What makes women turn to prostitution

They brought their anger or mental illness or whatever it was and they decided to wreak havoc on a prostitute, knowing I couldn't go to the police and if I did I wouldn't be taken seriously. I actually count myself very lucky. I knew some beautiful girls who were murdered out there on the streets.

I prostituted for 14 or 15 years before I did any drugs. But after a while, after you've turned as many tricks as you can, after you've been strangled, after someone's put a knife to your throat or someone's put a pillow over your head, you need something to put a bit of courage in your system. I was a prostitute for 25 years, and in all that time I never once saw a way out. But on 1 April , when I was nearly 40 years old, a customer threw me out of his car.

My dress got caught in the door and he dragged me six blocks along the ground, tearing all the skin off my face and the side of my body. I went to the County Hospital in Chicago and they immediately took me to the emergency room. Because of the condition I was in, they called in a police officer, who looked me over and said: "Oh I know her. She's just a hooker. She probably beat some guy and took his money and got what she deserved.

They pushed me out into the waiting room as if I wasn't worth anything, as if I didn't deserve the services of the emergency room after all. And it was at that moment, while I was waiting for the next shift to start and for someone to attend to my injuries, that I began to think about everything that had happened in my life.

Up until that point I had always had some idea of what to do, where to go, how to pick myself up again. Suddenly it was like I had run out of bright ideas. I remember looking up and saying to God, "These people don't care about me. Could you please help me? Find out more. God worked real fast. A doctor came and took care of me and she asked me to go and see social services in the hospital. What I knew about social services was they were anything but social. But they gave me a bus pass to go to a place called Genesis House, which was run by an awesome Englishwoman named Edwina Gateley, who became a great hero and mentor for me.

She helped me turn my life around. It was a safe house, and I had everything that I needed there. I didn't have to worry about paying for clothes, food, getting a job. They told me to take my time and stay as long as I needed - and I stayed almost two years.

My face healed, my soul healed. I got Brenda back. Through Edwina Gateley, I learned the value of that deep connection that can occur between women, the circle of trust and love and support that a group of women can give one another. Usually, when a woman gets out of prostitution, she doesn't want to talk about it. What man will accept her as a wife? What person will hire her in their employment?

And to begin with, after I left Genesis House, that was me too. I just wanted to get a job, pay my taxes and be like everybody else. But I started to do some volunteering with sex workers and to help a university researcher with her fieldwork.

After a while I realised that nobody was helping these young ladies. Nobody was going back and saying, "That's who I was, that's where I was. This is who I am now. You can change too, you can heal too. A dreamcatcher is a Native American object that you hang near a child's cot. It is supposed to chase away children's nightmares. That's what we want to do - we want to chase away those bad dreams, those bad things that happen to young girls and women. The recent documentary film Dreamcatcher, directed by Kim Longinotto, showed the work that we do.

We meet up with women who are still working on the street and we tell them, "There is a way out, we're ready to help you when you're ready to be helped. I also run after-school clubs with young girls who are exactly like I was in the s. I can tell as soon as I meet a girl if she is in danger, but there is no fixed pattern.

You might have one girl who's quiet and introverted and doesn't make eye contact. Then there might be another who's loud and obnoxious and always getting in trouble. They're both suffering abuse at home but they're dealing with it in different ways - the only thing they have in common is that they are not going to talk about it.

But in time they understand that I have been through what they're going through, and then they talk to me about it. So far, we have 13 girls who have graduated from high school and are now in city colleges or have gotten full scholarships to go to other colleges.

They came to us 11, 12, 13 years old, totally damaged. And now they're reaching for the stars. Besides my outreach work, I attend conferences and contribute to academic work on prostitution.

I've had people say to me, "Brenda, come and meet Professor so-and-so from such-and-such university. He's an expert on prostitution. Where did you get your credentials? At 13, she got married. Two years later, after giving birth to her first child, Nawal had to look for a job. Her husband was getting less and less work. With no education or skills, she tried working as a house cleaner in an apartment building. But she stopped when the building guards refused to introduce her to customers unless she had sex with them.

She refers to herself as a servant. Nawal has been robbed several times, but no one would help her. Officially, she does not exist. And the thing that really puzzles her is that a lot of people think that she enjoys sex work.

She does not. She just does not know any better way to survive. Because many men fear they will become infected with HIV when they have sex with older sex workers, there is an increasing demand for younger girl children to work in the sex trade. Other women are forced into sex work. Often women are tricked into thinking they are going to get jobs or rich husbands in other countries and are sold into sex work instead. The prostitutes tended to have most recently worked as domestic workers, casual laborers, or farm laborers.

The main reason for leaving their last occupation was obligation to provide sex services. Most prostitutes earned about Rs. Most prostitutes send remittances to their families. The prostitutes took care of each other.