The Baldwin Foundation offers our skills, experience, and supportive services to:

• Help survivors leave the life of prostitution and build safer and happier lives for themselves and their children,
• Help survivors obtain any treatment needed to manage chemical dependency, medical, or mental health problems they have been left with,
• Help survivors understand the forces that brought them into prostitution, and we
• Help survivors develop a positive identity as an ordinary person, as good as anyone else

Dear Survivor

This web site is about the experience of being hurt on purpose by other people, and the changes in your life that it leaves behind. You may wonder if what happened to you was bad enough to be called abuse. If you have to ask that question, it probably was. If you cannot remember large parts of your life, it almost certainly was.

I am sorry you have to read this on the internet. These things are better dealt with face-to-face. The effects of violence are best helped by different and more positive experiences with people. This is hard to do when you are looking for help on your own.

Take your time reading through this material. Use whatever parts seem helpful in your situation. Be patient with yourself. It will take time and work, but you can feel better.

Building a new life may take terrible faith and courage. Some days it will seem easy, on other days, impossible. You go on living with the unwanted knowledge of what evil people have done and can do, including what you yourself may have done and can do. Sometimes it takes all the courage you have just to get up and get dressed in the morning, knowing what can happen.

I wish you luck and courage on your journey. You will always have my respect.

Take Care,

Joe Parker
Clinical Director, The Lola Greene Baldwin Foundation