5 found guilty of forcing women into prostitution in L.A. The illegal immigrants were convicted of a plot to lure poor young Guatemalans to the U.S. with the promise of legitimate jobs.
Feb. 12, 2009, L.A. Times: A federal court jury on Wednesday convicted five people in connection with a plot to lure impoverished young women from Guatemala to the United States with the promise of legitimate jobs, only to then force them into prostitution to repay their supposed debts for being smuggled into the country.
All five defendants are illegal immigrants themselves, four of them women from Guatemala who also worked as prostitutes.
As the verdicts were read, the five defendants sat expressionless, as they did through much of the monthlong trial before U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Morrow. Each of the five faces a potential life sentence, according to the U.S. attorney's office.
The case presented by prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of 10 young women who said they were forced to work as prostitutes and turn over their pay to the defendants.
Only one woman said she knew she was going to work in the sex trade before arriving in Los Angeles. The others said they were expecting to work as baby sitters, housekeepers, waitresses or in other jobs in which they hoped to earn up to $10 an hour, far more than they could in Guatemala.
Only after they arrived in the U.S., the young women testified, were they told the truth about what they would be doing.
"These defendants exploited their hopes for a better life in the United States," Assistant U.S. Atty. Cheryl Murphy told jurors shortly before they were given the case last week.
After five days of deliberations, the panel convicted all five defendants of the most serious charge they were facing: sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. The defendants were also convicted of conspiracy and importing and harboring illegal immigrants for the purpose of prostitution.
In often tearful testimony during the trial, the victims described having sex with up to 30 men a day. Several testified that they were forced to work while ill or menstruating, or both.
The victims said they were almost always watched by the defendants and were beaten and threatened with violence, even witchcraft, to keep them from trying to escape.
A girl identified as Esperanza, who was allegedly 17 when she arrived in the U.S. in 2005, said she was told her legs would be cut off and her entire family killed if she tried to escape. Another girl, identified as Rosaura, sobbed throughout her testimony and told jurors that defendant Gladys Vasquez Valenzuela threatened to throw acid on her face if she ever tried to leave.
After Wednesday's verdict, two of the five women on the jury said they were too upset to discuss their deliberations. Another, a 52-year-old grandmother from Altadena who asked that her name not be used, said: "It was nauseating, difficult to listen to."
At trial, prosecutors argued that five of the young women were under 18 when they arrived in the U.S. One had never left her rural village before making the dangerous trek north in the company of human smugglers. Two others continued to dress in costumes for Halloween and decorate their bedroom with stuffed animals, even after they had been taught to dress like hookers and were shown how to use condoms.
But jurors said prosecutors failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the young women were underage.
"Not that they didn't look young -- they did," said Daniel Williams, a 59-year-old Exxon Mobil employee from Hawthorne. "But they didn't have proof."
The main defendant in the case was Valenzuela. According to prosecutors, Valenzuela, her sister, Mirna, and two of their nieces came to Los Angeles years ago and began working as prostitutes in the area around MacArthur Park. The women, along with Mirna's husband, Gabriel Mendez, then hatched the plot to force other young women from their rural Guatemalan village into the sex trade. They were arrested after a former employee helped some of the women escape and began cooperating with the FBI.
During the trial, defense attorneys sought to portray the young women as lying opportunists who had agreed to work as prostitutes before they left Guatemala.
They pointed to inconsistencies between their courtroom testimony and statements the women made when they were initially interviewed by FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents more than two years ago.
They also told jurors the women had motive to lie because if they were victims in the case as opposed to defendants it would help them secure legal residency in this country.
Though the women may have appeared weepy and vulnerable on the witnesses stand, they were in fact "seasoned liars" who came into court "ready, willing and able to lie," attorney Jeff Price told jurors during his closing arguments.
Dana Cephas, another defense attorney, suggested during his closing that the women may have willingly turned to prostitution to escape the poverty and despair of their lives in Guatemala.
This drew a stinging retort from Murphy, who prosecuted the case with Assistant U.S. Attys. Curtis Kin and Anthony Lewis.
