CAASE is on Groupon!

**Update as of 1/13/2011: The Groupon is closed and it was a BIG success! You helped us raise more than $1,500 for our curriculum. Thank you very, very much!

Today is Human Trafficking Awareness Day. You can help fight trafficking here in Chicago by giving to CAASE via Groupon today and tomorrow! Help us take this opportunity to raise funds for our high school curriculum for boys. Log on and give $12, and tell your friends:

The money raised via Groupon will help us teach young men how they can fight sexual exploitation. Our teachers use the CAASE curriculum, the first of its kind in the coutnry, to teach boys the realities of prostitution and human trafficking and empower them to end it in their own communities.

Your $12 gift via Groupon helps us to expand our classes so we can reach more young men, like those at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center.

Our goal is to reach some of the most vulnerable members of society who could become the next generation of leaders in the fight against sexual exploitation.
Thank

To give via Groupon, click here.

Sex Trafficking in the Suburbs: Mt. Prospect

   

Update: As of January 31, 2012, Alex Campbell has been convicted of sex trafficking. Read more here. 

Most people probably don’t imagine that sex trafficking happens in an affluent place like Mt. Prospect. Just last week, however, a man was charged with child sex trafficking in a massage parlor in that Chicago suburb. He is charged with forcing a child into prostitution and branding his employees.

When you see these stories like this one in the news, look for what’s missing. Who is buying sex from women and girls? Most likely, it’s men who live in the area and think they have the right to buy sex from another person. When we look the other way as men buy sex, the demand for prostitution thrives, and women and children are at risk of being trafficked.

Read the story in the Daily Herald here.

CAASE and our End Demand partners are proud that law enforcement is targeting traffickers. Together, we can fight to hold the invisible perpetrators in these stories accountable—the people who are fueling sex trafficking by buying other people.

To learn more about how you can help, visit www.enddemandillinois.org.

Photo by Scorpions and Centaurs.

Man in Chicago Charged with Trafficking: Why the Problem is Local and Real

A hot topic in today’s news, a Chicago man is being charged with counts of human trafficking after forcing his girlfriend into prostitution. According to CBS Chicago News, authorities say the man beat his girlfriend until she agreed to prostitute herself for his monetary gain.

In light of this reported human trafficking case, the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE) is urging awareness regarding the local prevalence of sex trafficking in our very own community.

Lynne Johnson, CAASE’s advocacy director gives us the facts,

“As many as 25,000 women and children are purchased for sex in Chicago every year. Many were forced into the sex trade by someone they knew and trusted, frequently when they were just children. We applaud the “We applaud the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office for their newly increased commitment to prosecuting pimps and traffickers aggressively and effectively,” she said.

CAASE is the lead agency for the End Demand Illinois campaign, which fights the demand for prostitution in Chicago.

There are many myths and misconceptions about human trafficking: CAASE offers these facts to help the public better understand the issue and fight trafficking in our community:

*According to the federal definition, ‘Sex Trafficking’ involves recruiting and maintaining another into or in prostitution.
“Aggravated Trafficking”- when force, fraud or coercion is used to get or keep people in prostitution—these are serious federal crimes.

*Contrary to conventional wisdom, trafficking offenses do not usually require the crossing of jurisdictional boundaries.

*Cook County’s new approach to targeting pimps and traffickers is innovative and necessary to ending the problem of sex trafficking: Historically 2/3 of all prostitution-related arrests in Chicago have been of women.

*Research reveals that the average age of entry into prostitution for women living in Chicago is16.

*The word “trafficking” is about exploitation: It does NOT require the movement or transportation of the person. Instead trafficking is defined at the Federal level as the use of force, fraud, or coercion against a victim.

*Research indicates that most victims of sex trafficking within the United States are women and children, particularly girls under the age of 18.

*A number of studies in the United States indicate that many women and girls in prostitution are also victims of sex trafficking. For example:

* 79% of women in prostitution in one study gave an indication that they were in prostitution due to some degree of force.

*In another study, 50% of the women and girls interviewed reported being kidnapped by pimps; 76% of those were beaten by pimps; and 79% were beaten by customers.

The demand for commercial sex is enormous, whether on the street, in strip clubs, escort services, or massage parlors. The willingness of some men to pay for sexual ‘services’ fuels a multi-billion dollar global sex industry, without which there would be no trafficking.

To learn more, visit http://www.caase.org/

What Did You Think of "Saved on the Strip"?

I watched Hookers, Saved on the Strip on Discovery Channel last night. It’s a new reality TV show about Annie Lobert, a survivor of prostitution (above). I wanted to weigh in about my reaction to the show and hear what you all have to say about it.

First of all, I want to acknowledge that the show perpetuates a lot of stereotypes about women in prostitution. It’s set in Las Vegas, and the B-roll used to tell Annie’s story includes many shots of women wearing fishnet stockings and looking generally happy and glamorous. This made me cringe—the vast majority of women in prostitution in the U.S. are having sex to survive, and they certainly aren’t wearing six-inch heels. Real women in prostitution live in our own community—from Naperville to Elmhurst to Chicago—not just in “sin city.”

