Two women are standing at the edge of an empty lot in a midday rain in southeast Chattanooga. One is wearing a pink windbreaker and blue jeans; the other, a denim jacket and black pants. Despite the steady shower, neither is wearing a hat or holding an umbrella.
Cars pass the women on either side of the road without stopping, the drivers likely unaware of who they are. The women glance at the vehicles as they go by and then resume their rain-soaked vigil.
Eventually, a midnight blue Toyota Highlander approaches the women and stops a short distance from them. The driver, Mimi Nikkel, 62, knows each by name.
“That’s Penny,” Nikkel says, using an alias to refer to the woman in the windbreaker.
When the ladies see her, they smile, wave and make their way to her door. Nikkel lowers her window, greets them and asks a rhetorical question.
“What are you doing out in the rain?”
Nikkel knows what the women are doing, but she’s not there to judge them; rather, she takes a moment to minister to them – to offer warm compassion in the cold drizzle.
One of the women asks for a bag. Nikkel keeps the trunk of her Toyota stocked with supplies for the women she encounters during her outreaches, including freezer bags packed with feminine hygiene products, condoms, bottled water and instructions for staying safe during the pandemic.
“They’re used to seeing this vehicle drive around this neighborhood,” Nikkel says as she pulls away after their brief exchange. “We’ve been ministering to Penny for 15 years.”
Nikkel is the founder and executive director of Love’s Arm, a local nonprofit that connects with women engaged in prostitution and sex trafficking and provides transitional resources.
She says Love’s Arm does not liberate the women it serves but offers them hope and healing.
“We’re not rescue workers,” Nikkel insists. “We meet people where they are, express love and grace and equip them with things they might need to stay healthy, but we don’t snatch them off the streets. They can call the number on the help line card when they’re ready.”
Nikkel says she spends as much time on the avenues and boulevards of Chattanooga as she does in her office in Metropolitan Ministries’ Impact Hub. She and her small band of volunteers conduct up to 50 outreaches a year in East Ridge, Bonnie Oaks and downtown, nurturing relationships and offering prayers and supplies to more than 230 women.
“Our street outreach allows survivors to have a connection with people who don’t want to hurt them,” Nikkel explains. “In some cases, it’s the only healthy connection the woman has.”
Nikkel says there’s no side street, strip club or motel where Love’s Arm is unwilling to go. Although she and her volunteers have been where many would fear to tread (including outside motels crawling with what she says she believes were gang members and their sex workers), no one has ever threatened to harm them or given them more than a warning glance.
On the contrary, Love’s Arm is able to engage the women in places most people would assume would be off-limits, including a strip club where Nikkel and her volunteers regularly conduct outreaches.
“We’re welcome there because we don’t beat people over the head with the Bible or preach fire and brimstone,” she points out. “We’re simply a source of safe, relational engagement. They call us the church ladies.”
Love’s Arm has also ministered to the women prisoners in Silverdale Detention Center, where Nikkel taught Bible classes before the pandemic.
These efforts are making inroads into shattered lives, says Lt. Daniel Jones of the Chattanooga Police Department. Currently in charge of special operations, Jones was formerly zone commander of Baker South, which consists of Ridgedale, Highland Park and East Lake – areas where he says there’s enough prostitution to keep the department busy.
“Prostitution is a symptom of another problem, so we think, ‘How do we fix this?’” Jones says. “That’s one of the things Mimi does. She meets the ladies where they are and tends to their immediate needs. In doing that, she builds relationships and trust. When the women see her, they know she cares about them.”
Jones notes that while prostitution tends to breed low self-worth and shame, Love’s Arm helps women understand their true value and provides a way for them to change their circumstances.
“The name of Mimi’s organization is perfect; it’s about loving people, no matter where they are.”
When a woman finally calls the number on the help line card, Love’s Arm opens the door to Rahab’s Rest, a six-bed safe house that offers female survivors of sex trafficking and prostitution an environment in which to heal and grow.
Nikkel named the home after the Rahab of the Bible, a prostitute who, the Book of Joshua states, helped the Israelites capture Jericho by hiding two men sent to scout the city before the attack.
Women living in Rahab’s Rest venture into the community to receive treatment from other agencies, such as CADAS, which provides addiction recovery services, and Hamilton County Mental Health Court, which offers sexual trauma counseling.