"It's better to be a whore in the United States than it is to be poor in Guatemala," the prosecutor said rhetorically as she addressed the panel before they began deliberations.
"That is an insult not only to the whole nation of Guatemala," she said, "but to all of the women in this case."
From http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-sextraffic12-2009feb12,0,1663774.story
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Showing posts with label Prostitution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prostitution. Show all posts
Monday, February 16, 2009
Friday, January 9, 2009
Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases
South Korea has railed for years against the Japanese government’s waffling over how much responsibility it bears for one of the ugliest chapters in its wartime history: the enslavement of women from Korea and elsewhere to work in brothels serving Japan’s imperial army.
Jan. 8, 2009, NY Times, SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has railed for years against the Japanese government’s waffling over how much responsibility it bears for one of the ugliest chapters in its wartime history: the enslavement of women from Korea and elsewhere to work in brothels serving Japan’s imperial army.
Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops.
While the women have made no claims that they were coerced into prostitution by South Korean or American officials during those years, they accuse successive Korean governments of hypocrisy in calling for reparations from Japan while refusing to take a hard look at South Korea’s own history.
“Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military,” one of the women, Kim Ae-ran, 58, said in a recent interview.
Scholars on the issue say that the South Korean government was motivated in part by fears that the American military would leave, and that it wanted to do whatever it could to prevent that.
But the women suggest that the government also viewed them as commodities to be used to shore up the country’s struggling economy in the decades after the Korean War. They say the government not only sponsored classes for them in basic English and etiquette — meant to help them sell themselves more effectively — but also sent bureaucrats to praise them for earning dollars when South Korea was desperate for foreign currency.
“They urged us to sell as much as possible to the G.I.’s, praising us as ‘dollar-earning patriots,’ ” Ms. Kim said.
The United States military, the scholars say, became involved in attempts to regulate the trade in so-called camp towns surrounding the bases because of worries about sexually transmitted diseases.
In one of the most incendiary claims, some women say that the American military police and South Korean officials regularly raided clubs from the 1960s through the 1980s looking for women who were thought to be spreading the diseases. They picked out the women using the number tags the women say the brothels forced them to wear so the soldiers could more easily identify their sex partners.
The Korean police would then detain the prostitutes who were thought to be ill, the women said, locking them up under guard in so-called monkey houses, where the windows had bars. There, the prostitutes were forced to take medications until they were well.
The women, who are seeking compensation and an apology, have compared themselves to the so-called comfort women who have won widespread public sympathy for being forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II. Whether prostitutes by choice, need or coercion, the women say, they were all victims of government policies.
“If the question is, was there active government complicity, support of such camp town prostitution, yes, by both the Korean governments and the U.S. military,” said Katharine H. S. Moon, a scholar who wrote about the women in her 1997 book, “Sex Among Allies.”
The South Korean Ministry of Gender Equality, which handles women’s issues, declined to comment on the former prostitutes’ accusations. So did the American military command in Seoul, which responded with a general statement saying that the military “does not condone or support the illegal activities of human trafficking and prostitution.”
The New York Times interviewed eight women who worked in brothels near American bases, and it reviewed South Korean and American documents. The documents do provide some support for many of the women’s claims, though most are snapshots in time. The women maintain that the practices occurred over decades.
In some sense, the women’s allegations are not surprising. It has been clear for decades that South Korea and the United States military tolerated prostitution near bases, even though selling sex is illegal in South Korea. Bars and brothels have long lined the streets of the neighborhoods surrounding American bases in South Korea, as is the case in the areas around military bases around the world.
But the women say few of their fellow citizens know how deeply their government was involved in the trade in the camp towns.
The women received some support for their claims in 2006, from a former government official. In a television interview, the official, Kim Kee-joe, who was identified as having been a high-level liaison to the United States military, said, “Although we did not actively urge them to engage in prostitution, we, especially those from the county offices, did often tell them that it was not something bad for the country either.”
