(photo: Monica Almeida/The New York Times)
On Halloween this year, the little mountain town of Ashland, Oregon reverberated with the rhythms of drum circles and laughter. Following the annual Halloween parade, the streets were throbbing with Little Bo Peeps and Buzz Lightyears, offbeat zombies and chuckling middle-aged women in street clothes.
I sat in a small cafe watching the crowd of strange creatures through the window. Three gorillas approached the glass door of the cafe (which was appropriately called Grilla Bites) and examined the hours of operation. They huddled together, saw that the cafe was about to close, and walked away, shaking their heads in disappointment. I was particularly struck, in the festive atmosphere, at how inclusive the celebration seemed to be. It wasn’t adults feigning fun for the sake of kids, or college students seizing an excuse to wear even sexier clothes and drink even more. Everyone seemed to be partying together. The grandmas and the kids and the sexy vampires were leaping around the drum circles in unison.
It is a town famous for its annual Shakespeare Festival (complete with an outdoor replica of the original Globe), its eco-friendly boutiques and cafes, its liberal politics, and as of last week, apparently, sex slavery.
As a termporary resident of a community half an hour outside of Ashland, I was as surprised as anyone to read that last week’s New York Times article on the national crisis of runaways and teenage prostitution opened in this quaint little mountain town with the story of Nicole Clark.
Ian Urbina reports that Clark ran away from a group home in nearby Medford, OR to Ashland, where she slept outside on the verge of destitution. She was befriended by a young man who provided her with shelter and food in return for sex — an exchange known as “survival sex” — and before long he coerced her into having sex with his friends for money. “That first exchange of money for sex led to a downward spiral of prostitution that lasted for 14 months,” Urbina reports, “until she escaped last year from a pimp who she said often locked her in his garage apartment for months.”
Nicole’s story provides an appropriate entree into an unbearably ugly world of sexual exploitation, child abuse, emotional manipulation, and violence that pervades the entire country — even tiny Ashland, with its green and bright golden autumn trees and Medieval costumed street performers and organic creekside cafes. According to the National Runaway Switchboard, the average time it takes before a runaway is approached by a pimp or otherwise solicited is approximately 48 hours. That means that even in small towns, it doesn’t take long for pimps or other exploiters to target girls who are in a physically and emotionally vulnerable situation.
Recruiting strategies rarely begin with violence or threats. In fact, Nicole’s story is typical: the relationship between a pimp and a runaway is usually initiated on the level of survival sex and emotional manipulation. Many girls fall in love with their pimps, as Nicole did, and dip their toes in toes in the water of prostitution at first only to help out the man they love and on whom they are completely dependent. It’s a relationship that’s analogous to that of women trapped in situations of domestic abuse, as Samir Goswami of Chicago’s Justice Project Against Sexual Harm (now the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation) told me last year:
You fall in love with a nice guy. Then once you’re in the relationship, the control starts. They lure you in, make you fall in love with them, which is not hard to do if you’re kind to someone who has never experienced kindness.
Antoin Thurman, a pimp interviewed by Urbina, said,
I’ll look for a younger female with a backpack. I’m thinking she’s leaving home, she’s leaving for a reason, she had a fight with her parents or she just wants to leave home.
Another pimp, Harvey Washington, confirms,
With the young girls, you promise them heaven, they’ll follow you to hell. It all depends on her being so love-drunk off of me that she will do anything for me.
Clearly, this muddies the question of force and coercion when it comes to the complicity of the prostitute herself. Girls who are pimped out often display fierce loyalty and attachment to their pimps. Law enforcement and social workers are often unable to prosecute pimps because they are so protected by the girls they exploit. This, however, is beside the point when we’re talking about minors. Sgt. Byron A. Fassett of the Dallas Police Department revealed to Urbina how complex the problem is, and how unjustly it criminalizes underage girls who are sold, rather than the sex profiteers who sell them or the men who buy them. Urbina writes,
If a 45-year-old man had sex wutg a 14-year-old girl and no money changed hands, she was likely to get counseling and he was likely to get jail time for statutory rape … If the same man left $80 on the table after having sex with her, she would probably be locked up for prostitution and he would probably go home with a fine as a john.
