I grew up in the 1960s on the West Side of Chicago. My mother died when I was six months old. She was only 16 and I never learned what it was that she died from - my grandmother, who drank more than most, couldnât tell me later on.
It was my grandmother that took care of me. And she wasnât a bad person - in fact she had a side to her that was so wonderful. She read to me, baked me stuff and cooked the best sweet potatoes. She just had this drinking problem. She would bring drinking partners home from the bar and after she got intoxicated and passed out these men would do things to me. It started when I was four or five years old and it became a regular occurrence. Iâm certain my grandmother didnât know anything about it.Â
She worked as a domestic in the suburbs. It took her two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. So I was a latch-key kid - I wore a key around my neck and I would take myself to kindergarten and let myself back in at the end of the day. And the molesters knew about that, and they took advantage of it.
I would watch women with big glamorous hair and sparkly dresses standing on the street outside our house. I had no idea what they were up to; I just thought they were shiny. As a little girl, all I ever wanted was to be shiny.Â
One day I asked my grandmother what the women were doing and she said, âThose women take their panties off and men give them money.â And I remember saying to myself, âIâll probably do thatâ because men had already been taking my panties off.Â
To look back now, I dealt with it all amazingly well. Alone in that house, I had imaginary friends to keep me company that I would sing and dance around with - an imaginary Elvis Presley, an imaginary Diana Ross and the Supremes. I think that helped me deal with things.
Even though I was a smart kid, I disconnected from school. Going into the 1970s, I became the kind of girl who didnât know how to say ânoâ - if the little boys in the community told me that they liked me or treated me nice, they could basically have their way with me. By the time I was 14, Iâd had two children with boys in the community, two baby girls. My grandmother started to say that I needed to bring in some money to pay for these kids, because there was no food in the house, we had nothing.Â
So, one evening - it was actually Good Friday - I went along to the corner of Division Street and Clark Street and stood in front of the Mark Twain hotel. I was wearing a two-piece dress costing $3.99, cheap plastic shoes, and some orange lipstick which I thought might make me look older.Â
I was 14 years old and I cried through everything. But I did it. I didnât like it, but the five men who dated me that night showed me what to do. They knew I was young and it was almost as if they were excited by it.Â
I made $400 but I didnât get a cab home that night. I went home by train and I gave most of that money to my grandmother, who didnât ask me where it came from.Â
The following weekend I returned to Division and Clark, and it seemed like my grandmother was happy when I brought the money home.Â
But the third time I went down there, a couple of guys pistol-whipped me and put me in the trunk of their car. They had approached me before because I was, as they called it, âunrepresentedâ on the street. All I knew was the light in the trunk of the car and then the faces of these two guys with their pistol. First they took me to a cornfield out in the middle of nowhere and raped me. Then they took me to a hotel room and locked me in the closet. Thatâs the kind of thing pimps will do to break a girlâs spirits. They kept me in there for a long time. I was begging them to let me out because I was hungry, but they would only allow me out of the closet if I agreed to work for them.
They pimped me for a while, six months or so. I wasnât able to go home. I tried to get away but they caught me, and when they caught me they hurt me so bad. Later on, I was trafficked by other men. The physical abuse was horrible, but the real abuse was the mental abuse - the things they would say that would just stick and which you could never get from under.Â
Pimps are very good at torture, theyâre very good at manipulation. Some of them will do things like wake you in the middle of the night with a gun to your head. Others will pretend that they value you, and you feel like, âIâm Cinderella, and here comes my Prince Charmingâ. They seem so sweet and so charming and they tell you: âYou just have to do this one thing for me and then youâll get to the good part.â And you think, âMy life has already been so hard, whatâs a little bit more?â But you never ever do get to the good part.Â
When people describe prostitution as being something that is glamorous, elegant, like in the story of Pretty Woman, well that doesnât come close to it. A prostitute might sleep with five strangers a day. Across a year, thatâs more than 1,800 men sheâs having sexual intercourse or oral sex with. These are not relationships, no oneâs bringing me any flowers here, trust me on that. Theyâre using my body like a toilet.Â
And the johns - the clients - are violent. Iâve been shot five times, stabbed 13 times. I donât know why those men attacked me, all I know is that society made it comfortable for them to do so. They brought their anger or whatever it was and they decided to wreak havoc on a prostitute, knowing I couldnât go to the police and if I did I wouldnât 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 youâve turned as many tricks as you can, after youâve been strangled, after someoneâs put a knife to your throat or someoneâs put a pillow over your head, you need something to put a bit of courage in your system.Â
I was a prostitute for 25 years, and in all that time I never once saw a way out. But on 1 April 1997, 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.Â
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: âOh I know her. Sheâs just a hooker. She probably beat some guy and took his money and got what she deserved.â And I could hear the nurse laughing along with him. They pushed me out into the waiting room as if I wasnât worth anything, as if I didnât 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.
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 didnât 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.Â
Usually, when a woman gets out of prostitution, she doesnât 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, âThatâs who I was, thatâs where I was. This is who I am now. You can change too, you can heal too.â So in 2008, together with Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, we founded the Dreamcatcher Foundation.Â
A dreamcatcher is a Native American object that you hang near a childâs cot. It is supposed to chase away childrenâs nightmares. Thatâs 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, âThere is a way out, weâre ready to help you when youâre ready to be helped.â We try to get through that brainwashing that says, âYouâre born to do this, thereâs nothing else for you.âÂ
I also run after-school clubs with young girls who are exactly like I was in the 1970s. 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 whoâs quiet and introverted and doesnât make eye contact. Then there might be another whoâs loud and obnoxious and always getting in trouble. Theyâre both suffering abuse at home but theyâre 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 theyâre going through, and then they talk to me about it.
People say different things about prostitution. Some people think that it would actually help sex workers more if it were decriminalized. I think itâs true to say that every woman has her own story. It may be OK for this girl, who is paying her way through law school, but not for this girl, who was molested as a child, who never knew she had another choice, who was just trying to get money to eat.Â
But let me say this too. However the situation starts off for a girl, thatâs not how the situation will end up. It might look OK now, the girl in law school might say she only has high-end clients that come to her through an agency, that she doesnât work on the streets but arranges to meet people in hotel rooms, but the first time that someone hurts her, thatâs when she really sees her situation for what it is. You always get that crazy guy slipping through and he has three or four guys behind him, and they force their way into your room and gang rape you, and take your phone and all your money. And suddenly you have no means to make a living and youâre beaten up too. That is the reality of prostitution.
Three years ago, I became the first woman in the state of Illinois to have her convictions for prostitution wiped from her record. It was after a new law was brought in, following lobbying from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, a group that seeks to shift the criminal burden away from the victims of sexual trafficking. Women who have been tortured, manipulated and brainwashed should be treated as survivors, not criminals.
So I am here to tell you - there is life after so much damage, there is life after so much trauma. There is life after people have told you that you are nothing, that you are worthless and that you will never amount to anything. There is life - and Iâm not just talking about a little bit of life. There is a lot of life.
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