Transcripts of parliamentary hearings also suggest that at least some South Korean leaders viewed prostitution as something of a necessity. In one exchange in 1960, two lawmakers urged the government to train a supply of prostitutes to meet what one called the “natural needs” of allied soldiers and prevent them from spending their dollars in Japan instead of South Korea. The deputy home minister at the time, Lee Sung-woo, replied that the government had made some improvements in the “supply of prostitutes” and the “recreational system” for American troops.
Both Mr. Kim and Ms. Moon back the women’s assertions that the control of venereal disease was a driving factor for the two governments. They say the governments’ coordination became especially pronounced as Korean fears about an American pullout increased after President Richard M. Nixon announced plans in 1969 to reduce the number of American troops in South Korea.
“The idea was to create an environment where the guests were treated well in the camp towns to discourage them from leaving,” Mr. Kim said in the television interview.
Ms. Moon, a Wellesley College professor, said that the minutes of meetings between American military officials and Korean bureaucrats in the 1970s showed the lengths the two countries went to prevent epidemics. The minutes included recommendations to “isolate” women who were sick and ensure that they received treatment, government efforts to register prostitutes and require them to carry medical certification and a 1976 report about joint raids to apprehend prostitutes who were unregistered or failed to attend medical checkups.
These days, camp towns still exist, but as the Korean economy took off, women from the Philippines began replacing them.
Many former prostitutes live in the camp towns, isolated from mainstream society, which shuns them. Most are poor. Some are haunted by the memories of the mixed-race children they put up for adoption overseas.
Jeon, 71, who agreed to talk only if she was identified by just her surname, said she was an 18-year-old war orphan in 1956 when hunger drove her to Dongduchon, a camp town near the border with North Korea. She had a son in the 1960s, but she became convinced that he would have a better future in the United States and gave him up for adoption when he was 13.
About 10 years ago, her son, now an American soldier, returned to visit. She told him to forget her.
“I failed as a mother,” said Ms. Jeon, who lives on welfare checks and the little cash she earns selling items she picks from other people’s trash. “I have no right to depend on him now.”
“The more I think about my life, the more I think women like me were the biggest sacrifice for my country’s alliance with the Americans,” she said. “Looking back, I think my body was not mine, but the government’s and the U.S. military’s.”
From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/world/asia/08korea.html?_r=1&sq=prostitution&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all >>Read more
Jan. 8, 2009, NY Times, SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has railed for years against the Japanese government’s waffling over how much responsibility it bears for one of the ugliest chapters in its wartime history: the enslavement of women from Korea and elsewhere to work in brothels serving Japan’s imperial army.
Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops.
While the women have made no claims that they were coerced into prostitution by South Korean or American officials during those years, they accuse successive Korean governments of hypocrisy in calling for reparations from Japan while refusing to take a hard look at South Korea’s own history.
“Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military,” one of the women, Kim Ae-ran, 58, said in a recent interview.
Scholars on the issue say that the South Korean government was motivated in part by fears that the American military would leave, and that it wanted to do whatever it could to prevent that.
But the women suggest that the government also viewed them as commodities to be used to shore up the country’s struggling economy in the decades after the Korean War. They say the government not only sponsored classes for them in basic English and etiquette — meant to help them sell themselves more effectively — but also sent bureaucrats to praise them for earning dollars when South Korea was desperate for foreign currency.
“They urged us to sell as much as possible to the G.I.’s, praising us as ‘dollar-earning patriots,’ ” Ms. Kim said.
The United States military, the scholars say, became involved in attempts to regulate the trade in so-called camp towns surrounding the bases because of worries about sexually transmitted diseases.
In one of the most incendiary claims, some women say that the American military police and South Korean officials regularly raided clubs from the 1960s through the 1980s looking for women who were thought to be spreading the diseases. They picked out the women using the number tags the women say the brothels forced them to wear so the soldiers could more easily identify their sex partners.
The Korean police would then detain the prostitutes who were thought to be ill, the women said, locking them up under guard in so-called monkey houses, where the windows had bars. There, the prostitutes were forced to take medications until they were well.
