Hi, I’m Jackie Strohm, the Prevention & Resource Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. Welcome to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To celebrate and highlight stories of people who advanced the anti-sexual violence movement, particularly Black women, we are sharing a series of shorter episodes so you can learn all about the people and events that contributed to our movement During today’s episode we’re going to learn about Nicole Pittman, an attorney and national expert working to end child sexual abuse and terminate the practice of registering children as sex offenders. As a warning, this episode contains descriptions of child sexual abuse. Please take care of yourself while listening. Nicole Pittman is originally from Philadelphia. She attended Duke University for her undergraduate education, and then pursued a law degree at Tulane. She planned to become a sports agent, but school requirements ended up setting her on a different path. In order to fulfill a mandatory pro bono requisite, she fought for parole for older adults in the prison system. This experience made her decide to pursue a different career, one that was focused on helping others. Pittman became an attorney for clients in New Orleans who couldn’t afford to pay for a lawyer, especially for juvenile defendants accused of serious crimes. She later moved back to Philadelphia, where she specialized in defending children who had been accused of sex crimes with the Defender Association of Philadelphia. With the National Institute of Justice at the Department of Justice, Pittman worked to prevent these children from being permanently listed as sex offenders. She provided testimony before Congress on the harms of this practice, but the issue was still largely unknown and unsupported. Pittman decided to fix the inattention, misunderstanding and opposition she so often faced in response to this issue. She received a fellowship grant from the Soros Foundation, and worked with Human Rights Watch to produce a 110 page report on the matter. She traveled across the country to speak with almost 300 people who became registered sex offenders as juveniles. Many had experienced trauma themselves, and the legal consequences of their offense tore their families apart, and led individuals to develop psychological issues like depression and suicidal ideation. Pittman found that childhood registration as a sex offender often lasted for life, and resulted in near-constant harassment. Some children were registered as young as eight years old. Children could be registered for crimes that included public urination, streaking, or consensual teenage sex. These children experienced educational disruptions, discrimination when seeking employment, homelessness, imprisonment, violence from strangers, and targeting by pedophiles. Families could face similar impacts. 90% were not told about any of the consequences they might face when they agreed to plea bargains that included registration as a sex offender. Worst of all, Pittman found that these youth registrations did little to protect the public. With the Stoneleigh Foundation and the Rosenberg Foundation, Pittman worked on the state and federal level to end the practice of putting children on sex offender registries across the United States. She founded the Center on Youth Registration Reform at Impact Justice with the same objective. Pittman gave testimony to 37 state legislatures, and has successfully changed laws on this topic nationally and in dozens of states. Pittman now works with Roadmap Initiative, an organization she founded, and as the Executive Director of the Just Beginnings Collaborative. Both organizations are working to heal families from child sexual abuse through non-punitive and non-carceral models. Instead, they are trying to combat child sexual abuse by directly addressing social conditions and norms that lead to child sexual abuse- and are created by it. She wants to take on the culture that fosters child sexual abuse in order to end it, while respecting the intersectional space this issue occupies. We are grateful to Nicole Pittman and to all survivors and advocates who work to address the issue of child sexual abuse. Thank you for sharing your stories and for fighting for change. Thanks for listening to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To learn more about Nicole Pittman, check out the resources shared in the episode description. To learn more about the history of the anti-sexual violence movement, check out PCAR’s free History and Philosophy eLearning course at campus.nsvrc.org.