(WOMENSENEWS)—When I was 18 years old, I fell in love. I had met a man near the University of Oregon campus who seemed to love me as much as I loved him.
Even though I was a promising high school student, varsity athlete and on the honor role, I had a vulnerability. I found myself, between high school and college, pregnant, unwed and now suddenly trying to figure out my future. He seemed to have all the answers, promises and security. He hooked me in with ideals of white picket fences and a home where my child and I could thrive.
This is how countless girls and women are defrauded and forced into prostitution, and it’s the story of the vast majority of those whose bodies are bought and sold into prostitution. Many people envision human trafficking as kidnapped children in developing countries, but the reality of modern slavery exists among us in our very own communities.
By the time I escaped from nearly six years as a so-called high-paid “escort,” I was sold between traffickers, had my face broken in five different places, bore other unspeakable physical abuse and was arrested seven times. I was branded twice: my traffickers tattooed their names on my body to indicate ownership, which is a common practice. Post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma bonding became the invisible chains that kept me and my child in captivity.
The myths about prostitution are proliferating. What is inherently harmful is being passed off by Hollywood as a glamorous lifestyle of choice. It is dismaying to note that “The Girlfriend Experience,” the Starz TV series based on the Steven Soderberg film of the same name, has been renewed for a second season. If only the entertainment industry could tell the real story and maybe someday they will.
I was living in a town in Southern Oregon, not in a bustling metropolis. My “boyfriend” persuaded me to move with him to Las Vegas where, he said, he ran a music production business. When we arrived at his home, he had me leave my baby with his brother and took me out to a “night on the town.” He drove me instead to a dead end street where he started pushing and said, “This is how it works here, I need to get my money back.” Insinuating that it cost him to move me there. It took months of abuse, force, fraud and coercion to get me to join my “wife-in-laws” in getting dolled up and dispensed to the seemingly endless stream of buyers in such abundance in Las Vegas.
Readily Available
Prostitution is as readily available as food in that city. It’s commodified. Bellmen have traffickers on speed dial. A casino host will text a trafficker: “You have a whale down here at blackjack” (a buyer with a lot of money). Everyone gets a 20 percent cut. Limo and taxi drivers fuel the trade. It’s hiding in plain sight.
I was forced into degrading acts, often with men older than my grandfather. And it wasn’t only the traffickers who exploited me. The wealthy clientele who bought my body (and my list would make Ashley Madison blush) were no saints. All the while my trafficker could be downstairs in a parked car with my young daughter—for whom he was her only father figure—essentially telegraphing that her well-being, her very survival, was dependent on my doing as I was told.
In time, I was recruited by another trafficker, who negotiated to purchase me. This process, called “choosing up” (though of course the choice wasn’t mine), is essentially a negotiation between two traffickers. As I was leaving my first trafficker and being handed over to the second, he required me to strip naked (because all my clothes had been bought and provided by him) and walk into the ownership of another man. I can remember walking out of the home naked, him yelling “you leave with what you come with. Came with nothing, leave with nothing.” The reality of trying to run, naked, homeless and without child became a fleeting fantasy and yet fueled my calculated escape.
Throughout the nearly six years, my new traffickers and three wife-in-laws schooled me as to how I was to behave with a buyer. I learned from them to make myself act as sexy as possible for the man buying me, because it would make things go faster. That was my costume, and I was essentially an actor covering over my revulsion and appearing submissive, though there was supposed to be an understanding with the buyer about what would and wouldn’t be allowed. My trafficker instructed me that he wanted the buyer to fall in love with me, to “sign his will over” to me, that a simple purchase of an hour of sex acts weren’t enough—my job was to have buyers essentially fall in love with me, thus assuring lucrative repeat business and top dollar and eliminating arrest.
From an initial nightly quota of $1,500 with the man who forced me into prostitution, I was now required to work from dusk to dawn. And with this new trafficker, it was a given that I would be bringing in larger amounts of cash based on his level of experience in this criminal enterprise. But this wasn’t something I was a willing participant in, I had four attempted escapes; once even when he flew to my home in Oregon to find me. I was afraid, beaten and traumatized having to nightly hand over every dollar or get strip searched for any money put aside. As with the overwhelming majority in prostitution, I had to turn it all over to my trafficker. I lived in a constant state of fear.
Trafficker, Not Pimp
I use the word “trafficker” because “pimp” has come to connote almost a cartoon character and is something people casually (tragically) joke about. Halloween costumes now celebrate pimps and “pimp” has become a verb as part of the normalization of the criminal. The FBI defines trafficking as anything involving “force, fraud or coercion.” So pimps are indeed traffickers, and the very people that are posting the majority of the online ads that only appear to be posted by (mostly) girls and young women.
Those who bought me were usually in denial. They wanted to believe I was working my way through school and that I was, in fact, that independent “happy hooker” portrayed most iconically by Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.” (By the way, it’s been reported that the film was written as a dark drama before being turned into a rom-com.) They’d say things like, “you’re putting yourself through college, right?” As if they were grasping at any last justification of their own conscience. And now, thanks to director Soderberg, their fantasy is being fueled with lies.
The attempts to glamorize and legitimize prostitution are deeply discouraging. But there’s hope. Prostitution is illegal in the U.S. except for a few places. And around the nation, law enforcement is becoming wise to the fact that those who are sold are not criminals, but victims. They know how difficult it is to prosecute traffickers, whose vast wealth buys them the best legal teams and whose “evidence” rarely sits in an evidence locker. Law enforcement are learning that prosecuting the buyers is a brilliant tactic. In cities across the nation, law enforcement is starting to dish out harsher sentences to buyers, who have indicated to researchers that they would stop buying if they knew they were truly at risk for arrest. Law enforcement is starting to mobilize.
The day of reckoning is on the way. It will be here sooner if the truth about prostitution were known. If men and women would stand up and start changing the way our culture glamorizes and normalizes “prostitution.” We all can do something.
Prohibition is the water of Mafia fish and it is better to avoid it where it is possible, as the paying sex among adult and consentient people.
But how can you know which people are consenting and which are not? The author of this article was prostituted in a state where prostitution was legal, yet she was still being trafficked, the people who bought access to her neither knew nor cared. Total prohibition won’t work, decriminalize the prostitute and criminalize the people who buy and sell them.
A lot of people, I see it on the Italian roads, where prostitutes have a smartphone, a car, they are absent during the periods of Christmas and Easter and the Italian women are amost never trafficket everywhere! By this one I can say that the most of Sex Workers are consensual workers. Moreover, banning only paying sex is enough to put the relative activity underground, as the total prohibition. It is logical to understand it and only people suffering of whorephobia cannot see it!
You sound like a very nasty person – obviously you’re a man and obviously you have never had to be a prostitute
I know that the consentient prostitutes are getting rich, as mother and daughter who were awareness prostitutes and they were crashing their big cars continuously, till the Italian Financial Police have got them sanctioned to not pay taxes, as now they must do in Italy (Article 36 paragraf 34bis, Law 248/2006, as the Italian High Court has told many times)!
Please, do not try to get the reality mystified!
And that represents all the women and children being sex trafficked all around the globe? You are the one who is mystified. I don’t give a shit about Italian financial police. Any john who uses a woman for sex is a rapist! There’s nothing mystical about that. How many johns pay taxes? How many traffickers pay taxes? And you want to point to one woman and her daughter who are supposedly getting rich and say that it’s prostitutes that are the problem? Why not be part of the solution instead of putting out garbage that takes away from problem solving? Men who pay to have sex with women and children – that’s the problem – 100% of the time.
What is happening in Italy is more or less the same all over the World. I am speaking about prostitution among adult people.
He cannot be a rapist, if there is a consensual action and this one is so much clear!
It is impossible that mother and daughter I told before had problems, because, crashing continuously their cars, it is easy to understand they were not problems, but they staid very good! Only a stupid person, or suffering of whorphobia, can think in a different way. As you have seen, I have nothing to mystifie.