The women, who are seeking compensation and an apology, have compared themselves to the so-called comfort women who have won widespread public sympathy for being forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II. Whether prostitutes by choice, need or coercion, the women say, they were all victims of government policies.
“If the question is, was there active government complicity, support of such camp town prostitution, yes, by both the Korean governments and the U.S. military,” said Katharine H. S. Moon, a scholar who wrote about the women in her 1997 book, “Sex Among Allies.”
The South Korean Ministry of Gender Equality, which handles women’s issues, declined to comment on the former prostitutes’ accusations. So did the American military command in Seoul, which responded with a general statement saying that the military “does not condone or support the illegal activities of human trafficking and prostitution.”
The New York Times interviewed eight women who worked in brothels near American bases, and it reviewed South Korean and American documents. The documents do provide some support for many of the women’s claims, though most are snapshots in time. The women maintain that the practices occurred over decades.
In some sense, the women’s allegations are not surprising. It has been clear for decades that South Korea and the United States military tolerated prostitution near bases, even though selling sex is illegal in South Korea. Bars and brothels have long lined the streets of the neighborhoods surrounding American bases in South Korea, as is the case in the areas around military bases around the world.
But the women say few of their fellow citizens know how deeply their government was involved in the trade in the camp towns.
The women received some support for their claims in 2006, from a former government official. In a television interview, the official, Kim Kee-joe, who was identified as having been a high-level liaison to the United States military, said, “Although we did not actively urge them to engage in prostitution, we, especially those from the county offices, did often tell them that it was not something bad for the country either.”
Transcripts of parliamentary hearings also suggest that at least some South Korean leaders viewed prostitution as something of a necessity. In one exchange in 1960, two lawmakers urged the government to train a supply of prostitutes to meet what one called the “natural needs” of allied soldiers and prevent them from spending their dollars in Japan instead of South Korea. The deputy home minister at the time, Lee Sung-woo, replied that the government had made some improvements in the “supply of prostitutes” and the “recreational system” for American troops.
Both Mr. Kim and Ms. Moon back the women’s assertions that the control of venereal disease was a driving factor for the two governments. They say the governments’ coordination became especially pronounced as Korean fears about an American pullout increased after President Richard M. Nixon announced plans in 1969 to reduce the number of American troops in South Korea.
“The idea was to create an environment where the guests were treated well in the camp towns to discourage them from leaving,” Mr. Kim said in the television interview.
Ms. Moon, a Wellesley College professor, said that the minutes of meetings between American military officials and Korean bureaucrats in the 1970s showed the lengths the two countries went to prevent epidemics. The minutes included recommendations to “isolate” women who were sick and ensure that they received treatment, government efforts to register prostitutes and require them to carry medical certification and a 1976 report about joint raids to apprehend prostitutes who were unregistered or failed to attend medical checkups.
These days, camp towns still exist, but as the Korean economy took off, women from the Philippines began replacing them.
Many former prostitutes live in the camp towns, isolated from mainstream society, which shuns them. Most are poor. Some are haunted by the memories of the mixed-race children they put up for adoption overseas.
Jeon, 71, who agreed to talk only if she was identified by just her surname, said she was an 18-year-old war orphan in 1956 when hunger drove her to Dongduchon, a camp town near the border with North Korea. She had a son in the 1960s, but she became convinced that he would have a better future in the United States and gave him up for adoption when he was 13.
About 10 years ago, her son, now an American soldier, returned to visit. She told him to forget her.
“I failed as a mother,” said Ms. Jeon, who lives on welfare checks and the little cash she earns selling items she picks from other people’s trash. “I have no right to depend on him now.”
“The more I think about my life, the more I think women like me were the biggest sacrifice for my country’s alliance with the Americans,” she said. “Looking back, I think my body was not mine, but the government’s and the U.S. military’s.”
From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/world/asia/08korea.html?_r=1&sq=prostitution&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all >>Read more
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
TRAFFICKING & TECHNOLOGY: Underage prostitutes marketed on Internet
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Friday, November 28, 2008
TRAFFICKING & PROSTITUTION
Prostitution realities are unlike glamor myth in wake of Spitzer scandal
March 18, 2008, AP: The call girl in the Eliot Spitzer scandal appeared to be leading a glamorous life – staying in an upscale Manhattan high-rise, traveling to seduce powerful men in swanky hotel rooms, making more than $4,000 in one night.
