What Is We Fight Monsters?
We Fight Monsters is a U.S.-based non-profit organization founded by Ben and Jessica Owen. Headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, its core work confronts and combats human trafficking, narcotics trafficking, addiction, and the ripple effects of violence and homelessness.
Their mission combines intervention, rehabilitation, and community restoration. They aim not just to rescue individuals but to provide sustained support, reintegrate people into healthy living, and address systemic issues that enable exploitation and addiction.
Who Are the Founders & Key People
Ben and Jessica Owen are co-founders. Their backgrounds deeply inform the organization’s work: they both experienced addiction, homelessness, arrests, and in Jessica’s case childhood trauma. These experiences drive their empathy and understanding in working with people facing similar crises.
The leadership draws in people with diverse experiences: former special operators, law enforcement professionals, ex-gang members, and people in recovery. This composition enables a mix of practical operational knowledge, outreach capability, and lived experience.
What We Fight Monsters Does: Programs & Operations
Here are the main pillars of their work:
Rescue & Recovery Initiatives
They locate and assist individuals trapped in sex trafficking, narcotics addiction, homelessness, or in perilous living situations. Those rescued are then moved into treatment, safe housing, or recovery programs.
Safe & Transitional Housing
Refuge is a priority: We Fight Monsters partners to build or renovate facilities like the “Hope House” in Memphis, which offer trauma-informed care, transitional housing, and longer-term support to survivors.
Neighborhood & Community Revitalization
They run operations aimed at reclaiming neighborhoods: shutting down harmful or exploitative houses, especially those used for drug dealing or trafficking, transforming them into recovery or safe living spaces. Community restoration efforts are part of their strategy.
Advocacy & Collaboration
They work with law enforcement, street gangs, and community agents to build trust, gather intelligence, and effect change from multiple fronts. Recently, they joined with other nonprofits in multi-state coordinated efforts to surge against trafficking networks.
Support Services & Rehabilitation
After rescue, there is care: shelters, sober-living, addiction recovery, psychological and trauma informed support. The aim is to help people not just survive but rebuild.
Recent Collaborations & Highlights
Interstate Justice Coalition: In 2025, We Fight Monsters partnered with other organizations to form this coalition. The purpose is to conduct surge operations across multiple U.S. states to disrupt trafficking networks, rescue victims, and amplify law enforcement and civic efforts.
Hope House, Memphis: Alongside partners, they are renovating a facility in Memphis to provide safe housing and comprehensive care to survivors of sex trafficking.
Quantifiable Impact: According to their public reporting, they have reclaimed a number of lives — people recovered from addiction, safe housing provided, homeless families rehoused, babies born into safer environments.
Strengths & Challenges
Strengths
Lived Experience: Because many in leadership and operation have personal history with addiction, homelessness, or trafficking, there’s authenticity and empathy in their interventions. This often builds trust where purely institutional efforts might falter.
Multi-Front Approach: Rescue + rehabilitation + community restoration + advocacy = more holistic impact.
Collaborative Model: They partner with other nonprofits, law enforcement, and even groups often considered “outside the system” to reach places many organizations can’t or won’t.
Community Engagement: Their operations aren’t just top-down rescues, but involve neighborhoods and volunteers. This helps in sustainability and broader awareness.
Challenges
Scale & Resources: To meet the level of need in human trafficking, addiction, and community decay, enormous resources—financial, personnel, logistical—are required. Nonprofits often run on limited budgets.
Complexity of Trauma: Survivors of trafficking or addiction often have deep trauma. Healing is not linear; relapse, setbacks, legal and mental health challenges are common. Sustained, long-term support is demanding.
Coordination & Risk: Working in dangerous or legally sensitive areas involves risks: safety, legal liability, confidentiality, and ensuring operations don’t re-traumatize survivors. Coordination with law enforcement and other agencies sometimes has bureaucratic or trust-barrier challenges.
Public Awareness & Stigma: Topics like addiction, human trafficking, and former gang involvement still carry stigma. Raising awareness in a way that draws support and reduces stigma is always tough.
Impact & Why It Matters
We Fight Monsters represents a model of social change built from the ground up, motivated by personal stories of survival. Its impact is two-fold:
For individuals: offering rescue, healing, and a path out of cycles of abuse, addiction, and exploitation.
For communities: restoring safety, reclaiming neighborhoods, and reducing harm by addressing root causes rather than only symptoms.
Moreover, by increasing awareness, forming coalitions, and setting up survivor-centered facilities, it contributes to systemic change. It demonstrates that interventions which are compassionate, operationally grounded, and coalition-based can make meaningful inroads into some of society’s most intractable problems.
Looking Ahead
Some of the opportunities and possible directions for growth:
Expanding safe homes and recovery houses in more locations.
Strengthening aftercare and reintegration programs, especially for survivors of trafficking and long-term addiction recovery.
Building more robust partnerships with mental health services, legal support, and housing agencies.
Increasing fundraising and resource mobilization to sustain and scale operations.
Public education campaigns to reduce stigma, especially around addiction and trafficking, so communities are more informed, supportive, and engaged.
Conclusion
We Fight Monsters is more than a name—it’s a movement. It’s an organization that fights both visible and invisible battles: against trafficking, addiction, homelessness, and trauma. Born out of personal suffering, it channels hard-won insight into real change. While the obstacles are great, the combination of lived experience, operational capacity, community engagement, and collaboration gives We Fight Monsters the potential to make a deep, lasting difference.
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