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May 7, 2008 6:02 pm US/Central
New Study Reveals Dangers Of Local Sex Trafficking
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
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Brenda Powell said she was 39 before she finally got out of the local sex trade, her life for 25 years. Now she's working with others to keep at-risk young women away from the dangers of prostitution.
CBS
Researchers at DePaul University have released a new report about the harmful effects of the sex industry.
The study reflects the lives and experiences of 100 local prostitutes and suggests the girls and women who sell sex are victims of more violence than previously thought. Seventy out of the 100 said they'd been victims.
Brenda Powell was one of them. Until she got out at 39, she was a Chicago prostitute for 25 years.
"I have been shot four times, stabbed over 13 times, I have been strangled, beaten..." Powell said.
Researcher Jody Raphael explained some reasons behind the high incidence of violence "from the pimps to keep them, and threats of violence and sexual assault to keep them in the industry, and often they are subject to violence from the customer."
"If a woman in prostitution gets through a week without violence," Powell said, "that's a good week for her, because violence happens all the time."
Raphael, who authored the study, recalls the recent scandal involving then New York governor Eliot Spitzer, and the $3,000-a-night, so-called "high class" call girl. At the time, many were asking, "what's the big deal?"
"And that just drove me crazy," Raphael said. "What's wrong with it is, this young woman in prostitution is descending into this downward spiral… she may very well be kept in that escort service through violence."
Powell and another former prostitute, Olivia Howard, know the bleak truth too well. They're both now counseling at-risk girls and young women to stay away from "the life."
"I surrounded myself with people who were doing the same things I was doing," Howard said. "To them I was a dope fiend and a whore and that's all I was ever going to be. How wrong they were."
The study recommends that customers, or "johns," should be arrested, and that penalties for customers who patronize young girls be increased.
It also calls on law enforcement to crack down harder on pimps who recruit girls and women into prostitution.
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