SUBMISSION OF AN OPINION PIECE WE MADE TO THE GUARDIAN TODAY

To: david.shariatmadari@theguardian.com
From: jodywilliams@hotmail.com
Subject: OPINION ON SEX TRAFFICKING
Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2016 07:29:11 -0800

Dear David:

Below is an opinion on the subject if you’d be interested in publishing in response to Julie Bindel’s opinion. http://www.theguardian.com/profile/juliebindel    As the founder of the modern sex trafficking movement in the USA – I think I have the right to spout my view on the subject more than she does.  I’ve not only answered over 500,000 phone calls on our hotline since 1987 according to our phone records, but our program, www.sexworkersanonymous.com , has chapters all over the world now including where the sex industry is both legal, illegal and decriminalized.  We literally wrote the book on recovery for our program “Sold Out” available on LuLu, but we are the oldest, and largest, program of not only survivors of sex trafficking, but ex-members of the sex industry in many forms, both male, female and transgender.  Our latest update of our active members in our database showed 190,000 on our contact list with over 50,000 subscribers to our blog going to our members.  I think this entitles us to have an opinion that’s heard on this subject – don’t you?   I made it long so I can edit it as needed for your purposes.  Just let me know what you need it cut to, or what you need removed, and I’ll be happy to edit it back to you for publication.  Thanks – Jody Williams  (702) 468-4529

Let me establish first before I spout an opinion about the sex industry what dog I have in this race. First, I grew up when the roles of women were dramatically changing during the feminist revolution of the 1960's. My grandmother had been raised to only be a wife and mother. My mother had been raised she had a choice between being a homemaker or a career outside the home.

However, I had been raised during the sexual revolution. The “pill” was being marketed to us and abortions had become legal with “Roe vs. Wade”. So born in 1960, I was offered a THIRD option where my sexuality could also be my career unlike generations before me. This is why I joined COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) while still in my teens.

We were pitched we had “control over our bodies and our sexuality” not limited to strict gender roles even while watching androgynous musicians like David Bowie or Grace Jones. In fact, we were encouraged to demand sexual satisfaction by feminist authors even if that meant it was with another woman. We also watched movies like “Gypsy” where a stripper was respected as an author, Dolly Pardon was a signing madam in the “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”, while Xaviera Hollender became a NY Times best Selling Author with her memoir “The Happy Hooker”.

Not confined to adult theaters in bad neighborhoods – we saw films like “Deep Throat” airing for the first time in a mainstream theater. Strip clubs were transformed into “Gentlemens' Clubs” while brothels became legal in Nevada in 1971. The adult industry even created their own awards show in 1983. Meaning my generation was the first one where we were pitched the idea of sex not only being a career – but a respected one at that where sex was a commodity – not an expression of emotion only. 

Growing up watching my aunts bogged down at home pumping out babies while financially dependent upon their abusive husbands. Seeing my mom being a career woman coming home to make dinner for my father to show she was a “mother and wife”, while the commercials pitched she should be able to “make the bacon and fry it up in a pan” - all prepared me to eagerly accept the idea of courted by men who would drip me in diamonds, furs and wads of cash while enjoying sex with them without fear of pregnancy nor having to be tied to them by marriage if I chose the third option presented to my generation of becoming a sex worker.  Not a “whore” nor a “slut” but an “entrepreneur”. 

Honesty with what I saw of marriage growing up - I would rather take the cash than a man's name was how I felt about the whole thing.  Why take a ring when I could make six figures a year and live in my own house in my name?  So unlike the people who claim for me that “no one grows up wanting to be a prostitute” I however did. 

When I went into the sex industry I went into it with the idea of it being just that – an industry. Like any industry, I found a mentor to teach me the ropes and I set about to make my first million dollars before I was 21 years old.

If anyone has ever watched the series “Mad Men” then you're seeing a time when smoking was done everywhere, even at work. Where drinking was something “real men did” and steak dinners were considered something you should look forward to at the end of a long day at work. The reason why we don't live that way anymore is because those ideas those ad men pitched us – was having us drop dead before we were 50 years old of heart attacks and clogged arteries from high cholesterol, lung cancer from smoking, and cirrhosis from drinking too much.

The same “reality” has been creeping in about the sexual revolution as well as the commercializing of sex. Just as we've learned that TV dinners aren't exactly a healthy lifestyle we once thought – so too have we been learning the truth about a lot of things that were marketed to us at one time including the sexual revolution.

Take a look at alcohol and cigarettes. A product once heavily marketed to us in films as something the “wealthy elite” enjoyed every time you saw an actor or actress with a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other started becoming a real problem when married men with children were drinking up their paychecks at the bar before coming home with no money for food or rent. Now what was the first response to this crisis? Prohibition. Government stepping in and making it illegal.

