The STOPLight

Starting life over again

Susan Battles, survivor of prostitution and program coordinator of the PRIDE* program in Minneapolis, tells what led to her involvement in prostitution and her escape from it.

It is my belief that a person’s prostitution starts with the first case of sexual abuse, a first rape, or sometimes battery. At any rate, it starts long before the first trick is turned. In my case, it started with incest. I was 12 years old when a 33—year-old cousin sexually molested me.

It is one of life’s greatest tragedies that, rather than getting help and support, so many girls are disbelieved when they tell someone about sexual abuse. That’s what happened to me. I told his sister whom I had always considered a good friend. Her reaction was denial; she shamed and blamed me. In most cases, if an abused child reaches out for help and is not believed, she goes no further. She doesn’t dare to tell anyone else because she feels too confused and rejected to risk it again. However, I did tell someone else: his mother, my aunt. She didn’t believe me either. I didn’t try again— just internalized my feelings.

Another really unfortunate thing in many girls’ lives is that their family is chaotic or dysfunctional. In my family, my father severely battered my mother and me. I suffered emotional and physical abuse from my mother as well. There was alcoholism and a lot of fighting. I ran away the first time at 14 to get away from the beatings.

My feelings of low self-esteem and feeling like a misfit were compounded when a 16-year-old boy raped me when I was 13. When I told about the rape to a counselor at school, he also attempted to rape me. I felt that the only use a man had for me was to use me sexually.

My active participation in prostitution began when I was 23 and my husband got laid off from his job. From the beginning of our marriage, he had always been physically, emotionally and sexually abusive toward me. Then, after he lost his job, he encouraged me to take a job modeling lingerie because it paid $15 an hour. He was a pimp in that he had me take money for being a sex object. That was the start of breaking down what values I had left —part of the brainwashing that went on to get me to accept that there were no alternatives.

People ask me sometimes what I thought of the johns. I was sexually used and abused so I didn’t like men in general. I felt sometimes like I was using them by making them pay me for what had been taken by force before. I saw so much perversion — a few of the men wanted regular sex, but most wanted really strange, kinky, perverted sex. I couldn’t respect them or think much of them. One thing is sure — johns aren’t just rapists or identifiable misfits.

They are judges, dentists, senators, the bagger at the grocery store, brothers, fathers, uncles, sons, husbands. It’s interesting to me that people I talk to never think they know any johns.

Many people ask: "Why didn’t you just walk away? Why didn’t you go to the police for help?" The answer is complex.

First of all, it is very dangerous for a woman to try to leave prostitution. She is most often the sole source of income for her pimp and he’ll go to any lengths to assure his "livelihood." The beatings are both physical and emotional. He keeps her self-esteem in shreds. The violence increases if he even suspects she is anything but submissive. Pimps are very similar to batterers of women with the added component that the woman is bringing in all the money but he controls it all. At one of the massage parlors, we were told if we tried to leave, our bodies would be found in a ditch with our arms and legs broken. There were girls I worked with who disappeared and were never heard of again.

Secondly, women on the streets don’t trust cops. I’ve been verbally abused by them and propositioned in a squad car on the way to jail after the parlor was busted. For a year, an officer of a vice squad was my "sugar daddy." That means he paid for my apartment, bought my clothes, gave me spending money —he kept me for his own exclusive, personal use and abuse. He met me when the police raided the parlor where I worked.

There are very real economic obstacles to a woman getting out of the lifestyle. Almost none have a high school diploma. How can you make a living with a "straight" job when you have no job skills? Most can’t or won’t return to their family because the situation there was often the very reason they left in the first place.

The emotional obstacles are also significant. You have to leave all your personal belongings — clothing, furniture, etc. — behind. You can’t tell anyone you’re even thinking of leaving or you’ll be dead. You have to leave your friends — and yes, you do make friends with some of the women you work with. Basically, you have to run away from it in the middle of the night and go across the country alone to someplace where no-one will find you. You have to start all over again.

Another thing that people don’t generally know is that even though pimps are more visible, it’s the men who own the massage parlors who have the influential connections. They are the ones with more far-reaching power. To cross them is extremely dangerous. Also, in every town I worked, the first thing I did was find a lawyer who would trade services —sex for legal. I never once had a lawyer turn me down. Every time I was arrested, he would get the charges dropped to a misdemeanor or dismissed.

Getting out of prostitution is a process of months and years, not days and weeks. The process is gradual, leading up to the flight.

When I was 31,1 started noticing what was happening to women older than me — I’d see them get passed over time and again for younger girls. If their breasts started to sag or they had a bit of a belly, they were humiliated by not being chosen.

Then things started happening —strange, inexplicable things — that got me thinking. I would get a headache or stomachache and leave work right before a bust or some violent incident happened. For two years, I never got busted. The owner of the parlor thought I must have been working with the police because I didn’t get arrested. Once I was being severely beaten and a girlfriend came in and stopped it. She had never been in the parlor at that time of night before. I felt there must be some reason why she came in just then and my life was saved. I thought about the incident a lot and wanted to get out but didn’t. Then once, when I was too sick to work, the girl taking my place was robbed and her throat was slit. Again, I felt my life was spared for a reason, but I still didn’t get out.

Finally I got so physically ill that I couldn’t work. I lost weight to the point where I was emaciated, my stomach bloated. I was scared and didn’t know what was wrong. It was then, as I was watching a TV program called "Children of the Night," that I knew I was getting out. The program was trying to help young girls get off the streets and out of prostitution. It hit home. "This is what I am supposed to be doing," I thought, and I did it. I left and came halfway across the country to a smallish town to start over.

The first thing I did was enter chemical dependency treatment. I went to a vocational school to get my GED. I started college, had a ‘straight’ job as an advocate in a sexual assault center, and was in therapy. But I felt so alone so alienated from everyone around me. I told my counselor, "I think I need to meet and talk with someone else who has gotten out of prostitution. I feel so isolated."

That’s when I first came to the PRIDE support group. It helped a lot but the commute from where I was living was too long so I started a group in the town where I was going to school. When I finished college, I was hired by Family and Children’s Services as an advocate in the PRIDE program. Two months later, I became program coordinator.

Right now, I facilitate three support groups for adult women who are getting out of prostitution or who want to get out. The newest of the groups meets at the Hennepin County Workhouse.

I love what I do. I’m not just doing a job when I work with survivors of prostitution. It is my "calling." I really feel something special for these women. I’m doing now what I was meant to do with my life.

Interviewed by Joan Hendrickson, STOP Light committee

Program

The PRIDE program is operated by Minneapolis Family and Children’s Services to help people get out and stay out of prostitution. Besides the three adult women’s support groups, the PRIDE program includes advocate services, individual and group therapy and a support group for family’ members of people who are or have been involved in prostitution. In conjunction with Project Offstreets (also of Minneapolis), PRIDE offers young men’s and teen girls’ support groups. For more information about PRIDE or other services of Minneapolis Family and Children’s Services, call (612) 340-7444.