MDFT International Brings Family Therapy to Human Trafficking Court

When the System Finally Asks the Right Question

For years, women caught in cycles of solicitation and prostitution charges, substance misuse, and trauma encountered a justice system that neither protected the public nor helped them. They cycled through courts, jails, and treatment programs that operated in isolation from one another, and from the relationships and family dynamics that often held the greatest potential for change. 

CATCH Court – “Creating Autonomy Through Collaborative Healing” – was built on a different premise. This innovative problem-solving court was founded in 2009 by Judge Paul M. Herbert and is currently led by Judge Jodi Thomas of the Franklin County Municipal Court in Columbus, Ohio. CATCH is similar in principle and structure to drug courts but focuses exclusively on women charged with prostitution and solicitation offenses, most of whom are survivors of human trafficking. Unlike the courts these women have typically encountered before, CATCH does not criminalize its participants. It recognizes them as victims and survivors, worthy of opportunities to heal and build healthier, more fulfilling lives. Much like treatment drug courts, women who successfully complete the program have their charges dropped and their records expunged. 

The results of CATCH have been strong, and the model has spread across Ohio and beyond. But even CATCH had a gap, until a new partnership was recently forged with MDFT International. 

The Missing Piece

Dr. Aaron Murnan, a researcher at The Ohio State University College of Nursing, has spent his career studying women at the intersection of the criminal justice system, substance misuse, and the sex trade. He is driven to understand their treatment needs, the family systems surrounding them, and what helps them heal He repeatedly found the same blind spot across programs: these women were receiving individual therapy, substance use services, and psychiatric care. What they weren't receiving, in any structured, evidence-based way, was family therapy. 

This was true even though family dynamics played a central role in almost all of the women’s stories. The research literature documents the types of relationships that place women at risk for or sustain their involvement in the sex trade. But research programs and treatment systems have paid far less attention to something equally present: the family’s potential to support recovery. Dr. Murnan posed an essential question: could family relationships, with the right intervention, become a source of healing rather than harm? 

Dr. Murnan secured a five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to address this directly, to develop and pilot a co-designed, family-based therapy for marginalized women with opioid use disorder (OUD) and justice involvement. His team, which includes women with lived experience, began looking for an evidence-based family therapy model with strong research support and a philosophy that could translate to this population. That search led them to the interventions developed, researched and disseminated by MDFT International. 

The partnership made sense. MDFT is one of the most rigorously tested family-based behavioral health interventions in the field, with numerous randomized controlled trials supporting its effectiveness. And MDFT International had already demonstrated that family-based interventions work within court-based systems, through “Engaging Moms,” a family-centered model developed for mothers in dependency court that became the clinical foundation for MDFR and MDFTR. Additionally, MDFT has been rigorously studied in juvenile drug court, as an intervention for TAY in criminal drug court, and with other justice partners and populations. 

What Comes Next

Under the NIDA-funded partnership, MDFT International has adapted its model specifically for this population. With innovative treatment development methodology used in over four decades of MDFT clinical research, Dr. Gayle Dakof has led the refinement of the intervention to reflect the realities participants face in CATCH. Four clinicians are currently being trained. The adapted model draws on the MDFTR framework, moving across individual, couple, and family sessions, and integrating within CATCH's coordinated care structure. The hallmark of community work in all MDFT adaptations is essential here, working alongside court, probation officers, treatment providers, and community partners, not parallel to them or in separate silos. 

This is a genuinely new territory. A rigorous, federally funded effort to bring evidence-based family therapy into a human trafficking specialty court hasn't been done before. Dr. Murnan saw the need, built the platform, and knew that family intervention had to be part of the answer. We're proud to be the partner he called.