acknowledge that my reluctance was based in fear. Fear of their inability to keep me safe while at their shelter, fear of violence, fear of being treated like an animal, like a burden.

I didn’t have the strength to endure the abuse, but that didn't mean I didn't want, need or deserve safety. What I needed was a shelter that was safe, where they don’t treat you as less than human, where they don't require anything of you except to show up.

You don't have to throw away your drugs that you just had to allow men to purchase access to your body to attain. We don't care about that and we won't ask that of you.

We won't make you show ID. You don't have to get a bed or a mat on the dining room floor surrounded by perpetrators (both guests and staff).

We don't care if it's 7 p.m. or 2 a.m. We just want you to be safe and warm and we see, hear and understand how hard it must be to walk through our doors.

If I was met with unconditional positive regard instead of judgment and contempt, perhaps I would have accessed the resources I needed to exit the life sooner, perhaps not, but what's the actual harm in being kind to people?

It's nights like this that violence increases. We get in cars with men that we know aren't safe just to warm up, we take the chance of brutal assaults and perhaps death, just to warm up.

We agree to do things we don't want to do just because we need the money so badly, because the drugs make us feel dead inside and warm outside.

These are the tradeoffs our sisters are making tonight so perhaps show a little more compassion, a lot less judgment and even more important make resources safe, relevant and accessible to survivors.

Those aren't choices, those are tradeoffs we make just to live another night though many of us don't really want to anyhow.

Nicole Bell is CEO and founder of Living in Freedom Together.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Nicole Bell column for more compassion for victims of trafficking