EVANGELISM vs. HELP FOR TRAFFICKING VICTIMS
Domestic sex trafficking is nothing new. Just because people are discovering it for the first time - doesn't mean it's new. Now I'm glad they're discovering it's there. Let me tell you a true story about human perception. For about two weeks, the Peruvian shaman was telling the villagers that he was seeing the Spanish ships coming in off the horizon. Now they had never seen ships before so they'd stand there and look - but just not see them. That's because in their belief system - ships didn't exist. So they just didn't see them despite them being right there. The shaman saw the ships because they don't filter what they see with their eyes against their perceptions of what they believe. http://www.amazon.com/Indians-Couldnt-see-Ships-Really/forum/Fx37SLUQG9TVNBX/Tx2A1UNU59WTXAL/1/ref=cm_cd_naredir?_encoding=UTF8&asin=B000FKO3JO
Now if you check the news clippings at www.hightechmadam.com you will find that I'm the founder of the modern day sex trafficking movement itself. I'm also no "Samoly Mam" fake victim - but a bona fide person who has seen it all out there. I not only saw sex trafficking of all kinds - but I also got to see how the "system" responded to me when I was seeking help to escape for five years before I found that help - as well as how the counseling community responded to my seeking help for my PTSD, depression, addiction, eating disorders, etc.
So prior to my stepping up on that first talk show stage in 1987 - no one believed domestic was real, and that it was happening currently. Again, I refer back to the film that had just come out with Dolly Parson "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" as a musical comedy. That's the world perception about the WHOLE sex industry when I stepped out there to call for change.
The last person before me to try and tell the world that people were being forced to work in the sex industry was Linda Lovelace. Now when she was on Donahue - the audience would literally "boo" at her in disbelief. The pimp, Chuck Traynor, of course denied it. Marilyn Chambers, his next victim, denied it because she was making films that needed to be sold. The crew was denying it because they wanted to continue working. The media was denying it because no one else was stepping up to confirm her story.
Now here's the difference though between her and I and why I say I'm the "founder of the movement". She was talking about her trafficking - and the public wasn't buying it. When I stepped up - I wasn't just saying this was real. Other people before me had said "this is real" and they'd be disbelieved. There were even people who had set up a hotline and a house for teen victims before. So people had said this was real before.
However, I was the first one not just saying this was "real" but ALSO calling out for our whole legal system to change to provide us with help. MEANING the current system we had wasn't working for us - we needed something "different". Now watch the film "Frozen Ground" with Nicholas Cage. I want you to see how we were treated when one of us would go up to the police and talk about just barely escaping a crazy serial killer. I want you to see how the police treated us and refused to even so much as get a search warrant. This was our reality.
Meaning the "system" wasn't equipped to deal with us at all either. The police viewed us as criminals only. The church viewed us as "Jezebels" out to destroy families, the community, family values, even whole neighborhoods. Churches used to organize rallies just to chase the girls out of "their part of town" like they were vermin. I want you to watch that film also to see how when the killer came after her - the "system" did not have a safe place for her to go either.
The churches were not equipped for us because they demonized us. I used to have to hide what I was when I'd attend church and for years (until the Trafficking Act of 2000) our program wasn't even able to get meeting space at churches because they "didn't want a bunch of hookers in their building". If I let it slip that I was a hooker, or even that I used to be in my church - I'd have to find another church. The women made it quite clear I was not welcome there.
Counselors thought we were nymphomaniacs or sex addicts. If you opened up a college textbook for a psychology class - all you saw written about us was that we were junkie prostitutes with pimps standing on street corners. There was nothing in those books about the porn industry, escorting, bondage parlors where a mistress can be making six figures a year, massage parlors, sex clubs, etc. Certainly not anything about transgenders or the LGBT sex worker. Nothing about lesbian bars with female strippers and clients let alone anything about female pimps. They weren't addressing the problem - let alone the solutions. There was nothing in there at all about how to treat us to overcome our issues because our issues weren't even in the textbooks.
The jails viewed us as criminals and an easy way to get a "per diem" payment for our incarceration. The courts viewed us as "hopeless" cases who would always "be back". Domestic violence and homeless shelters refused to admit us even when our program wasn't prostitution that we were seeking out help for. Hospitals wouldn't admit us and in 1986 there was even a Bill being discussed to put us on quarantine on an island with junkies to try and protect "decent' people from getting infected with HIV.
So trust me - when I stepped up on that stage with the first 800 number hotline for ADULTS asking for anyone who needed help to not just leave sex work to call us but also if they NEEDED HELP TO ESCAPE TRAFFICKING, and also asking for our legal system to CHANGE by stopping treating us like criminals across the board without first taking the time to understand each individual case, asking our counseling system to change by understanding we were not nymphomaniacs or sex addicts with daddy issues, the church to not treat us like we were tools of the devil to be shunned and cast out but actually as part of their church like any other sinner, the colleges to start developing coursework for people on how to work with us, and even hospitals to treat us like any other patient - it was truly ground breaking. It was not unlike what the domestic violence, the rape, and the child abuse movements have had to go through as they've had to evolve the whole systems' way of responding to them as well.
Take for example that after a rape in the "old days" they didn't use to have rape kits. Nowadays it's standard - but that had to be fought for. The domestic violence movement had to fight to have police officers trained in how to respond to a DV call properly. Tracey Thurman had to have her throat cut, her head stomped on while an officer stood right there before it's now become standard police training to make sure all weapons are removed from the abuser when the police arrive upon the scene. So what I'm saying is that I wasn't just saying we needed to be believed - I was saying that the system had to change the way it responds to us in order for us to get the proper help.
Now I was not welcomed either like you see today when I started opening my mouth about this stuff. The police felt I was saying they "weren't good enough" which wasn't the case. Different doesn't mean bad - but yes they need to evolve just as they evolved to address domestic violence, rape and child abuse. I had the audiences yelling at me also just like they did Linda. Every single time I went on TV I was fired and evicted.
So you know what? I had to be a fighter and I had to have a tough skin or I never would have kept coming back and kept coming back no matter how many times people told me "this isn't true" or "this is too dark" or "this is too negative" and "we don't want to hear this - it's depressing" and I just kept coming back DEMANDING that America LOOK and DO SOMETHING. I mean realize it took us from 1987 to 2000 to get that Trafficking Act passed - do you realize how many YEARS this took of me yapping at people's heels to get their attention for this movement to even exist?
In 1988 - Joe Conforte gave $1,000,000 to a PR firm to announce his campaign to expand brothels across California. He had a study done by a professor at UC Berkeley that was rigged to make it appear that no brothel prostitute had HIV. Then he embarked upon a media campaign to convince voters to allow those brothels to expand into California. The only person who would stand up against him because of his reputation was myself. Which means at least once a month I'd be going up against Joe and usually about 3 or 4 other prostitutes from the ranch yelling at me for an hour about how it was all a "victimless crime" and how "wonderful" prostitution was - then I'd come home to a pink slip and a 30 day notice to move as my thank you from a landlord who "didn't want a whore for a tenant" and a boss who said "I will lose customers if people know you used to be a prostitute". We got no grant money nor any donations because we weren't even recognized as real yet. So everything that we did - had to come out of my personal pocket. So on top of all of this - I had to work two and three jobs also.
