Sex for Hire: Real Stories of Prostitution in America
ABC News' Two-Year Examination of Women Working in the
Commercial Sex Industry
By ELIZABETH JOSEPH
March 21, 2008—
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=4495721&page=1
For more than a week, Americans have been fascinated
by the revelation that
former New York Gov. Eliot
Spitzer was a client of a high-end escort service
called "The Emperors Club."
"The last time I saw him, he had asked me to write
about prostitution and his work on the field," said
The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof. "It's just such
an astonishing act of bravado and chutzpah considering
what we know of him now."
What we know now is not just a tale of one man's
political fall from grace, but one that represents the
lives of thousands of women collecting money in return
for sex in the U.S. every day.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN ABOUT ORGANIZATIONS WORKING TO
HELP WOMEN ESCAPE THE SEX TRADE.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=4495862&page=1
Long before the Spitzer scandal broke, ABC News had
been investigating the multifaceted world of sex for
hire, from women selling themselves to support a drug
habit to closed-door negotiations in Nevada's
world-famous Bunny Ranch, one of the nation's few
legal brothels.
For more than two years, ABC News' Diane Sawyer and
her producers met with prostitutes as they walked the
streets, spoke with the johns that pay and learned
firsthand
what keeps this underground culture hidden
from view and yet completely available to those who
seek it.
'You Can't Be Nice'
Jessi, a platinum-blond 22-year-old, walks the streets
in Reno City, Nev., most days and nights. She grew up
on an organic farm in California and dreamed of
becoming a firefighter but said her home life was
unstable and caused her to leave. She said her
happiest times were when she joined the Navy at 17,
and the saddest times began when she was later
diagnosed with epilepsy and discharged. Soon Jessi was
homeless and began using drugs. "I was shooting up 50
times a day," she said. "Toward the end, I was using
methamphetamines."
It was her drug dealer who suggested she prostitute
herself to make money.
"With the females, most of them don't have residence
here," said Sgt. Dave Evans of the Reno Street
Enforcement Team. "They're homeless, and they're
balancing from place to place. Very few of them have
valid IDs. They don't have jobs, so they don't qualify
for citations, so they go to jail."
"Most girls here make an average of $20 -- $20 for
half and half, which is both: oral and physical sex,"
Jessi said. "You can't be soft, you can't be nice, you
can't be sweet. You have to treat everyone like
they're going to f**k you over. Because they are."
Growing tired of working the streets, Jessi explored
expanding her business to cyberspace.
Today, women advertise themselves in the online
red-light district under various aliases.
"You could go to Craigslist, you could open your
yellow pages, you could see pages and pages of ads,
escort agencies and massage parlors," explained
Rachel
Lloyd, executive director of Girls' Educational
Mentoring Services of New York City, a group that
specializes in rescuing underage girls who enter the
sex world.
Hiding in plain sight are hundreds of thousands of
individuals both seeking and selling sex. "The nice
thing about this site is the women in the pictures are
all wearing suits," Jessi said. "And so when you first
get to it, you can't really tell what kind of site it
is. Most of my clientele that I've met are married,
and they don't want a little girl in that little red
mini dress and sky-high heels to walk up to them in a
bar if that's where they're meeting."
Prostitution is a two-person event, but men and women
are perceived and prosecuted very differently.
"The johns do have a stake in the society. There is
some risk if you're a policeman or if you're a
prosecutor that if you start arresting johns, that one
of them will be your neighbor, your boss, whatever
else," explained Kristof. "It's much simpler just to
arrest the young women."
Referring to the Spitzer situation, Kristof said, "I'm
just afraid that people are going to mistake that for
typical prostitution in the U.S., and you know, that
is a sliver of it,
but for an awful lot of young women
and girls -- and girls meaning, you know, teenage
girls, young girls -- it is not a choice, it's a
nightmare."
Happily Ever After at the Bunny Ranch?
But what happens when prostitution is legal? What
about the women who work in the
30 legal brothels of
Nevada?
All sorts of people, from businessmen to cowboys, even
some women, visit the Moonlight Bunny Ranch in Carson
City, Nev., for an opportunity to hire one of the
women sex workers.
Christina, who ended up at the ranch after 37 foster
homes and was trying to put herself through nursing
school, said working at the legal brothel seemed like
a dream come true.
"[Owner Dennis Hoff] told me that I could make a good
living out here and that I'd be happy. I'd never go
without a roof over my head. I'd never go hungry, I'd
never go without money."
Another one of the prostitutes, a former nurse, said,
"In here I can work four, five, six hours if I wanted
to and make as much money in one day that I can in two
weeks nursing."
Men spend large amounts of money at the ranch for not
only sex but for what is commonly referred to as the
GFE: The Girlfriend Experience. "He wants you to be
his girlfriend for however long he booked you for,"
one prostitute explained. "Whether that's 10 minutes
or 10 hours, kissing, holding hands, cuddling."
Hoff tells his employees to "fulfill those fantasies.
Be the fantasy experience you know and create them.
You'll be rewarded handsomely, have six figures and
live happily ever after."
"My rate is
$2,000 an hour for everything, $1,000 for
half an hour, $500 for 15 minutes," another employee
claimed.
Though licensed sex workers are legally allowed to
charge for their services in Nevada, the drug culture
still integrates itself into the lives of some women
there.
According to a Bunny Ranch prostitute named Danielle,
"A lot of the girls here do drugs. Whether it's
illegal drugs on the street, coke and ecstasy kind of
stuff, or whether its prescription drugs, three or
four
Xanax to get through the day, most of them are on
something."
Dependence on Pimps
There are about
800 women working in legal brothels in
Nevada. However, the majority of prostitutes in
America are the tens of thousands working in fear of
and dependency on the men who make the money -- the
pimps.
"Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the girls we work
with have been under, or are under, the control of a
pimp at some point," said GEM's Lloyd. "If we're
talking about girls or young women who have been, you
know, systematically abused, who have previous trauma,
who maybe have run away from home and are currently in
a really vulnerable situation, and this adult man who
comes onto them, and promises them the world, that can
be very intoxicating."
"It's like a cult where they brainwash you," said one
woman who escaped the world of prostitution. "In the
beginning, it's as if they're training you like a dog,
but when I wanted something, I got it. If I wanted a
car, I got it. If I wanted a fur coat, I got it. If I
wanted to go shopping, I got it."
Kristof explains that for law enforcement, the
difficulty in prosecuting pimps begins with the
victim's reluctance to help. "You would have to show
force, fraud and coercion, and the argument is that
if
the pimp is essentially a financial manager to a young
woman, then that is not so serious a crime, while if
he's forcing the girl to sell herself, that is.
The
problem is that to prove force, fraud and coercion,
you pretty much have to get this young woman to
testify against her pimp. That means her life will be
in jeopardy, [the lives] of her family will be in
jeopardy, and also there really is often an emotional
bond in a very weird way between her and that pimp."
An
emotional bond that another young former prostitute
formerly known as Caramel knows all too well. "I
thought I was so in love," she said. "You've got
somebody there to take care of you, take care of your
money."
[Daß diese informellen Subkulturmechanismen eine Folge
des Prostitutionsverbotes sind wird nicht diskutiert.]
'Anything Can Happen'
Street prostitutes are obviously the most vulnerable.
Jessica, another prostitute who works the streets
outside Philadelphia said, "The Friday after
Thanksgiving I got robbed at gunpoint, beat in the
head with a gun [and] I've been stabbed --
127 stitches."
"Every time you get into a car you know anything can
happen. You can get raped, you can get killed, you
have all different types of people out here,"
explained a prostitute named Audrey.
Be it glamorized prostitution with high-end escorts,
poverty stricken street hookers or legal working women
in the sex trade, these women all [? unbewiesen] share some things in
common. Sexual abuse at a young age, broken homes and
addictions to drugs and alcohol all lead women to
pursue lives that aid them in getting money any way
they can.
During her investigation into the lives of
prostitutes, Diane Sawyer asked Skylar, a college
graduate turned street prostitute what it would take
for her to change her life.
"I don't know," Skylar said. "Maybe watching this when
it airs." [gute Selbstvermarktung]
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