TimeOut Chicago Story: A Rape Survivor's Journey with CAASE

There’s a powerful article in TimeOut Chicago today about a young woman who sought CAASE’s help after a man raped her. Our Legal Director Kaethe Morris Hoffer helped rape survivor Suzanne Alton navigate the court system and file a civil no contact order, which forced the man who attacked her to stand trial. We won the case. Read the story here.

We are extremely proud of Kaethe and want to say thank you to all of you who make CAASE’s work possible. Thanks to reporter Claire Bushey for covering this important topic. Thanks also to Suzanne for the tremendous bravery it took to share her story, which will help so many others. Kaethe is working with survivors of sexual assault every single day at CAASE and your support is making that possible. If you’d like to donate to CAASE to support our work, please click here.

Prostitution in the News: Suburban Law Enforcement Focusing on Demand

We’ve noticed a few articles in the past week about prostitution stings happening in the Chicago suburbs. There are a few things that the staff here at CAASE looks for when we see these types of articles. Are johns, pimps and sex traffickers being held accountable? Were children involved? How does the reporter portray the people being prostituted? Here are some initial thoughts and a few stats from our study Deconstructing the Demand for Prostitution. What are your reactions to these stories?

Sept. 10, 2010: Daily Herald | Nine arrested in Aurora prostitution sting: We think it’s very important and a victory that local law enforcement in Aurora are going after the men who are trying to buy sex acts. The sex trade is a crime that is happening locally, here in Chicagoland, and it is harmful to our communities and to women: 27% of the men CAASE interviewed acknowledged that they had committed sexually coercive acts against women.

Sept. 25, 2010: 4 arrested in prostitution investigation near Willowbrook: This story reveals that people are being trafficked into our area for prostitution. The woman arrested is “from” Seattle—we wonder who brought her to Chicago and if that person is being punished. Of the men CAASE interviewed, 20% said they had purchased sex from women who were trafficked from other countries.

Sept. 27, 2010: Police nab eight in prostitution sting: (Elmhurst) This story lists the names and addresses of the men who were arrested for attempting to buy sex. In our study, 87% of men said that having their photo or name in the local paper would deter them from buying sex.

Notice another buried aspect of the Elmhurst story: The final paragraph reveals that one of the women who was arrested for prostitution was only 17 years old, and therefore released. This is because of a new law, the Illinois Safe Children Act, which will end the practice of prosecuting young people who have been prostituted, and instead offer them a safe place to stay and services. This law was an initiative of our End Demand campaign, and we’re extremely proud to see that it’s working!

To learn more about how you can help with the End Demand Illinois campaign, please visit www.enddemandillinois.org.

Demi and Ashton's Real Men Campaign

Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore unveiled a new campaign today called Real Men, which targets the demand for child prostitution. This is exciting news, and we love Ashton and Demi's DNA Foundation.

We want to recognize, however, the alarming emergence of the idea that sex trafficking is only wrong if it affects children. "Real men protect, respect and care for girls," Demi said. "Real men don’t buy girls." This is, at the same time, both wonderful and misleading messaging. People purchasing children for sex are indeed committing a heinous crime that happens all too often. But Demi then made a comment that it is acceptable for men to buy sex from a woman who chooses prostitution. That is a myth. Real men must not buy sex from women, men, girls or boys and here's why:

Most women in prostitution did not choose it. Free choice implies that a prostituted person has been presented with a variety of options and simply picks the one she feels is in her best interest. This is rarely the case for those who end up in the sex trade. The most common reason women enter prostitution is to meet basic survival needs. Many others were coerced or abused by sex traffickers. One study indicates that 92% of women in prostitution would like to escape it immediately.

That being said, great awareness was raised today about sex trafficking. We especially like Real Men's focus on ending the demand for prostitution, which is the purpose of our End Demand Illinois campaign. If there were no demand, there would be no prostitution. Let's just make sure the Real Men campaign targets the trafficking of all people, regardless of their age. To find out how you can help, download our 10 Actions on 10 Issues guide for real, simple ways you can end sexual exploitation.

Here's the video of the press conference:

Watch live streaming video from cgi_press at livestream.com

Women Taxi Drivers Are Important Part of a Bigger Story

 

I loved reading Tracy Swartz's article about the two strong female cabbies in today's Red Eye. I always want to hear more about successful women in traditionally male-dominated industries.  These two women are among the 120 female licensed cab drivers in the city of Chicago and as you may guess, their experience is a bit different than the traditional male driver.

