Trigger warning: The following contains content relative to sexual trauma and abuse.
They Were Children First
By Amanda Aronson
October 2025
Thistle Farms restored my faith in humanity.
Between national events demonstrating that good people will let bad things happen if it serves them well, and a local situation where I witnessed person after person allowing harm to be done to others, I could feel myself losing faith in people to look after one another. Researching Thistle Farms restored my hope that it’s possible to live in a society where people protect rather than harm.
It took me weeks to absorb the experience I had at Thistle Farms.
The stories I heard were gruesome. Gruesome. So tortuous, in fact, that it was hard for me to fathom a woman wanting to live beyond them. And yet, many were. I met and heard about so many women who are healing, thriving, and reaching back to help others. They were told that LOVE HEALS, and over time, as they experienced the healing power of love themselves, they began loving others around them. They had to learn about love.
But they shouldn’t have had to. They should have had it as children.
The mission of Thistle Farms is centered on the safety of women, but I was reminded as I listened to survivor stories that we cannot create safety for women without first creating safety for children.
Abuse is rampant in our culture. Nearly all of the women Thistle Farms supports, who have been trafficked, exploited, forced to prostitute themselves, or ended up incarcerated due to non-violent crimes, were abused between the ages of 7-11. Most were abused by people they knew. Most developed addictions to cope with the trauma they endured, and all were then vulnerable to exploitation because of those addictions.
As we work to create a safer world for women who have been harmed, we need to remember that they were children first.
