Tina's Sister is Dead

I've posted about Tina many times. I've said that she is small; she is sick; she doesn't back down from a fist fight; she believes in revenge, and she believes in family. I've said that she and her cousin Liz remind me of a pair of leathery old cowboys, bones smashed almost to dust from all the hard falls they've taken, still riding the same sad, few streets of Baltimore with death, for each of them, almost visible on the horizon.

Somewhat more prosaically, I've also said that Tina's mother tried to hang her when she was still in elementary school and that Tina believes she was infected with HIV by the aunt who regularly injected her with heroin when she was 14. I haven't written how she became a prostitute because I've never asked her that. Anyway, I think I already know. A poor family like Tina's doesn't spend daily heroin money on little girls without a reason, and what more efficient, economical reason can there be than to keep them compliant for their tricks?

Another thing I haven't written about was how much Tina loves her sister. They're close in age, and although the sister was the favored child, she was still abused more than enough for Tina to cling to her and love her. Tina's sister got the heroin injections too, of course, prostituted, got HIV and then AIDS, got sick, gotten beaten, was in and out of comas. After her children were born, she went off heroin and onto methadone so she could care for them. She married, drove a car, lived in a Section 8 house with her mother and her family. Her husband was a drug dealer and violent, but he didn't hit her or their children. On the whole, Tina's sister seemed far healthier than Tina. Still, she spent a long time in the hospital, seemed to get better, then developed some sort of strange lung infection and rapidly died. Tina's reaction has been an enormous surprise.

Tina's using fewer drugs, often far fewer, so that she can care for her nieces. Drug dealer dad is still on the scene, but Tina doesn't think too much of his parenting abilities. She's sure she can do better. The Section 8 house has already been transferred to Tina's name because, in Baltimore at least, people with HIV get faster city services. She's afraid to live there with him, but she does so anyway for the sake of the children. To a very large extent, Tina has stepped into her sister's shoes and has begun living a healthier life. I had thought her sister's death might just kill her instead.

Tina herself seems to have at least a fair understanding of how much she is helping herself by helping her nieces. She told us one day that she didn't worry too much about her own daughter because she knew her child was happy and safe being cared for by her (paternal) grandmother. All of Tina's focus now was on her sister's daughters. Then Tina said she knew she was being selfish. Of course, we assured her that she was not. It might be more accurate to say that she was being the best sort of selfish, protecting and strengthening herself through a worthwhile mission. She may have been the last sort of person Ms. Rand and Mr. Brandon were thinking of when they wrote the "Virtue of Selfishness," but she's a living example of some of their better ideals.

Faced with tragedy, Tina did not give in. She did not accept merely surviving from day to day, hoping only to avoid greater pain. Tina has a project. She has love. She has a deep desire to impose her will on her own ugly little corner of the world and make it a better place. Despite all her many wounds, Tina is just plain strong. She makes me feel the way I did when I was 14: that there will always be a great love to be had, something important to do, a big fight to be won. All those romantics who used to write about the indomitable human spirit should be so lucky as to meet someone like Tina.

Grieving for Lilian

This is the 6th or 7th time I've written something about Lilian, but it will be the first time I tell you about the person she has become. As I wrote in the beginning, she's a petite, white woman, well groomed, well dressed, somewhere near 50. When I first knew her, she was quiet, rather dull, in fact, and I didn't think so much of her. She'd stare into the distance or make some remark in her flat affect way, and then drift back into her mousy silence.

In the fall, her energy level picked up dramatically, and suddenly a lively, teasing, sweet natured personalty emerged. I assumed that the change in Lilian was a change in drug usage, and I was right. The Lilian who was fun to be around was the real Lilian, no longer repressed by whatever she was putting in her veins or taking in a pill. She was rapidly becoming sicker, though, leaning a little sideways from a stroke, her t-cell count plummeting almost to the point of full blown AIDS, going into the hospital with serious breathing problems. None of that seemed to bother her, however. Lilian had a level of denial that made her seem indomitable.

She disappeared for a while, and came back sicker than ever. She was still the same sweet natured Lilian, eagerly finding the good news or the humor in anything and laughing delightedly at her own self mocking jokes. The denial, however, was gone. She even spoke about having to start getting honest with herself about how sick she was. She was thankful for the support she received. She was thoughtful. She seemed like a remarkably well integrated adult. I don't know how such growth can be possible for a woman who was helped into prostitution by her mother while she was still in her teens and who appeared to have spent all or most of the long years that followed caught up in the trauma and addiction that come with a life of "getting into cars." Still, there it was. I saw the growth. I saw the whole person, the one that had been dormant all that time, blossoming forth with all her rich appreciation of the world around her.

