Meet Our Team
A little about us…
Our team is survivor-informed and diverse . 79% of the team identifies as a survivor of sexual violence, with 36% experiencing sexual violence that was recorded/photographed and distributed, without their permission. 57% of the team has had sexual images taken of them, without their permission. 72% of the team identify as part of the LGBTQIA2+ community and 57% identify as Black, Indigenous/American Indian or Alaskan Native, or LatinX/Hispanic. The entire team also identifies as living with either physical or mental health challenges, or a learning disability. Team members also have a wide-range of educational and economic experiences that they bring to this work.
Katherine Bright, Lead Researcher
Katherine Bright has worked with survivors of sexual violence for over a decade. In her early twenties, she worked in service to teen parents and teenagers living in foster care. These positions strengthened her knowledge of trauma-informed practices and shaped the way she thinks about research experiences today. She started working as a researcher since 2008 and has extensive experience interviewing survivors of sexual and gender violence, mothers trying their best to parent in challenging living situations, minors experiencing homelessness and/or commercial sexual exploitation, persons returning from prison or jail, and she has lots of experience working for and learning from people who manage their lives with trauma, mental health disruptions and/or who sometimes struggle with substance use.
Katherine deeply cares about participant safety and creating dignified research experiences. She has hired several survivor-consultants on this project to help improve the ways researchers conduct science, including how they recognize and compassionately respond to triggers, disassociation, homicidal and suicidal ideation, confidentiality and any other concerns participants might have. You can find a record of her written and professional work here. Outside of her working life, Katherine tries to walk amongst the trees or sit in the sun to help her body get calm, she takes refuge in reading books, and she curses like a sailor. She pretends to like yoga and running, but most days, she does neither and eats ice cream instead.
Rose Kalemba, Consultant
Rose Kalemba had to learn how to be her own advocate after some of her lived experience in both sex and labor trafficking was recorded and posted on a popular porn website. A couple years later, she was once again re-exploited through a revenge porn website. Because of her firsthand knowledge of how the internet can immortalize trauma, a lot of the work she does is in helping other survivors navigate removing their abuse from the internet and coping with the additional trauma of having experiences of sexual violence shared online.
Rose is a grassroots community advocate, a contractor and a consultant who works in many anti-exploitation spaces. In her communities, she does many different things to help provide wrap-around community care services/resources to support survivors' healing and safety. She also does a lot of “behind the scenes” work for organizations, such as reviewing grant applications, reviewing documents and toolkits from both trauma-informed and lived experience expertise perspectives, and working on teams as an educator, curriculum creator, and presenter.
Outside of this work, she is also a writer, holistic accessible wellbeing advocate, lifelong animal rescuer, and an indigenous beadwork artist, and she finds that her different areas of work often intersect in a variety of (sometimes surprising!) ways. She is working on building her website as a place to keep all the things she does in one place.
Enid Baerga, Research Assistant
Enid Baerga was born and raised in Puerto Rico, till she was 19, and survived sex trafficking and CSE till the age of 24, in the mainland. During that period of time, she was forced to produce digital adult content without her permission, where perpetrators used it for CSE. Together with lawyers and a group of professionals, Enid was able to takedown some material that was being sold without publishing rights, as well as material that was defamation of her character online. Enid, obtained a BA on Digital Media Production/Minor on Education. She has worked with survivors of CSEC as a mentor, advocate, and educating on prevention of sexual abuse. She then obtained an MSW, and worked in transitional housing for CSEC survivors as a Case Manager. Enid is currently the Safe Jobs Employment Specialist for survivors of Sex Trade, Human Trafficking, and Labor Trafficking at 2 different organizations. She trains and consults national corporations on STR Trainings (Stress, Trauma and Resilience), as well as partners with 5 agencies to facilitate employment to survivors, in the state of WA.
Enid Baerga is also an artist and CEO of Eb Productions PR, a music and video production company. Her passion is traveling, singing, composing, and different forms of art media to express different parts of her artistry. She enjoys connecting with her family, getaways doing nothing, meditation, and doing water activities with friends.
Hazel Mae Fasthorse, Consultant
Hazel Mae Fasthorse is a force to behold. She is a survivor of child sex trafficking, including having images of that abuse posted online, without consent. She is a mother, leader, gardener, healer, avid cook, dancer, singer, speaker, wife, partner, sister, and autistic human who has been working to combat stigma and change victim services and law enforcement protocols since 2013.
Over the last decade, Hazel has trained 118 hospitals and more than 45 police departments on trauma-informed and anti-racist practices, served as a human trafficking specialist, victims’ liaison, community liaison and Lived Experience Expert (nationwide and internationally), with a primary emphasis on crimes against indigenous people, victimology, domestic violence, human trafficking and decolonization.
Hazel has given hope to communities ravaged by these crimes through her innovative training curriculum and her self-care initiative, Fasthorse Creations. While maintaining her career as a multi-agency consultant, she became the creator and master brewer behind Fasthorse Creations, a company that specializes in all natural, handcrafted body products, with inclusivity and equity in mind—providing, vegan soap, toxin free candles and wax products. To learn more about Fasthorse Creations, click here.
Lola Akintobi, Consultant
Lola Akintobi is a public health professional that has been dedicated to improving sexual health outcomes for over a decade. Throughout the span of her career, Lola has supported youth in reaching their education goals, delivered pregnancy prevention curricula, provided family planning counseling in a school-based health center, trained young women to educate peers about HIV prevention, and managed the delivery of health education to over 2,500 youth in 15 public schools.
Lola prioritizes racial justice, reproductive justice, and health equity as the guiding principles in her work. She is a proud alum of UMass Amherst, where she received her BA in Psychology, and Boston University, where she received her MPH in Maternal and Child Health.
Jacqui Ferraiolo, Consultant
Jacqui Ferraiolo is a somatic therapist. She currently works at an agency offering low-fee and sliding scale services and works primarily with neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ populations and trauma survivors. Her work centers on using holistic modalities and somatic (body-based) practices to provide trauma-informed care to her clients. In her current role, Jacqui also works to create partnerships between her agency and other community organizations to offer more access to wraparound care and support.
Jacqui received her Master's in Counseling Psychology at JFK University with a focus in Somatic Studies. She previously worked in the Center on Race, Crime, and Justice at Northeastern University, as a research assistant and collaborated on NIJ-funded studies focused on the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) and human trafficking.
Jacqui is also a yoga instructor and uses her understanding of the body and nervous system to use the yoga practice as another way to integrate and digest trauma while also finding play and joy. She's interested in any body-based practices that support this empowered relationship (for her currently this also includes boxing, gardening, and hiking).
Chloé Sudduth, Lead Research Associate / Project Manager
Chloé Sudduth is a doctoral student at the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice and a research assistant for this project. She comes to this work with an intimate understanding of the harm caused by sexual violence and trauma. Prior to graduate school, Chloé worked organizing alongside people experiencing homelessness in Cleveland and advocating for laws to protect and preserve affordable housing and expand tenants’ rights. She also spent several years doing civil legal work with folks whose lives had been deeply impacted by involvement in the criminal legal system.
As the daughter of a self-employed glass artist and a high school educator, Chloé learned from an early age to approach everything with imagination and love. She grounds her personal and professional life in the undying belief in the creativity of people and the power of radical love. Chloé is dedicated to the continued work of uprooting systems of oppression and the collective cultivation of our radical imagination for a different world. In her free time, you can find her creating art, baking sourdough bread, fly fishing, or restoring wood furniture.
Jordan DiTullio, Lead Research Associate / Project Manager
Jordan DiTullio is a research assistant for this project. She enters this role with a close familiarity of the damage inflicted by sexual violence.
A doctoral student at Rutgers University, her educational experience includes a Master’s degree in Criminology from the University of Nebraska-Omaha and a Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice from the University of New Haven. Throughout her education and into her work beyond academia, Jordan has consistently been an advocate for gender inclusivity, particularly in spaces of gender and sexual identity marginalization.
Before graduate school, Jordan worked as a fellow for a juvenile justice non-profit organization, where she prioritized the voices of those with lived-experiences when advocating for laws that protect justice-involved youth and promote community care. Outside of her work, Jordan is a lover of health and fitness, trying new foods, and spending time with her dog.
We are thankful to the survivor consultants who helped design this research, contributed resources, and made a trauma-informed approach possible.