The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-03)

SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C7

Advocates question whether traumatized teenagers will be willing and able to prove “by a preponderance of the evidence” that they have been trafficked so that their crimes can be dismissed under safe harbor. Like those who experience domestic violence, victims of sex trafficking often feel bonded to and indebted to their abusers. They may be afraid to share what they have endured — or they may not even know that what has happened to them is trafficking. “Our laws are not compatible with the way brainwashing and trauma occurs,” said Amelia Rubenstein, who oversees direct services at the SAFE Center. “For teenagers, especially, the process of recognizing there is exploita- tion going on can take years.” Instead, Rubenstein said, it will be up to the police officers, public defenders, prosecutors, social workers and judges to recog- nize when a minor might qualify for safe harbor protection. The bill comes with no funding to train those groups about how the law should work.

Erin Cox contributed to this report.

lead to more prosecutions of sex traffickers and those exploiting our children,” said Joyce King, chief counsel at the Frederick County State’s Attorney’s Office. The state’s public defenders support the bill but wish it also provided protection for addition- al victims. There have been many notable cases across the country in which sex-trafficking victims killed their abusers to escape. In Maryland, those crimes and other violent crimes would not qualify for safe harbor. The bill also doesn’t provide protection for children who qualify as human-trafficking victims because they are being forced into selling drugs or doing other kinds of work. “We are sending the message to children who are victims of drug or labor trafficking that there are no resources for them, that they should feel ashamed... and that they are a delinquent child who should be detained, even if they were forced into this,” said public defender Michal Gross. All sides agree that even if safe harbor becomes law, the chal- lenges of working with trafficked youths won’t be eliminated.

are not more likely to cooperate with prosecutors if threatened with jail time,” Emerson told lawmakers earlier this month. Police and prosecutors also worried that arresting exploited youths was the only way to quick- ly get them into a safe place and connect them to supportive resources. Many contended that without the juvenile justice sys- tem, there wasn’t a clear alterna- tive for where victims could go. To fix that, the state established a regional navigator program in

Under the program, every
county has a designated organiza-
tion that responds anytime a po-
tentially sexually exploited child
is found.
When police officers or service
providers suspect a person under
24 may be involved in commercial
sex, they are obligated to contact
the regional navigator, who en-
sures that person is connected to
needed services.
With these changes in place,
the Maryland State’s Attorneys
Association signed on to support
safe harbor this time.
“Now that we’ve seen the effec-
tiveness of the regional navigator
program, we believe this bill will

before the legislative session ends April 11. The bill will then go to Gov. Larry Hogan (R), whose spokesperson said he will “con- sider the legislation should it reach his desk.” Although similar bills were deemed controversial in years past, this version of safe harbor has bipartisan support and the backing of advocates, prosecutors and public defenders. Until this legislative session, the strongest force against safe harbor was the state’s prosecutors, who argued that the threat of criminal charges should be kept as an option to persuade victims to testify against traffickers. Survivors of trafficking and those who work with them argued that such tactics rarely work. Jessica Emerson, who runs the Human Trafficking Preven- tion Project at the University of Baltimore School of Law, testified that this approach only confirms to victims what their trafficker is likely to have told them: Authori- ties won’t help you if you try to escape. “Trust us when we say that incarceration is not the way to protect these youth and that they

ers, many states have expanded safe harbor to other charges victims frequently face. In Maryland’s proposed safe harbor bill, minors who can show a judge that their actions were a direct result of being trafficked can have charges dismissed for drug possession, trespassing, theft, public assistance fraud, driving without a license, disor- derly conduct, unauthorized use of a vehicle and other low-level offenses. During hearings on safe harbor last month, lawmakers heard from sex-trafficking survivor Eliz- abeth Kimbel, 33, who stressed how the manipulation and con- trol that traffickers exert over their victims leads to other crimes. “You only know what he has been telling you. It is instilled in you, literally beat into you that you are a criminal,” Kimbel said in an interview. “I will have scars on my body, brain and soul forever.” After her testimony, the House passed the bill 126-5. The Senate, which already heard testimony on a similar bill from Sen. Susan C. Lee (D-Montgomery), is ex- pected to advance the House bill

