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Brooke Axtell, singer and poet, made a powerful plea when she introduced Katy Perry during the 2015 Grammy Awards. At thirty-four years old, she gave a speech describing her survival of human trafficking and domestic abuse. She asserted, “Authentic love does not devalue another human being. Authentic love does not silence, shame or abuse.” It was the perfect segue into Perry’s rendition of “By the Grace of God.”
Axtell has been a longtime activist against sexual violence (Dockterman, 2015). Her story began when she was seven years old. Her mother was hospitalized and her father traveled often because of his job, so she was left in the care of many nannies. In one of her poetry pieces, “What I Know of Silence,” she describes the abuse she suffered when her nanny took her to the basement of an unknown house and sold her to men who raped her. Sadly, Axtell remained silent and carried her childhood pain into adulthood. She revealed that her childhood trauma led her to become involved in an abusive relationship in her adulthood, in which she experienced sexual violence again, this time by her boyfriend. Once she freed herself from that relationship, she discovered the power of art in helping her to recover from the trauma she had experienced in her childhood and adulthood. Since then, Axtell has released three albums and two collections of poetry and has been published widely online. She is the founder of Survivor Healing and Empowerment (S.H.E.), a group that supports survivors of rape, abuse, and sex-trafficking and currently serves as the director of communications and survivor leadership for Allies Against Slavery, a group striving to end human trafficking (Brooke Axtell, 2016).