This allows Rahab’s Rest to simply serve as the residents’ home. “We don’t do a lot of service provision in the house,” Nikkel says. “Instead, we partner with other agencies in the community.”
When Rahab’s Rest is full, Love’s Arm plugs into a broader network of partners through Thistle Farms, a Nashville-based nonprofit that helps women survivors recover from trafficking, prostitution and addiction.
Through this canopy of care, Love’s Arm can access dozens of organizations that offer similar services, including transportation and beds.
“The primary breakdowns are transportation and housing,” Nikkel says. “If you don’t have a safe place to live and a way to get there, then you’re stuck where you are.”
Another challenge for Love’s Arm is public awareness, which Nikkel says is lacking locally. “We often see only what we want to see, so many people say, ‘That doesn’t happen in Chattanooga.’”
But it does, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation confirms.
Although the TBI has not published a report on the scope of human trafficking in the state since 2013 (titled “The Geography of Trafficking in Tennessee,” the report drew from research conducted in 2010), the agency has been tracking calls to the state’s trafficking hotline.
TBI communications director Josh Devine says the hotline received 161 East Tennessee referral calls in 2020 – an increase from 80 in 2018.
Contrary to Nikkel’s assessment of public awareness, Devine attributes the increase in calls to a broader understanding of sex trafficking and what to do when one sees it as opposed to an increase in the prevalence of the crime. Still, he says it indicates a significant level of activity.
A December undercover operation in Chattanooga suggested the same. During a two-day period beginning Dec. 9, agents with the TBI’s Human Trafficking Unit and Task Force, Homeland Security Investigations and the Chattanooga Police Department arrested 14 men accused of seeking sex from minors.
“It’s a business, which means it’s about supply and demand,” Nikkel laments. “And as long as there’s demand, there will be a supply.”
Nikkel and her Toyota are now in East Brainerd, which she describes as a stable, upper-middle class community. Regardless, its motel district is one of the busiest areas for sex trafficking in Chattanooga, she asserts.
Some local residents might choose to avert their eyes, Nikkel says, but it’s still there.
“We need to be informed so we can meet people where they are and offer them hope. Part of that is understanding the immense gravity of this situation in our community.”
Love’s Arm was birthed from Love Your Neighbor, a Bible class Nikkel taught at Silverdale in 2004. From there, Nikkel launched an aftercare program for women and then started ministering in the streets of Chattanooga in 2005.
Although vitalized with a sense of purpose, Nikkel says she lacked empathy. Rivers of compassion for the women she served flowed through her, but those waters were unable to reach the deepest parts of her being.
Those places were crushed when Nikkel was a child and then spent decades buried under the rubble of her coping mechanisms. Unearthing them and allowing light to invade the darkest crevasses required nothing less than a sledgehammer blow to her core.
The first strike came as Nikkel cupped the face of a drug-addicted prostitute in her hands and saw herself reflected in the woman’s eyes.
Abused as a child
By her father’s account, Nikkel grew up happy in Birmingham. Although her parents divorced when she was 4, her father has told her she was a portrait of contentment and rarely stirred up more than a scrap of trouble.
That changed when Nikkel was 9. Suddenly, she went from peaceful adolescent to “blowing in the back door, blowing out the front door and wreaking absolute destruction between the two,” Nikkel says.
“If you see that kind of shift in a child, it usually means something bad happened to them.”
Actually, something horrendous had happened to Nikkel: She’d been raped.
She says her perpetrator was her best friend’s 14-year-old brother, who pinned her in bushes one day and forcefully took her virginity.
The abuse didn’t end there, Nikkel says. After raping her, he began taking instant photographs of her and distributing them to his male friends.
He also had her stand in front of his friends and strip in order to advertise her, she adds. Then, when they were ready to lose their virginity, he would arrange a date with her.
“A child’s brain can’t comprehend those things, so I had a lot of pain I didn’t understand. The best way to make it go away was to numb it, so I pursued drugs and alcohol.”
By 18, Nikkel says she was dating women because she was tired of being a receptacle.
“Our worth as human beings is degraded in these situations, and we feel more like objects that are bought and sold, or used and thrown away,” she says. “Our sexual identity is a big part of who we are, and when it’s mistreated, the person we become is centered on that damage.”
Nikkel says a “Pauline” conversion experience in 2001 caused a dramatic shift in her life. “I didn’t intend to meet God that day,” she says, comparing her transformation to that of Saul’s in The Acts of the Apostles.