Lilian came back sporadically, used the snow storm to manipulate an overnight visit with her grandchildren away from her transitional house. She was still a pleasure every single time she came. Recently, she has been gone for 8 weeks. It was time spent in the hospital and a nursing home. She is leaning on her cane much more dramatically now. She's had the AIDS pneumonia and probably another stroke. Her legs are badly swollen, and her hands shake from the seven medications she's on. She has an infection in her intestines that the doctors can't cure, and they've told her that they will have to remove her colon. That means a colostomy bag.

Lilian is still alive. She's still a lovely person but every time I see her now, I think of a snowman, slowly decreasing in the sun and the rain. It's hard to imagine a return to health for Lilian and hard to imagine that she has all that many more years left. She's still trying, though. She still has her good attitude. I'm going to try too, although my attitude isn't nearly as good. I hope to find a way to take her for a second opinion on the colostomy bag thing. Still, I've already started to grieve for a good woman who may have begun to enjoy her life only at its end.

Why do Women Prostitute? Part III

Without prompting, a young YANA client wrote down some of her feelings and gave them to me to read. She also gave me permission to post her writing on the internet. Here is what she said:

When women get sexually assaulted people fail to realize that it lead's to alot of things. Some of us don't feel loved. We get into prostitution and other things. When being in situations like that we alway's seem to think that it's our fault but in reality it's there's.

We feel abandoned and it hurt's to really talk about our problems. Most of us have trouble sleeping, trusting people. I should know because that's how I started off. Some people ask what do you think about while your doing it? I said that it's different for others but your mind goes through phases.

When your out and about there's alot of things to watch out. The main one is getting locked up or having sex for no money. Alot of people will Judge you but not realizing the situation that brought you to this point. Most of us have flashback's about our rape or situation. Some of us would have never imagined that what we once endured as kids that's would be our situation year's later.

I'm so glad that I found someone who would really listen instead of Judging me. The trouble with most of us is that we have no guidance or no one to talk to about our problem's at all. Some people ask me what I'm addicted to the money or the sex? I'm addicted to the money because it's fast. It's not a easy journey for most but it's a stepping stone. If it wasn't for God, YANA and positive roll model's most of us would be still dealing wtih day to day life style that we once lived. By the grace of God I survived.

Dear H.

A while back someone named "H" left a very thoughtful comment on the blog, and I haven't had time until now to respond. I 'm doing so now in a post because I thought that what H had to say was important enough for a longer discussion.

H. took me to task a bit for a reference I made in the "Whatever Happened to the Little Girl" post. I said that 12 seems to be the average age for entry into prostitution. H. asked how I know what the average age is and seemed genuinely interested in any statistics I could give him (I'm assuming H is male). The truth is that even "seems to be" is stronger language than I should have used. I had mentioned in an earlier post that people who work with prostituted women often cite research claiming that 11 to 13 is the average age at which people enter prostitution, but that I didn't know how the studies were performed. I can tell you that at YANA, the counselors have worked with many hundreds of women in Baltimore and have found that almost all of them have been subjected to very severe sexual abuse at a very early age. I've been to symposiums about working with prostituted women and have heard the directors of other agencies say the same thing. As I may have quoted in another post, one woman announced "Incest is the boot camp of prostitution." The rest of the room nodded. A police sergeant, Byron Fasset from Dallas, Texas, has formed a unit specializing in working with underage prostitutes. He's kept statistics on more than a thousand girls and found a near universal pattern of abuse suffered by both the girls and their mothers. I see the faces and hear the words of the women at YANA. Even to a layperson like me, so many of them seem frozen at some very early stage of development, and it's easy, very easy to imagine that a part of them just stopped growing on the day they first learned what horrible things that the grownups would do to them.

But none of that is proof of the average age at which women or girls enter prostitution. For one thing, I seriously doubt that anyone has done the kind of exhaustive study necessary to know the average anything for prostitution. There are precious few provider agencies in this country, and they aren't in the business of keeping statistics or probing the women for information they might not want to give. Academics are starting to take an interest in prostitution, but how many of them do you think are out doing lengthy evaluations of thousands of women all across the country? We had a woman do her Ph.D. research at YANA. She spoke to ten of our clients for a little under an hour each. My understanding is that her committee not only accepted this day and a half of research as being good enough for a doctorate, but they also praised her for her great street creds.

