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)

A Delicate Balance

Since the moment I interviewed to be a “legal intern” at CAASE, this organization has proved to be unlike any I have ever seen.

Officially, I assist in the “representation of clients who have experienced sexual exploitation.” Specifically, clients are usually victims of either sexual assault or sex trafficking.” In reality, it’s much more complicated than that.

As a legal intern, I work within two distinct arenas: the legal and advocacy fields, and the latter is often referred to as “the movement.” This distinction has been critical to understanding my role and facing the sometimes heartbreaking challenges.

On my first day we went to a meeting with what I describe as some suits from the State’s Attorney’s office to politely disagree with the way they prosecute – or do not prosecute – sexual assault cases. Nice first day, right? It was certainly time for my big girl pants. Put in a more eloquent way, this is the policy side of the job that requires patience and professionalism in the face of a great institutional barrier to justice for victims of sexual violence.

After that introduction into my new world, it was back to the office where all the other interns were buzzing about the upcoming play that CAASE and End Demand Illinois was launching. The two-part play was a depiction of the harsh realties of prostitution and exposed the ignorance about what “the life” does to young girls and women – the same ignorance I saw earlier that day at the State’s Attorney’s office. The only difference was that most people in the audience were already part of the movement, and it was the suits that should have been in attendance.

From that first day, it became clear that on top of all of the emotions I would experience as a result of working with victims of sexual exploitation, I needed to see these different worlds for what they are and appreciate the frustration that would stem from such a dichotomy. In other words, I needed to adjust my expectations for the crowd – the suits of the legal field would need a little more patience.

When I hear a police officer or other criminal justice actor imply that a rape victim becomes less credible because she showered after her assault, because she took a few days to cope with the trauma of what was done to her body, or because she can’t exactly remember what time it was when she was coming in and out of consciousness during the attack, I have to remind myself of the imaginary line between these worlds. I have to remember that not everyone grasps the who, what, where, when, and most importantly, the why of sexual violence against women.

Not to imply that the only troubling side of my internship is the legal field; in fact, I often become frustrated with individuals in the movement. There are the typical divisions that sometimes impede the progress of any issue-based movement, but advocates also sometimes forget about this gap between worlds. What I have learned is that advocates also struggle with this delicate balance. How far do you go to agitate the legal system before inadvertently leaving it in the dust?

What I have learned while working at CAASE is that we cannot expect the criminal justice system to miraculously change, but that we should also never stop shaking the trees in hopes of small victories. Enough adages for you? Here’s one more - I guess it’s all in a day’s work.

Porn Free, Live Free- Mamie Adams

Being an intern at CAASE has taught me many things thus far, and I have found myself connecting and integrating my internship with my life. “Hmm”, I’ve thought to myself, “That color blue on the walls really would work in my living room.” I have also wanted to become a spin instructor, just like Rachel,the Executive Director of CAASE, and have a little dog as cute as Maggie who comes to the office daily. My new found inspiration at CAASE hardly stops there. I have begun to see the world of exploitation in a new light and my own life as well. I must confess I used to be a woman who would watch porn on my own and think that I was sexually empowering myself. “See? I can do it too and wow, aren’t I just the fifth Sex and the City gal to come along!” My interest in porn quickly fizzled since what I find erotic was never represented . But it wasn’t until my internship at CAASE that I truly understood the problems of the porn industry. Watching the movie, “The Price of Pleasure”, certainly ended any doubt in my mind that porn can be good. I have been vegan for some years now and when people think that’s extreme I don’t mind. When exploitation is extreme and prolific, then I don’t mind having an extreme response by not involving myself or participating at all. The same has gone for porn now and I am happy to say that I am porn free. The following essay comes from comparing my past (and present) veganism with my now present anti-porn stance.

What do the porn and fast food industries have in common aside from the fact that they are both an ordinary and daily part of the majority of American’s lives? Exploitation, propagating false information, and devaluing life are the main ingredients of both. While one exploits women, the other, animals. They make a tremendous profit by turning women into “sex objects” and animals into “meat; both being consumable and discard-able.

Fast food corporations turn our survival cravings for food into their marketable gain. Fast food uses unnecessary fat and salt to provide a quick fix to hunger that makes us fill up faster but leaves us only temporarily satisfied and wanting more before long. The industry cleverly disguises the high caloric content and the animal cruelty that goes into their cheap cheeseburgers and milkshakes. In the last few years it has become a trend for a few fast food chains to claim that animals are treated well and they paint a pretty picture of cows and pigs grazing on acres of land. This fabrication of the truth leads people to believe that animals are comfortable and happy to be commodities in the industry. Chipotle touts their treatment of pigs as excellent; however, the motive is solely to ensure a pleasurable taste for the consumer once the animal has been killed.

“Pigs raised in this way are not given antibiotics, and their feed does not contain animal by-products. They are free to roam the pasture, to root in deeply bedded barns, and to socialize with other pigs. We believe pigs that are cared for in this way enjoy happier, healthier lives and produce the best pork we've ever tasted.”

–Chipotle’s official website

Misguiding terms such as cage-free, organic, and free-range are harmful because there is no strict enforcement. The hidden truth is that animals live in horrifying conditions of cruelty, torture, and death. We are too far removed from the realities of factory farming and we wrongly rely on the industries themselves to reassure us of their conduct.



“Farmed animals are routinely tortured as a part of standard agricultural practice. They're debeaked. They're castrated without anesthesia or pain medication on a regular basis. They are treated with disrespect and ignorance, regarded with indifference to their needs and desires, and controlled with intolerance if they resist being dominated. This is the unavoidable reality of an industry that exploits animals for profit.”

-Cayce Mell, co-founder of Oohmahnee Sanctuary

Ensuring the rights of individuals in the pornography industry is just as difficult and as low of a priority. There is not someone present at every video shoot to guarantee that each and every woman feels safe and comfortable with each and every act. Women in pornography are instructed to act as the director sees fit, not how they feel sexually enjoyable. Their forced and faked moans of pleasure are meant for male pleasure, not their own.

The pornography industry thrives on our society’s lack of equality for women. In a society where it is a standard that women earn less than men and where rape victims are treated with disrespect and shame, it is not a surprise that the pornography industry can profit from women’s bodies being used for sex. Women’s bodies are used as a commodity and like any object for sale, they are easily usable, abuse-able, and discard-able.

Consumers of fast food and pornography do not know, and do not want to know the ingredients of what they are purchasing. It is much more preferable to remain blissfully ignorant under the falsities that animals and women are happy and content with their role in these industries. Women enjoy having body-punishing sex with several men in a shoot and animals enjoy eating food all day in cages. The pornography and fast food industries are vocal in supporting and spreading this fallacy. It is outright dangerous and insupportable that these billion-dollar corporations are giving the public the impression that women are empowered in pornography and animals are living an ideal life in cage-free environments. The truth is that many women are sexually exploited for money and paid to look like they enjoy it and animals are trapped in small areas that are deemed “cage-free” by regulations that are far from satisfactory. The notion that women and animals are happy living in exploitive circumstances is steeped in an age old belief that they are too stupid and valueless to live any differently. These industries reinforce the notion that women are born for the sexual pleasure of men and animals are born for the eating pleasure of people.

I call upon you, dear reader, that when you scoff at an adult video store billboard on the highway that you also recognize the exploitation and oppression behind a towering McDonalds sign. We have the power to tear down and put an end to the illusions that the pornography and fast food industries try to sell us. Exploitation is exploitation is exploitation. Please join me in thinking critically about what these industries are doing behind the scenes and how that impacts our society and lives.