I was asked to come into a high school
in Chicago to work with their 9th grade boys. The school
indicated that they were troubled by the behavior exhibited in the
halls by some of the boys toward some of the girls, and thought the
boys would benefit from going through our program. At the start of
the first day, I asked the boys to write down words they would use to
describe “a prostitute.” The majority of the responses were
words like, “slut,” “hoe,” “THOT” (That Hoe Out There),
“easy,” “nasty,” “dirty,” and “worthless.” Many of
these words were the same words that the administration reported
hearing directed at the girls in the school. At the end of the
4-session program, the boys had a new perspective. They really
understood how different the realities of prostitution were from the
myths they were accustomed to hearing and how many prostituted
people endure violence, poverty, and trauma. They also learned about
about how society frequently shames and isolates people in
prostitution.
As these young men went through our
4-session program, they had an opportunity to examine what they know
about “being a man” and think critically about how those shared
perceptions influence their own decision making. They also had a
chance to consider how their behavior, and the behavior of their
peers, can impact their community. One student wrote, “I’ve
learned that men treat women like crap, they use them as an object…
I know that this puts girls in danger of becoming a prostitute.”
He and his classmates began to see that objectifying women and
degrading them with words like “slut” can have serious
consequences. When asked how girls end up in prostitution, many
responded with “they had a traumatized life,” “they had a rough
childhood,” or “[society says] they have less power.”
Now, not every girl who is objectified
and degraded will end up being commercially sexually exploited, and
these young men acknowledged that. But as one student said, “we
[never] know her story.” At the end of the final session, I asked
the young men if there was anything that they would do differently
now, based on what they had learned during the program. The two most
common responses were “I will stop saying words like ‘thot’”
and “I am going to respect women more.”
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