Now - do you see brothels in California? No. We won. Do you see them in Las Vegas? After 20 years of battling it out - Las Vegas finally put up the Mob Museum where it had been trying to plant a brothel instead and there's also now an art district there. Do I get an award or a plaque? Hell no. My name even mentioned? In the news where it spoke about the final vote going down against them - our name isn't even mentioned. If not for the videotape we have of the hearing - you'd never even know we'd even been there to counter the brothel lobbyist who was making the push and lost. Look - do you see Sex Workers Anonymous anywhere in this article? But what went down was George got up and gave his pitch - and then we had Aubrey, an ex-brothel prostitute get up and tell them what REALLY goes on inside a legal Nevada brothel. http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada-legislature/prostitution-bill-not-nevada-legislatures-agenda Fanfare? Parade? Abolitonists throwing banquets for us? Not a chance.
So I think I know something about this field and this work after answering 500,000 phone calls and letters, after 29 years of working with us from one end of the country to the other, after writing our Recovery Guide, etc. But to get our program started - then mayor Tom Bradley opened a lot of doors for us. He got us into the Sybil Brand Institute for Women where we interviewed every single inmate. We found that no matter what the charge - every woman in that jail, over 2,000 of them, had been forced into prostitution at one point or another by a pimp or a trafficker (and yes there's a difference).
Armed with now 2,000 case histories - we were then able to go to another 2,000 sex workers in the community and ask them what the story was. Why were they there? What was blocking them from leaving the sex industry? Did they have a pimp? How could the city help them? Now let me ask you something - do you have ANY IDEA how long it took me, and how hard it was to get 2,000 ex-prostitutes to admit to me they used to be prostitutes first of all, and then after that to get them to tell me their whole story of what happened and how they got out? It was no easy feat and it was very time and money consuming. But I didn't want "theories" on what "worked" to get us out and stay out - I wanted to know what DID work. To do that - we needed to interview 2,000 male and female ex-prostitutes that had five years or more of "time". So I scoured and scoured and asked and asked - and we found them. In fact, I spent over $400,000 putting these case histories together and building our program out of my own money mind you.
Armed with that information we learned quite a few things. For one thing - the church had tried to help many times before. I gathered together a whole stack of case histories of faith based outreach programs that had tried to go out and help. But they all failed because of a lack of understanding about what they were doing, who they were doing it for, the dynamics of the relationships, how the sex industry worked, how trafficking worked, etc. It was like asking someone with no training and no experience to go out and repair a car with only a screw driver. They had the heart - but not the right tools or training. As a result - they burned out and the hookers got tired of listening to them.
To learn about "deprogramming" the brainwashing the pimps do on their victims - I had to go study with a religious cult deprogrammer. Interestingly, the methods of brainwashing are almost identical. For Stockholm Syndrome - I had to ring up a fortune in long distance phone calls to even find anyone that knew how to treat it. Then I had to talk them into teaching me for free. For our PTSD - I sought out experts at the Veterans Hospital and talked them into giving us free training on how treatment for that works. I sat in on countless classes at UCLA where the professors were kind enough to let me just sit in and listen.
Once we felt we had a program that worked - well then we had to go out there to find people to help. A commission was put together by Bradley where someone from every department was there. The police, probation, social services, judges, the church, health services, etc. No one got paid and there was no media there. We removed the financial factors and we removed the need for posturing for the media.
This was just about the work and what needed to get done. From those meetings we were able to put together a combination outreach program, intervention, residential, outpatient, etc., program that WORKED. For example, we found the transgenders were unwilling to come out to be tested because they were afraid they'd be stared at. So we set up a place that was staffed by other trans-genders and that encouraged them to come out. It worked because when we started the program - sex workers had an 80 percent HIV infection rate with 90 percent saying they wanted help to quit. One year later - we had dropped the HIV rate to 6 percent (less than non-sex workers) and those who had said they didn't want to be in the sex industry were all out. We had found them jobs, created them jobs, or got them into a program that supported them without sex work.
Relapse was a huge problem at first. Almost 98 % were relapsing within three days of intervention just like that article with D'Lita Miller stated here http://www.ocregister.com/articles/trafficking-599120-beach-long.html It was confusing to everyone. Which is another reason why we formed ourselves as a 12 step group - because everyone kept complaining "but no matter how much we help them they just go back" so we had to stop that relapse cycle.
I put together a board of mentors from the various 12 step programs - we had Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Emotions Anonymous, etc. Because you have to realize these men and women weren't just suffering from one issue. The average person we saw as suffering from it ALL - from Stockholm Syndrome, to depression, to eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, addiction, PTSD, disassociative disorders, the whole shebang. But besides resources - we had to address WHY they kept relapsing.
Do you know why? Because a relapse could be fatal that's why. I saw a woman once before we knew what we were doing relapse. Only a week later they found her body in a motel room murdered by her pimp that "taught her a lesson for leaving him" when he caught up with her back on the streets. This is not a game here - these are people's very life. The system had to start realizing that a relapse could be fatal - because in many cases it is. A relapse is preventable if you know what you're doing and have proper training.
Now the first program was a big disaster. No one wanted to listen to us. They thought this was just a social services and/or drug program. They thought housing, self-esteem classes, drug treatment and teaching job skills was going to solve the problem. So they got them all these resources together to provide them with. I disagreed with their approach and walked away briefly wanting nothing to do with what they were doing. I told Bradley "it won't work and I don't want my name on it" and quit.
Do you know what happened? A year later they had clean typists with apartments and GED's who were then getting arrested for prostitution. How's that?
With egg on their face - these people came back and said "okay we're willing to listen" and that's when they allowed us to start taking real recovering sex workers and going in to better train people working with us. Word spread fast that we were effective. We had the resources - the system just didn't know how to utilize them properly. I remember getting a call from a program down in Long Beach. The director said they were having a real problem with the residents so I agreed to come down and see what I could do. Upon walking into the program I found the problem - and it wasn't with the residents. It was the staff. When the program made the staff changes I suggested - the problem resolved itself and their recovery rates went up.
What was their problem? Every case is different but with this situation I walked in to see an African American pregnant prostitute who was holding a two year old with one hand and holding a baby carriage with a newborn in the other. The counselor was a skinny white woman with glasses who looked like she was in school on daddy's money. I checked the parking lot and sure enough - she was driving a BMW. The woman was standing there not helping the mother with this look of disdain like she had cooties or something on her face. Clearly this was not an "emphatic" relationship that Narcotics Anonymous says in their "Basic Text" is the "healing therapy" for those like us.
But that wouldn't have happened without the support of the governor. He saw the 99 % failure rate of these programs when it came to the prostitutes and trafficking victims. He said he wasn't going to "keep funding failure". Then he said anyone who didn't bring up their success rates within one year was going to have their funding cut. THAT'S when people started bringing us in for training - and that's when we got the numbers turned around. In other words, before these people didn't care as long as they got their paychecks. But when their checks got tied to some results - then they were willing to take some training from us and that's when things turned around.