And even if we did know the real averages for childhood sexual abuse, how would we know whether the children were actually prostituted? Remember that prostitution can have a very broad definition. If, for example, mom is turning her five year old over to her drug dealer or landlord once in a while in exchange for a little credit, then that five year old has been prostituted. If mom is letting dad have a go at their three year old in exchange for a little peace in the home, then that three year old has been prostituted. If dad is turning a blind eye to what his buddies or maybe his own father does to his eight year old in exchange for their approval, then that eight year old has been prostituted. I know that happens, but how would I or anyone ever know how often it happens? Usually, the child will only know that the landlord, or the dad, or the strange men in the neighborhood hurt her. She won't know who benefited from it.

And much of the time, she doesn't want to know. Within the safety of YANA, most of our clients will talk openly about being raped as children, but they do not think of themselves as having been prostituted as children. Prostitution was their own decision, and it most certainly had nothing to do with their mothers. Recently Sid spoke about the 5 year old in North Carolina who was prostituted by her mother. The child was found dead. Our women were appalled. "Anyone under the age of 18 who is prostituted is a victim of human trafficking," Sid explained. "Have you ever heard of anyone under the age of 18 who was prostituted?"

"People from the Philippines!" one woman said. "I've heard about that!" Nobody else seemed to have ever heard of such a thing anywhere, and the subject swiftly died in an embarrassed silence. So, to answer H., no I don't know the average age at which a woman or girl enters prostitution. And I don't think anyone does, even for one country. If you're thinking about walking-the-street prostitution, then your estimate of somewhere between 16 and 24 sounds as good as any other to me. As for your "defensiveness" about people who try to "demonize" prostitution with claims of child sexual abuse, well, human behavior is complicated, and all we have are anecdotes. If your girl friend is the basis for your "defensiveness" around the idea that being raped repeatedly as a child leads women to prostitution later, it's always possible that she really is that co-ed paying for college tuition that we hear about so much on the t.v. shows. Maybe she went into prostitution for any variety of her own reasons. But if she's been prostituting, and she's promoting defensiveness around the idea that anything her parents did was the cause. . . well, like I said, she might be the exception to all our anecdotes. Then again, H., she might not be.

Why do Women Become Prostitutes? Part I.

I suppose that most of you have heard Mackenzie Phillips' claim that she had a ten year sexual relationship with her father, beginning when she was 19. Her father, a musician with the Mamas and Papas, can't deny it because he's dead. Mackenzie Phillips has a long history of serious drug addiction and doesn't present particularly well. And the claim itself -- well, by now, we're used to hearing the stories of young children who've been made the victims of incest or preyed upon by daycare providers. We know how we're supposed to react to them. Mackenzie's claim, that as an adult she had an affair with her own father, is something else. People don't seem to know how to react to her. As far as I can tell, she's become a very, very public object of embarrassment. You can't help but look at the red haired, slightly ravaged looking woman, tossing her head, smiling ingratiatingly, and talking, talking, talking about how she spent her 20s sleeping with dad. At the same time, you don't want to look at a person like that any longer than you have to. She's probably sick, after all, and, given the incest, maybe a victim, but in a lot of ways she's just plain repulsive for having participated in her own degradation.

It's her family I find most interesting. Both her dad's ex wives have denounced her, even Michelle, with whom she was supposed to have had a close relationship. Neither of them mentioned the father's role in addicting Mackenzie to drugs before she reached her teens. Her youngest sister has unleashed a series of snide remarks, supposedly meant to be neutral, acknowledging Mackenzie's need to "come clean." Little Sister also sounded angry that Mackenzie had left her alone with the father who could have done the same things to her -- if he had done them to Mackenzie -- which probably he didn't. It was Mackenzie's other sister, Cheyenne came to Mackenzie's rescue, proclaiming her belief in Mackenzie and her love of her sister. Cheyenne's support consisted of the following: 1) a statement that she believed the affair happened, 2) repeated emphasis on the consensual nature of the affair, 3) a description of what an idyllic time she had with their father the few times he visited, 4) a lengthier discussion of how hard Mackenzie's revelation had been on Cheyenne's family, and, finally, 5) forgiveness for Mackenzie for having told her story. At no point did Cheyenne or anyone else express any interest in Mackenzie's claim that the "affair" began when her father raped her, that their sex frequently took place when Mackenzie was too stoned to know what was happening, or that her father had allowed one of his friends to rape her when she was a child. For this display of sympathy, Mackenzie gratefully and enthusiastically professed her love of Cheyenne.

Perhaps she was right to be grateful. Nobody at all came to Ellen's defense when she turned over evidence against her husband the rapist. We had a client whose uncle went to prison for the years he spent raping her while she was in elementary school. When he came out, the family welcomed him back with open arms. Decades later, when the woman's father died, a YANA staffer took her to his funeral. Nobody in the family would let her ride with them. When our women are battered, even by a stranger, they want to protect the man who attacked them, the way their mothers protected the men who attacked them as children. Very few of our women have ever denounced a family member who beat them or raped them, and of the ones who have, I can't think of any who got even as much support as Mackenzie got from Cheyenne.

