Prostitution is not the “romanticized fantasy from the movie “Pretty Woman,” US Attorney Steven D. Weinhoeft recently said after a federal grand jury in East St. Louis indicted two with operating five prostitution-front massage operations in Illinois and Indiana. It exploits and coerces women “into degrading subjugation” and violates the “rights of vulnerable victims across southern Illinois.”
Jianhong Hu Allbright of Indiana and Yalong Cao of a Chicago suburb face money laundering charges related to prostitution and other counts.
The fate of sex workers in Chicago has been grisly. Thirty-nine were killed during the 1990’s before they could avail themselves of the protection from street predators that online “dates” could sometimes afford. Key word, sometimes.
Sex workers in Chicago’s marginal neighborhoods were terrorized by four different mass murderers: Gregory Clepper—alleged to have confessed to killing 40 prostitutes—Geoffrey Griffin aka the Roseland Killer, Hubert Geralds and Andrew Crawford. Thanks to pimps and addictions, few women could stop working despite the lethal risks.
China, a cousin of Kizzy Macon, 17, who was murdered by Gregory Clepper, told the Chicago Tribune in 1996, “Kizzy would get high with anybody,” and admitted she too had partied with the killer before he was arrested. “I didn’t know he would kill her,” she added.
Street prostitute Pam Bolton, killed in 1995 by a customer, told the Chicago Sun-Times days before her murder, “This street life is more addictive than cocaine. More addictive than heroin.”
THROWAWAY WOMEN
Like other “johns,” Clepper, Griffin, Geralds and Crawford knew they could gain access to a sex worker for a few dollars or drugs, harm her with no police intervention and dispose of her body with impunity because no one would miss her.
A 2007 study by bestselling Freakonomics author and then University of Chicago economics professor Steven D. Levitt with Alladi Venka found that Chicago sex workers were victims of violence from pimps or clients once a month and forced into extorted sex with law enforcement officers or gang members in one out of 20 transactions.
“Condom use is shocking low,” wrote Levitt in “An Empirical Analysis of Street Level Prostitution” and sex workers “absorb enormous risk for a small pecuniary reward.”
NOT “PRETTY WOMAN”
Regardless of movies like Pretty Woman and college boys’ tales of their Cool Trip to Nevada, sex work is not noble, salt of the earth employment that just needs legalization said members of SWOP (Sex Worker Outreach Project) at a public library in Chicago a few years ago. As long as sex workers are morally quarantined by illegality and stigma, they risk being robbed, cheated, raped, knifed, shot, beaten up, strangled, abducted, arrested and given diseases they said.
Public health programs are a joke a spokesperson added. “They train workers to train workers to train workers to then go out and try to find ‘victims,’” but [meanwhile] who is handing out a bag of condoms to the outdoor sex workers on Belmont avenue? Who is protecting women who are getting beat up?”
The true needs of the sex worker community are occluded by asinine studies full of social scientist babble, continued the spokesperson. One actually called johns (customers) “hobbyists.” Also, a $1000 “john school” was recommended where arrested clients of sex workers were remanded in California to “learn how to not buy sex.”
“I’ll teach them that for $250,” said the spokesperson.
Rosenberg recently illustrated a true story written anonymously by one of these women called Diary of a High-Risk Lifestyle.
It can be procured shortly at this site