Human Trafficking Survivors.
Thirty-three of those arrested
were 15 or younger.
Advocates and survivors have
been trying to end those arrests
for years. In 2021, Maryland re-
ceived one of the lowest ratings in
the country from Shared Hope
International, an anti-trafficking
organization, when it came to
protecting trafficked children.
Virginia, too, still allows minors
to be criminalized for being sold
for sex, and a similar safe harbor
bill did not pass there this year.
In D.C., the law is in line with
federal statute, which states that
children cannot consent to being
involved in commercial sex.
While adult victims need to prove
force, fraud or coercion, children
meet the definition for sex traf-
ficking any time sex is traded for
anything of value, including cash,
food or a place to stay.
The new Maryland law would
go even further than focusing
only on charges of prostitution.
Because exploited children often
commit other crimes at the direc-
tion of their traffickers or while
attempting to escape their abus-

SAFE HARBOR FROM C1

Under bill, minors can have low-level charges dropped if tra∞cking was cause

BY HARRISON SMITH

Richard Howard, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning poet who helped
revive the dramatic monologue
as a poetic form, writing elegant,
highly mannered verses from the
point of view of Walt Whitman,
Telemachus and John Milton’s
daughters even as he maintained
a parallel career as a renowned
translator of French literature,
died March 31 at a hospital in
Manhattan. He was 92.
The cause was complications
of dementia, said his husband,
David Alexander.
Mr. Howard was a stylish,
beguiling fixture of the American
poetry world for more than half a
century, based out of a cramped
Greenwich Village apartment
where he lived with floor-to-ceil-
ing bookshelves, a French bull-
dog named Gide and a sprawling
art collection, including draw-
ings made by his friends Jean
Cocteau and Dorothea Tanning.
Every surface of his bathroom,
from the ceiling to the inside of
the shower, was covered with
photographs of friends and art-
ists, including Paul Valéry, Rob-
ert Frost, Harold Bloom and
Susan Sontag.
Like Ezra Pound, he believed
that “all poets are contempora-
neous,” and spent much of his life
promoting the work of classic
writers as well as young upstarts.
He nurtured student poets crav-
ing guidance and support in
addition to introducing many
English-language readers to
works by Stendhal, André Bret-
on, Jean-Paul Sartre and other
French masters, winning a Na-
tional Book Award (then known
as the American Book Award) in
1983 for his translation of
Charles Baudelaire’s 19th-centu-
ry poetry collection “Les Fleurs
du Mal.”
“He really is that European
idea of a man of letters,” said one
of his former students, the poet
Mary Jo Bang, in a 2017 interview
with the Paris Review. “It’s not
just the expanse of his erudition,
but the expanse of his work. ... If
you stick around once he wel-
comes you, and you continue to
seek him out, you see an example
of what it is to be a poet — to have
an expansive intelligence, to be
generous with others, and to
form a community.”
Mr. Howard taught at schools
including the University of Hous-
ton and Columbia University,
was poetry editor of the Paris
Review and the Western Human-
ities Review, and published more
than 200 works in translation,
including the war memoirs of
French statesman Charles de
Gaulle and numerous essays by
his friends Emil Cioran and Ro-
land Barthes. He also wrote more
than a dozen books of poetry and
literary criticism, including the
700-page essay collection “Alone
With America” (1969), which ex-
amined the work of 41 contempo-
rary American poets.
In his own poetry he devel-
oped a polyphonic approach,
writing “outrageous ventrilo-
quisms,” as he put it, in which he
adopted the perspectives of liter-
ary and historical figures, usual-
ly from the Victorian era.
His dramatic monologues