I’ve never heard of whorphobia – I guess I’m stupid. Technically giving a person money to have sex with them when they would rather not have sex with you but just need or want the money – that’s using another person’s body for your own sexual selfishness – that’s violence and that’s rape to me. And I see you have nothing to say about the children – there are a lot of children used by adults as rape victims and a lot of adults were forced into that life by people like you when they were children. I realize you think that whoever does not agree with you is stupid – I’ll let that speak for itself.
As I told before, cannot be present a rape if there is a consensual act, even there is only exchange of money. In fact, prostitution is sex by low cost! This is not only my thinking but a logical way! Moreover, I am speaking only for adult people and not about children. I told this one before, but you don’t want to read this one!
I understand english is not your native language but just because you say something that doesn’t make it true. You have to think about these things deeply, as if you’re a woman, rather than the man in charge. I understand it “seems” like consent but just know that when you pay a woman money to put up with having “sex” with you – she does not enjoy it, she doesn’t like you and in my books that’s rape – just because you throw some money at her, doesn’t make it consensual. Using women as your garbage can, that’s what it is to me – no man with any self-respect or respect for women would consider using a female human being to dump their sperm into. I know you’re not speaking about children. But the reality is there are children being raped for money by men every day sir! EVERY DAY! EVERY HOUR, EVERY MINUTE on EVERY CONTINENT. And they grow up in slavery to men like you and become adults with whom you believe are having consensual sex – even though most of them have to hand their earnings over to traffickers (like you?)
It is fake! They can get enjoy with money. So every marriage of convenience could be a rape. This one cannot be acceptable for the logical ways, especially if the sex seller is getting money. The real salvers are people exploiting forced prostitutes and not relative customers, thinking to stay with a consensual Sex Worker. It is so clear and easly to understand. Moreover, when people get the adult age, they are and they must, be free to have sexual free choice. This one is a rightness, as
homosexuality and transexuality.
Just because you said it’s right, does not make it right! Having consensual sex is not the same as paying for it. I don’t know what you are referring to (or even why) marriage of convenience. You probably think it’s also impossible to rape your own wife – because she is, after all, your property. You are no different than most men in the world. If you think for a second that any prostitute you have sex with likes you you are sorely mistaken – it’s acting for money – it’s allowing someone to deposit their garbage in you for money. Subhuman men pay for sex. Most prostitutes are also drug addicts and so they are submissive to 2 masters, the rapist and the drug pusher. All “sex workers” are exploited women. You can reason it out any way you want and I know there are women who say they enjoy sex “work” and that they are happy doing it but that is not the norm. Please do your spirit a service and realize that 99% of women who are in the sex “business” feel like they have no other choice and they hate you – believe me they hate you so much and think you are subhuman garbage – all the while making you think they like you – it’s a living. But the women and children I am talking about the most are the trafficked ones. Men will always find a way to steal a prostitutes money too – pimps/traffickers – as Rebecca says – they’re the same thing
It is not true. I have just told that if there is a consensual way, cannot be present a rape. There is no worst blind person who does not want to see (read). The most of prostitutes are not forced, I have told with real conditon ways, not even drugged. It is possible to see this one! I have forgot to say I met a lot of women, who have left from prostitution several times to return permanently to prostitution. As you see, it is easy to say you are speaking about mystifying conditions!
Well, obviously you’re an expert – I agree there is none so blind as he who will not see. I hope if you eventually awaken that it’s not too rude an awakening. Most women in prostitution have already been raped and used and feel that they are not worth anything. Since you are not a woman and don’t really care to know the truth about women’s lives and feel like it’s okay to dump your sperm like garbage into women who feel they have no choice but to sell their sacred bodies to you, there’s no way to convince you otherwise. A prostitute is not going to tell a john the truth – ever – Never! So you enjoy your superior knowledge of the lives of women – and telling other women that they don’t know what they’re talking about because you know better. That’s what rapists/johns do. Is it a coincidence that we call you johns and we also call toilets johns?
Yes I am an expert, because I am into the Sex Workers World for about 25 years and I can say you are telling fake things, which are typical of people suffering of whorephobia. It is not true that the most of prostitute had a rape. Even if they want to have a consensual sex, even paying sex, it is a right way choice, which must be respected!
A man who pay for sex, he does not want to pay so much with other kind of sex. This is the reason bywhich normal women suffer the existence of Sex Worker. They are not toilets people, but intelligent people and real people support Sex Workers’ and relative customers rightness.
They have not told me the truth, but I have seen they were not in a poor condition, returning to prostitution and crashing their cars continuously.
I have alredy told this one. Unfortunately, there is someone here who does not wanto to read!
No, I just don’t believe you and I’m not saying that the women are the toilets, it’s the johns – they are the subhuman rapists. A man in the sex worker world? So you are a trafficker or just a rapist? Enjoy – don’t expect respect though. For the women – I respect them all but the johns, the traffickers, the rapists – no, no respect from me ever. I don’t know why you are continually going on about crashing cars – what the hell does that have to do with anything? Good day John, Mr. “I know everything,” Mr. typical rapist man! You are such a stereotype.
In fact I told that john cannot be toilet but intelligent people, who cannto be rapist if they buy sex from consensual prostitutes. I cannot see this one!
I am a customer’s prostitute and I am defending my social caste. It easy to understand that who gets so much money, crashing cars and returning definitively to Sex Work cannot be a raped person. Only people suffering whorephobia cannot understand it and they are trying to say wrong motivation against it as you are doing, hoping someone could believe in them!
Whorephobia – you seem to love that word that you made up! Johns are rapists and I do not fear or hate prostitutes. I hate johns who are rapists. I still don’t understand your constant references to crashing cars. I don’t give a shit whether you believe me or not – I don’t care at all what you think. I’m just standing up for women and children who are entrapped and enslaved in prostitution. You will never convince me that you have a heart. I don’t know what customer’s prostitute means – are you saying you are a prostitute? Are you a man? Cops rape prostitutes all the time. Johns rape prostitutes too and try not to pay them and kill them also. Prostitutes are a vulnerable population.
I am a customers’ prostitute (john) and I am against slavery and child prostitution. If a john pays for sex with a consensual and adult Sex Worker cannot be a rapist. It is logical to understand it. I see you cannot read this one! Because I am repeating it so many times!
Whorephobia means phobia about prostitution among adult and consentient people.
My phobia is for johns who don’t know the difference between a real relationship with an adult and paying to be able to rape women. You can repeat 5 million times that it is consensual and I know that is just what you tell yourself to make yourself feel better. Why can’t you have a real relationship with love and respect? What’s wrong with you? Prostitutes are vulnerable to ignorant raping johns like you – free? Do you really think that if you just gave these women money and give them the choice whether or not to be raped by you that they would choose to be manhandled by you? Wake up John! You’re living in a world of imagination and you don’t care about these women – you don’t even understand that you are raping them and do not have the emotional intelligence or the heart to have a real relationship apparently? Never heard of cops raping prostitutes? Never heard of johns raping a woman and then refusing to pay? Trust me, it happens every day.
It is fake. It is logica that the consensual giving sex cannot be the rape. Who pays for sex is not condemned for rape.
Paying sex is sex by low cost and only real love cannot be bought. This one is the riality. Wake up you, that you are blinded by whorephobia and you are living only with illusions, carried out by moralist and pimps, who want prohibition of prostitution!
I’m sorry, it’s is you who are a hater of so-called whores – I don’t even call these women that because I care about them. You are a rapist, plain and simple. You are unable to open your heart to a real relationship and are selfish enough to use women for your sexual gratification. You know deep down that they despise you – unless you’re that sick that you can’t see it when you’re alone. Prostitutes hate johns – trust me. I want prohibition of johns and I want prostitutes to be offered healthy lives where they choose who they want to have sex with and are cared for and treated like human beings instead of sperm receptacles. It is difficult for me to understand that you think you are better than a subhuman, that’s for sure. I don’t even know what you mean by sex by low cost. Does that mean you don’t have to love or care for the piece of meat you deposit your scummy sperm into? ‘Cause that’s what it sounds like to me. Anyway, you are the one who seems to be delusional. I have no interest in carrying on this sick “conversation” so I wish you well with your inability to love and using women as toilets. I hope you sleep well at night. If you answer this one I will just delete it. I hope someday you can learn to respect yourself enough to realize that women are human beings and not just your personal toilet.
I have told you that only real love cannot be bought. We cannot make a confusion between it and sex. Every consensual sex cannot be rape. The contray is mystification. I write this one not for you, but for others reading this discussion.
I can say that a fake prostitute will not be a good prostitute and so she/he will loose her/his john. So it is so easy that real prostitutes loves their job and so their good customers!
You’re the only one here calling these women whores, you disgusting POS.
I have told whorephobia and not whores
Exchange of money is coercion, coercive rape is still rape, predator.
Totaly wrong if there is consensual and relative getting money. Stop with this stupid and illogical, not to say femminist, mystification!
Payment=coercion.
It is fake, because Sex Worker and all other workers, wants to be paid. Stop with stupid mystification please.
Oh they have cellphones, well never mind then. You’re the only one suffering from hatred of women, prick.
If I was a slaver, I would not give them on the road a smartphone, even a car, otherwise, they could escape easly!
Did you read the article? She wasn’t consenting at all. She was forced, coerced and threatened at every turn. Men like you are predators.
Yes I read it, but I am speaking about consensual prostitution. I am against forced prostitution and I have told that the wrongest way to fight it is the prohibition of prostitution, even only for the offering or buying, because on this ways it would go underground (in a hidden places and hidden condition) and so criminals could lead it easier. So it is better to avoid it where it is possible, at least when it is carried out by aduld and consentient people, not for other conditions.
A man who pay for sex, he does not want to pay so much with other kind of love
Thank you for a wonderful article Rebecca – thank God you’re not only okay but you’re thriving. I hope you and your daughter are still very close and healing. I’m buoyed by you saying that the changes are coming – I truly hope so. Bless you <3
A heartbreaking story, an inconvenient truth. Thank you for your powerful honesty, Rebecca. I wish you the best.
I agree, Rebecca. There’s no glamour in prostitution. Just the same-old, same-old patriarchy — but often a lot more dangerous for the woman in many ways.
And of course the customers don’t want to give up their privilege. That’s why they argue argue argue argue argue when any woman tells the truth.
Thank you for your article. May your life be filled with peace and love.
As I told before, it is a mystifical article.
How men can treat women like this is disturbing and disgusting. Death penalty for traffickers works for me.
Speaking the truth and exposing the truth will get rid of this, horrendous crime against humanity. There are boys who are sold into this as well. I am so glad that you got out, the trauma will be with you for years. There is a very good Book and Work Book, called the Wounded Heart (Sexual Abuse). I bought it, had them on the shelf for about 5 years, tried reading the book and it was as I found out later, not suppose to be read cover to cover, but used with the Work Book. I found a group that was actually holding this course, over a 14 week period. We met, 12 of us, with 6 course leaders, and we broke into groups of 4… we were the only group that started and ended with the same number. It was a growing, learning experience. I encourage anyone who needs this to get the books, and seek out a group or make a group who is willing to do this. You must together be confiding and promise not to harm yourself while doing it, and promise to be confidential. It is an exercise in a lot of things, trust being one of them. We had 2 leaders with each group of 4, and that was a good thing, encase someone of them could not be there for what ever reason. I also found that really good Art Therapy is quite useful and helpful, for repressed Memory syndrome and PTSD. All the best to you sending love your way.
Francostars, I’m sharing this for you. Hopefully you’ll learn something by reading this article.
http://kuow.org/post/how-end-prostitution-educate-middle-school-boys
prostitution is a matter for consenting adults, and people like escort Arezzo sul sito http://www.torchemada.net/annunci-escort-arezzo-26/ and I do not think that they would accept the abuse of power by evil-intentioned people.