"Many lured to the life by food, shelter and drugs"

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"Many lured to the life by food, shelter and drugs"

Postby MaggieH » Wed May 07, 2008 2:51 pm

"One girl's story: Pimp bought me for $400
PROSTITUTION STUDY | Many lured to the life by food, shelter and drugs


http://www.suntimes .com/news/metro/935552,CST-NWS-prost07.article#none

May 7, 2008

BY ANNIE SWEENEY Crime Reporter

At 15, her mother put her out because she was too much of a reminder of her father.

First, she slept in hallways but eventually a couple of drug dealers offered her a place in exchange for sex.

Then, a woman paid the dealers $400 for her. Soon after, the teen had new clothes and was dining out. She also was prostituting for the woman at a hotel room near Midway Airport -- first taking about eight clients a day and later 15.

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Brenda Myers-Powell stands in front of the West Division building where she began a life as a prostitute at the age of 14.
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That anecdote is one of many collected by Chicago researchers who interviewed Chicago prostitutes controlled by pimps.

It highlights what their work found: Chicago prostitutes sometimes are recruited into the life with the promise of nothing more than food and shelter or to support a drug habit. Money is sometimes withheld or stolen.

Some others are forced to stay after threats of violence. In several cases, they are pimped along networks stretching over state lines.

In Chicago, it's no different, researchers say, than international pipelines where people are bought and sold into sex work.

"How dare anyone call it prostitution,'' former prostitute and study interviewer Brenda Myers-Powell said of the 15-year-old working near Midway. ". . . That's trafficking. All day long.''

The study involved interviews with 100 prostitutes up to age 25 and it will be released today.

According to the findings, 70 percent were recruited into sex work and about half of those were coerced. Twenty-eight percent of the participants reported working in other states on a regular basis.

"We have a sense that these girls and women go out in front of their house. But they are involved in a business, the sex trade,'' said Jody Raphael, who authored the study and is a staff attorney at the Schiller DuCanto & Fleck Family Law Center at DePaul University. "Their pimps take them where the demand is.''

The pimps cited in the study would likely be covered in a pending expansion of federal sex trafficking laws, experts said.

The change in law would make it easier to seek federal prosecution for domestic trafficking by expanding the current requirement for conviction of "force, fraud and coercion'' to include "persuade, induce or entice.'' Under the law, pimps who recruit girls or women by taking advantage of problems such as drug addiction, sexual abuse and homelessness could be charged federally."
"The assumption that "most women are innately heterosexual'' stands as a theoretical and political stumbling block for many women. It remains a tenable assumption, partly because lesbian existence has been written out of history or catalogued under disease;. . . partly because to acknowledge that for women heterosexuality may not be a "preference" at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized and maintained by force is an immense step to take if you consider yourself freely and "innately" heterosexual. Yet the failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness. . ."
-- Adrienne Rich, in Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence: http://www.terry.uga.edu/~dawndba/4500compulsoryhet.htm

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.” ~ Alice Walker
MaggieH
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Re: "Many lured to the life by food, shelter and drugs"

Postby pisaquari » Wed May 07, 2008 6:36 pm

I would be interested in seeing this "$400" itemized.
You can call a woman anything these days except "woman"--Sam
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Re: "Many lured to the life by food, shelter and drugs"

Postby toaster » Thu May 08, 2008 10:46 am

In California, which is a geographically larger state, the children are traded across cities and urban areas, but often not across state lines. In the SF Bay Area, the kids I talk to are frequently traded across a route that stretches across Oakland/Vallejo up to Sacramento. It seems to be a cluster of criminal enterprises with one main gang doing the controlling.

The gangs that trade across state lines are in a different ballpark.
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