SOURCE: Medill Reports - Chicago, Northwestern University. A publication of the Medill School.
Ariel Ramchandani/MEDILL
The Salvation Army Promise initiative helps victims of sex trafficking escape.
BY ARIEL RAMCHANDANI
FEB 29, 2012
Brenda had noticed prostitutes outside her window since she was 9 years old. When her grandmother told her that these women “took off their panties and men gave them money,” Brenda could relate. A latchkey kid, left only in the care of her alcoholic grandmother, Brenda had been molested by men coming in and out of her house since she was 4 years old.
When she had looked out the window and saw these women, who were wearing makeup, and fishnet stockings patrolling the streets, she wanted to be like them.
“I always wanted to be shiny. I couldn’t be shiny because of the things that were happening to me.”
Not long after she began working downtown she was kidnapped by two pimps and held against her will for approximately six months. “They would threaten and say they could shoot me and put me in a cornfield and nobody would know, and I would believe them,” she said.
She finally got away from them after they began to pay attention to another girl they had kidnapped. She never saw the other girl again.
Brenda was one of the many young women in the Chicago area who are commercially sexually exploited. According to the Salvation Army Promise Initiative, 16,000 to 25,000 women are commercially sexually exploited each day in the metropolitan area.
This may come as a surprise to some, who think of trafficking as something that happens in foreign countries.
But “a young woman on one side of the city could be recruited into prostitution and sold in a different neighborhood,” said Kristin Claes, the communications manager at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation.
Since 2007, Illinois has had the fifth highest number of calls to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline of any state.
Legal Action Brenda, who worked all over the country in strip clubs, as an escort and on the streets over the course of her career, is going to be one of the first women in Illinois to petition to have her prostitution conviction vacated on the grounds of her being a trafficking victim.
Illinois recently passed the Justice for Victims of Sex Trafficking Crimes Act. The law, which went into effect in January, aims to help survivors get their lives back. A woman can petition any time after her conviction to prove she was a victim of commercial sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is defined as sexual abuse in exchange for money, goods or services. Judges will look at arrest records, medical records and expert testimony.
“The law is really important because petitioners are asking a judge to recognize that they are sex trafficking victims,” said Claes. The Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation was a major force behind the law. “This will give recognition by the courts that the victims were not criminals.”
This law comes alongside other measures by the county and state to target human trafficking more effectively and to change the status of women trafficking in prostitution from criminals to victims.
In 2010, Illinois passed the Safe Children’s Act, which was a collaboration between Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and the End Demand Illinois campaign. This act wipes the term “juvenile prostitutes” from the criminal code, and sends children arrested for prostitution to social services instead of detention.
Under this law, law enforcement can also go after traffickers through wiretapping.
These laws work together with the Human Trafficking Initiative, also created by the state’s attorney. In this initiative, prosecutors work with law enforcement to coordinate sometimes lengthy investigations. It also networks together nonprofits that help victims.
A difficult game to beat Even on the offensive, law enforcement faces myriad problems in tackling the issue.
The sex trade is highly lucrative. A drug dealer can only sell drugs once, but a pimp can sell a girl multiple times in a day.
“It’s a billion-dollar industry,” Brenda said. “People don’t play when you’re talking about that kind of money. They’re very dangerous, they’re very harsh.”
The director of the Salvation Army’s Promise initiative, which helps trafficking victims, said the hardest part was “disentangling the abusers from the abused.”
“When these pimps starve girls and lock them in a hotel room, and then finally feed them, the girls think, ‘oh they didn’t have to do that,’” he said.
“It’s so hard for a victim to come face-to-face with her victimizers,” Brenda said. “This has been the problem all these years. That’s just the worst thing in the world. Just like a rape victim looking at the person that raped her, but even harder for a victim, because they are brain washed.”
Women like Brenda might also encounter problems as they craft their petitions. Because prostitution is illegal, when Brenda sought out medical treatment she would use different names. She remembers going to Mount Sinai to get treatment after she was shot and then again to get the bullet removed, but medical records in her name only show she got the bullet removed.
“I’m trying to figure out, did I use one name when I got shot and another name to get the bullet out,” she said. “I got frightened because the police were always talking about locking me up.”
The Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation and the Salvation Army provide legal services to help women craft their cases.
Brenda said she doesn’t know what will happen with her case, or those of other women in the future. “I don’t know because we haven’t even done one yet. We don’t know how this will play out.”
Hold the johns responsible
Those on the front lines of the fight to end trafficking say real change will come when the johns, or clients, are held responsible.
“For too long our culture has blamed women and girls for the harms of prostitution,” said Claes. “Without demand from men there would be no prostitution.”
“When a pimp gets busted, the other pimps know about it, but that doesn’t run them off,” said the director of the Promise program. “When a john gets busted, that runs them off. The biggest admonishment for a john is not that he gets arrested and pays a fine, but that people know.”
For Brenda, the evidence is clear as well.
“You could lock up a drug dealer and a new drug dealer would set up shop immediately, but when they would lock up the customers it would go down. If we hit the demand side as consistently and harshly hard as we hit suppliers, we would have a great impact.”
Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart has organized two National Days of Johns Arrest. On the most recent one, during the Super Bowl, 216 sex purchasers were arrested.
Helping others
Brenda picked up her last client, a white man who looked like he could be a doctor, in a white Mercedes in 1997. When they finished, he began to beat her. As she struggled to leave the car her clothes got stuck in the door. He dragged her six blocks, and the rough concrete scraped the skin off of the left side of her face and body.
In the hospital she met a doctor who helped her get into a safe house, where she lived for a year and a half, reveling in little things people often take for granted, such as being able to open the fridge and make herself something to eat.
Now in her 50s, she runs the Dreamcatcher Foundation, along with another woman she met in that house. The foundation intervenes early to keep girls out of trafficking.
On the day we met she was rushing off to a middle school in Dolton, where a young woman was being trafficked and trying to recruit other girls. Brenda’s goal was to bring the girl to Anne’s House, a safe house run by the Promise program.
Asked as she gathered up her coat to leave if she was worried at all that the girl wouldn’t come, that she might not trust her, she replied:
“Yeah, they’re going to trust me,” she said. “I’m a diva.”
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