made him an heir to writers such as Robert Browning and also served as a sneaky form of self- exploration, according to his friend Edward Hirsch, a poet and former colleague at the Univer- sity of Houston. “He’s always throwing his voice, and therefore distracting you the way a magician does, from something that is driving him,” Hirsch said in a phone interview, noting that Mr. How- ard had grown up gay in the constricted milieu of 1940s Ohio. “It’s possible to be dazzled by the literary encyclopedia coming to life,” he added, “and to miss the fact that these poems are driven by personal experience, by a need to disguise yourself and reveal yourself.” Mr. Howard received a Pulit- zer Prize for his third poetry collection, “Untitled Subjects” (1969), which featured dramatic monologues from the perspec- tive of artists and writers such as John Ruskin, Walter Scott and Jane Morris. Written in the form of letters or journal entries, the poems suggested “a deeper plot,” wrote New York Times reviewer David Kalstone, “which makes this book exhilarating to read whole, rather than as detached or detachable poems: its aware- ness of the evasions and rigidi- ties of history.” While it was somewhat unusu- al for Mr. Howard to embrace the dramatic monologue at a time when confessional poetry was in vogue, it was even more striking that he wrote syllabic verse, embracing a poetic form that was more common to languages such as French, rather than writing in free verse or adopting a more typical metric line like iambic pentameter. “His designing poems in all kinds of different syllable lengths meant that he brought prose rhythms into verse, in a really startling way,” said Rosan- na Warren, a poet and University of Chicago professor who described Mr. Howard as “an ex- traordinarily generous mentor.” Mr. Howard added a second speaker to his poems in the book “Two-Part Inventions” (1974), which included an imagined dia- logue between Whitman and Os- car Wilde, and drew on memo- ries of his childhood for his last published collection, “A Progres- sive Education” (2014), written as a series of letters from a sixth-grade class in 1950s Ohio. Even when he dispensed with the dramatic monologue to write in other forms, he frequently turned to art and artists as his subject. He offered what Warren described as a credo of sorts in the final lines of his poem “The- bais,” about an Italian Renais- sance painting by Gherardo Starnina, whose life is shrouded in mystery but whose works are exhibited at museums including the Uffizi in Florence. “Look!,” Mr. Howard wrote, “a man may vanish as God van- ished, / by filling all things with created life.” Richard Joseph Howard was born in Cleveland on Oct. 13,

Put up for adoption along
with a younger sister, he never
learned the names of his siblings

or birth mother, and was raised primarily by his adopted mother, a social worker who gave him the last name Orwitz and changed it to Howard after getting a di- vorce. Mr. Howard grew up in a mansion owned by his adopted maternal grandmother and spent most of his childhood ex- ploring its vast, gilt-edged library. “History and high culture were indeed my real home, and I found them right there in our house — in the library which became, indeed, my precocious playroom,” he told the Paris Re- view in 2004. He often told the story of how he started learning French: When he was traveling to Florida for a family vacation at age 5, one of his cousins decided to teach him the language, giving the names of things they saw outside the car window. By the time they arrived in Miami, “I had amassed a formidable vocabulary of nouns and even a rudimentary stock of verbs,” he said. Years later, when de Gaulle asked him how long it took to learn the language, Mr. Howard replied in typically playful fashion: “Five days, mon general.” Mr. Howard graduated from high school in Shaker Heights outside Cleveland and studied English literature at Columbia University, dazzled by professors including the poet Mark Van Doren and literary critics F.W. Dupee and Lionel Trilling. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1951, spent another year at Co- lumbia as a graduate student and continued his studies at the Sor- bonne in Paris. Returning to the United States around 1954, he worked as a lexicographer for several years at the World Publishing Co., writing dictionary definitions while also working on poems for his first published collection, “Quan- tities” (1962). “Water is sour, the air is lonely here / And all the noises of this natural shire / From stable or from sty are not enough,” Mr. Howard wrote in one poem. By then, he had also started working as a kind of in-house translator for Grove Press, falling into the field after he began holding dinner parties where he cooked blanquette de veau and read French poetry for friends who couldn’t speak the language. “Had Howard done nothing but translate all his life,” Willis Regier wrote in Prairie Schooner, a literary journal, “he would have been one of the greatest translators who ever blessed English.” Mr. Howard received a Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur “genius” grant. He was also a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, president of the PEN American Center and poet laureate of New York state, and an eight-time finalist for the National Book Awards, most recently for his 2008 collection “Without Say- ing.” In 2012 he married his long- time partner Alexander, a digital artist and his sole immediate survivor. Friends said Mr. Howard could

be blunt in his poetry criticism — he introduced one writer at a public reading by calling him “the best monosyllabic poet of his generation” — but had a fundamental generosity of spirit, keeping tabs on young poets well into his 80s and offering encour- agement whenever he could. “I suppose I have a pretty even balance of interest in the poetry of the past and the poetry coming into being,” he told the Paris Review. “The energy necessary for both interests doesn’t have to be sustained — it sustains me.”

RICHARD HOWARD, 92

‘European idea of a man of letters’ was a

Pulitzer-winning poet and celebrated translator

obituaries

1999 PHOTO BY JIM COOPER/ASSOCIATED PRESS Richard Howard’s Greenwich Village apartment was filled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and an art collection that included drawings from friends Jean Cocteau and Dorothea Tanning.

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