“Right now, as we’re sitting here doing this interview, there is a child being sold on Aurora without a doubt,” Sarah Ann Hamilton told the Mirror about the stretch of road in Seattle.

Hamilton is the Director of Survivor Services at The More We Love, an organization that does outreach to those experiencing homelessness, with an emphasis on women and survivors of trafficking. She lives in Federal Way and the organization is based in Burien, but they do outreach all along Pacific Highway as it stretches from North Seattle down to Tacoma.

“I do outreach on Aurora. If I come across ten girls, seven of them are underage, and most of them are our Black and brown girls,” Hamilton said. Some of this outreach happens in encampments, which she said often include people being trafficked.

As a survivor herself, Hamilton knows what it is like to be on the street as a child working up and down Pacific Highway.

For her dedication to creating safe spaces for survivors and the obstacles she has overcome to do so, Sarah Ann Hamilton is the Mirror’s Hometown Hero for the month of August.

“My story is a lot like everybody else’s story. I was in a household where abuse was going on. It’s funny how when you’re in a situation like that, you think it’ll be better on the streets than being there,” Hamilton said. She was only 12 when she had her first customer, after a friend showed her that prostitution could be a way to get money for food.

“You’d be surprised what you do when you’re hungry,” Hamilton said.

That same friend not only had money for food, but an apartment too. Hamilton was invited to go see the apartment, then “I, of course, met her pimp and…it got ugly after that.”

Hamilton was in and out of prostitution and drug use from that day until her early thirties. Poverty and the stigma of her 14 prostitution arrests before age 18 kept her stuck. Today, children cannot be charged with prostitution, but that law hadn’t changed yet then.

At one point, Hamilton tried to get out by investing in a career change.

“I went to school to be a medical assistant. I graduated, I did my internship, I went to go get a job, and when they ran my record, they’re like, you cannot work here. It’s a morality thing,” Hamilton said.

To actually leave the life, Hamilton said it took finding community and that “relationships got me in and relationships got me out.”

At The More We Love, Hamilton works to create that community for other survivors and connect them with resources and support to help them follow in her footsteps. She and friend and fellow survivor Kristine Moreland founded the organization together.

In the first year of the organization’s existence, they’ve helped at least 146 women. That doesn’t mean all of them have left that life behind. That can take time.

For Hamilton this process took about five years.

In her early 30s, Hamilton was staying in a shelter when a friend invited her to an art workshop at the Organization for Prostitution Survivors (OPS).

“We showed up to this little house in the [Central District] in Seattle and they have this patio that looks like fairies live there, with all these plants. It was so beautiful. It was so pretty,” Hamilton said.

Walking in the door, she smelled good food cooking and liked what she saw: “There’s just all these women everywhere. There were high heels that were hung up along the wall that women had turned into art, there was poetry on the walls…I had never been anywhere like that before.”

After a lot of encouragement that day, Hamilton tried painting for the first time. “I don’t know what it is about putting paint on a blank canvas, but something happened, and all of a sudden, I just felt like I could breathe. It didn’t happen overnight, but I just started painting every chance I got,” Hamilton said.

Life started to change for Hamilton the more time she spent with other survivors in these spaces. She started taking on the mentorship of others and listening to their stories. She sold her art for the first time at an art show in memory of the victims of the Green River Killer put on by OPS founder Noelle Gomez. At that art show she realized that she was a good enough artist to make some income with her work. She got an apartment, got her first job at Youth Care, started speaking at events, and stopped using drugs.

Hamilton described typical outreach as “clinical,” saying “there’s no heart in it at all.”

That’s where The More We Love comes in.

“I’m really excited to be in this leadership position, because I want to do things differently, and I want to show other survivors that if I can do it, you can do it,” Hamilton said. Having a survivor-ran, survivor-led organization can help “show survivors that you can use your transferable skills. You can and you could thrive, and you don’t have to keep being stuck.”

The organization works with a ten-to-one model, where each survivor has a team of ten people there to support them. Hamilton does intake and direct outreach and then helps mentor and connect women with resources to improve their lives.

“I think we do things a little bit differently. We’re very trauma informed and led, and we understand the intersectionalities of everything that’s going on. We understand that our Black and brown girls are the most marginalized group of people in human trafficking, and that they don’t get enough resources, assistance, all that, but we do understand that every survivor matters,” Hamilton said. “We’re really looking outside of the box to create new ways to really heal and help women to not just survive anymore, but thrive.”

The organization also does events and giveaways, like a recent backpack drive. Simple things like a backpack for school, car trouble or a holiday could be what pushes people back into the life of prostitution, which was true for her Hamilton said.

“Poverty is our biggest trafficker,” Hamilton said. “My kids deserved presents…it wasn’t going to be enough…but I knew how to go get it.”

Accountability

To fight trafficking at the source, Hamilton said there needs to be more consequences for buyers and traffickers.

“Everybody needs to be held accountable. So the guy who is coming from Boeing or coming from Microsoft on his lunch break to pick up one of those kids, his life needs to get a little difficult for doing that,” Hamilton said.

One of the big barriers she’s seen is the network of buyers protecting each other. In her experience, every day, all day, men of privilege are getting away with horrific things “because he has something to lose, and his friend’s are going to protect him.”