What had happened before was identical to how people used to view alcoholism. Prohibition had been brought about thinking that was a solution. It just created more crime. There are a lot of parallels there by the way. Churches used to have alcoholics sign pledges to never drink again. Didn't work. Other churches told the wives if they were "better wives" their husbands wouldn't drink so much. Didn't work. Even the Oxford Group church devoted to helping alcoholics was not working long term. Nothing worked until Bill Wilson came in and created a system of "one alcoholic helping another" AND took out the restriction of religion - making recovery about recovery and not about religion in other words.
The minute I saw money enter into this field - the field forgot it's founder - me. It seemed to forget everything I was calling for. We don't need more of the very things that caused these problems. Just as you don't solve alcoholism by prohibition and adding more cops to the beat. AA also showed us that doctors and therapists needed to be trained properly - and now we even have a special license for drug and alcohol counselors because the training about how we operate is different than "other" people also. Well trafficking victims are the same.
But instead of focusing on healing us - what I've been seeing is this field has turned into a battle ground because it involves sex. I'm also seeing this field turned into a way for the church to evangelize in the disguise of trafficking because to them sex means women. They are not acknowledging that ALL can be victims - women, men and transgenders. They've also turned this into their new evangelizing and the safe houses are the new "building fund" of the past.
See it's not cool to go out anymore and hand out tracts to get people into your church. What is cool now is to play a trafficking film that will bring the men into the church with the check books. It's not cool anymore to get donations to spread Christianity across the USA and other countries. But it is cool now to go out scouring for "trafficking victims to save". It's not good anymore to build orphanages or senior or nursing homes. No - now it's cool to "build safe houses". There's no need to have "single mothers' homes" like my grandmother had to disappear to when she got raped and pregnant in the 1940's. Where young girls used to "go visit an aunt" have the baby and then go back home like nothing had happened. But where do those babies come from now? They're coming out of the "safe houses for trafficking victims" - that's where.
Now the only thing I saw turn around this situation before was when the governor threatened the funding because of the failure rates. Right now I don't see that happening because trafficking programs are bringing money into the states - without tying them to success rates. The police aren't going to stop it because they're getting a boatload of money into their stations that wouldn't be coming otherwise because our "terrorist threats" aren't the ticket anymore.
So I"m researching a very large "economic interference" lawsuit at the moment to do something to stop this mad rush for money WITHOUT changing the very system that created this problem in the first place. Because honestly - when a program that is in the field I created wants to act like I don't exist so they can line up for the grant money that wouldn't exist without my hard work and sacrifice - I call that "economic interference". Since more than one person is involved - that makes it a conspiracy. And when they want to act like my knowledge and experience don't matter in the field I created and developed - then I also call that "defamation". I don't know what else to do to turn this around but sue. Even AA had to sue at one point to get their program forced into the jails at one point. So yes I'm looking into legal measures to take to solve this problem because honestly the churches have turned this into their new battleground because they know these women can't stand up for themselves publicly without identifying themselves as "prostitutes". What a fix.
Because this field turned into a battle ground over women's bodies by people who think this is about women. My head never spun around so fast as when this issue got federal recognition. Once it became "real" in the mind of the public and once money became available - because of my YEARS of hard work, expense, sacrifice, etc. and because of Michael Horowitz's writing of the Trafficking Act of 2000 where even he says this field has become an "entitlement program for states" and confirms he believes the field has been hijacked by the religious right - it has become a battle ground for the issue of abortion, birth control, even control over womens' bodies.
All the while ignoring the male victims of this problem. Male victims like this boy - http://calcoastnews.com/2015/07/alleged-16-year-old-pimp-identified/ Because if all 16 year old females are victims - then a 16 year old male is a victim also. Little girls don't pop out of the womb hookers and neither do little boys pop out of the womb pimps. There is an adult behind this boy and he needs to be identified as a victim because in the eyes of someone who does know how this world works - he is a victim just as much as that girl is.
Just as Planned Parenthood is under attack by actors and hidden cameras along with all kinds of media distortions about what they do - our program has also been experiencing the same issues. In the year 2000 - we had a meeting of Sex Workers Anonymous in just about every Salvation Army Shelter, Catholic Charity, etc. Just about every court, mental health center, social worker, etc. would give referrals to our program. We were truly a nationwide program that was effective. Two people who are public about getting help from being hopeless in our program were Kathleen Mitchell and Brenda Myers-Powell - who then went on to form their own programs. So we even have a "second generation" of members who are out helping others by 2000.
But then the pink slips went out. I didn't know why for a while - but I found out. The Catholic Church had gone in and told all these other programs they would pay for "case management" of each client as long as they only used programs that were in the "Freedom Registry". What that registry was consisted of a list of programs who had signed an agreement they would not let their clients access any services that would bring them into contact with anyone that would even say the word "abortion". That included medical doctors and licensed therapists. https://www.aclu.org/news/court-prohibits-religious-restrictions-government-funded-trafficking-victims-program
So what you were now seeing was prostitutes who were suffering from horrific trauma and in need of very highly skilled professional medical and psychological treatment - were being denied access to anyone other than a "pastoral counselor" with 16 hours of training. That's it. Only women of child bearing age were being targeted for "safe houses" because they might be pregnant. What that looks like is this - there's a program in Los Angeles called "Treasures". They go out into the strip clubs and tell the strippers that "Jesus Loves Them" and they look for women who might be pregnant and needing to get away from a pimp. They are then sent to what they are told is a "aafe house" but in reality it's an adoption mill. Doubt me? Check out www.mercyministries.org where they have the words "safe house" and an adoption application right on the same page. Well prayers and the Bible are great - but sometimes people need proper medical professional help.
Now we advise our members to "not make any major decisions" until they have a year of time under their belt and are stabilized. That means a year from the streets. A year off drugs. A year in their own homes and working. A year where they're stable and can make a rational decision. Yet this Mercy Ministries program is asking women who are hormonal anyway because they're pregnant, and in this horrible traumatized state - to make a decision like giving up their babies without any professional or experienced advice from the outside. And because a program like ours would say that they need to be stable before making a life altering decision like that - well then they just want to pretend like we don't even exist.
It's the "crisis pregnancy centers" reborn. You remember them if you're my age. They would advertise "free pregnancy testing" and then when you'd get there they'd play a bunch of videos at you and if you were pregnant they'd then do everything they could to get you to sign an agreement you would not abort the baby. Which is fine really - but then they'd lie. They'd tell the women that abortion was illegal, there were no doctors in that state that would do them - or any other lie they could think of to convince this woman to think their way. I'm not for abortion mind you but I am not for deception and manipulation. That's what pimps do.
