Listening to survivors prostitution is important.  Their voices need to be heard.  Jacqueline S. Homan shares her experiences with, as she describes it, the commercial rape industry.

 

“Do you REALLY want the truth from real sex trafficking survivors? Because those of us sex trafficking victims/survivors who HAVE BEEN trying to speak out about how wrong this whole shit show is have NO money to even live on let alone mount a media campaign to protect our interests as we are NOT a $32 billion dollar a year industry—unlike the rapists, pimps and traffickers you seem hell-bent on protecting.

We have NO resources, NOTHING to enable us to protect ourselves when we DO speak out about what was done to us and then we get stalked, harassed, libeled, discredited, and threatened for speaking our truths.

This has happened to EVERY survivor who wants the Nordic model AND solid economic supports for women wanting to exit the commercial rape trade. And as a sex trafficking survivor, that is EXACTLY what prostitution is: COMMERCIAL RAPE.

So let’s be honest, shall we? You people who continue to stand on YOUR privileges (middle/upper class privilege and/or male privilege) to shout survivors down and subvert OUR human rights (yanno, like the right to NOT be pressed into commercial rape) don’t want to hear from the 90% who want out but can’t exit and you damn well don’t want to hear from destitute survivors like me who ARE out and who have had to resort to eating out of garbage cans and sleeping in cars for YEARS after escaping because of NOT being allowed ANY OTHER PLACE IN SOCIETY EXCEPT THE GUTTER AND AN EARLY GRAVE rather than go back to what your side glibly euphemizes as “a job like any other.”

You would prefer us to be PERMANENTLY silenced by being left to DIE from poverty, or DIE at the hands of violent abusive johns (either from deadly incurable STD’s since the majority of johns REFUSE to wear condoms and DELIBERATELY infect their victims, as revealed by Dr. Jay Silverman from Harvard Medical College in his 2007 report published in JAMA) from being economically forced to return to the very same sexual slavery hell we have fought so damn hard to ESCAPE from (often with NO help at all from ANYONE else in society, mind you).

So how about asking the the REAL question here: Whom does the Grail serve?

FACT: Only 15% of men are johns. At least 60% of them are married or are in a long-term relationship. Most are white and from the middle and upper classes. And many of them already have plans in mind to seek out women and girls specifically to TORTURE OR KILL when they seek out prostituted women—as revealed by recent john busts in Ottawa, Canada and also in the state of Virginia in the US where one john seeking a trafficked 14 yr old “for sex” was found to be carrying a loaded gun.

WHY are you more interested in protecting the profits of pimps, brothel owners, traffickers and johns—RAPISTS AND KILLERS—whose money and male privilege entitles them to do this shit with society’s full blessing and support and protection than you are in protecting the human rights of the VICTIMS of the commercial rape trade in the name of supporting women’s autonomy?

Is it because you think it’s perfectly OK to sacrifice an entire class of women and kids (and even young men too) as human shields to bear the brunt of life-threatening poverty due to job discrimination against racialized groups and poor, unvalued women (made worse by the lack of a social safety net thanks to Welfare Reform) and to bear the brunt of male sexual violence and cruelty just so that YOU can continue to unjustly benefit from it?

Or is it because you are really a paid shill for those at the apex of this trade in human flesh and blood and possibly have BLOOD MONEY in your bank account to protect?

Want to hear from some MORE survivors? How many MORE victims of the commercial rape trade do you need to hear from before you decide that OUR claims for some restorative justice and human rights are valid?

I tagged some brother and sister survivors as well as a male anti-trafficking ally. Whether they choose to participate in a convo dominated by johns, pimps and their cheerleaders where they know that they can expect to just get stomped into the ground yet again by those with privilege who don’t give a fuck about us is another matter.

I spoke out. You heard from me, a REAL sex trafficking survivor. If you will NOT listen or give a crap about me and my quest for justice and human rights, or Rebecca Mott’s or Rachel Moran’s or Stella Marr’s, then you won’t give a shit about what the rest of my fellow survivors have to say either. Your side never has. Which is why the Happy Hooker myth and the Pretty Woman Hollywood fantasy continues to dominate the public discourse in this matter at the expense of trafficking victims’ human rights.

There is NOTHING “objective” about this issue. Side 1 believes that a class of women and girls should continue to be set aside to be dehumanized and sacrificed as human shields to bear the brunt of poverty and male sexual violence and entitlement and allowed NO OTHER PLACE in society other than the gutter and an early grave, while Side 2 believes that women are human beings that deserve lives with dignity, to NOT be stripped of basic human rights by being reduced to disposable commodities for the sake of maintaining male privilege.”