Why do women become prostitutes? I don't have the answer, at least not all of it, but Mackenzie Phillips' family gave us all a nice, on-air demonstration of the culture that produced many of our clients. All the attention, all the concern is focused on maintaining the family just as it is. There just isn't any room left to worry about what's happening to the victim. The result sometimes seems to be a woman willing to participate in her own degradation. Long ago, I began to think of the women at YANA as the obedient daughters. Well into adulthood, they keep doing what they've been taught long ago.

Speaking of stereotypes. . .

I've described our women as being the victims of brutal childhood rape, poverty, and isolating stereotypes. This is how I see them, but it would be a mistake for me to portray them as nothing but child-like victims who loathe every minute of what they're "forced" to do. They are quirky and sometimes strong. They can take some strange routes to prostitution, and when they find what they consider "goodness," such as motherhood or God, they can lord their discovery mercilessly over anyone in their path. They often look nothing at all like frightened teenagers, and, like Diane with Edgar, they can get some pleasure out of the street life, or at least from their idea of what that life is supposed to be. Here are some moments from today.

Today was the last day for Ellen, a quiet woman who has only been coming for a couple months and whose story I don't know well. Ellen is probably in her sixties, extremely obese, with waist length hair, and the dazzling blue eyes so many of our white clients have. She looks a little like someone who should be living in a forest with the Keebler elves. Asked how old she was when she became addicted to crack, she broke into a grin that was half embarrassment, half elven merriment. "Fifty-five," Ellen answered.

Ellen had been smoking pot intermittently since she was 19, but apparently didn't start on crack until her sister, "Miss Crack-head of the world" moved in with her. Then her life went to hell in a handbasket -- not that it was all that great before. Back in the 80s, her husband was arrested and convicted of serial rape. He was given three consecutive life sentences, but it was Ellen who was the pariah among their friends and family because she had given the police the evidence they needed. She has said that sometimes she feels guilty because she didn't turn her husband in earlier and protect some of his victims, but then she says she remembers what the man did to her, and her voice trails off.

Did she have a background of child sexual abuse? Did she start prostituting as a little girl, before she even had the comfort of pot? How can anyone stand to put their face in a stranger's crotch, be sodomized by someone who has no reason to care how rough he gets, go off with man after man not knowing if this is the night to become a murder victim -- without at least a little dope? Did she wait to start prostitution until her crack addiction, in her 50s? The fact that several of her siblings have serious drug addictions and that they turned against her, rather than her husband, when she gave evidence of his brutality suggest that she came from a severely abusive family. For that matter, the fact that her sister's presence triggered her addiction suggests it too. But the fact that she reports long periods of no drug use and stability while raising her children (and while hubby was out raping the neighbors) shows control, doesn't it? And apparently she waited something like ten years between the husband's conviction and her crack spree, so it sounds like more than simply trading off one form of degradation for another.

Maybe if I'd gotten to know her better, I would have seen that her background fitted a predictable pattern. Maybe not. Maybe I would have seen a weird, meandering path, blazed partly by her parents long ago, and then continued with whims, odd chances, conscious bad choices of her own. I doubt much of it was meant as a highway to adventure, though. She drew a picture of her dreams once -- a picture of a little house on a hill with sunshine and a lake "for swimming and fishing." She told me that having an image like that in her mind was "a survival technique." She said that when people wondered "where she had gone" when she stared off into space, they didn't know she'd left them behind to go to that peaceful home.

Ellen, of course, did not fill the whole day. We had the ravening hordes in for their clothes and "personals." They're an issue to be addressed later at YANA and in the blog. We had a very sweet, young volunteer, one who's loved by the clients, who talked to me about how trendy "sex work" has become among college students who see it as feminism and power. I hope that, like so many fashions, it mostly talk, mostly temporary. I managed a few words about the need for hurt people to master a bad situation -- trying to glamorize and conquer it. Feel bad about sex, get raped, get humiliated even, and maybe you have a great need to get control over the whole thing by making somebody pay. I don't know whether that's the driving force behind the feminism/power business, though. Maybe it's just all those idiots singing songs about pimps and 'hos.

I was bothered by the idea of it, anyway, and bothered by the fact that our t.v/vcr with its outdated tapes has been hijacked to play a single movie every day, nobody paying full attention to it, but everybody looking over at it from time to time. The movie is "Coyote Ugly." It's full of very sexy women dancing on a bar, in a half-way strip. They look kind of feminist and powerful, to tell you the truth.

