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Expungement: A Fresh Start for Survivors of Human Trafficking
November 3, 2022 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
All are invited to IJPC’s virtual educational event, “Expungement: A Fresh Start for Survivors of Human Trafficking” on Thursday, November 3 from 6:00-7:30PM. This session will feature a panel of experts who can break down what criminal record expungement is and why it’s important to survivors of human trafficking. RSVP now through Zoom!
The panel will feature Barbara Freeman, founder of The Freeman Project in Columbus, and Verjine Adanalian, Director of the Second Chance Project at the Ohio Justice and Policy Center in Cincinnati.
Barbara Freeman is a survivor of sex trafficking who has been out of the life for 13 and a half years. She says that living this life has not been easy, but she has been able to maintain by putting her life back together with the help of Catch Court Amethyst and many other people in her community. She says, “It was very hard for me in the beginning because I had no skill set from being trafficked at an early age of 13 years old. Being coerced and not being able to make decisions for myself made it hard for me.” With the expungement program, she was able to go to school and to get jobs. They gave her a career as a peer recovery support specialist, as a chemical dependency counselor, and as a motivational speaker. “Today I can say that I am very grateful that I was given the chance to live again.”
Verjine Adanalian is an attorney and the Director of the Second Chance Project at the Ohio Justice & Policy Center. OJPC is a nonprofit, public interest law firm, whose mission is to create fair, intelligent, redemptive criminal justice systems. Verjine joined OJPC in 2018 as an Equal
Justice Works fellow, specializing in providing legal services to victims of human trafficking. At OJPC, Verjine provides direct representation, community outreach, and policy advocacy. She represents clients that are in our community and clients that are currently incarcerated. Verjine is an adjunct professor at Wright State University, where she teaches classes on human trafficking and the criminal justice system to graduate students in the Applied Behavioral Sciences master’s program. Verjine graduated from the University of Cincinnati College of Law, where she served as Managing Editor of the Human Rights Quarterly academic journal.