The reason why this ACLU lawsuit came about is because I kept getting phone calls from women telling me they were being told they would "make horrible mothers because they were just junkie whores after all", and then once they'd given up the baby they'd be cast out in the street like garbage. Since they had lied to this woman and told her that "no other services existed" she'd be right back out on the streets again. Luckily some found their way to us and told us the story while we patched their lives back up. https://www.aclu.org/blog/first-circuit-court-should-defend-victims-human-trafficking
I want to invite you to look at the effects of this. If we had been left alone - we'd still have Sex Workers Anonymous groups all over Long Beach, and the whole USA, like it was still today. Even bigger than they were. We used to do programs in the high schools where survivors would go out and talk to the high school kids about what to watch out for from pimps. We even spoke at some of the high schools in Long Beach in the late 1980's and early 1990's before I left California in 1994. We used to have self-defense classes donated by local instructors. Tarzana Treatment Center was one of the places where we had weekly meetings in Long Beach actually. Once the women would graduate from there - they would hold service positions teaching about rape prevention, answering the suicide hotline, and going out again to speak to the young about what to avoid and be careful of. Because our program teaches that you "keep what you have by giving it away" so we advocate holding service positions in the community as part of your recovery.
As well as helping girls avoid prostitution - we also used to work with the young men to not be lured into becoming pimps as well down there. We had an ex-pimp that used to go down there speaking to young men about leaving the game also. Yes we worked with the pimps - but they had their own sub-group led by ex-pimps that worked with the newcomer pimps to help them also exit and recover. For every victim of trafficking you get off the streets - for every pimp you get off the streets you save at least 10 victims. And in the cases of teenage pimps - they're victims also.
I read that D'Lita Miller had her own daughter sucked into trafficking in 2011. I would like to think if we had not been forced to reorganize our program to not have such a visible presence as we once had - that this might have been avoided. We used to run PSA's at night on TV in Long Beach. We had a weekly cable show that used to air in Long Beach with men and women telling their stories that the young were learning from. We had social workers in the juvenile system that would refer the kids to us as well as the parents. The local mental health centers used to refer prostitutes to us as did the probation officers. That was until the Catholic Bishops started cutting off anyone from services that wasn't in their "Freedom Registry". This by the way is why we're supposed to have "separation of church and state". So I'd like to think if we hadn't of been bowled over in this "war on women" that maybe D'lita's daughter might have been forewarned - and her mother might have known that programs like Children of the Night were 20 minutes away for her daughter and that SWAN was a phone call away for her.
Instead in these articles, she says she was told "there were no resources in 2011". She told me on a phone call we had that they didn't have any way to relocate them to safety. My heart broke when I heard that because I know of more than one existing resource where she, and her daughter, could have been relocated to safety in a way that's designed to protect from dangerous pimps. So someone lied to her. Maybe these resources aren't a part of her church - but they do exist. And since she's only been "out of the game" for about two years now from what this article said - we've been doing this since 1987.
So let's get clear about this. It's not that "resources don't exist". It's that "religious" resources don't exist. Let's be very clear about that. Especially when I'm reading articles like this that claim that a young girl had to be "shipped out to San Bernardino". There are resources 20 minutes away from them. What breaks my heart is to think that a victim is going back into their situation thinking that "no resources exist" simply because their church doesn't want to recognize something else exists. Either that or this is another propaganda campaign to get grant money - one or the other.
All I can do now is talk to the reporters who are writing these articles like the ones with Kevin Brown or these with D'Lita Miller because to say "nothing exists" is just plain wrong. Now not everyone has internet to look up that resources do exist so something needs to be done because someone isn't doing their homework. Only this lack of information is directly linked to young girls being trafficked, and victims thinking that "no resources" exist when it reality that's what people are saying to get grant money into their county. I'm sorry but some of these people are part of the problem.
Because if these people can't get onto Google and see that there are resources all over Los Angeles County that have been providing help to these victims in some cases for over 30 years - I mean how much can they know about this work? The Mary Magdalene Project was opened in 1980 in Reseda. Children of the Night was opened in 1979 in Van Nuys. Our program opened in Los Angeles in 1987. I don't remember how long Covenant House has been around. Treasures even exists for that matter. So there are other programs that exist.
If you want to evangelize for your religion - then be upfront about it. But if you want to help sex trafficking victims - then you have an obligation to those victims to provide them with a program of help that works. This isn't a game. People die if this isn't done right. People don't just pick up a scalpel and go operate on someone. You need to go to medical school and get a license. And frankly if you're going to go out there and help other trafficking victims D'Lita - then you need a little more than just your daughter's been out two years now. She hasn't even hit the three year wall where studies show that 98 percent of us relapse without "proper" treatment. Treatment that doesn't just fall out of thin air nor that's available in our "traditional system". Plus what works for your daughter isn't a cookie cutter that will work for every victim coming in the door. It's not that simple.
Now numbers don't mean effective. You might have 1,000 people in your program - but that doesn't mean it's working. I mean people actually leaving the sex industry permanently, staying clean, and finding recovery long term. We have members of SWA now who have been with us since 1991. Here's a video of one of them. This woman has now raised three kids, clean, and out of prostitution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33weIPOhqVU I think we know what we're doing.
So the question is - why am I being treated like the enemy by these people? I wish I knew because they won't talk to me. I've told D'Lita Miller that I can show her everything I know - and she just stopped talking to me. So I don't know. Maybe I'm like those ships the Peruvians couldn't see that were right in front of their eyes. I mean I'm glad all these people are finally opening their eyes to a problem that's been here all along. But there's a solution that's here also too they need to open their eyes to also before the Spaniards hit the sand.
But this not talking to me or anyone in SWA or people who aren't part of their church? It's not what Jesus taught - that's for sure.
Because honestly - I got two ways of looking at someone who isn't seeing the ship in front of their own eyes. It's either they haven't heard of us possibly before - or they don't want to hear about us. I mean look at this great propaganda campaign we just saw Kevin Brown pulling off - http://www.latimes.com/local/great-reads/la-me-c1-prostitute-squad-20131002-dto-htmlstory.html Now this guy was in the OC Register also. He was in the Los Angeles Times. He even had a whole "reality" series produced by Relativity Media and aired on A&E. Only there was no "program" he was talking those women into. The women on the show? All paid actors. Even D'Lita Miller told me she's got a "signed confidentiality agreement with Tom Forman". Now why would that be? What's she got to not talk about? Kevin Brown's so called "church" turned out to be a bunch of doctor's offices when checked into. So I've got a lot of legwork to do here about what's obviously one big fraud with Kevin Brown.
My point being when HE acted like he didn't know anything about our program, and others, it was because he didn't want to know because it was a complete fraud upon the public right down to the paid "survivors". What's D'Lita's excuse for not knowing about us before? Don't know but I know she knows about us now and now my calls are going unreturned.
This is why I'm embarking upon the reports I'm going to be investigating. This is not "personal". But I got this movement federal recognition. I got the fact we exist to become a reality. I got federal recognition meaning that there's money now to help us. But now what's standing inbetween real victims getting real help is the police and these church people. Because that's a lot of money I'm not seeing going into real victims. I'm sorry but a "drop in center" in Long Beach ISN'T to help SEX TRAFFICKING VICTIMS.
Why? I guarantee you a true trafficking victim wouldn't be wallowed to walk into that center. Just as a true victim isn't going to go into a hotel room with Kevin Brown and after 8 minutes go "okay" and walk off into the sunset with him to be free. The DEFINITION of a trafficking victim is that they can't get out and they can't get to help. They can't get to a phone. They're locked up in a house somewhere. If they can call for help - they can't because someone they care about is being threatened if they do.