We also have another little outburst of nasty religion. Generally it's snide one upmanship as to who knows the bible the best or who really knows how to pray. The remarks are kept more or less neutral, delivered with a smile, but they get their point across. Today, however, we had a new client who went into an intense, full-out harangue, first trying to use her grandmother status to tell other people what to do, then trying for the same domination using the Jesus & prayer rationale. If she does that again, I expect I'll be writing my first post about throwing a client out.

We also had Liz, another woman pushing 50, who came in, crying as usual. I have become very fond of Liz, though I'd be hard put to tell you why. Perhaps it is partly because what she repeatedly says about herself is true: she is dying or very close to it. Telling all about Liz would take far too much space for this blog, but I will say that she fit her usual pattern today. She came in, weeping and announcing her latest hardship. What's difficult about Liz is that they really are hardships, very serious ones, often visible in the bruises and abrasions on her face. Today she said she had cirrhosis of the liver. Given her astounding level of drink, liver damage was pretty much a given. After she cried and got hugged and received, once again, far more than the theoretical quota of donations, she went to the bathroom to wash up and put on her new clothes. Liz emerged, as always, triumphant. Weeping little old lady gone, somewhat faded beauty-queen stripper returned.

Lots of "I love you's" from Liz, lots of talk about surviving and kicking ass, and looking sexy. Mentions of her newest "friend." This one wants to commit her to a psych ward until she goes in for her interferon treatments. We nod when she says the psych ward might be a good idea. "I might go psycho on someone!" she says, waving her hands threateningly and laughing her Liz laugh, filled with bravado. The cure for Liz's mind boggling array of problems is always the same, and it always works. Give her a hug and help her look pretty. The rewards of being a girl are like jet fuel for Liz. She comes in, gets refilled, and takes off soaring.

Being "on the side of" Prostitutes

The women we meet in this blog are the adult sort- of survivors of childhood abuse. Thirty, forty, fifty, and older, they are still struggling with the things that happened to them as children, faithfully recreating the abuse that was inflicted upon them when they were three, four, and five. Sometimes YANA works with the children themselves, though. Sid and her determined little band of volunteers collaborate with police and prosecutors, providing comfort and advocacy for those the government has chosen to consider the victims of human trafficking. By definition, anyone under the age of 18 who has prostituted is a trafficking victim, whether they cross jurisdictions or not. Often, by definition, they are also criminals and are prosecuted no matter how young they are. We will undoubtedly talk more about the children in later posts. Today, though, was a good reminder of where the grown up YANA women come from.

Sid and I talked before the women came in. Sid was still shocked and supremely frustrated by the treatment a teenage girl had received from some rural police. The girl, who was being prostituted by her father, and who was pregnant by one of her tricks, was interrogated at length by an officer who apparently knew both the father and the trick. She was told, repeatedly, that she was an habitual runaway and liar (wonder why she would be that?). She was told that, despite the fact that her father collected money from the tricks immediately after they screwed her, she was engaging in consensual sex. She was told that the victims services workers who were waiting for her in the building were nowhere around. She was told that they only wanted to help her in order to get her baby from her.

As far as anyone knows, the officer wasn't a rapist. He didn't have a thing for little girls, and he didn't profit from the prostitution. He had just chosen which side he wanted to be on, and it damn sure wasn't the side of a prostitute. In a sense, it's not an unreasonable choice. Being "on the side of" a prostitute, any aged prostitute, is painful, involving, as it does, the thought that mothers and fathers will sometimes do horrible things to their children, and that people can be hurt so badly that they will eventually start hurting themselves. What does that say about free will? Nothing most of us want to hear. Perhaps worst of all, it means that people we know, nice people, might have taken part in something evil when they decided to find out what being with a hooker is like. It's so much easier to believe that the homeless women wandering down Wilkens Ave. just decided to prostitute because they were too slutty and lazy to live normal lives. Besides, if you don't think being "on the side of" any aged prostitutes is just plain weird, tell all your coworkers that you read this blog. See what their reaction is.

And then, after you do that, maybe take things one step further, and tell them a benefit of reading. Without intervention, the isolation that little girl felt alone in an interrogation room with the sneering cop is something she could carry with her for the rest of her life. After what had been done to her by her own family, the contempt of the outside world could simply destroy her sense of being part of the human race. When we meet the women as individuals, not stereotypes they get to be human again. First they're human on the screen, then in our minds, then in the way we talk, eventually in the way that they get treated. The women I've met could use a few people on their side. They'd like to be seen as human again.