One relates: "You have to be on the defense without being rude. You have to expect what you'd never expect." The story reveals that these women have faced sexual harassment, attacks by male passengers and solicitations for prostitution.  While I am not surprised to hear these stories, it adds a new dimension to the story of sex trafficking in Chicago.

We have heard stories of male cab drivers who share profits with pimps and help the sex trade to thrive. Not all cabbies of course, but some cabbies are regularly paid for referring customers to pimps. This came to light in the just-released research on 25 Ex-Pimps in Chicago. This study by Jody Raphael and Brenda Myers-Powell documents how profit sharers all play a role in the sex-trade. They report: "Pimps said they shared profits with a host of other actors, including lawyers and doctors, but also bellman, hotel clerks, bartenders, and cab drivers, all of whom were regularly paid for referring customers."

The act of cab customers soliciting female cabbies for paid sex is clearly unacceptable. Why then do we tolerate the actions of those who perpetuate the demand for prostitution in Chicago? It’s time to speak up and to combat forced prostitution and human trafficking. This effort takes the collaboration of many, including criminal justice professionals and politicians. We must End Demand for prostitution in Illinois. 

According to the article, these two female cabbies will soon leave their cabs behind and move on to new careers. One will run for Alderman and one will study criminal justice. I wish them luck in their new careers and know of a movement that could use their help.

Lindsey LaPointe is a Policy Intern for the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation. 

Photo by Carl Raether.

Five Truths About Prostitution

Sudhir Venkatesh is wrong about prostitution. In his recent Washington Post column, “Five myths about prostitution,” he presents a set of skewed and harmful untruths. Here are some real truths here in Chicago and, almost certainly, across the country:

1. Venkatesh says that many men who pay for sex end up “just talking” to prostituted women instead of requiring them to perform a sex act. This is false. Of the 113 men interviewed in a CAASE study about the demand for prostitution, 100% of the men who self-identified as buying sex were purchasing a sex act. Of those interviewed, 53% purchased sex as frequently as once a month to several times a week.

2. He claims that prostitutes are motivated by money and are not coerced or abused. His examples of “high-end” and well-educated women in prostitution are misleading. In “Sisters Speak Out: The Lives and Needs of Prostituted Women in Chicago,” more than 60% of prostituted women reported domestic violence in their household and 21.4% of women in escort services being raped more than 10 times.

3. The relationship between women who are prostituted and the police is not nearly as rosy as Venkatesh asserts. Of all the prostitution-related arrests in Chicago over the course of a year, approximately two thirds of arrests are people who are being prostituted while only one third are customers. Less than one percent of arrests are of pimps and traffickers.

4. Until Craigslist closed its U.S. adult services section last week, there were hundreds of local postings in Chicago every single day. Most were extremely graphic and dehumanizing. These listings continue to be posted on Craigslist’s international websites.

5. More must be done to show our culture the harms of prostitution and the ways to end sexual exploitation.
What can you do?

1. Share this link with 5 people you know, and leave us a comment on this blog post.
2. Sign up for our newsletter! Send an email to Kristin “at” caase.org with the subject line “newsletter” to learn more about our events.
3. Read and take action with one of these 100 meaningful ways you can demand change.

-Kristin Claes is Communications Manager for the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation.

Abuse isn’t Cheeky. At All.

About to embark on a move to Germany, airport travel has been weighing on my mind as my departure date gets closer. An organized person might be focusing on practical things like rolling underwear neatly into shoes to obtain maximum use out of every square inch in the suitcase but I am not said organized person. My travel concerns are which vintage suitcase will look best on the baggage claim and which shoes will best compliment the blue bins when going through security. I must not be the only person in the world who is more concerned with the aesthetics of travel than practicality because there is a website entirely devoted to stickers that will “draw attention to your bag and [make] it easily identifiable and sure to make you some new friends.”

“Take a stand against monotonous travel with Suitcase Stickers.”, the Cheeky.com website reads. Running my mouse over the four available stickers, the enlarged images pop up. Three stickers show a suitcase torn away to reveal something “daring” and “risqué”: bundles of money, bags of cocaine, and a plethora of sex toys. The fourth sticker made me catch my breath. Inside the suitcase was a weeping woman bound and gagged. Upon closer inspection I could see that she was an air stewardess and her facial expression is absolutely terrified.

My mind started racing with incredibility that a company was making a $15 profit from this horrifying image of a violated and abused woman. Hadn’t they heard about domestic violence, rape, or sex trafficking? Didn’t they know that this is the reality for thousands upon thousands of women?