Although several threads connect Nikkel’s spiritual awakening to her work in the nonprofit world, she says one of the brightest was a mentor who crossed her path and then walked with her for a season.
As the woman counseled and guided her, Nikkel felt drawn to Christian ministry, although she was unable to form a clear mental picture of what her work would look like. An image finally came into focus the day she shared her story with the women prisoners in a Birmingham jail.
“I knew I was doing what I was supposed to do,” Nikkel says. “God called me to take something that had been a curse in my life and turn it into a blessing.”
Nikkel launched Love Your Neighbor after moving to Chattanooga and then within a year transitioned the ministry to Love’s Arm. But as she drove through the streets of the city, offering hot chocolate in the winter and bottled water in the summer, she was still clinging to her childhood trauma.
“Our biggest challenge is tearing down the wall that says, ‘These women choose to do this, and they can choose not to,’” Nikkel asserts. “People need to understand that everyone who does this is a victim. It was chosen for me, but I blamed myself and then carried that blame for decades. That’s what victims do.”
Nikkel says her trauma began to surface the day she held a prostitute’s face in her hands.
“I wanted to change the difficult places in my life, but I hadn’t received the care I needed. Seeing myself in the woman’s eyes woke up my need for healing.”
Partner agencies
Although destructive, Nikkel’s experiences birthed her profound empathy for the women Love’s Arm serves. Likewise, her healing process – which involved professional counseling – made her aware that these victims need more than her kindness.
One critical necessity is addiction recovery, which Love’s Arms provides through a partnership with CADAS.
Debbie Loudermilk, director of outpatient services at CADAS, says many of the women who have been exploited through human trafficking have a substance abuse disorder.
What’s more, if they’re unable to put their addiction in remission, then they’re typically unable to remain in a stable living environment and are easily lured back into trafficking.
“When you’re addicted to a substance, boundaries become more fluid, so women will ask themselves, ‘What do I need to do to be able to feed my addiction?’ Prostitution is one of their go-tos because they have something they can sell and others can exploit,” Loudermilk explains.
“We try to increase their self-worth so they know they can change this part of their history moving forward.”
Loudermilk says CADAS has had considerable success with the women Love’s Arm has sent to the treatment center, partly because Nikkel’s nonprofit allows its residents to live in Rahab’s Rest for up two years.
This gives them enough time to stabilize in a safe environment before tackling their trauma, self-esteem and other issues, Loudermilk states.
“Love’s Arm allows survivors to hit the reset button on their life. The women who stick it out do very well. If they can get into the house, work on themselves and not be pulled back into a destructive environment, then they will turn themselves around.”
As an example, Loudermilk mentions a Love Arm’s client who received treatment at CADAS and is now working at the center as a technician.
“She’s been sober for quite some time and has done remarkably.”
Every resident of Rahab’s Rest also qualifies for the therapy programs at Mental Health Court, which include one-on-one counseling with a sexual trauma clinician, art classes held in partnership with Mark Making and meditation classes with Peace Strength Yoga.
Nikkel says these partnerships demonstrate the healing power that’s unleashed when a community works in unity to elevate its most vulnerable citizens.
“Joining forces with CADAS, Mental Health Court and other service providers in Chattanooga wraps the women we serve within a community that believes they can recover and build a life worth living,” Nikkel says. “We’re in this work together.”
As a nonprofit, Love’s Arm wouldn’t exist without the support of the public, Nikkel says. While the organization makes good use of its volunteers, who logged over 5,500 hours in 2019, and fully owns Rahab’s Rest, the pandemic has shuttered its usual fundraising efforts.
To supports its programs and four paid staff, Nikkel is focusing on raising an additional $3,000 a month in donor support.
While she’s invested in every administrative task and is grateful for the fruit it produces, she says the streets, where victims like Penny watch for her Toyota and long for a moment of warm compassion in the cold drizzle, never stop pulling at her.
“I know hundreds of amazing human beings because of this work. When I met them, neither of us were in a good place. But they pursued healing. They fell down and skinned their knees, but they didn’t give up.
“If that was just one person, everything I went through and everything I do now would be worth it. Thank God I’m in a place where I can share my own experiences in a healthy, empowering way. It’s taken years to get here, and it’s going to take them years to get there.”