Did it work? Nope. Made a lot of money for bootleggers and put a lot of politicians in office – but it didn't do a thing to stop the rampage of alcoholism that spread across our country. Churches even tried to jump in with revivals going around having men sign “pledges” only to find them in the speakeasy later that evening. In fact, nothing worked until after Prohibition was repealed and Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob stepped up with Alcoholics Anonymous. What doctors and psychiatrists used to consider a 100 percent terminal disease at one time – AA was now churning out sobriety for the first time in history.

When I was looking around for help to leave the sex industry, and to deal with sex trafficking, I found nothing. Looking to the history of AA for answers – I founded Prostitutes Anonymous in 1987 (now called Sex Workers Anonymous). When we opened our program, and hotline, we heard “once a whore always a whore” ringing in our ears. We also were living in a world that had no concept sex trafficking even existed. When the police used to raid a brothel – they'd arrest everyone on the premises without asking if anyone was there by force or not.

In believing those forced to be there shouldn't be penalized as criminals a second time by going from the pimp to the courts as a criminal - we offered our 12 step program as an “alternative to sentencing” in the same manner as how addicts and alcoholics are also offered to be referred to AA or NA instead of jail for their crimes. This was because there's a huge difference between a crime committed while drunk vs. a crime committed because one was suffering from a disease which requires treatment rather than incarceration to treat.  Besides, while attending our program instead of being in jail this allowed them to keep their children rather than to have them all wind up in foster homes – 100 times more likely to follow in their mothers’ footsteps by becoming easy prey for the pimps. 

Only we were told there was no money for services for these victims because they were still considered 'criminals” by our legal system. This was why we started asking for prostitution to be decriminalized – so that not only could victims of forced prostitution receive the same assistance as any victim of crime but also to help us gather the evidence and testimony needed to put these criminals away by people not being afraid to come forward for fear of self-incrimination. To convince America these victims needed to be treated not as criminals, but as the victims they were – we embarked upon a major media campaign to raise awareness sex trafficking was in fact “real”.

Only to be told it wasn't going to be “real” until our government gave it federal recognition through the passing of the Trafficking Act of 2000. Only once  this Act was passed - it's now been hijacked by the religious right who want to turn this into a “womens” issue where all the victims are put into Christian homes.  As a matter of fact, the ADL has told me they are not “interested in the subject” like this doesn’t affect Jewish victims for some unknown reason.  Probably because the religious right has hijacked this issue as their new building funds where victims go right from raising money in one house for the pimps to being paraded around the Christian rescue homes to raise money for them in one sweep.

Something even the author of the Act, Michael Horowitz, has been quoted as saying in agreement with us about what's happened to a movement we started as it’s been “hijacked” by those turning this into an avenue for money and power.  What's happened since this hijacking I look at kind of like this – imagine if you were to start going into the drug cartels and saying you were going to take all of the heterosexual females in this world and allow them to receive a special status of “victim” where they would receive all of this assistance – while anyone else you would ignore entirely. They don't exist.

There's no such thing as a “drug dealer” only “victims of the drug war”. So all the males, lesbians, oh and let's not forget the Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, or any other non-Christian drug dealer we're going to refuse to acknowledge in any way. Further, we're going to not have a drug court and act like AA or NA don't exist. Then we're going to give those who we've identified as “victim” and give them yoga classes, help to go back to their home country, and vocational training to find new jobs. Ignoring the fact most of these women have children with their husbands who are considered still as criminals. In fact, we'll even give them a college education if they agree to testify against their husbands. Of course ignoring their kids' grandparents are his parents. Or his brother is their uncle. Oh and while he's in jail for drug trafficking she's still required to provide him with visitation with his kids for the next 18 years. I mean that's about as crazy as this movement has become.

When alcoholism was viewed as a “vice” no one got sober and bootleggers were rich. Bill Wilson taught us alcoholism wasn't just wino's, while Betty Ford taught us it affected women and even the affluent as she was First Lady. Eliot Spitzer is a notorious “buyer” where the most public shaming in the world didn't deter him. In fact, he was accused of assaulting a sex worker recently. We ignore Belle Knox confessing when it became public she'd done porn to pay for college she was almost driven to suicide as another young woman was simply because she doesn't have a pimp standing behind her. That in my opinion is wrong.

We accomplished nothing by looking at alcoholism and drug addiction as a “vice”. However, we were making a lot of progress when we were allowed to simply market the message “if you are a male, female or transgender, who wants help for any reason to leave any part of the sex industry call www.sexworkersanonymous.com”. 

This isn't a “womens' issue” nor is the only enemy here that of the “trafficker” when even more men and women are forced into the sex industry through addiction, mental illness, poverty, disability, and a lack of proper job training than are by a pimp.  Nor when the concept on only helping those with a pimp completely excludes the transgender sex workers for whom pimps almost virtually don’t exist. 

So may we please stop turning this issue into the battleground where the “war on women” is being played out because those who need help to exit the industry, for any reason, are human period.  Male, female, transgender, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Syrian, adult, juvenile – human. 

Thank you.  www.sexworkersanonymous.com