Some people will find Brenda's account upsetting. Right from the start life was handing me lemons, but I've always tried to make the best lemonade I can. I grew up in the s on the West Side of Chicago. My mother died when I was six months old. She was only 16 and I never learned what it was that she died from - my grandmother, who drank more than most, couldn't tell me later on.
The official explanation is that it was "natural causes". I don't believe that. Who dies at 16 from natural causes?
I like to think that God was just ready for her. I heard stories that she was beautiful and had a great sense of humour. I know that's true because I have one also. It was my grandmother that took care of me. And she wasn't a bad person - in fact she had a side to her that was so wonderful.
She read to me, baked me stuff and cooked the best sweet potatoes. She just had this drinking problem. She would bring drinking partners home from the bar and after she got intoxicated and passed out these men would do things to me. It started when I was four or five years old and it became a regular occurrence. I'm certain my grandmother didn't know anything about it. She worked as a domestic in the suburbs. It took her two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. So I was a latch-key kid - I wore a key around my neck and I would take myself to kindergarten and let myself back in at the end of the day.
And the molesters knew about that, and they took advantage of it. I would watch women with big glamorous hair and sparkly dresses standing on the street outside our house. I had no idea what they were up to; I just thought they were shiny.
As a little girl, all I ever wanted was to be shiny. One day I asked my grandmother what the women were doing and she said, "Those women take their panties off and men give them money.
To look back now, I dealt with it all amazingly well. Alone in that house, I had imaginary friends to keep me company that I would sing and dance around with - an imaginary Elvis Presley, an imaginary Diana Ross and the Supremes.
I think that helped me deal with things. I was a really outgoing girl - I used to laugh a lot. At the same time, I was afraid, always afraid. I didn't know if what was happening was my fault or not.
I thought perhaps something was wrong with me. Even though I was a smart kid, I disconnected from school. Going into the s, I became the kind of girl who didn't know how to say "no" - if the little boys in the community told me that they liked me or treated me nice, they could basically have their way with me.
By the time I was 14, I'd had two children with boys in the community, two baby girls. My grandmother started to say that I needed to bring in some money to pay for these kids, because there was no food in the house, we had nothing.
I was 14 years old and I cried through everything. But I did it. I didn't like it, but the five men who dated me that night showed me what to do. They knew I was young and it was almost as if they were excited by it. I went home by train and I gave most of that money to my grandmother, who didn't ask me where it came from. The following weekend I returned to Division and Clark, and it seemed like my grandmother was happy when I brought the money home.
But the third time I went down there, a couple of guys pistol-whipped me and put me in the trunk of their car. They had approached me before because I was, as they called it, "unrepresented" on the street. All I knew was the light in the trunk of the car and then the faces of these two guys with their pistol.
First they took me to a cornfield out in the middle of nowhere and raped me. Then they took me to a hotel room and locked me in the closet. That's the kind of thing pimps will do to break a girl's spirits. They kept me in there for a long time. I was begging them to let me out because I was hungry, but they would only allow me out of the closet if I agreed to work for them. They pimped me for a while, six months or so.
I wasn't able to go home. I tried to get away but they caught me, and when they caught me they hurt me so bad.
Later on, I was trafficked by other men. The physical abuse was horrible, but the real abuse was the mental abuse - the things they would say that would just stick and which you could never get from under. Pimps are very good at torture, they're very good at manipulation. Some of them will do things like wake you in the middle of the night with a gun to your head. One study found prostitutes in Colorado Springs were 18 times more likely to be murdered than other women of a similar age.
Some experts say making prostitution legal everywhere — as it is in the Netherlands, parts of Mexico, and parts of Nevada — is the only way to make it safer and less stigmatized. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation.
Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Erin Fuchs. Half of the prostitutes in a new survey say they became prostitutes because of sexual curiosity, and 68 percent consider their line of work as part of their sexuality.
Women became prostitutes for many different reasons, but they often feel stigmatised by society as needing help to stop their work fewer than half of the prostitutes have considered stopping , instead of society respecting their choice of work. Child abuse is often regarded as a reason for prostitution by the media, politicians and general public, who feel the prostitutes need help to stop their work. But the survey produced no clear conclusion on this — some prostitutes were abused as children, others were not.
The SFI researchers calculate that there are a little over 3, prostitutes in Denmark, which is fewer than expected, for example because some prostitutes work at several clinics. The report is based on interviews with former and active prostitutes and with experts from the authorities and NGOs associated with the sex environment. A majority of female escort and female clinic prostitutes gave sexual curiosity as a reason for entering prostitution; many had great interest in sex before becoming prostitutes.
Almost half of the female escorts and just over a sixth of the clinic prostitutes started their work because they saw an opportunity to make money through sex. Street prostitutes, however, draw another picture: they are not in the business for the sex but to deal with problems such as drug abuse.
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