However, I think the show tackles a lot of issues that women right here in Chicago are facing as they try to exit prostitution. She touches on issues pertaining to violence, pimps, the legal system and more. I think it’s very brave of Annie and the other survivors on the show to tell their stories. They’re educating the public about the harms of prostitution and trying to help other women. Here are a couple things that stood out to me as being as being informative and pertinent to Chicago:

From what I could tell, Annie was a minor when she was recruited into prostitution. She was lured into it by someone she knew. This is really, really sad and also a very common experience for women in prostitution. Until recently in Illinois, girls could be charged with prostitution even though they were minors, and adults were paying to have sex with them. Our End Demand Illinois campaign advocated for a law that ends this practice: The Illinois Safe Children Act is changing the way law enforcement in our state treat survivors of domestic sex trafficking. Instead of being treated like criminals, youth survivors of prostitution are seen as being worthy of service and treatment.

Annie is also showing how the arrest and re-arrest of women in prostitution makes it incredibly difficult for women to leave the sex trade. This practice ignores the cause of this problem—the people who are buying sex and creating a demand for prostitution. Regina, a survivor on the show, was working to have her criminal record sealed so that she could apply for a job outside of the sex trade. She found this process incredibly difficult and wondered aloud if returning to stripping wouldn’t just be easier on her. This was a really sad moment in the show. Our culture’s stigmatization and legal treatment of women in prostitution is so harmful and cyclical. The End Demand Illinois campaign seeks to stop this cycle by shifting law enforcement’s attention to the cause of the problem—the men who are buying sex—and to stop the arrest and re-arrest of women.

To learn more about how to end the demand for prostitution, visit CAASE's resource page.

Sex Trafficking Revealed in Little Village

Many Americans believe that sex trafficking happens primarily in other countries, but human trafficking is a problem right here at home in Chicago. Just this week, a woman was arrested for trafficking young girls in a brothel in the Little Village/Pilsen neighborhood. The Chicago Tribune reports here:

Rubicela Montero forced the underage girls and other victims into prostitution and threatened them or their families with death if they quit, authorities said.

We are thrilled to see that our advocacy efforts are creating change. The Cook County State's Attorney's Office and the Chicago Police Department uncovered these victims of human trafficking. They treated the girls who were being exploited as worthy of support, not arrest - and to direct resources toward the investigation, charging, and prosecution of those who profit from commercial sexual exploitation. This is a major shift in the way survivors of sex trafficking are treated.

How can you get involved?

Learn more about the issue. Visit our resources page to read more about human trafficking.

Share with your friends. Send the link to this story to five of your friends to raise awareness about the issues in Chicago.

Join the End Demand Illinois campaign. Help us hold people accountable when they buy sex and contribute to sex trafficking in our community : www.enddemandillinois.org

A few more facts about sex trafficking:

• Research indicates that most victims of sex trafficking within the United States are women and children, particularly girls under the age of 18

• It is just as likely that a trafficking victim could come from your own neighborhood and be a local teenage girl.
  
  
• Sadly, Americans tend to refer to U.S. trafficking victims as anything but victims. They are referred to as criminals, prostitutes, child prostitutes, runaways, addicts, or juvenile delinquents. Traffickers are often referred to only as pimps

Thank you for your support!

Looking Beyond the Story of Madame Rose

Rose Laws, a "madam" who prostituted women on the Gold Coast and was then imprisoned, is profiled by ABC7 this week about her "business" selling women's bodies to wealthy men in our community. In the interview, she reveals many disturbing facts about prostitution in Chicago and names some names. Most importantly, her story subtly reveals the rampant violence and indignity experienced by women in prostitution:

• Laws says that professional football players hurt some of her "girls" by holding their heads under water in a hot tub. Violence is rampant in prostitution-the average life expectancy for a woman in prostitution is seven years after she enters the trade.
  
  
• She also describes sending her "youngest girls" to service men--the connection between child sex trafficking and "high-end" prostitution is strong and clear. As long as there is a demand for young bodies, children will be trafficked. We must ask why we would implicitly allow men in our community to buy children for sex.
  
  
• Laws estimates her women sold their bodies to as many as 5,000 men in Chicago. There is indeed a huge demand for prostitution in Chicagoland, and it feeds on more than 25,000 women and children who are prostituted in our city on any given day. There are very few consequences for men who are caught buying sex, while women in prostitution are often arrested and re-arrested.

I am genuinely interested in the reasons why Laws entered the sex trade. For the majority of women who do, it is out of desperation, not choice.

What can you do to help women in Chicago who would like to leave the sex trade? Join the End Demand Illinois campaign to fight the demand for the sex trade in Chicago. Respond to the media using our toolkit with common myths and misconceptions, and hold the media responsible when they get it wrong or only tell one side of the story.

Visit www.enddemandillinois.org to learn more.

Security Screenings and Survivors of Sexual Harm

There’s lots of chatter today about TSA security screenings and pat-downs at the airports on this busy travel day. Our legal director, Kaethe Morris Hoffer, was on WBEZ this morning talking about how the issue affects survivors of sexual harm. She states that the screenings could be traumatic to survivors. Listen to what she had to say, and leave a comment!

Kaethe and CAASE offer low- or no-cost legal representation to survivors of sexual harm. To learn more about our efforts, visit http://www.caase.org/work_legal.aspx.

Have a safe and Happy Thanksgiving.