I mean having a center is great - but let's get real here - that's not for trafficking victims to get help. So I'm starting on these reports - city by city - about how these programs are operating and what is being done, and not done, for REAL victims - and well I guess I can see the fight isn't over yet to get help to these victims. At least we have people knowing we exist. Now we just have to educate them as to WHAT we are. And what pimps are - you know people who exploit prostitutes for money?
(copyright 2015 J. Williams all rights reserved)
Now if you check the news clippings at www.hightechmadam.com you will find that I'm the founder of the modern day sex trafficking movement itself. I'm also no "Samoly Mam" fake victim - but a bona fide person who has seen it all out there. I not only saw sex trafficking of all kinds - but I also got to see how the "system" responded to me when I was seeking help to escape for five years before I found that help - as well as how the counseling community responded to my seeking help for my PTSD, depression, addiction, eating disorders, etc.
So prior to my stepping up on that first talk show stage in 1987 - no one believed domestic was real, and that it was happening currently. Again, I refer back to the film that had just come out with Dolly Parson "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" as a musical comedy. That's the world perception about the WHOLE sex industry when I stepped out there to call for change.
The last person before me to try and tell the world that people were being forced to work in the sex industry was Linda Lovelace. Now when she was on Donahue - the audience would literally "boo" at her in disbelief. The pimp, Chuck Traynor, of course denied it. Marilyn Chambers, his next victim, denied it because she was making films that needed to be sold. The crew was denying it because they wanted to continue working. The media was denying it because no one else was stepping up to confirm her story.
Now here's the difference though between her and I and why I say I'm the "founder of the movement". She was talking about her trafficking - and the public wasn't buying it. When I stepped up - I wasn't just saying this was real. Other people before me had said "this is real" and they'd be disbelieved. There were even people who had set up a hotline and a house for teen victims before. So people had said this was real before.
However, I was the first one not just saying this was "real" but ALSO calling out for our whole legal system to change to provide us with help. MEANING the current system we had wasn't working for us - we needed something "different". Now watch the film "Frozen Ground" with Nicholas Cage. I want you to see how we were treated when one of us would go up to the police and talk about just barely escaping a crazy serial killer. I want you to see how the police treated us and refused to even so much as get a search warrant. This was our reality.
Meaning the "system" wasn't equipped to deal with us at all either. The police viewed us as criminals only. The church viewed us as "Jezebels" out to destroy families, the community, family values, even whole neighborhoods. Churches used to organize rallies just to chase the girls out of "their part of town" like they were vermin. I want you to watch that film also to see how when the killer came after her - the "system" did not have a safe place for her to go either.
The churches were not equipped for us because they demonized us. I used to have to hide what I was when I'd attend church and for years (until the Trafficking Act of 2000) our program wasn't even able to get meeting space at churches because they "didn't want a bunch of hookers in their building". If I let it slip that I was a hooker, or even that I used to be in my church - I'd have to find another church. The women made it quite clear I was not welcome there.
Counselors thought we were nymphomaniacs or sex addicts. If you opened up a college textbook for a psychology class - all you saw written about us was that we were junkie prostitutes with pimps standing on street corners. There was nothing in those books about the porn industry, escorting, bondage parlors where a mistress can be making six figures a year, massage parlors, sex clubs, etc. Certainly not anything about transgenders or the LGBT sex worker. Nothing about lesbian bars with female strippers and clients let alone anything about female pimps. They weren't addressing the problem - let alone the solutions. There was nothing in there at all about how to treat us to overcome our issues because our issues weren't even in the textbooks.
The jails viewed us as criminals and an easy way to get a "per diem" payment for our incarceration. The courts viewed us as "hopeless" cases who would always "be back". Domestic violence and homeless shelters refused to admit us even when our program wasn't prostitution that we were seeking out help for. Hospitals wouldn't admit us and in 1986 there was even a Bill being discussed to put us on quarantine on an island with junkies to try and protect "decent' people from getting infected with HIV.
So trust me - when I stepped up on that stage with the first 800 number hotline for ADULTS asking for anyone who needed help to not just leave sex work to call us but also if they NEEDED HELP TO ESCAPE TRAFFICKING, and also asking for our legal system to CHANGE by stopping treating us like criminals across the board without first taking the time to understand each individual case, asking our counseling system to change by understanding we were not nymphomaniacs or sex addicts with daddy issues, the church to not treat us like we were tools of the devil to be shunned and cast out but actually as part of their church like any other sinner, the colleges to start developing coursework for people on how to work with us, and even hospitals to treat us like any other patient - it was truly ground breaking. It was not unlike what the domestic violence, the rape, and the child abuse movements have had to go through as they've had to evolve the whole systems' way of responding to them as well.
Take for example that after a rape in the "old days" they didn't use to have rape kits. Nowadays it's standard - but that had to be fought for. The domestic violence movement had to fight to have police officers trained in how to respond to a DV call properly. Tracey Thurman had to have her throat cut, her head stomped on while an officer stood right there before it's now become standard police training to make sure all weapons are removed from the abuser when the police arrive upon the scene. So what I'm saying is that I wasn't just saying we needed to be believed - I was saying that the system had to change the way it responds to us in order for us to get the proper help.
Now I was not welcomed either like you see today when I started opening my mouth about this stuff. The police felt I was saying they "weren't good enough" which wasn't the case. Different doesn't mean bad - but yes they need to evolve just as they evolved to address domestic violence, rape and child abuse. I had the audiences yelling at me also just like they did Linda. Every single time I went on TV I was fired and evicted.
So you know what? I had to be a fighter and I had to have a tough skin or I never would have kept coming back and kept coming back no matter how many times people told me "this isn't true" or "this is too dark" or "this is too negative" and "we don't want to hear this - it's depressing" and I just kept coming back DEMANDING that America LOOK and DO SOMETHING. I mean realize it took us from 1987 to 2000 to get that Trafficking Act passed - do you realize how many YEARS this took of me yapping at people's heels to get their attention for this movement to even exist?
In 1988 - Joe Conforte gave $1,000,000 to a PR firm to announce his campaign to expand brothels across California. He had a study done by a professor at UC Berkeley that was rigged to make it appear that no brothel prostitute had HIV. Then he embarked upon a media campaign to convince voters to allow those brothels to expand into California. The only person who would stand up against him because of his reputation was myself. Which means at least once a month I'd be going up against Joe and usually about 3 or 4 other prostitutes from the ranch yelling at me for an hour about how it was all a "victimless crime" and how "wonderful" prostitution was - then I'd come home to a pink slip and a 30 day notice to move as my thank you from a landlord who "didn't want a whore for a tenant" and a boss who said "I will lose customers if people know you used to be a prostitute". We got no grant money nor any donations because we weren't even recognized as real yet. So everything that we did - had to come out of my personal pocket. So on top of all of this - I had to work two and three jobs also.
