Kari Lydersen: “Turning a Corner:” Changing Attitudes, Confronting Realities of Prostitution
Chicago
Lucretia Clay was sold to a Chicago pimp by her mother, a prostitute herself, before she even turned 18.
At first the life seemed glamorous, traveling from town to town and being showered with furs, jewelry and attention.
But the novelty quickly wore off, and she found herself in a living hell, survivable only with the aid of drugs and alcohol.
Eventually, Clay managed to leave prostitution, and now she helps others do the same thing.
Recently, she returned to some of the locations where she had worked the streets for more than two decades, for a documentary by and about former prostitutes in Chicago exploring their own experiences and the exploitation in the industry.
“It’s hard to come back and look at where your life could have ended,” said Clay, fighting back tears, in the documentary, “Turning a Corner.” “I don’t believe I spent 26 years of my life out here turning dates, buying someone else’s cars and jewelry who wasn’t doing shit for it.”
“Turning a Corner” was produced through workshops by the Chicago media activism group Beyondmedia Education.
“The experience was healing for almost everybody in the workshop,” said Beyondmedia executive director Salome Chasnoff, producer of the documentary. “The first day when we sat around the table, there were women who couldn’t stop talking because they had never been in a room where they could just speak their truth.”
In the documentary, Clay describes how the pimp down the street in a car who was supposed to be watching her back didn’t do a thing all the times she was kidnapped and raped. “He was still just sitting in that car,” she says.
Advocacy efforts in Chicago and around the country have tried to raise awareness and change laws and attitudes on a number of levels in regards to prostitution and other sex work.
A major focus is often addressing the inequity in how sex workers – primarily women – are treated by law enforcement, the general public and the economics of the industry itself. In many cities there are efforts underway to increase penalties on johns, who normally get off relatively easily compared to sex workers. In Chicago, when johns are prosecuted at all, they usually get municipal charges involving about $1,500 in fines, but don’t face jail time or criminal records. When johns abuse prostitutes, even in the minority of cases when sex workers go to police, they are not often held accountable.
Parallel to campaigns to change the inequity of the criminal justice approach are efforts to decriminalize and/or legalize sex work as a whole.
“Women in prostitution aren’t given any kind of protection because the assumption is that they’re committing crimes, so even when crimes are committed against them – violence, rape, you name it – nothing’s done,” said Chasnoff. “The attitude is you deserve it.”
Brenda Myers-Powell, a former Chicago sex worker who now does advocacy with Beyondmedia, the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and other groups, said that after she was stabbed and shot five times, she was incarcerated while police made little effort to find her attacker. In “Turning a Corner,” a former prostitute describes being ignored by police after she was attacked by a serial killer who had been targeting prostitutes in the city’s impoverished Englewood neighborhood.
While johns often abuse sex workers and get off scot-free, in many cases pimps play an even more insidious role. Not only do they often physically, sexually and emotionally abuse women (or men) working for them. As Clay describes, they also profit handsomely off of their labor and suffering. During meetings over the past few years of a Chicago group called the Prostitution Alternatives Round Table (PART), former and current sex workers described how they were lured or coerced into the trade by pimps; how they were forced to work long hours against their will; and how things like racism and ageism affected wages, just like in the “legitimate” workplace.
Homer King, a former pimp in Chicago who now speaks out against the trade, says it is standard practice for pimps to keep all of a woman’s earnings, doling gifts or spending money out to her as they see fit, creating an extremely paternalistic relationship that can be very difficult for a woman to get out of.
“I’d say ‘Ladies, stack up,’ and they’d give me the money, or if they came home when I was out gambling or something, they’d leave the money on their dresser and I’d go through and clean out the traps,” King said. He said he would beat a woman who showed up wearing clothes he hadn’t bought for her, because she wasn’t supposed to have any money of her own. “Just enough to make a phone call,” he said.
Largely because of the efforts of PART and sex workers and their advocates, Illinois is on the verge of passing a bill which would enable lawsuits against those who recruit people into prostitution, force them to stay in prostitution or profit off prostitution. The Predator Accountability Act, which is similar to bills already passed in Florida and Minnesota, will enable sex workers to sue their pimps for their revenue and damages. It passed the state legislature this year, after being introduced and killed last year. Now it is just awaiting the governor’s signature, which is expected. Though the bill would not result in criminal charges, it would allow sex workers or their advocates to sue people who exploit them; something which is difficult to do otherwise since the sex workers themselves are technically committing a crime.
According to the state legislature’s website, the bill “creates a cause of action against a person who: coerced an individual into prostitution; coerced an individual to remain in prostitution; used coercion to collect or receive any of an individual's earnings derived from prostitution; or advertised or published advertisements for purposes of recruitment into prostitution.”
The Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Abuse notes that the bill helps fulfill a 1949 United Nations Convention stating that prostitution and trafficking “are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person.” It puts a local context to the global fight against sex trafficking, which has gained increasing international attention and governmental support in recent years. If people who traffic women across borders for profit are considered criminals, the thinking goes, shouldn’t pimps who exploit and repress women within the U.S., often taking them from location to location against their will, get the same treatment?
The Predator Accountability Act and the movement to hold johns and pimps accountable is just one piece of the puzzle. Myers-Powell and Chasnoff said the underlying theme of their work is simply to get the general public and legislators to see sex workers as human beings deserving of respect, dignity and understanding, and the same labor and human rights as anyone else. That includes protecting the rights of women (and men) in the sex industry, as well as providing the support and tools for those trying to leave the trade.
“Prostitution seems to be a nexus of a number of intersecting human rights issues, from domestic violence to health to criminalization to labor rights,” said Chasnoff. “Women in prostitution are on the lowest rung of the hierarchy in this society; the object of so many kinds of discrimination.”
“We want to show that this is a woman who once was a little girl, she was a child, she went to school, she played in a yard somewhere before these things started happening to her,” said Myers-Powell, who herself knew she would be a prostitute from a young age since men were already “taking my panties off.” “Was she someone’s mother or sister? Was there anyone praying for her when she was walking down that dark alley? Of course there was. We want to show how she got there, what happened to her when she was there; and once she got out what kind of barriers she faces.”
Chasnoff said several groups nationally, including “Kim’s Project” connected with the organization Fenix House in Boston, are forming connections with the Beyondmedia workshop for future collaboration. This is part of a relatively new movement for sex workers to tell their own stories, countering mainstream media that usually glamorizes, tokenizes or misrepresents sex work.
Myers-Powell said it’s important the movement be led by people like her who are themselves participants in or survivors of the sex industry.
“You have to go to the mountain, baby,” she said. “I hear people bring out all the statistics. But if you’ve never sat on the corner and gotten in a trick’s car, you don’t know anything about prostitution. If you’ve never met a stranger and propositioned him and went in a room alone with him, you don’t know what prostitution is. To have strangers jump on top of you, people you don’t even know…experts can get up and try to give me all the information they want, but they can’t tell me shit.”
For more information on “Turning a Corner,” visit www.beyondmedia.org.
*
Kari Lydersen is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, In These Times, LiP Magazine, Clamor, and The New Standard.
Lucretia Clay was sold to a Chicago pimp by her mother, a prostitute herself, before she even turned 18.
At first the life seemed glamorous, traveling from town to town and being showered with furs, jewelry and attention.
But the novelty quickly wore off, and she found herself in a living hell, survivable only with the aid of drugs and alcohol.
Eventually, Clay managed to leave prostitution, and now she helps others do the same thing.
Recently, she returned to some of the locations where she had worked the streets for more than two decades, for a documentary by and about former prostitutes in Chicago exploring their own experiences and the exploitation in the industry.
“It’s hard to come back and look at where your life could have ended,” said Clay, fighting back tears, in the documentary, “Turning a Corner.” “I don’t believe I spent 26 years of my life out here turning dates, buying someone else’s cars and jewelry who wasn’t doing shit for it.”
“Turning a Corner” was produced through workshops by the Chicago media activism group Beyondmedia Education.
“The experience was healing for almost everybody in the workshop,” said Beyondmedia executive director Salome Chasnoff, producer of the documentary. “The first day when we sat around the table, there were women who couldn’t stop talking because they had never been in a room where they could just speak their truth.”
In the documentary, Clay describes how the pimp down the street in a car who was supposed to be watching her back didn’t do a thing all the times she was kidnapped and raped. “He was still just sitting in that car,” she says.
Advocacy efforts in Chicago and around the country have tried to raise awareness and change laws and attitudes on a number of levels in regards to prostitution and other sex work.
A major focus is often addressing the inequity in how sex workers – primarily women – are treated by law enforcement, the general public and the economics of the industry itself. In many cities there are efforts underway to increase penalties on johns, who normally get off relatively easily compared to sex workers. In Chicago, when johns are prosecuted at all, they usually get municipal charges involving about $1,500 in fines, but don’t face jail time or criminal records. When johns abuse prostitutes, even in the minority of cases when sex workers go to police, they are not often held accountable.
Parallel to campaigns to change the inequity of the criminal justice approach are efforts to decriminalize and/or legalize sex work as a whole.
“Women in prostitution aren’t given any kind of protection because the assumption is that they’re committing crimes, so even when crimes are committed against them – violence, rape, you name it – nothing’s done,” said Chasnoff. “The attitude is you deserve it.”