Since I have taken a vow of boisterous noise when confronted with injustice I thought I should tell them. I wrote them this letter:



Dear Cheeky.com,


When you created the sticker of a woman bound and gagged in a suitcase I don't think that you were considering the horrifying reality that thousands of women and young girls are trafficked into America every year to become sex slaves. Violence against women isn't cheeky or funny. It's not cleaver or witty to reproduce age old beliefs that women are less valuable than men and that it doesn't matter if they are gagged, beaten, and stuffed into a suitcase like any other object. I'd like to hope you have more educated people on staff who can create products that don't use abused women as the source of a joke.

Please remove this product from your site. And please educate yourself on this issue by visiting sites like www.love146.org and reading books like Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Day Slavery by Siddharth Kara.

Sincerely,

Mamie Adams



I felt satisfied with my response but wondered, who else is getting upset about this enough to do something about it? Further investigation led me to news articles that covered these stickers but they managed to completely fail at discussing the abused woman. One news source described it as “luggage porn” which is alarming that when they think of a woman bound and gagged this reminds them of pornography. Focus was more on the offense to airport personnel rather than the offense to victims of gender violence.

What this sticker shows is that violence against women is treated lightly and as a joke. There is a hardly surprising lack of outcry to TheCheeky.com because it’s not just this one website and it’s not just this one instance that treats violence against women as a comical joke at which to smirk or smile. In the undertones and fabric of our society there is a common and widespread notion that women are worth less than men and are valued more for their sexuality than person-hood.


I have yet to hear a response from TheCheeky.com to my email. But I can smile knowing that I will never be silent when violence against women is used for a joke. When I travel to Germany this fall I hope that wherever in the world I may be, in an airport, in Chicago or Berlin, that I always raise my voice for the voiceless.

Become educated and take action in your community!

More often than not, people assume that prostitution and sex trafficking do not happen in their hometown or city, instead they, like millions of others, believe that sex trafficking and sexual exploitation is an issue that exists only in underdeveloped countries. This misconception blinds the world of the reality. Sexual exploitation is a wide spread, growing issue and is happening in our own backyard-Chicago. Between 16,000 and 24,000 women and girls are impacted by the sex trade in Chicago every day. Not such a small problem, is it? In fact, prostitution is a pervasive issue that affects an immeasurable number of women and girls. These women and girls are frequently victimized and enslaved by pimps and traffickers who use abusive tactics (physical, sexual, psychological) to control and exploit them. Pimping is form of modern day slavery and should not be tolerated in any part of the world, including Chicago.

As part of combating sexual exploitation, CAASE is developing a Community Response Toolkit for community members to raise awareness and to mobilize their communities to work towards ending sexual exploitation. CAASE recognizes that if there weren’t any men purchasing sex, then there would be no prostitution in our communities. Eliminating the demand will ultimately end sexual exploitation. To accomplish this goal, communities need to first become aware of the issue. Next, communities need to continue to create awareness and educate their fellow community members and organizations about the harms of human trafficking and sexual exploitation, and to work with them to identify ways to take action toward change. Communities and its individuals, big or small, can have an amazing impact towards ending sexual exploitation and CAASE encourages everyone to take action towards creating a global world free from sexual harm.

Although the Community Response Toolkit is under development, here are a few action steps that you can begin to take within your community:

1) Attend your neighborhood CAPS meeting - Help refocus the response of law enforcement and community members toward addressing demand by raising awareness of sexual exploitation and the harms to those being prostituted. Advocate that they spend their resources targeting the demand side, not supply. You can encourage your CAPS beat facilitator to invite a guest speaker to speak about prostitution in the community. If you are interested in having someone speak to your community, please contact CAASE.

2) Get involved with district subcommittee meetings - Contact the Community Policing Office in your local district for information on subcommittee meetings. Choose one, such as the domestic violence subcommittee, and attend the monthly meetings to become informed about the issue, as well as to bring issues, such as sexual exploitation, to the table.

3) Use fair trade coffee or have traffick-free chocolate parties – Buy fair trade and traffick-free chocolate and coffee and use them as an entry point for conversations with friends, family, and neighbors about human trafficking, both abroad and in Illinois. Use fair trade coffee at community and private functions and encourage surrounding communities (especially schools, colleges, and local shops) to do the same.

And please encourage others to do the same!

C. O’Leary and O. Howard, The Prostitution of Women and Girls in Metropolitan Chicago: A Preliminary Prevalence Report (Center for Impact Research, 2001)