Pimps Posing as “Sex Worker Activists” & Conflicts of Interest

I wrote this piece on the widespread problem of  (usually white)  female and male pimps posing as ‘sex worker activists’ for the Survivors’ View Blog:

Well meaning people think most “sex workers activist” organizations/unions speak for women in prostitution. They are mistaken. A shocking number of these “sex worker” organizations were started by women and men who are admitted pimps and madams, or have been convicted of pimping, pandering, or conspiracy to promote prostitution. These people call themselves ‘sex workers’ but it’s a ruse. This is a huge conflict of interest. These organizations and their ‘partners’ and affiliates cannot be allowed to speak for women in prostitution or collect funds on their behalf. Any NGO, university, college of nonprofit organization that engages with these pimp-affiliated organizations or their partners is tainted by association. These organizations benefit the predators who profit off of sexual exploitation; they don’t help women in prostitution.

A pimp is someone who makes money from another’s prostitution. A madam is a female pimp. Whether they call themselves managers, brothel owners, escort agency owners — they are all pimps. As a survivor of ten years of trafficking/prostitution, I have a right to use this word. If someone poisons another in cold blood, it doesn’t matter if they call themselves a life extinguisher or claim they’re an innovative longevity re-allocation businesswoman. They’re still a murderer. A pimp is still a pimp, no matter what name they peddle.

But pimps don’t like that word. So these founders and leaders of ‘sex worker activist’ organizations say they’re sex workers. They appropriate the identity of those they exploit. It’s a bit like a plantation owner in blackface pretending to be one of the slaves they oppress. They’re trying to steal our survivor voices.

Douglas Fox, the main ‘activist’ at the International Union of Sex Workers, claims to be a male sex worker. But he and his partner John Dottery were featured as the owners of a large UK escort agency in the British documentary ‘The Escort Agency.’ On a website he co-edits Fox states his partner owns an escort agency and argues ridiculously that pimps are ‘sex workers.’ He also states ” The fact that paedophiles produce and distribute and earn money from selling sex may make them sex workers.”

The first so-called ‘sex worker activist’ group in the United States was Whores, Housewives and Others (WHO) which eventually became COYOTE. It was founded by Margo St. James, who like Douglas Fox claimed to be a prostitute when she was actually a pimp. She’s admitted to being convicted of running a disorderly house – a brothel – in 1962.

The Sex Workers’ Outreach Project USA (SWOP USA) was founded by Robyn Few the year after she was convicted of conspiracy to promote interstate prostitution. This means that like St. James, Few was also a madam, a female pimp. As a survivor of ten years of prostitution myself, I would never feel safe around a madam. Most women in prostitution wouldn’t. Such an organization can’t speak for us. Few calls herself a ‘sex worker’ most of the time so the conflict of interest isn’t obvious. But the SWOP website makes a point of acknowledging her conviction for promoting interstate prostitution. Why? Because pimps across the country are using SWOP to connect with Johns while they recruit vulnerable young women. This isn’t activism, it’s marketing while lobbying for pimp interests.

SWOP USA isn’t the only ‘sex worker activist’ organization founded by a female pimp. The Erotic Service Providers Union is led by Maxine Doogan who was convicted of running an escort service. Like Robyn Few, Maxine Doogan poses as a ‘sex worker. She claims that legislation which helps pimps is good for women in prostitution. Terri Jean Bedford, who was widely represented in the Canadian media as an advocate of women in prostitution, was convicted of running a brothel. So she’s also a pimp.

Executive Director of COYOTE/ Los Angeles Norma Jean Almodovar was convicted of pandering while she was working as a cop. As such she is part of a long tradition of police officers involved in the prostitution of other women. It’s an unholy alliance that sends women in prostitution the message they can’t get out and they can’t get help. Like Robyn Few, Norma Jean Almodovar calls herself a ‘sex worker,’ but details the pandering conviction on her nonprofit organization website.

Now when a survivor of trafficking/prostitution such as myself happens to bring up this conflict of interest, the pimping parties in question react as if viciously attacked. But there’s nothing personal about saying someone has a conflict of interest. It’s a statement of existing conditions not a vendetta. The majority stockholders of Walmart can’t speak for the company’s minimum wage employees because what benefits those stakeholders may be bad for the workers. But in the ‘sex worker activist’ movement, pimps pretend to be workers when in fact they are management — the ones in control.

No wonder SWOP -USA, COYOTE, The Erotic Services Providers’ Union, the International Union of Sex Workers as well as their partners and affiliates which include the Desiree Alliance, the Red Umbrella Project, and Prostitutes of New York (PONY) support policies that protect pimps rather than women in prostitution. PONY actually claims to “reach out” to Madam members.

