LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP) – Priscilla Roman says she felt carefree. She had just danced two hours in a Louisville, Ky., strip club and made $900 in a job she started the year her father reneged on a promise to co-sign a lease for her college apartment.
By the time Roman met her father at age 11, he already had a wife and two other children, she told Baptist Press, and she is painfully aware that he never told her she was special, pretty or important.
Show Roman a woman who works in any aspect of the sex industry and Roman is assured that same woman will have suffered a deep emotional wound from her father, termed a “father wound.”
Roman won’t celebrate Father’s Day this Sunday. She doesn’t talk to her earthly father. Instead, she’ll go about a normal Sunday with our heavenly Father who saved her from the deceitful strip club stage she had considered her lifeline for four years.
“Struggling with father wounds, it’s a generational problem,” Roman said, “and 9 out of 10, if not 10 out of 10 women who find themselves in these circumstances of working in the sex industry, whether it be at a club or the streets or online, I’m going to argue 10 out of 10 of them will say they have [a damaging] relationship with their father.”
Roman’s father wound, compounded by a mother who drank heavily and was abusive, derailed Roman until she met her heavenly Father. She was saved through the work of Rachelle Starr and the Scarlet Hope ministry Starr founded nearly 20 years ago to share the Gospel with women in the sex industry.
Roman, now 27, and Starr, who has helped more than 10,000 women leave the sex industry in a 10-state network, spoke with Baptist Press after sharing their stories in the redemptive documentary “He Calls Me Daughter.”
Starr enjoys a loving relationship with her earthly father, minister John Nappo, who appears with her in the documentary, along with those who have suffered father wounds, including Christian comedian Chonda Pierce, and others attesting to the importance of the father-daughter relationship, including filmmaker and actor Alex Kendrick.
He Calls Me Daughter Director Rick Altizer learned the prevalence of father-daughter wounds as his previous films gave him audiences at churches.
“The father wound affects far more than a woman’s relationship with her earthly father. It can shape her sense of identity, self-worth, relationships and even how she views God,” Altizer told Baptist Press. “When those wounds go unaddressed, the effects can be carried for a lifetime and passed from one generation to the next.”
It’s important that women as well as the larger society understand the phenomenon’s impact, Altizer said.
“Healing doesn’t just change one person’s life,” he said. “It can strengthen marriages, families, churches and entire communities. When people experience the love of a perfect heavenly Father, it has the power to break cycles of hurt and bring lasting restoration.”
The documentary premiered in theaters in March and is now available on major online platforms, with licensing available for churches to host viewings.
“My hope is that He Calls Me Daughter will help women recognize that they are not alone in their struggles and that healing is possible,” Altizer said. “The film is ultimately about identity, restoration and the life-changing love of a perfect heavenly Father. If even one woman finds hope, healing or a renewed relationship with God because of this film, it has accomplished something meaningful.”
Roman’s father wound is generational, she said, as her mother suffered a fractured relationship with her own father. Roman still deals with the shame of having danced in a strip club, she said, but is comforted that God’s love is redeeming.
Starr began her ministry in 2007 by driving by strip clubs with her husband and praying for opportunities to take the Gospel inside the venues, she told Baptist Press.
“The very first thing that God gave me to say to the owner of the first club I ever went into was, ‘Jesus sent us here to do something kind and loving for the people in this place. Could we bring in a homecooked meal?’” Starr said. “And that statement and that phrase that came from the Holy Spirit opened up almost 100 strip club doors to bring the Gospel into the darkness.”
He Calls Me Daughter is important, Starr said, because it presents a narrative that is foreign to so many.
“It opens up a category in people’s hearts and lives that most of us don’t want to talk about,” she said. “But (for) a large number of people, (father wounds are) inhibiting them from experiencing God as a heavenly Father. And if we don’t bring those wounds to light and we don’t begin to walk through the healing and the pain and all of the things that we’ve been through, then we will stay sort of stuck in that understanding.”
Starr’s father’s input was positive. As a pastor and minister, he often opened his home to the broken and hurting, Starr said, which led her to seek God’s guidance in her early 20s.
“I got to share in the film sort of the opposite experience when you do have a godly earthly father, what that does in the kingdom,” Starr said. “That was a real special treat to be in the film with my dad.”
When Roman encountered Scarlet Hope, she thought it peculiar that women were bringing homecooked meals to strippers who were making hundreds of dollars an hour, she said. After all, she could afford to eat in fancy restaurants and care for a younger sibling, while also giving money to other relatives.
But a few weeks into Scarlet Hope’s visits, Roman lost her job.
“By the grace of God I got fired a few weeks after meeting them. And I said, ‘You know what, God, this is it. This is going to be my rock bottom. Like this as low as it’ll go. I’m done here,’” Roman recalled. “That’s how confused I think I was. I can’t work the strip club. I’m hitting rock bottom. … This is as bad as it’s going to get for me, where I am on the fritz financially, and I have nothing to show for anything.”
That was when Roman asked God to take over her life.
“And Rochelle and Scarlet Hope just opened the doors as I needed to walk through them,” Roman said. “I thought they were just ladies that hung out at the strip club and brought us food. No, it’s an entire foundation of resources and help … and women who are devoting their lives to ministering and discipling women who are like me.”
Roman finds solace and strength in her church family, she said, and in a God who loves her without condemnation and has His hand on her life.
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