Brenda Myers-Powell, a former Chicago sex worker who now does advocacy with Beyondmedia, the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and other groups, said that after she was stabbed and shot five times, she was incarcerated while police made little effort to find her attacker. In “Turning a Corner,” a former prostitute describes being ignored by police after she was attacked by a serial killer who had been targeting prostitutes in the city’s impoverished Englewood neighborhood.
While johns often abuse sex workers and get off scot-free, in many cases pimps play an even more insidious role. Not only do they often physically, sexually and emotionally abuse women (or men) working for them. As Clay describes, they also profit handsomely off of their labor and suffering. During meetings over the past few years of a Chicago group called the Prostitution Alternatives Round Table (PART), former and current sex workers described how they were lured or coerced into the trade by pimps; how they were forced to work long hours against their will; and how things like racism and ageism affected wages, just like in the “legitimate” workplace.
Homer King, a former pimp in Chicago who now speaks out against the trade, says it is standard practice for pimps to keep all of a woman’s earnings, doling gifts or spending money out to her as they see fit, creating an extremely paternalistic relationship that can be very difficult for a woman to get out of.
“I’d say ‘Ladies, stack up,’ and they’d give me the money, or if they came home when I was out gambling or something, they’d leave the money on their dresser and I’d go through and clean out the traps,” King said. He said he would beat a woman who showed up wearing clothes he hadn’t bought for her, because she wasn’t supposed to have any money of her own. “Just enough to make a phone call,” he said.
Largely because of the efforts of PART and sex workers and their advocates, Illinois is on the verge of passing a bill which would enable lawsuits against those who recruit people into prostitution, force them to stay in prostitution or profit off prostitution. The Predator Accountability Act, which is similar to bills already passed in Florida and Minnesota, will enable sex workers to sue their pimps for their revenue and damages. It passed the state legislature this year, after being introduced and killed last year. Now it is just awaiting the governor’s signature, which is expected. Though the bill would not result in criminal charges, it would allow sex workers or their advocates to sue people who exploit them; something which is difficult to do otherwise since the sex workers themselves are technically committing a crime.
According to the state legislature’s website, the bill “creates a cause of action against a person who: coerced an individual into prostitution; coerced an individual to remain in prostitution; used coercion to collect or receive any of an individual's earnings derived from prostitution; or advertised or published advertisements for purposes of recruitment into prostitution.”
The Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Abuse notes that the bill helps fulfill a 1949 United Nations Convention stating that prostitution and trafficking “are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person.” It puts a local context to the global fight against sex trafficking, which has gained increasing international attention and governmental support in recent years. If people who traffic women across borders for profit are considered criminals, the thinking goes, shouldn’t pimps who exploit and repress women within the U.S., often taking them from location to location against their will, get the same treatment?
The Predator Accountability Act and the movement to hold johns and pimps accountable is just one piece of the puzzle. Myers-Powell and Chasnoff said the underlying theme of their work is simply to get the general public and legislators to see sex workers as human beings deserving of respect, dignity and understanding, and the same labor and human rights as anyone else. That includes protecting the rights of women (and men) in the sex industry, as well as providing the support and tools for those trying to leave the trade.
“Prostitution seems to be a nexus of a number of intersecting human rights issues, from domestic violence to health to criminalization to labor rights,” said Chasnoff. “Women in prostitution are on the lowest rung of the hierarchy in this society; the object of so many kinds of discrimination.”
“We want to show that this is a woman who once was a little girl, she was a child, she went to school, she played in a yard somewhere before these things started happening to her,” said Myers-Powell, who herself knew she would be a prostitute from a young age since men were already “taking my panties off.” “Was she someone’s mother or sister? Was there anyone praying for her when she was walking down that dark alley? Of course there was. We want to show how she got there, what happened to her when she was there; and once she got out what kind of barriers she faces.”
Chasnoff said several groups nationally, including “Kim’s Project” connected with the organization Fenix House in Boston, are forming connections with the Beyondmedia workshop for future collaboration. This is part of a relatively new movement for sex workers to tell their own stories, countering mainstream media that usually glamorizes, tokenizes or misrepresents sex work.
Myers-Powell said it’s important the movement be led by people like her who are themselves participants in or survivors of the sex industry.
“You have to go to the mountain, baby,” she said. “I hear people bring out all the statistics. But if you’ve never sat on the corner and gotten in a trick’s car, you don’t know anything about prostitution. If you’ve never met a stranger and propositioned him and went in a room alone with him, you don’t know what prostitution is. To have strangers jump on top of you, people you don’t even know…experts can get up and try to give me all the information they want, but they can’t tell me shit.”
For more information on “Turning a Corner,” visit www.beyondmedia.org.
*
Kari Lydersen is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, In These Times, LiP Magazine, Clamor, and The New Standard.
posted by Alice at Monday, June 05, 2006
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