But the reality for most prostitutes is far different.
Many come from broken homes, were homeless at some point, were abused as children and suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, says Mary Anne Layden, director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program in the Center for Cognitive Therapy at University of Pennsylvania. She says many are not making any money because of a drug habit and a pimp or madam who takes half their earnings.
“The idea of 'Pretty Woman' is a huge lie,” says Layden, referring to the hit movie about a man (Richard Gere) who hires a prostitute (Julia Roberts) and falls in love with her. “Most prostitutes spiral downward.”
Ashley Alexandra Dupre – the 22-year-old identified as “Kristen” in court documents accusing the former New York Governor of paying thousands for prostitutes' services – doesn't seem to be “Pretty Woman” either. Her MySpace page portrays her as a New Jersey native who left a broken home to pursue a music career in New York.
“I have been alone,” she wrote. “I have abused drugs. I have been broke and homeless. But, I survived, on my own.”
Prostitution takes many forms, from homeless teens who prostitute out of desperation to women and children who are trafficked from other countries and high-end escorts who drum up business online. This last group, with its seeming hint of glamour, has gotten the most media attention in the wake of the Spitzer scandal.
Former prostitute Norma Hotaling, who walked the streets and worked for an escort service, says it felt glamorous at first.
“I felt an incredible sense of power,” she said. “'Here's a way I can make money. I can work any hours that I want to work. I can call my own shots. I don't have to take the dates I don't want. It's like, 'I have my own business. Isn't this amazing?'”
But those feelings didn't last long. She was addicted to heroin; she was homeless at times; she was beaten and raped. She began to be horrified that her livelihood depended on sex with strangers on a regular basis.
“It makes it so appealing to think that it's an easy life, and it's not,” says Hotaling. “You don't find a whole lot of women speaking out about how glamorous it was.”
Melissa Farley, a research psychologist who has been studying prostitution for the last 14 years, estimates that 80 percent of prostitution is done indoors, including massage parlors, champagne rooms in strip clubs, health clubs and hotel rooms. She has interviewed 900 prostitutes in 10 countries. She says about 90 percent say they want to get out.
University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, of “Freakonomics” fame, recently studied street-level prostitution in Chicago, and estimated there were about 4,400 prostitutes active there in an average week. They made an average of about $25 an hour, a far cry from the thousands of dollars charged by the Emperor's Club VIP.
The Chicago prostitutes were also more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one, and used condoms only a quarter of the time, Levitt found.
On the other end of the spectrum, Sudhir Venkatesh, a Columbia sociologist who collaborated with Levitt, says it is not uncommon to find prostitutes charging $10,000 per session. Still, he says those women report getting abused twice a year. (Street prostitutes report three times that amount of abuse.)
Some current and former sex workers who push for legalizing prostitution say most of the data on the subject is flawed because it is based on interviews with street hookers who are arrested, in battered women's shelters, or enrolled in drug treatment programs.
Former sex worker Veronica Monet says she was working in the business world when she decided to become a high-end prostitute. She has never worked on the streets or for a madam. She made as much as $15,000 a night as an escort, in addition to her own private hotel suite, spa services, dinner and entertainment.
“It's professional dating,” says Monet, a sexologist and sex educator. “It's not complicated. People do this all the time for free. We have learned to charge for it.”
Robyn Few, also a former prostitute and co-founder of SWOP-USA (Sex Workers Outreach Project) says she has met thousands of sex workers, many of whom are middle-class women who run their business on the Internet and consider themselves entrepreneurs. She advises against street prostitution.
“I can promise you we're not all drug addicts,” she says. “We're not all abused. We're all human. We have desires, wants, needs. 'Kristen' has huge desires. She wants to be a singer. She found a way to work towards those goals.”
Many prostitutes believe their life is glamorous, says Martha L. Shockey-Eckles, assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Saint Louis University, whether they came from lower class or middle upper class or are using prostitution to make money while pursuing another career.
She has interviewed medical school students who said they were only prostituting to pay for school. But they abandoned those aspirations after becoming enthralled with the accouterments that came with the work – she says it's not uncommon for a high-end escort to make $3,500 to $4,000 a night.
So in essence those students say, “'You know what? I'm already successful,'” she says.
But that “success” can come at a price.
For every Veronica Monet, there are horrific stories that point to the ill effects of prostitution, says Layden. There are stories of prostitutes as young as 13, women being beaten and raped by the pimp, abused by the clients, contracting HIV, committing suicide because they don't see a way out.
“The story you're not hearing being told is the violence in the sex trade, the story of the degradation, the large amount of women who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder on par with returning veterans,” says Rachel Durschlag, founder and director of The Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE).
There is no bright future in prostitution, says Hotaling, founder of the SAGE Project (Standing Against Global Exploitation), which helps women leave and recover from sex work. Besides the physical and emotional effects, and the risk of jail time, women eventually find it hard to compete with younger and trafficked women. She says they are left penniless (most weren't investing) with no education, social life (most of their friends were in the industry) or life skills (many have never even had a bank account).
Dupre has not commented about her life as a prostitute, except to tell The New York Times she does not want to be thought of as a monster.
She has become a high-profile symbol, both as a victim – a young dropout with a drug problem – and as a woman who defies stereotypes. Madeleine Dash, a sex worker and co-founder of the Sex Workers Action New York, says “Kristen” proves that not all prostitutes are forced into this line of work out of desperation.
But Farley says prostitution is a dead-end. She says homicide is the most frequent cause of death for women in prostitution. Durschlag says prostitution impacts more than the prostitute and the client.
“When you glamorize prostitution, it doesn't just affect 'Kristen,'” she says. “But it affects all these other young vulnerable individuals because it becomes normal.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20080318-1108-fea-lifestyles-prostitutionrealities.html >>Read more
March 18, 2008, AP: The call girl in the Eliot Spitzer scandal appeared to be leading a glamorous life – staying in an upscale Manhattan high-rise, traveling to seduce powerful men in swanky hotel rooms, making more than $4,000 in one night.
But the reality for most prostitutes is far different.
Many come from broken homes, were homeless at some point, were abused as children and suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, says Mary Anne Layden, director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program in the Center for Cognitive Therapy at University of Pennsylvania. She says many are not making any money because of a drug habit and a pimp or madam who takes half their earnings.
“The idea of 'Pretty Woman' is a huge lie,” says Layden, referring to the hit movie about a man (Richard Gere) who hires a prostitute (Julia Roberts) and falls in love with her. “Most prostitutes spiral downward.”
Ashley Alexandra Dupre – the 22-year-old identified as “Kristen” in court documents accusing the former New York Governor of paying thousands for prostitutes' services – doesn't seem to be “Pretty Woman” either. Her MySpace page portrays her as a New Jersey native who left a broken home to pursue a music career in New York.
“I have been alone,” she wrote. “I have abused drugs. I have been broke and homeless. But, I survived, on my own.”
Prostitution takes many forms, from homeless teens who prostitute out of desperation to women and children who are trafficked from other countries and high-end escorts who drum up business online. This last group, with its seeming hint of glamour, has gotten the most media attention in the wake of the Spitzer scandal.
Former prostitute Norma Hotaling, who walked the streets and worked for an escort service, says it felt glamorous at first.
“I felt an incredible sense of power,” she said. “'Here's a way I can make money. I can work any hours that I want to work. I can call my own shots. I don't have to take the dates I don't want. It's like, 'I have my own business. Isn't this amazing?'”
But those feelings didn't last long. She was addicted to heroin; she was homeless at times; she was beaten and raped. She began to be horrified that her livelihood depended on sex with strangers on a regular basis.
“It makes it so appealing to think that it's an easy life, and it's not,” says Hotaling. “You don't find a whole lot of women speaking out about how glamorous it was.”