We trafficking/prostitution survivors have had enough. We’re going to start calling out the NGOS, universities, and academics who tacitly support and encourage these pimp-led groups. The concept of fruit of the poisonous tree applies here. Any organization that partners or collaborates with these groups is tainted by association They can’t speak for us or collect funds on our behalf.

Related articles

• Nevada’s Legal Brothels Are Coercive Too(survivorsconnect.wordpress.com)
• Trafficked: Sex Slaves Seduced and Sold (bbc.co.uk)
• Former Montreal sex workers outraged by Ontario brothel ruling(vancouversun.com)

• “I’m not the only one who was mistreated in prostitution” (secretlifeofamanhattancallgirl.wordpress.com)
• Prostitution crackdown praised (bbc.co.uk)
• The Sneaky Language of the Sex Industry Lobby (survivorsconnect.wordpress.com)
• Trafficked: Sex Slaves Seduced and Sold (bbc.co.uk)
• Former Montreal sex workers outraged by Ontario brothel ruling (vancouversun.com)

An Ex-Hooker’s Letter to her Younger Self

Dear twenty-year old Stella,

Work hard on learning to ask for help.  It’s the only way you’ll ever  break free.  No one ever does anything alone.  You don’t have to.

You’ll learn how to make the men happy.  The happier they are the nicer they treat you.  You’ll get very good at being a hooker.  But when the Johns say “baby you were born for this” that doesn’t mean its true.

Now when most men come near you  feel a stabbing at your eyes, your throat, and your gut that you know isn’t real.  You don’t want to admit it but you’re terrified.  You start, you tremble.  Your hands shake.  Think about it, you’re being stabbed a lot these days.  This is a quite reasonable reaction to being used by man after man, day after day, in this prison of a brothel.  It doesn’t mean you are so miserably flawed that you can’t do anything but be a hooker.

Being a hooker doesn’t make you subhuman.  It’s not OK for your (white) pimps to smack you and tell you they’ll kill you.

You have to work up the nerve to pay a cashier for a soda.  You’re too scared to ask that guy behind the deli counter to make you a sandwich.   This isn’t weakness, it’s biology.  Trauma changes your brain.    Your hippocampus, where you form narrative memory in the brain, shrinks.  This is a symptom of PTSD –  a neurophysiologic response to repetitive trauma –not evidence that you deserve to be in prostitution.

In the middle of the winter in the middle of the night when that guy in theDoubletree suite invites you to sit while he pours you a seltzer trust your gut and back out of there before the five guys you can’t see who are waiting in the bedroom have a chance to get between you and the door.

Being vulnerable means you’re alive.   There’s no shame in it.  It doesn’t mean you’re a terrible person.  You don’t have to apologize for doing what you must to survive.

When Samantha tries to stop working for your pimp Johnny.  make her get out of the city.  Otherwise two weeks later Nicole, the madam who works with Johnny,  will show you Samantha’s diamond initial ring and tell you Johnny murdered her.  Though you’ll always hope she was lying, you doubt it.

You’ve lost all sense of the linear — time  disappeared and you felt it leave.  Now you’re living in the immediate and eternity.  It’s scary and bewildering, but you need this — you need each moment to stretch infinitely so that you can be acutely aware of each man’s tiny movements and shifts in expression,  which can reveal a threat before it happens.  This hyperawareness will save your life.  One day you’ll see this being untethered from time as a kind of grace.

When that shiny classical pianist you meet at Au Bon Pain says he wants to know everything about you don’t believe him.

A lot of what’s happening doesn’t make sense now but it will later.  That habit you have of writing poems in your mind to the beloved you haven’t met yet as you’re riding in cabs to calls?  There’s something to it.

Your ability to perceive beauty is part of your resilience and survival.  When a man is on top of you watch the wind-swirled leaves out his window.  Seize the gusty joy you feel as you run three blocks to a bodega to buy condoms between calls at 3 AM.  When you think for a minute you see that friend,  who’s death you never got over,  standing in the brassy light under a weeping linden, be grateful.  All this has a purpose.

Being a hooker can seem to mean you’ve lost everything you hoped to be, but that’s not true.  You’ve splintered into a million pieces, but you’re still you. You’re alive.    It’s in the spaces between those pieces where you learn to feel how other people are feeling.  It hurts so much you’re sure it’ll kill you, but it won’t.  Later when you’re out of the life it’ll be so easy to be happy.  The mundane will buoy you.

When your madam sends you to the Parker Meridien at 3 AM and you meet a British professor who says he wants to help you, believe him.  He will set you up in a beautiful condominium across from Lincoln Center that he deeds in your name.  Of course you’ll have everything to do with this — you are so “good” at being a hooker, so “good” at fucking that you can make a guy want to buy you acondo.  Shame is a hollow stone in the throat.

