Hard truths about prostitution

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 23, 2007 by Margot Patterson

The sex trade is a multibillion dollar business in this country. In telling their life stories, the four former prostitutes who spoke at the fall retreat sponsored by the Sophia Circle brought to light some of the salient features of the prostitution industry and the challenges women face in quitting it. Their remarks and those of Edwina Gateley painted a fuller picture of a business built on the exploitation of women that elicits little attention from society.

* "A place to stay is the biggest need for women wanting to leave prostitution. A woman wants to feel safe," said Olivia Howard, an addictions counselor who does outreach to prostitutes and whose own experiences in the sex trade are described in a book called Listening to Olivia: Violence, Poverty and Prostitution by Jody Raphael. "She needs to have a safe haven where she doesn't have to worry about paying the bills. The comfortability has to come first before you can start addressing issues."

* Violence against prostituted women is endemic. "The first night I was put on the street, I was gang-raped by three men," Howard noted. She added that the violence that goes on in indoor venues (VIP clubs, escort services, strip clubs, massage parlors, dance clubs) is less visible but often as bad as or worse than that happening on the street. A Chicago survey of women in escort services found that 21 percent stated they had been raped more than 10 times, the same rate as women working on the streets, and 11 percent stated they had been raped five to 10 times.

* The average age of a woman entering prostitution is 15; the average age of the customer is 32, according to a documentary film called "Turning the Corner," made by Salome Chasnoff in 2005 and funded by PART, the Prostitutes Alternative Round Table, and the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, which found that 90 percent of the women exiting county jail for prostitution were homeless.

* Alcohol and drug addiction among prostitutes is widespread, with various studies of prostituted women in U.S. cities reporting addiction rates of 92 percent to 94 percent to 100 percent. In some instances, women seem to turn to prostitution to support their habit; in other instances, drug and alcohol addiction may follow the onset of prostitution, with women turning to drugs and alcohol to numb themselves in their encounters with clients.

* African-American girls are particularly vulnerable to prostitution, with women of color appearing to start in prostitution earlier and stay in it longer than white women. The film "Turning the Corner" reports that women of color comprise 40 percent of those in street prostitution, 55 percent of those arrested, and 85 percent of those in jail. A Minneapolis study cited by Raphael notes that an African-American woman jailed for sex offenses will on average spend almost twice as much time in jail as a white woman.

* The prevalence of incest among prostitutes is three to five times that of the general prostitution, Raphael's book reports. "Original sin is incest," observed Edwina Gateley, who directed a recovery program for prostitutes for many years and is now director of Sophia Circle, which sponsors retreats for prostitutes. "That's the situation of innocence turned evil that sets a woman on a path of self-destruction, which she may not recognize," Gateley said.

* Relapses are common for women leaving prostitution. "The first seven or eight months I continued to see three tricks," said Howard. She and the other three speakers added that women leaving prostitution often need a wide range of therapies and social services before they successfully quit. "It took a village to raise me--a village of different types of therapies, a village of different types of social services," Brenda Myers-Powell said.

* Rarely do legal and medical authorities attempt to intervene in a prostituted woman's life to help her escape her situation or deal with her addiction. Often, there is little or no effort on the part of police to follow up on attacks on prostitutes. Myers-Powell told of being pushed out of a speeding car being chased by police. She reported the police picked her up and took her to jail and made no attempt to go after the driver, who might have killed her. Studies indicate that not only is police inaction common when crimes are committed against prostitutes, but police officers can themselves be perpetrators of abuse, demanding sexual favors from prostitutes they threaten with arrest.

* Self-loathing is one of the biggest obstacles to women quitting prostitution, said Gateley. "Nobody beats up on us as much as we do to ourselves," Howard affirmed.