Extraordinary and terrifying article about the train of young white mid western girls into big city prostitution and sexual abuse. Here are some excerpts:
“The emerald-eyed prostitute from Kansas just escaped from two New York johns who kidnapped her, bound her naked in their basement, assaulted her and chopped off her strawberry blond locks while shouting voodoo chants and recording it all on videotape.
The majority of these underage prostitutes in San Francisco are not from impoverished Asian or Eastern European countries. They are honey-haired teenagers hauled in from America’s heartland. Magnet cities along the so-called Pacific Pipeline trafficking circuit such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas can’t get enough of them.
These magnets attract more than young hotties and the johns who buy them. Where prostitutes roam, so do drug dealers, pimps and mobsters.
Every day the simple equation of supply and demand snags young lives: The Nordic belly of America overflows with fair- skinned teenagers hungering for new lives. Pimps and traffickers, eager to cash in on the demand for young blondes, scoop up far too many.
Each year in the United States, 400,000 children are lured or forced into prostitution. Many of them are white, working- and middle-class runaways from troubled homes who start selling their bodies by 13 or 14. They are all around — in city strip clubs, massage parlors, escort services, and on the streets.
…”Middle-class girls from the isolated suburbs usually make the best hos,” [a pimpo] says. “They wasn’t raised full of callousness. They don’t have no street in ‘em.”
…Predators intent on exploiting America’s daughters find a plentiful supply. Midwestern friendliness makes many particularly vulnerable, says the Rev. Alvin Erickson, head of A- Stop (Alliance for Speaking Truths On Prostitution)…”We’ve got something called ‘Minnesota Nice.’ We try hard to be helpful and not offend strangers or people of different races.”
…Sleepy towns in Minnesota, Oklahoma and Missouri are the likeliest targets. “There’s nothing to do in those locations, to put it simply,” says Susan Breault, head of the Paul and Lisa Program that saved Johnson’s life. “Mix in some abuse in the home and a pimp who says he’ll get you out of the humdrum life by providing transportation, and very quickly the girl finds herself beholden to him.”
…In prostitute round-ups in Las Vegas, police find more than half the underage streetwalkers are Minnesota imports. “We lose about 1,000 kids a year to the trade,” laments Erickson. “Pimps have fertile ground here, but the people of Minnesota haven’t confronted it yet. It’s our dirty little secret.”
“Men in the program tell us they prefer white, young, blue- eyed blondes,” says Norma Hotaling, founder of San Francisco’s First Offenders program. Hotaling, a hazel-eyed blonde, was a prostitute herself for two decades before escaping the streets.
…Fresh, snowy girls…are known as thoroughbreds on the streets because of their money-making potential.
Underestimating the craftiness of pimps and traffickers can be deadly for many of the young girls. “In the U.S., we do not appreciate the cleverness, entrepreneurship and ability to coerce that pimps have — both men and women,” Breault says. “They use manipulation followed by violence, degradation and dehumanization, including gang rapes.” Pimps are masters at psychological control who seek out attention-starved teens. They often pretend to be the young girl’s boyfriend, using her romantic devotion to put her on the streets. “A 14-year-old that’s hopelessly in love with you,” Eskimo says, “there’s nothing she won’t do for you. It’s brainwashing, really.” To desensitize the girls to street life, pimps expose them to increasing amounts of pornography and violence. They often begin by asking girls to turn a trick with one of their friends.
Slowly they begin to control the girls’ every move, down to how much toilet paper they can use. “Once you can get a person to say to herself, ‘I’m a prostitute,’ and change her identity,” says Erickson, “you basically got her. If you melt an ice cube and add in coloring and sugar and refreeze it. Then it’s no longer an ice cube — it’s a Popsicle.”
Runaway shelters, halfway houses and foster homes scream “Vulnerable Flesh Over Here” to pimp-predators. Nowhere is safe: malls, parties and high schools are rich recruitment grounds.
Hookers still attending school will even pull their classmates into the game to curry favor with their pimp. They’re competing with their “wives-in-law” (other girls in the stable) to be their pimp’s “bottom bitch,” or his favorite girl. Meanwhile the smug felons stay safely outside school grounds. “Right now, pimping is coming back,” Eskimo says. “Everybody’s trying to get in. It’s just like heroin being back on the streets, or coke.”
“If you would have told me in high school I would be ‘hoing,’ ” she says, “I would have never believed you. But that’s their job and they’re good at it.”
Pimps, who consider themselves above using condoms, frequently impregnate girls in their stable and later use the children to control them…Many girls never escape their pimps’ mind control. Many end up drug- addicted, broke, infected with diseases or worse. Some are murdered. Many die spiritually and emotionally.
“Women who started in prostitution at 12 or 13 and come to us as 22-year-olds. They sit across the table from me and say ‘I’m used up,’ or ‘my life is over, I’m so tired.’ They’ve never had any feelings of hope or control over their lives. The level of psychological paralysis is phenomenal,” says Hotaling, who helps prostitutes change their lives.
{ 0 comments… add one now }