During the two years that this voracious man ‘keeps’ you as his private prostitute the condo will come to feel like a platinum trap.  But it’s still your chance to get out and heal. Take it.

After you’ve sold the condominium and are living in a graduate dorm atColumbia University, a man with eyes like blue shattered glass will sit beside you in the cafeteria.  When he begins to speak you know he’s the unmet beloved you’ve been writing poems to all these years.  You’ll try to run away, but he won’t let you.  Fourteen years later the two of you will be hiking through pink granite outcroppings with your Labrador retriever.  You’ll  feel like the freest woman in the world.

One afternoon when you’re twenty-one you’ll be at the Museum of Metropolitan of Art with your best friend Gabriel, who’s a hustler, a male prostitute.  When he says you ‘remind him of his death’, don’t lash back.  Even though he told you the doctor said he didn’t have that rare new virus named AIDS, it would behoove you to realize he’s still coughing.

Stop thinking about your own hurt.  Don’t lash back with that vicious phrase your mother’s said to you so many times  –” I hope you die a slow death.”  Don’t tell Gabriel  you never want to see him again and storm out of the  sculpture gallery.   Or it will be the last time you see him.  Gabriel will die of AIDS five months later.  When he said you reminded him of ‘his own death’ he was trying to tell you he was dying.   You’ll regret what you said for the rest of your life.  But even more you’ll regret running away from his friendship.

Say forgive me.

Say I love you.

Stay connected.

Love,

Stella

This is a tribute to Cheryl Strayed‘s transcendent letter to her younger self.  Her letter’s form gave me a pitcher that I filled with my life.  A big shout out toDublin Call Girl who’s thank you letter to punters is already a classic.  Re that phrase my mom used to say to me, “I hope you die a slow death.”  I’m sure she used to hear it from her dad.

Related articles

• Where were all the Happy-Hookers when I was on The Game? (survivorsconnect.wordpress.com)
• The Sneaky Language of the Sex Industry Lobby (secretlifeofamanhattancallgirl.wordpress.com)
• Hooker: DSK orgy ‘violent’ (thesun.co.uk)

When Survivors Speak Out, Online Pimps and Johns/Punters Attack

Dublin Call Girl writes  about the toll of online stalking and hate.  Sex industry pimps’ and buyers’ viciousness online makes it tough for prostitution/trafficking survivors to speak out.  Here’s an excerpt:

I’m not stopping this because of the ridiculous amount of anonymous internet punter abuse I have received. I’m not stopping it because they hurt me, or scared me (like the threats to ‘out me’, heh), or anything else. They did do those things, but I’m perfectly capable of not letting some dick or dick-ess control my actions or how I feel about myself. I’m becoming okay with myself. I kind of like myself. So there.

But you know what, it is shit. It’s horrible to read such vile and personalised things. You practically spill your entire heart out and you get some dickhead punter getting off on hurting me, or scaring me, or upsetting me. I have to read them before I delete them you see. If someone is particularly unpleasant repeatedly I can ban them and they just end up in spam and then self delete, but I’d really prefer to just have let it all out so you could see all of it. Punters and others that used to be in my life are not going to be fully out of my life while I’m still online as this person that I was. I know it’s ‘me’ but it’s a certain part of ‘me’ that I’m supposed to be getting away from. The internet is the problem here, the anonymity, the speed of it, the paranoia and the interactivity.

I’m stopping writing this because it’s just too interactive. My heart would break to stop people from sharing whatever they want to say to me about their own experiences, so I didn’t want to just take off commenting entirely, but then it’s still too interactive. The interactivity of it is creating another weird secret world again, and I’m trying not to have a secret world. I am communicating with people here all the time, but it’s secret communication to the rest of my world.  I am talking about issues about prostitution constantly. It’s in my head constantly. People who have been involved or are involved in the industry are also leaving messages. I always respond to them, I have time for everyone. My therapist says that it and the stuff I went through previous to it, is all consuming. And it is. Because I’m finally dealing with it. Writing this definitely helped get things out and get them out exactly how I wanted them to be out, but I think it’s over now. I’m always thinking about if a punter has left a stupid comment, or if any of my escort names have been discovered, or what I’ll write about next, and if I should delete that last one because it was too much emotional exposure etc. I did not realise at all how popular it would get. I had no idea. I was completely shocked by it. For nearly the whole month of February it got 1000 views a day. It freaked me out and amazed me at the same time. What is also amazing about it is how far it has travelled around the world. My favourite feminist blogger, Nine Deuce, likes it . Discovering that was a very proud moment.