Melissa Farley, a research psychologist who has been studying prostitution for the last 14 years, estimates that 80 percent of prostitution is done indoors, including massage parlors, champagne rooms in strip clubs, health clubs and hotel rooms. She has interviewed 900 prostitutes in 10 countries. She says about 90 percent say they want to get out.
University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, of “Freakonomics” fame, recently studied street-level prostitution in Chicago, and estimated there were about 4,400 prostitutes active there in an average week. They made an average of about $25 an hour, a far cry from the thousands of dollars charged by the Emperor's Club VIP.
The Chicago prostitutes were also more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one, and used condoms only a quarter of the time, Levitt found.
On the other end of the spectrum, Sudhir Venkatesh, a Columbia sociologist who collaborated with Levitt, says it is not uncommon to find prostitutes charging $10,000 per session. Still, he says those women report getting abused twice a year. (Street prostitutes report three times that amount of abuse.)
Some current and former sex workers who push for legalizing prostitution say most of the data on the subject is flawed because it is based on interviews with street hookers who are arrested, in battered women's shelters, or enrolled in drug treatment programs.
Former sex worker Veronica Monet says she was working in the business world when she decided to become a high-end prostitute. She has never worked on the streets or for a madam. She made as much as $15,000 a night as an escort, in addition to her own private hotel suite, spa services, dinner and entertainment.
“It's professional dating,” says Monet, a sexologist and sex educator. “It's not complicated. People do this all the time for free. We have learned to charge for it.”
Robyn Few, also a former prostitute and co-founder of SWOP-USA (Sex Workers Outreach Project) says she has met thousands of sex workers, many of whom are middle-class women who run their business on the Internet and consider themselves entrepreneurs. She advises against street prostitution.
“I can promise you we're not all drug addicts,” she says. “We're not all abused. We're all human. We have desires, wants, needs. 'Kristen' has huge desires. She wants to be a singer. She found a way to work towards those goals.”
Many prostitutes believe their life is glamorous, says Martha L. Shockey-Eckles, assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Saint Louis University, whether they came from lower class or middle upper class or are using prostitution to make money while pursuing another career.
She has interviewed medical school students who said they were only prostituting to pay for school. But they abandoned those aspirations after becoming enthralled with the accouterments that came with the work – she says it's not uncommon for a high-end escort to make $3,500 to $4,000 a night.
So in essence those students say, “'You know what? I'm already successful,'” she says.
But that “success” can come at a price.
For every Veronica Monet, there are horrific stories that point to the ill effects of prostitution, says Layden. There are stories of prostitutes as young as 13, women being beaten and raped by the pimp, abused by the clients, contracting HIV, committing suicide because they don't see a way out.
“The story you're not hearing being told is the violence in the sex trade, the story of the degradation, the large amount of women who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder on par with returning veterans,” says Rachel Durschlag, founder and director of The Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE).
There is no bright future in prostitution, says Hotaling, founder of the SAGE Project (Standing Against Global Exploitation), which helps women leave and recover from sex work. Besides the physical and emotional effects, and the risk of jail time, women eventually find it hard to compete with younger and trafficked women. She says they are left penniless (most weren't investing) with no education, social life (most of their friends were in the industry) or life skills (many have never even had a bank account).
Dupre has not commented about her life as a prostitute, except to tell The New York Times she does not want to be thought of as a monster.
She has become a high-profile symbol, both as a victim – a young dropout with a drug problem – and as a woman who defies stereotypes. Madeleine Dash, a sex worker and co-founder of the Sex Workers Action New York, says “Kristen” proves that not all prostitutes are forced into this line of work out of desperation.
But Farley says prostitution is a dead-end. She says homicide is the most frequent cause of death for women in prostitution. Durschlag says prostitution impacts more than the prostitute and the client.
“When you glamorize prostitution, it doesn't just affect 'Kristen,'” she says. “But it affects all these other young vulnerable individuals because it becomes normal.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20080318-1108-fea-lifestyles-prostitutionrealities.html >>Read more
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