Now - do you see brothels in California? No. We won. Do you see them in Las Vegas? After 20 years of battling it out - Las Vegas finally put up the Mob Museum where it had been trying to plant a brothel instead and there's also now an art district there. Do I get an award or a plaque? Hell no. My name even mentioned? In the news where it spoke about the final vote going down against them - our name isn't even mentioned. If not for the videotape we have of the hearing - you'd never even know we'd even been there to counter the brothel lobbyist who was making the push and lost. Look - do you see Sex Workers Anonymous anywhere in this article? But what went down was George got up and gave his pitch - and then we had Aubrey, an ex-brothel prostitute get up and tell them what REALLY goes on inside a legal Nevada brothel. http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada-legislature/prostitution-bill-not-nevada-legislatures-agenda Fanfare? Parade? Abolitonists throwing banquets for us? Not a chance.
So I think I know something about this field and this work after answering 500,000 phone calls and letters, after 29 years of working with us from one end of the country to the other, after writing our Recovery Guide, etc. But to get our program started - then mayor Tom Bradley opened a lot of doors for us. He got us into the Sybil Brand Institute for Women where we interviewed every single inmate. We found that no matter what the charge - every woman in that jail, over 2,000 of them, had been forced into prostitution at one point or another by a pimp or a trafficker (and yes there's a difference).
Armed with now 2,000 case histories - we were then able to go to another 2,000 sex workers in the community and ask them what the story was. Why were they there? What was blocking them from leaving the sex industry? Did they have a pimp? How could the city help them? Now let me ask you something - do you have ANY IDEA how long it took me, and how hard it was to get 2,000 ex-prostitutes to admit to me they used to be prostitutes first of all, and then after that to get them to tell me their whole story of what happened and how they got out? It was no easy feat and it was very time and money consuming. But I didn't want "theories" on what "worked" to get us out and stay out - I wanted to know what DID work. To do that - we needed to interview 2,000 male and female ex-prostitutes that had five years or more of "time". So I scoured and scoured and asked and asked - and we found them. In fact, I spent over $400,000 putting these case histories together and building our program out of my own money mind you.
Armed with that information we learned quite a few things. For one thing - the church had tried to help many times before. I gathered together a whole stack of case histories of faith based outreach programs that had tried to go out and help. But they all failed because of a lack of understanding about what they were doing, who they were doing it for, the dynamics of the relationships, how the sex industry worked, how trafficking worked, etc. It was like asking someone with no training and no experience to go out and repair a car with only a screw driver. They had the heart - but not the right tools or training. As a result - they burned out and the hookers got tired of listening to them.
To learn about "deprogramming" the brainwashing the pimps do on their victims - I had to go study with a religious cult deprogrammer. Interestingly, the methods of brainwashing are almost identical. For Stockholm Syndrome - I had to ring up a fortune in long distance phone calls to even find anyone that knew how to treat it. Then I had to talk them into teaching me for free. For our PTSD - I sought out experts at the Veterans Hospital and talked them into giving us free training on how treatment for that works. I sat in on countless classes at UCLA where the professors were kind enough to let me just sit in and listen.
Once we felt we had a program that worked - well then we had to go out there to find people to help. A commission was put together by Bradley where someone from every department was there. The police, probation, social services, judges, the church, health services, etc. No one got paid and there was no media there. We removed the financial factors and we removed the need for posturing for the media.
This was just about the work and what needed to get done. From those meetings we were able to put together a combination outreach program, intervention, residential, outpatient, etc., program that WORKED. For example, we found the transgenders were unwilling to come out to be tested because they were afraid they'd be stared at. So we set up a place that was staffed by other trans-genders and that encouraged them to come out. It worked because when we started the program - sex workers had an 80 percent HIV infection rate with 90 percent saying they wanted help to quit. One year later - we had dropped the HIV rate to 6 percent (less than non-sex workers) and those who had said they didn't want to be in the sex industry were all out. We had found them jobs, created them jobs, or got them into a program that supported them without sex work.
Relapse was a huge problem at first. Almost 98 % were relapsing within three days of intervention just like that article with D'Lita Miller stated here http://www.ocregister.com/articles/trafficking-599120-beach-long.html It was confusing to everyone. Which is another reason why we formed ourselves as a 12 step group - because everyone kept complaining "but no matter how much we help them they just go back" so we had to stop that relapse cycle.
I put together a board of mentors from the various 12 step programs - we had Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Emotions Anonymous, etc. Because you have to realize these men and women weren't just suffering from one issue. The average person we saw as suffering from it ALL - from Stockholm Syndrome, to depression, to eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, addiction, PTSD, disassociative disorders, the whole shebang. But besides resources - we had to address WHY they kept relapsing.
Do you know why? Because a relapse could be fatal that's why. I saw a woman once before we knew what we were doing relapse. Only a week later they found her body in a motel room murdered by her pimp that "taught her a lesson for leaving him" when he caught up with her back on the streets. This is not a game here - these are people's very life. The system had to start realizing that a relapse could be fatal - because in many cases it is. A relapse is preventable if you know what you're doing and have proper training.
Now the first program was a big disaster. No one wanted to listen to us. They thought this was just a social services and/or drug program. They thought housing, self-esteem classes, drug treatment and teaching job skills was going to solve the problem. So they got them all these resources together to provide them with. I disagreed with their approach and walked away briefly wanting nothing to do with what they were doing. I told Bradley "it won't work and I don't want my name on it" and quit.
Do you know what happened? A year later they had clean typists with apartments and GED's who were then getting arrested for prostitution. How's that?
With egg on their face - these people came back and said "okay we're willing to listen" and that's when they allowed us to start taking real recovering sex workers and going in to better train people working with us. Word spread fast that we were effective. We had the resources - the system just didn't know how to utilize them properly. I remember getting a call from a program down in Long Beach. The director said they were having a real problem with the residents so I agreed to come down and see what I could do. Upon walking into the program I found the problem - and it wasn't with the residents. It was the staff. When the program made the staff changes I suggested - the problem resolved itself and their recovery rates went up.
What was their problem? Every case is different but with this situation I walked in to see an African American pregnant prostitute who was holding a two year old with one hand and holding a baby carriage with a newborn in the other. The counselor was a skinny white woman with glasses who looked like she was in school on daddy's money. I checked the parking lot and sure enough - she was driving a BMW. The woman was standing there not helping the mother with this look of disdain like she had cooties or something on her face. Clearly this was not an "emphatic" relationship that Narcotics Anonymous says in their "Basic Text" is the "healing therapy" for those like us.
But that wouldn't have happened without the support of the governor. He saw the 99 % failure rate of these programs when it came to the prostitutes and trafficking victims. He said he wasn't going to "keep funding failure". Then he said anyone who didn't bring up their success rates within one year was going to have their funding cut. THAT'S when people started bringing us in for training - and that's when we got the numbers turned around. In other words, before these people didn't care as long as they got their paychecks. But when their checks got tied to some results - then they were willing to take some training from us and that's when things turned around.
What had happened before was identical to how people used to view alcoholism. Prohibition had been brought about thinking that was a solution. It just created more crime. There are a lot of parallels there by the way. Churches used to have alcoholics sign pledges to never drink again. Didn't work. Other churches told the wives if they were "better wives" their husbands wouldn't drink so much. Didn't work. Even the Oxford Group church devoted to helping alcoholics was not working long term. Nothing worked until Bill Wilson came in and created a system of "one alcoholic helping another" AND took out the restriction of religion - making recovery about recovery and not about religion in other words.
The minute I saw money enter into this field - the field forgot it's founder - me. It seemed to forget everything I was calling for. We don't need more of the very things that caused these problems. Just as you don't solve alcoholism by prohibition and adding more cops to the beat. AA also showed us that doctors and therapists needed to be trained properly - and now we even have a special license for drug and alcohol counselors because the training about how we operate is different than "other" people also. Well trafficking victims are the same.
But instead of focusing on healing us - what I've been seeing is this field has turned into a battle ground because it involves sex. I'm also seeing this field turned into a way for the church to evangelize in the disguise of trafficking because to them sex means women. They are not acknowledging that ALL can be victims - women, men and transgenders. They've also turned this into their new evangelizing and the safe houses are the new "building fund" of the past.
See it's not cool to go out anymore and hand out tracts to get people into your church. What is cool now is to play a trafficking film that will bring the men into the church with the check books. It's not cool anymore to get donations to spread Christianity across the USA and other countries. But it is cool now to go out scouring for "trafficking victims to save". It's not good anymore to build orphanages or senior or nursing homes. No - now it's cool to "build safe houses". There's no need to have "single mothers' homes" like my grandmother had to disappear to when she got raped and pregnant in the 1940's. Where young girls used to "go visit an aunt" have the baby and then go back home like nothing had happened. But where do those babies come from now? They're coming out of the "safe houses for trafficking victims" - that's where.
Now the only thing I saw turn around this situation before was when the governor threatened the funding because of the failure rates. Right now I don't see that happening because trafficking programs are bringing money into the states - without tying them to success rates. The police aren't going to stop it because they're getting a boatload of money into their stations that wouldn't be coming otherwise because our "terrorist threats" aren't the ticket anymore.
So I"m researching a very large "economic interference" lawsuit at the moment to do something to stop this mad rush for money WITHOUT changing the very system that created this problem in the first place. Because honestly - when a program that is in the field I created wants to act like I don't exist so they can line up for the grant money that wouldn't exist without my hard work and sacrifice - I call that "economic interference". Since more than one person is involved - that makes it a conspiracy. And when they want to act like my knowledge and experience don't matter in the field I created and developed - then I also call that "defamation". I don't know what else to do to turn this around but sue. Even AA had to sue at one point to get their program forced into the jails at one point. So yes I'm looking into legal measures to take to solve this problem because honestly the churches have turned this into their new battleground because they know these women can't stand up for themselves publicly without identifying themselves as "prostitutes". What a fix.
Because this field turned into a battle ground over women's bodies by people who think this is about women. My head never spun around so fast as when this issue got federal recognition. Once it became "real" in the mind of the public and once money became available - because of my YEARS of hard work, expense, sacrifice, etc. and because of Michael Horowitz's writing of the Trafficking Act of 2000 where even he says this field has become an "entitlement program for states" and confirms he believes the field has been hijacked by the religious right - it has become a battle ground for the issue of abortion, birth control, even control over womens' bodies.
All the while ignoring the male victims of this problem. Male victims like this boy - http://calcoastnews.com/2015/07/alleged-16-year-old-pimp-identified/ Because if all 16 year old females are victims - then a 16 year old male is a victim also. Little girls don't pop out of the womb hookers and neither do little boys pop out of the womb pimps. There is an adult behind this boy and he needs to be identified as a victim because in the eyes of someone who does know how this world works - he is a victim just as much as that girl is.
Just as Planned Parenthood is under attack by actors and hidden cameras along with all kinds of media distortions about what they do - our program has also been experiencing the same issues. In the year 2000 - we had a meeting of Sex Workers Anonymous in just about every Salvation Army Shelter, Catholic Charity, etc. Just about every court, mental health center, social worker, etc. would give referrals to our program. We were truly a nationwide program that was effective. Two people who are public about getting help from being hopeless in our program were Kathleen Mitchell and Brenda Myers-Powell - who then went on to form their own programs. So we even have a "second generation" of members who are out helping others by 2000.
But then the pink slips went out. I didn't know why for a while - but I found out. The Catholic Church had gone in and told all these other programs they would pay for "case management" of each client as long as they only used programs that were in the "Freedom Registry". What that registry was consisted of a list of programs who had signed an agreement they would not let their clients access any services that would bring them into contact with anyone that would even say the word "abortion". That included medical doctors and licensed therapists. https://www.aclu.org/news/court-prohibits-religious-restrictions-government-funded-trafficking-victims-program
So what you were now seeing was prostitutes who were suffering from horrific trauma and in need of very highly skilled professional medical and psychological treatment - were being denied access to anyone other than a "pastoral counselor" with 16 hours of training. That's it. Only women of child bearing age were being targeted for "safe houses" because they might be pregnant. What that looks like is this - there's a program in Los Angeles called "Treasures". They go out into the strip clubs and tell the strippers that "Jesus Loves Them" and they look for women who might be pregnant and needing to get away from a pimp. They are then sent to what they are told is a "aafe house" but in reality it's an adoption mill. Doubt me? Check out www.mercyministries.org where they have the words "safe house" and an adoption application right on the same page. Well prayers and the Bible are great - but sometimes people need proper medical professional help.
Now we advise our members to "not make any major decisions" until they have a year of time under their belt and are stabilized. That means a year from the streets. A year off drugs. A year in their own homes and working. A year where they're stable and can make a rational decision. Yet this Mercy Ministries program is asking women who are hormonal anyway because they're pregnant, and in this horrible traumatized state - to make a decision like giving up their babies without any professional or experienced advice from the outside. And because a program like ours would say that they need to be stable before making a life altering decision like that - well then they just want to pretend like we don't even exist.
It's the "crisis pregnancy centers" reborn. You remember them if you're my age. They would advertise "free pregnancy testing" and then when you'd get there they'd play a bunch of videos at you and if you were pregnant they'd then do everything they could to get you to sign an agreement you would not abort the baby. Which is fine really - but then they'd lie. They'd tell the women that abortion was illegal, there were no doctors in that state that would do them - or any other lie they could think of to convince this woman to think their way. I'm not for abortion mind you but I am not for deception and manipulation. That's what pimps do.
The reason why this ACLU lawsuit came about is because I kept getting phone calls from women telling me they were being told they would "make horrible mothers because they were just junkie whores after all", and then once they'd given up the baby they'd be cast out in the street like garbage. Since they had lied to this woman and told her that "no other services existed" she'd be right back out on the streets again. Luckily some found their way to us and told us the story while we patched their lives back up. https://www.aclu.org/blog/first-circuit-court-should-defend-victims-human-trafficking
I want to invite you to look at the effects of this. If we had been left alone - we'd still have Sex Workers Anonymous groups all over Long Beach, and the whole USA, like it was still today. Even bigger than they were. We used to do programs in the high schools where survivors would go out and talk to the high school kids about what to watch out for from pimps. We even spoke at some of the high schools in Long Beach in the late 1980's and early 1990's before I left California in 1994. We used to have self-defense classes donated by local instructors. Tarzana Treatment Center was one of the places where we had weekly meetings in Long Beach actually. Once the women would graduate from there - they would hold service positions teaching about rape prevention, answering the suicide hotline, and going out again to speak to the young about what to avoid and be careful of. Because our program teaches that you "keep what you have by giving it away" so we advocate holding service positions in the community as part of your recovery.
As well as helping girls avoid prostitution - we also used to work with the young men to not be lured into becoming pimps as well down there. We had an ex-pimp that used to go down there speaking to young men about leaving the game also. Yes we worked with the pimps - but they had their own sub-group led by ex-pimps that worked with the newcomer pimps to help them also exit and recover. For every victim of trafficking you get off the streets - for every pimp you get off the streets you save at least 10 victims. And in the cases of teenage pimps - they're victims also.
I read that D'Lita Miller had her own daughter sucked into trafficking in 2011. I would like to think if we had not been forced to reorganize our program to not have such a visible presence as we once had - that this might have been avoided. We used to run PSA's at night on TV in Long Beach. We had a weekly cable show that used to air in Long Beach with men and women telling their stories that the young were learning from. We had social workers in the juvenile system that would refer the kids to us as well as the parents. The local mental health centers used to refer prostitutes to us as did the probation officers. That was until the Catholic Bishops started cutting off anyone from services that wasn't in their "Freedom Registry". This by the way is why we're supposed to have "separation of church and state". So I'd like to think if we hadn't of been bowled over in this "war on women" that maybe D'lita's daughter might have been forewarned - and her mother might have known that programs like Children of the Night were 20 minutes away for her daughter and that SWAN was a phone call away for her.
Instead in these articles, she says she was told "there were no resources in 2011". She told me on a phone call we had that they didn't have any way to relocate them to safety. My heart broke when I heard that because I know of more than one existing resource where she, and her daughter, could have been relocated to safety in a way that's designed to protect from dangerous pimps. So someone lied to her. Maybe these resources aren't a part of her church - but they do exist. And since she's only been "out of the game" for about two years now from what this article said - we've been doing this since 1987.
So let's get clear about this. It's not that "resources don't exist". It's that "religious" resources don't exist. Let's be very clear about that. Especially when I'm reading articles like this that claim that a young girl had to be "shipped out to San Bernardino". There are resources 20 minutes away from them. What breaks my heart is to think that a victim is going back into their situation thinking that "no resources exist" simply because their church doesn't want to recognize something else exists. Either that or this is another propaganda campaign to get grant money - one or the other.
All I can do now is talk to the reporters who are writing these articles like the ones with Kevin Brown or these with D'Lita Miller because to say "nothing exists" is just plain wrong. Now not everyone has internet to look up that resources do exist so something needs to be done because someone isn't doing their homework. Only this lack of information is directly linked to young girls being trafficked, and victims thinking that "no resources" exist when it reality that's what people are saying to get grant money into their county. I'm sorry but some of these people are part of the problem.
Because if these people can't get onto Google and see that there are resources all over Los Angeles County that have been providing help to these victims in some cases for over 30 years - I mean how much can they know about this work? The Mary Magdalene Project was opened in 1980 in Reseda. Children of the Night was opened in 1979 in Van Nuys. Our program opened in Los Angeles in 1987. I don't remember how long Covenant House has been around. Treasures even exists for that matter. So there are other programs that exist.
If you want to evangelize for your religion - then be upfront about it. But if you want to help sex trafficking victims - then you have an obligation to those victims to provide them with a program of help that works. This isn't a game. People die if this isn't done right. People don't just pick up a scalpel and go operate on someone. You need to go to medical school and get a license. And frankly if you're going to go out there and help other trafficking victims D'Lita - then you need a little more than just your daughter's been out two years now. She hasn't even hit the three year wall where studies show that 98 percent of us relapse without "proper" treatment. Treatment that doesn't just fall out of thin air nor that's available in our "traditional system". Plus what works for your daughter isn't a cookie cutter that will work for every victim coming in the door. It's not that simple.
Now numbers don't mean effective. You might have 1,000 people in your program - but that doesn't mean it's working. I mean people actually leaving the sex industry permanently, staying clean, and finding recovery long term. We have members of SWA now who have been with us since 1991. Here's a video of one of them. This woman has now raised three kids, clean, and out of prostitution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33weIPOhqVU I think we know what we're doing.
So the question is - why am I being treated like the enemy by these people? I wish I knew because they won't talk to me. I've told D'Lita Miller that I can show her everything I know - and she just stopped talking to me. So I don't know. Maybe I'm like those ships the Peruvians couldn't see that were right in front of their eyes. I mean I'm glad all these people are finally opening their eyes to a problem that's been here all along. But there's a solution that's here also too they need to open their eyes to also before the Spaniards hit the sand.
But this not talking to me or anyone in SWA or people who aren't part of their church? It's not what Jesus taught - that's for sure.
Because honestly - I got two ways of looking at someone who isn't seeing the ship in front of their own eyes. It's either they haven't heard of us possibly before - or they don't want to hear about us. I mean look at this great propaganda campaign we just saw Kevin Brown pulling off - http://www.latimes.com/local/great-reads/la-me-c1-prostitute-squad-20131002-dto-htmlstory.html Now this guy was in the OC Register also. He was in the Los Angeles Times. He even had a whole "reality" series produced by Relativity Media and aired on A&E. Only there was no "program" he was talking those women into. The women on the show? All paid actors. Even D'Lita Miller told me she's got a "signed confidentiality agreement with Tom Forman". Now why would that be? What's she got to not talk about? Kevin Brown's so called "church" turned out to be a bunch of doctor's offices when checked into. So I've got a lot of legwork to do here about what's obviously one big fraud with Kevin Brown.
My point being when HE acted like he didn't know anything about our program, and others, it was because he didn't want to know because it was a complete fraud upon the public right down to the paid "survivors". What's D'Lita's excuse for not knowing about us before? Don't know but I know she knows about us now and now my calls are going unreturned.
This is why I'm embarking upon the reports I'm going to be investigating. This is not "personal". But I got this movement federal recognition. I got the fact we exist to become a reality. I got federal recognition meaning that there's money now to help us. But now what's standing inbetween real victims getting real help is the police and these church people. Because that's a lot of money I'm not seeing going into real victims. I'm sorry but a "drop in center" in Long Beach ISN'T to help SEX TRAFFICKING VICTIMS.
Why? I guarantee you a true trafficking victim wouldn't be wallowed to walk into that center. Just as a true victim isn't going to go into a hotel room with Kevin Brown and after 8 minutes go "okay" and walk off into the sunset with him to be free. The DEFINITION of a trafficking victim is that they can't get out and they can't get to help. They can't get to a phone. They're locked up in a house somewhere. If they can call for help - they can't because someone they care about is being threatened if they do.
I mean having a center is great - but let's get real here - that's not for trafficking victims to get help. So I'm starting on these reports - city by city - about how these programs are operating and what is being done, and not done, for REAL victims - and well I guess I can see the fight isn't over yet to get help to these victims. At least we have people knowing we exist. Now we just have to educate them as to WHAT we are. And what pimps are - you know people who exploit prostitutes for money?
(copyright 2015 J. Williams all rights reserved)
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