Read more at Dublin Call Girl’s blog

Related articles

• Looking for Unicorns: The Search for the “Happy Hooker” & the “Good Punter/John” (secretlifeofamanhattancallgirl.wordpress.com)
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• Thank You Letter to Punters (Johns) (survivorsconnect.wordpress.com)
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Let’s Empower Teachers to Fight Sex Trafficking

Amazing survivor Holly Smith has a fantastic editorial online at  the Washington Times.  Here’s an excerpt:

Traffickers specifically target school-age boys and girls not only because children are preferred by the buyers but because children are deemed easier to manipulate and control.  I know this because I was once one of those kids, lured away from home at age 14.

In the summer of 1992, just after I graduated eighth grade middle school, I ran away with a man I had met at the mall.  I was lonely and angry, and this man reached out to me.  This stranger, who gained my trust over several phone conversations, turned out to be a manipulative and intimidating pimp.  He took me to Atlantic City, New Jersey, and he forced me to prostitute.  By the time police spotted me on the street, I had been trafficked over half a dozen times.

Besides immediate family members, the only people to visit me in the hospital were my middle school science teacher, Mr. Steele, and two guidance counselors, Ms. Jackie Somma and Ms. Carol Turano.  They drove over an hour to see me.  Mr. Steele brought science textbooks because I loved biology.  Ms. Somma and Ms. Turano sat close together on a couch and encouraged me the best way they could.  I don’t remember anything they said.  I just remember them being there for me.

These teachers wanted to help me; they just didn’t know how.  Within days of my rescue, I attempted suicide.

Earlier this year, I testified in Richmond, Virginia, before the Senate Education Committee in support of SB 259 which had been introduced by Senator Adam Ebbin.  This legislation, which passed unanimously and is being signed by Governor Bob McDonnell today, will require the Board of Education and the Department of Social Services to provide awareness and training materials for local school divisions on human trafficking, including strategies for the prevention of trafficking children.

As a survivor and advocate for child trafficking victims, I encourage other legislators and states across the country to follow Virginia’s lead.

Read more

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• The Anti-trafficking Movement Needs Survivor Voices: Why Are We Ignored? (secretlifeofamanhattancallgirl.wordpress.com)
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Survivors Must Lead the Anti-Trafficking Movement

All for one and one for all

Survivors Connect Network, an international online network of trafficking/prostitution survivors, now has 44 members from seven different countries. It’s been recognized that the absence of survivor leaders in most major anti-trafficking NGOs has created a void. Survivor knowledge and insight is essential. With survivor leadership the movement’s success would be inevitable.   Demand Abolition recently set an example by inviting seven survivors to participate in their Arresting Demand colloquium May 3rd and 4th in Boston. We are extraordinarily grateful.

An exciting example of collaboration among survivor groups involves the Bedford case. Sister survivors in the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network, Educating Voices, LaCLES, and SexTrade101 have been valiantly educating the public about the harms of the Bedford ruling — which upholds the criminalization of prostitutes on the street — who are almost always crime victims- while it empowers and legitimizes their predators, the male and female pimps who own brothels and escort services.

So we survivors recently voted to issue a statement against the Bedford decision. Dozens of us joining our voices in political action is a big deal. Here’s the statement:

We the members of Survivors Connect Network stand with the women of the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network, SexTrade101, La Concertation des Luttes Contre L’Exploitation Sexuelle (CLES), and Educating Voices. We are sad and shocked by the Bedford ruling. It’s especially troubling that this decision upholds the criminalization of prostitutes selling sex on the street, as these women are almost always traumatized crime victims who need support not arrest. Meanwhile the ruling empowers the male and female pimps who terrorize and exploit women in prostitution by making it legal to own brothels or escort services.

Researchers have found the women in prostitution suffer from the same levels of trauma symptoms as the victims of state-sponsored torture. It forever changes how we face the world. After going through trafficking/prostitution everything you do is an act of will — you must summon and form a new self from your fragments. And yet as the survivors of torture or trafficking/prostitution rebuild our selves and find our voice, we can develop extraordinary abilities to connect with, inspire, and understand others.

Nelson Mandela exemplifies this type of rebirth. Most everyone understands that Mandela’s experiencesof being held 27 years in a prison infamous for torture make him unique. When he was finally released few denied the vast injustice done to him. No one expected him to act like everyone else. Instead South Africa and the world stepped back, and waited to see how this extraordinary man would transform the terrible wrongs he’d been through — they gave him a chance to bring something new into being.

As more trafficking/prostitution survivors speak out, the public will recognize we’re people society has wronged. They’ll understand we’ve been changed by the pain and harshness we’ve experienced. At present public denial of the sex industry’s violence and prostitute-blaming forces many of us into hiding. But as more survivors lead, we’ll be empowered to bring something new and beautiful into being.

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