Accountability is important not just because it reduces demand, but also because it changes societal attitudes and shows survivors that they matter, Hamilton explained. Partnering with law enforcement can be an important part of that work – and has been an important part of her personal healing.

“I won’t say what police department was, but I was 14 years old, a buyer assaulted me. I called the police and they laughed at me,” Hamilton said. “So what does that tell a 14 year old little girl? That you don’t matter. That there’s no reason to say anything, right? You’re just a commodity…you’re worth as much as you can get.”

A huge moment of healing came for her when she had the opportunity to meet and have lunch with two of the arresting officers of the Green River Killer, aka Gary Ridgway, who confessed to murdering at least 71 women, most of whom were prostitutes or runaways in vulnerable situations.

“I always thought that those women, or women like me, were just forgotten, and that nobody would look for us and nobody cared,” Hamilton said. “Listening to them talk about the victims’ families” hearing “how they mourned these women, that they didn’t even know” and learning “what they would do to get information” all “changed something in me,” Hamilton said.

“To hear these people of privilege and power say that they lost sleep – it just blew me all the way away and it has helped me heal in a way that I wish every survivor to get to feel,” Hamilton said.

Supporting survivors

Long-term, The More We Love hopes to be able to create an emergency receiving center (ERC) to be able to offer transitional housing to survivors.

“If you came to a survivor and you said, ‘Hey, do you want to get out?’ And she said, ‘Yes’, you would be halted because there’s only seven emergency beds in all of King County for survivors.”

Hamilton emphasized the importance of working together. “There’s a lack of resources all together and and then we have organizations that are not collaborating like we should…We should be breaking down systematic silos.” This collaboration recently made it possible for The More We Love to house nine individuals, including children.

Doing this work, it is also very important to understand how more marginalized people are at a higher risk. Hamilton is currently advocating for local authorities to create an Ebony Alert – similar to an Amber alert that spreads information about a missing child or a Silver alert about vulnerable over adults, but instead focuses specifically on Black youth. California is the first state in the country to create an Ebony Alert.

In her work Hamilton said she experiences first hand how differently authorities respond to survivors depending on their race.

In one recent example, Hamilton said “I had a person call me and say that a child that was in their life – a black girl – was at a known traffickers house getting fed drugs, and they knew where she was down to the apartment number. She called the police, and they told her, we don’t pick up runaways because the girl is 14 years old. Two days later, I get another call from a white family going through the same thing – and by the end of the morning, they’ve got an Amber alert out for her.”

“It’s a true statement that our most marginalized people are underserved, and it is our responsibility. It’s everybody’s responsibility, but especially our responsibility of people who are white bodied and privileged,” Hamilton said. “I understand that I come from a really hard place, but that doesn’t take away the fact that I have privilege, and so I make it a point to try to use the privilege I do have to correct these wrongs.”

Hamilton’s work focuses on helping survivors escape prostitution and trafficking and said that all sex work does come with a risk of violence. That being said, the is in solidarity with those who desire to continue that type of work and that they need to support and protect each other.

Federal Way

From 2011 to 2020, a group called the Federal Way Coalition Against Human Trafficking (FWCAT) was active in the city. The organization held community forums like these covered by the Mirror in 2020 and 2019, fundraised through an annual 5K and focused on educating and engaging the community about the issue.

Since 2020, the group appears to no longer be active. They no longer posts on Facebook and have not held any events that the Mirror could find. Executive Director of the nonprofit in 2020 Claudia Lawrence did not respond.

Human trafficking is an ongoing issue in Federal Way, like this couple who was charged with promoting prostitution through their multiple massage businesses throughout King County in 2023 including one in Federal Way.

Hamilton said it is important to recognize that “nobody’s immune from this.” She said that while some are more vulnerable than others, “any person has the potential of being groomed and trafficked.” Even something like online dating, Hamilton shared the example of “the girl who’s lonely, who meets that slick talking guy,” and gets trapped.”

Hamilton also encouraged parents to monitor their children’s social media and technology use closely.

For those that want to help, Hamilton encouraged people to just reach out to organizations like The More We Love and offer whatever you can, whether that is money or something else. “We all bring something to the table, whether that’s saying I can take a survivor to a doctor’s appointment, or my kids have old toys that this survivor’s kids could use…saying hey, I can provide meals once a month I’m really good at cooking. Or hey, I’ll teach a class on how to cook. Those little things matter tremendously.”

A painting by Sarah Ann Hamilton. She first began painting through an art workshop for survivors put on by OPS. Photo provided by Sarah Ann Hamilton

A painting by Sarah Ann Hamilton. She first began painting through an art workshop for survivors put on by OPS. Photo provided by Sarah Ann Hamilton

An colorful octopus tattoo now covers up a tattoo that connected to Sarah Ann Hamilton’s past. Photo by Keelin Everly-Lang / the Mirror

Reclaiming your own image after decades of survival is a journey. Fresh nails are a form of self care for Hamilton and a wedding ring represents the love and healing family relationships that are part of her life now. A tattoo from the past adds to her story of personal evolution. Photo by Keelin Everly-Lang / the Mirror