This, to be blunt, is clearly insane. Worse than insane — it’s diabolical. Have we really decided that if we want men to get away with statutory rape they can just leave a few bills on the table?
Whatever arguments fly back and forth regarding the complicity of grown women in such situations of domestic abuse/sexual exploitation, underage girls should not be held responsible for their own exploitation — even when they have been programmed to protect their pimps. Battered women shield their spouses from harm. The Manson girls protected Charles. Patty Hearst devoted herself to the Symbionese Liberation Army. It’s called brainwashing. When those in power enforce their will, whether through threats, violence, propaganda, or emotional manipulation, on those who are physically, emotionally, or mentally vulnerable, they are able to seize control. This is true on every level, from the state and corporate down to the domestic. While adults may have responsibility in this, children are a societal group that should be protected from that accountability. Even television advertisers have limits on what they are allowed to market to minors, since underage people are less able to distinguish between truth and advertising (although the effectiveness of those rules are another story entirely).
All over the world, anti-trafficking activists and policymakers are campaigning to focus penalties for prostitution on those who benefit economically from it (including pimps, procurers, etc.) as well as the buyers, or “johns” (see previous post on Ruchira Gupta’s work in India).
The problem of child prostitution is escalating, especially with the ease the internet provides in connecting pimps and clients. “Gangs used to sell drugs,” Sgt. Kelley O’Connell with the Boston Police Force’s human trafficking unit told Urbina. “Now many of them have shifted to selling girls because it’s just as lucrative but far less risky.”
And it’s not just t
he girls in the ghettoes that can be shrugged off on this issue. It’s also middle-class girls.
Traffickers target dissatisfied and/or insecure middle-class girls in malls, as well as underprivileged girls in homeless shelters and bus stations, Urbina reports. And just like in Russia or the Phillippines, they often pose as talent scouts or photographers, showering young girls with attention and promises.
When I was researching domestic sex trafficking of minors last year, DePaul University College of Law professor and longtime prostitution researcher Jody Raphael described the commonly used pimp tactic of trolling malls to recruit girls who might be interested in making some money to buy clothes or other items. Sitting there during the interview in the school’s downtown Chicago campus, I suddenly remembered something:
When I was 16, I spent a summer working for my aunt in Minnesota’s gaudy Mall of America. She owned a kiosk that sold children’s toys. One day, while I was probably pricing some beanie babies or folding onesies, a man in his mid-twenties approached me. He was extremely charming. He was remarkably attentive. He joked around with me, eyeing the ridiculous pile of beanie babies and rolling his eyes. I laughed and rolled mine too. We chatted for a few minutes while he half-browsed the merchandise, and then he asked, “How much do you make at a job like this anyway?”
I shrugged. “Pretty much minimum wage.”
He faked a charmingly outraged reaction. “Damn! You should work for me, girl!”
“Doing what?”
“Working in Chicago. You could make way more money than this!”
At which point, even I, the oblivious 16-year-old, got a little suspicious. “I think my parents might have some questions about that,” I ventured.
Bingo. He made a rushed excuse and bolted. Meddling parents. Not a good business venture.
The most notable part of that memory, though, comes not from the incident itself (which is really quite ordinary), but the fact that I remember thinking, “Huh. He must be a pimp, trying to recruit teenagers or something.” And then I shrugged it off.
This, Rachel Durchslag of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation told me later, is pretty common. We as a culture hardly talk about these issues, much less prepare our children for them. It’s a preparation that involves much more than a fear-fueled warning against bad people at malls. It’s a comprehensive and radical overhaul of how both boys and girls are taught to view gender, domination, commodification, consumption, and, most of all, their own worth. It’s something Durchslag is even trying to integrate into public education in Illinois. It’s about laying mental and emotional foundations that will help girls grow into young women who are less susceptible to such forms of exploitation in the first place. And that is a cultural shift that is all of our responsibility — from the pimps and the beauty industry right down to you and me.
For further information:
- Click here to read my previous reports on the demand for prostitution in Chicago, and the broader issue of domestic sex trafficking in Chicago.
- Last year, Durchslag conducted a study exploring what drives the demand for prostitution in Chicago.
- Libby Spears’ 2008 documentary, Playground, addresses the issue in Atlanta, the number one U.S. destination to buy sex with a child. Preview below:
