The day "Suja" saw her young son crying and banging on the car window as her husband drove him away, she knew she had to get away.

Terrified and sobbing, she walked to a nearby playground and typed into Google: “My husband is hitting me. My son is crying.”

The number for a domestic abuse hotline came up. She called. The hotline worker asked if she was safe. Suja cried and said her husband had taken their son, and she didn’t know what to do.

They advised her to go back to their home. Pack quietly. Wait until her husband leaves the house again. The next day, Suja picked up her son from school and called the crisis helpline. They sent a cab and took them to a safe house.

When her husband realized they were gone, he began calling her relentlessly.

Suja, who is being identified by a nickname for her safety, went back to him that night, again hoping that he might change. She had left once before. Years ago, she took her son to India to escape her husband’s abuse. Family pressure and his promises of change brought her back to America, to the St. Louis area.

Change didn’t last.

This time, he reverted to his patterns much more quickly. Within a week, he started hitting their child. Suja called 911. The cops asked her if she had a place to go, and the crisis center sent another cab.

“I didn’t come back,” she said.

This was in 2015. When she left, Suja had an H-4 visa, granted to dependents of immigrant workers in America on an H1-B visa. The shelter connected her to Aruna Tailor, an advocate for domestic abuse survivors who has helped them navigate complex legal and immigration paperwork. Tailor advised her to file for an order of protection. After her husband was served court papers, he fled to India, taking all their passports and revoking Suja and their son’s visas.

Suja remembers her husband’s lawyer's words to her at the safe house: “You’re out of status now.”

She was desperate and terrified. Suja had $20 to her name and a dead cellphone with no service.

She realized that if she ever went back to her husband, she and her son could be killed, but once it was time for them to leave the shelter, she had no idea where to go. A friend from her church collected money for a deposit on a one-bedroom apartment.

Suja, whose husband had never allowed her to work in the U.S., began looking for a job that would pay in cash. Despite having a master’s degree, she accepted a restaurant job offering $3 an hour. She also met a woman at her local library who became another lifeline. This woman helped her find work cleaning houses, so Suja could pay her rent in cash.

Tailor helped her file for a temporary work authorization permit for domestic abuse survivors that the Biden administration had put on a faster timeline. Then, Suja’s husband came back from India.

Suja filed for divorce. It took more than three years of court battles to get it finalized. She won protection orders and testified in court when her ex violated them and began stalking her. In 2018, she applied for a permanent resident card for domestic violence victims.

Tailor, who co-founded a nonprofit for South Asian domestic abuse victims and serves on several boards to help survivors, says many factors prevent immigrant women from seeking help. They face cultural or language barriers and are often reliant on their abusers for legal immigration status. One of the women she was helping told her family about the abuse, and they told her to bear it, Tailor said. When she does presentations about domestic violence for refugee or immigrant groups, she is careful about the words she uses. If the women reveal they went to a presentation on domestic violence, it may trigger violence in the home, Tailor said.

Mary Ann Owens, CEO of The Women’s Safe House in St. Louis, said their help is available to any victim regardless of immigration status. In fact, they have a legal advocate who helps those survivors with the long and difficult process of regaining legal status. She said the current political crackdown on immigrants and ICE raids, which have ensnared even those who are here legally, have created an atmosphere of such fear that those trapped in abusive situations refuse to seek help.

Many won't even leave their homes.

Once Suja was legally allowed to work, she found a professional contract job with a large corporation. She rebuilt her life -- buying a used car and a small home, creating stability for her son. The nightmares that plagued her daily have lessened.

Suja said sometimes she still feels ashamed for the years she stayed in her abusive marriage.

“I was a very well-educated person,” she said. “How could I not know these things?”

She has continued to work under an authorization permit while her application for permanent legal status has been pending in the system for seven years.

She has no idea how much longer she’ll be waiting.

For help, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by texting “start” to 88788 or calling 800-799-SAFE (7233) or going to thehotline.org. The Department of Health and Human Services has also compiled a list of organizations by state (bit.ly/47jV00K).

Charles Frey, 32, stood at the altar on his wedding day and spotted his third grade teacher sitting in the pews at the Catholic Student Center at Washington University.

That moment connected a childhood turning point to an adult milestone.

Frey, an EMS provider, grew up attending Webster Groves schools in the St. Louis area before earning a business degree at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Now, he’s attending the St. Louis Fire Academy to become a firefighter.

As a young kid, he struggled in school. He had trouble focusing, taking tests and working under pressure. Even when he tried his best, it often wasn’t enough.

“I was not any good at school,” he said.

He knew his brain worked differently than other kids'. Around age 4, Frey was diagnosed with a form of autism then called Asperger’s syndrome. Back then, patience and understanding were rare. Then came third grade, and Miss Katie O’Connor. She was patient and compassionate with him. She worked with him one-on-one, teaching him to read and helping him understand math.

O’Connor was early in her teaching career in 2002, when she invited her entire third grade class to the wedding ceremony where she became Mrs. Katie French. French recalls that she was moving from third to fourth grade with the same class, and she wanted them there.

“Those kids have a special place in my heart,” she said. “We did a lot of growing up together.”

Twenty-three years ago, Frey was the one sitting in the pews at St. Margaret of Scotland church, watching his teacher get married. It was the first church wedding he ever attended.

It made an impression on him, and now, as an adult, he realizes how much it meant.

When Frey and his fiance, Mary Seise, began planning their Oct. 4 wedding, she asked him if he had any mentors he wanted to invite. He immediately thought of French. He had never forgotten the teacher who taught him how to read and, more importantly, to believe in himself.

He wanted to thank her properly, so he wrote a letter telling her how special she was to him and how she had changed his life. After some online sleuthing, he found French's address and mailed her a wedding invitation and the letter.

French, now in her 26th year of teaching, was surprised when she received the invite -- her first from a former student -- and remembered Frey instantly.

“He was a unique personality,” she said. “He did need a little extra attention, but he was more capable than he knew.” She had the same expectations for him as everyone else, and the class culture was one of supporting and encouraging one another.

French remembers opening the invitation and reading his letter.

“It brought tears to my eyes,” she says. “A lot of times, teachers don’t get that feedback. To hear that from someone I taught at 8 or 9 years old, it was so touching.”

She didn’t hesitate to RSVP “yes.”

In the receiving line, Frey greeted French with a hug and introduced her to his bride.

"Mrs. French, it’s so good to see you," he said. She reintroduced him to her husband. Frey laughed and said he remembered him being a lot bigger from when he was a kid.

In the card with her gift, French included a snapshot from her wedding more than two decades earlier, showing her and her husband flanked by Frey and his classmates.

French received a gift herself that day: She got to reconnect with the small boy who had once struggled to learn, now standing tall as a husband and fulfilling his dreams. She said the experience affirmed a belief she’s held throughout her career.

“I’ve always thought that kids won’t remember the content you teach them,” she says. “But they will remember how you made them feel.”

That rings true for Frey.

“She saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself,” he says.

When social media first began attracting young people more than two decades ago, parents worried about whether their children were chatting with nefarious strangers.

Now, with the emergence of AI chatbots, parents should worry if their children are being seduced by equally dangerous computer programs.

The use of AI chatbots as “friends” is more common than many parents realize.

Three out of four American teenagers have already chatted with an AI bot for companionship, according to a national poll by Common Sense Media earlier this year. These chatbots are integrated into the apps millions of teens use every day. And yet, there’s almost no oversight of how they operate or how they interact with vulnerable young users.

This has already had high-profile, devastating consequences. A teenager in Southern California reportedly received suicide coaching from ChatGPT. And a recent investigation by Reuters found that Meta’s internal policies had permitted the company’s AI creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.”

Meta says it has since fixed those problems.

But Common Sense Media recently completed one of the most comprehensive independent risk assessments of Meta’s chatbot.

“We gave Meta’s AI an unacceptable rating,” said Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media. It is both very likely to cause harm and very likely to occur, he said.

Millions of teens message Meta’s AI chatbot directly through Instagram and WhatsApp as if chatting with a friend. The chatbot can even do voice chats with celebrity-voiced personas. Common Sense’s investigation found that the system routinely fails to recognize warning signs of teens in crisis.

”Meta didn’t just miss signs of dangerous situations, it actively got involved in remembering and planning harmful activities,” Torney said. In some conversations, the bot spontaneously reintroduced topics like eating disorders and suicide and re-engaged users on them.

Meta says it’s addressed many of these problems. But the night before Common Sense executives testified in Congress just weeks ago, their team repeated its tests and found the safety issues persisted.

Unsurprisingly, the Big Tech companies behind chatbots in Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and ChatGPT are failing to protect children. These AI chatbot systems aren’t regulated or held accountable. They don’t have to meet any standard for safety before they’re put in front of millions of minors.

Tech companies say teens want AI companions. But just because children want something doesn’t mean it’s safe.

“You wouldn’t put a toy on the market if it were injuring kids,” Torney said. And yet, that’s what’s happening here. These powerful, persuasive systems, capable of deep emotional influence, are being deployed without basic safeguards.

It goes beyond just giving out dangerous advice. Bots are trained to prioritize keeping teens engaged in conversations over getting them help. They can use teens’ private data, including their faces and voices, for AI training. OpenAI’s new video platform Sora 2 can generate content with a user’s likeness and voice.

Have we stopped to consider the consequences of a teenager’s image becoming part of an AI model’s training data?

The potential for harm here dwarfs what we saw with social media, and we’re still grappling with the fallout from that. When platforms like Facebook and Instagram first came around, we let our children be their profitable guinea pigs. It took us too long to recognize how these platforms were harming kids’ mental health, increasing bullying and radicalizing vulnerable young people.

Barely three years into the ChatGPT era, we are on the path to making the same mistake -- this time, with even more powerful technology.

This should be a bipartisan issue prompting congressional action. Torney shared what he thinks needs to happen:

-- Tech companies need to be regulated to stop chatbots from engaging in mental health or emotional support conversations with anyone under 18 until there is more rigorous oversight and evidence that they are safe. There need to be stronger age verification systems that go beyond a user simply typing in a birthday.

Companies should also be required to design safety-optimized versions of AI tools for teens, with tighter guardrails and more reliable crisis detection. Many already do this internally. But right now, kids can simply lie about their age and bypass those protections entirely.

-- California lawmakers are already considering such legislation, currently on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, that would ban the use of AI for mental health purposes without first proving its safety. This should be a model for federal policy.

-- Parents need to talk with their kids about AI chatbot use. But the responsibility should not fall just on parents. The systems themselves must be designed and governed to protect young users.

If we fail to regulate these platforms now, we risk exposing a new generation of kids to dangers we barely understand, plus some we’ve already seen. Too many children and families suffered while tech companies made billions off of their social media sites.

The stakes are even higher now.