Book telling of sex trafficking and other abuse includes DeKalb narrative

Sarah Koeppen, founder of Georgia-based The Hope Box, a nonprofit advocacy organization for at-risk mothers and children, said with a laugh, “You don’t find a job like this; it finds you.”

Koeppen’s experiences with The Hope Box and the events that led to its founding in 2014 prompted her to write Called to Hope: The Story of Sarah Koeppen, founder of the Hope Box Inc. The book includes accounts of some of her most touching and rewarding incidents, one of which started in a DeKalb County hospital with a mother and twin babies whom Koeppen and her organization rescued from sex traffickers.

Describing The Hope Box as “a wheel with interconnected spokes that reach out into the local community and beyond,” Koeppen said, “We assist mothers and equip them to make life decisions concerning themselves and their children. We have linked arms with other nonprofit organizations and work together to bring needed resources to mothers who choose to parent their children…When mothers decide not to parent their infants, we come alongside them and help them understand their legal rights and the various choices they may make concerning their infants.”

Koeppen said she originally conceived The Hope Box as a network of literal boxes throughout the state where mothers who had infants they couldn’t care for could leave the children—no questions asked and no threat of prosecution. In time, she said, God gave her a blueprint for the organization. Among its missions is to advocate to the state legislature for the well-being of young children and at-risk mothers, providing them with legal, public safety, and medical resources.

 

The Hope Box was instrumental in amending the Georgia Safe Haven law in 2017 so that places such as health departments, hospitals, fire departments and police stations became facilities where mothers could leave their children and decide whether they would leave their information. According to The Hope Box website, 4,002 lives have been saved because of this law.

Among the experiences in Koeppen’s life that led her to realize that many troubled mothers and children desperately need help is the difficult process she and her husband went through in adopting their son Elijah, who was 3 years old when he came into their lives. In her book she recalls: “Elijah had experienced a lot in his first three years. Due to his biological mother’s life choices, he had experienced so much emotional and physical trauma. Every day was a new challenge that we faced with love. Elijah was developmentally delayed, which is very common in children who have experienced trauma. Anger was his way of communication — screaming and hurling himself against the walls were daily occurrences.”

As heartbreaking as experiences such as Elijah’s are, there are children for whom life gets much “darker,” according to Koeppen. “As the Lord put federal, state, and local investigators in our paths we learned about the insidious black market where infants from 0 to 3 years old are high commodities. We became aware of the absolutely evil issue of sex trafficking of infants and children under 3. We were horrified to learn that babies were being bought and sold for sex and also for organs. Sex trafficking is a business and it’s a very lucrative business. We learned that in the past women who were being sex trafficked would have in-home abortions. Now they are allowed to have their babies because they brought even more money. The criminals get two for one.”

Such a fate likely would have awaited twins born in a DeKalb hospital that a caseworker had an “uneasy” feeling about and called The Hope Box. “The mother was a beautiful young girl. There was a woman with her who wasn’t a relative and that woman had filled out the birth certificate information,” Koeppen recalled. When she was able to speak with the mother alone, Koeppen learned that the young woman had been recently released from incarceration and did not know the woman with her.

“I realized the young woman was in trafficking. I asked her how long she had been trafficked and she said, ‘my whole life.’ …I immediately asked the mother if I could notify the hospital of what was going on and she said yes. The mother was moved to another room and the hospital was put on lockdown. The hospital was able to correct all of the documentation, including the birth certificates.” The Hope Box then helped the young mother place her babies with an adoption agency.

Koeppen said she is dedicated to expanding awareness of issues surrounding infant abandonment and—with the help of her foundation and her book—she aims to “spread hope and inspire people to do a better job in taking care of our nation’s children.”