Statistics of Prostitution

Human sex trafficking and involvement in the sex industry either through choice, force, or coercion is a sad world, full of broken dreams, battered, shattered, sexually abused women, men and children. It is destroying our families. And it is causing alarming divorce rates, teen pregnancies, drug usage, STDs-AIDS and oher sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention altered views of what sex truly was intended to be!

SEX TRAFFICKING IS A CRIME... and we need to DO something about it! Only our ACTION against it... by truly helping others will MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

Buckle your seatbelts, here below are the stats on prostitution in the United States.

AGE FACTORS

• Average age of entry: 12-14 yrs
• Average mean age: 31
• Average years in prostitution: 11
• Percent younger than age 18 at entry: 42 percent

VIOLENCE IN PROSTITUTION

Traumatized individuals tend to minimize or deny their experiences, especially when they are in the midst of ongoing trauma, such as war combat or prostitution. This leads to a decreased rate of reporting violent crimes. Please understand these girls are afraid of their pimps, and if they told everything that is actually going on behind closed doors, they fear violent retaliation from the pimp or death. I can personally relate to this myself!

• Threatened with a weapon: 78 percent
• Physically assaulted: 82 percent
• Raped: 82 percent

Many women in this business are confused of the definition of rape. If rape is as unwanted sex act or coerced, then the statistic would be a much higher percentage. Some women in prostitution assume there is no difference between prostitution and rape, and they only call it rape if they were not paid, regardless of the violence of the act—asking them is like asking someone in a combat zone if they are under fire. A significant percentage of women currently prostituting deny rape and other violence because it would be too stressful to acknowledge the extreme danger posed by johns and pimps!

• Raped more than five times: 73 percent
• Current or past homelessness: 84 percent
• As a child, was hit or beaten by a caregiver until injured or bruised: 49 percent
• Sexually abused as a child: 65-95 percent

PROSTITUTION AND PORNOGRAPHY

• Upset by an attempt to make them do what had been seen in pornography: 32 percent
• Pornography made of her in prostitution: 49 percent

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL USAGE

• Drugs: 75 percent
• Alcohol: 26 percent

HOW DO PROSTITUTES RESPOND WHEN ASKED WHAT THEY NEED?

• Would you leave prostitution: 87 percent
• Need home or safe place: 78 percent
• Need job training: 73 percent
• Need health care: 58 percent
• Need peer support: 50 percent>
• Need legal assistance: 42 percent
• Need alcohol and drug treatment: 67 percent
• Self-defense training: 49 percent
• Need child care: 28 percent
• Need physical protection from pimp: 28 percent?

Note: Most women will not say that they need protection, because they are mentally still “in love” and in denial that their pimp will hunt them down to hurt them.  Based on my own personal experience and understanding of the capabilities of pimps, I believe the percentage is as high as 80 percent.

• Need individual counseling: 48 percent?

Quick to note from experience with myself and friends, most women are in denial of the fact that they need counseling, and when they do find out they need it, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder sets in, this then will involve severe alcohol and drug abuse, not to mention other additions to cover up the memories of pain.

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is defined as the psychological consequences of exposure to, or confrontation with, stressful experiences that the person experiences as highly traumatic. The experience must involve actual or threatened death, serious physical injury, or a threat to physical and/or psychological integrity.

People most likely to develop PTSD include PROSTITUTES, PORN STARS, rape victims, battered women, childhood sexual abuse, a person experiencing psychological or physical torture, witnessing the death of a loved one, natural catastrophes, bad trip on drugs, and WAR or COMBAT EXPOSURE.

PTSD has been called “shell shock,” “battle fatigue,” “accident neurosis,” and “post-rape syndrome.” It has been often misunderstood or misdiagnosed, even though the disorder has very specific symptoms that form a definite psychological syndrome. In some cases, the symptoms of PTSD disappear with time, but in most cases, they will persist for many years, and cause severe depression. Many need professional help to successfully recover from the psychological damage that can result from experiencing, witnessing, or participating in an overwhelmingly traumatic event.

These girls experience rape, pimping, psychological torture, physical abuse, medical conditions that threaten death, and addictive behaviors such as drug usage, cutting, bulimia, poor self-image issues, suicidal tendencies, anxiety attack, and mood swings.

These girls need OUR help to recover—they need pastors, family, and friends to support them as they “walk out” their pain.

Diagnosis of PTSD per country of prostituted respondents:

• Canada: 74 percent
• Colombia: 86 percent (get this—this is where it is LEGALIZED)
• Germany: 60 percent
• Mexico: 54 percent
• South Africa: 75 percent
• Thailand: 58 percent
• Turkey: 66 percent
• USA: 69 percent
• Zambia: 71 percent
• Diagnosis of PTSD for combat war veterans: 69 percent

This is very interesting to note—these women in the sex industry are just as traumatized as someone in combat on the front lines!!!

A Canadian woman says: “What rape is to others is normal to us.”

A Thai woman said, “I hate that I have to have sex with someone I don’t like or love!”

For the vast majority of the world’s prostituted woman and me personally, prostitution and trafficking are experiences of being hunted down, dominated, sexually harassed, and assaulted. We are treated like commodities into which men masturbated, causing immense psychological harm to the person acting as their receptacle.

There is widespread misinformation about prostitution, based on the media that neutralizes the harms described above. This is then spread throughout organizations that present prostitution as legitimate, that it is merely “unpleasant labor” for the women involved.

It’s a LIE people!!!

Prostitution is MULTITRAUMATIC whether its physical location is in clubs, brothels, hotels/motels/john’s homes, motor vehicles or on the streets. Women have said that they felt safer in street prostitution compared to legal Nevada brothels, where they were not permitted to reject any customer. Others commented that on the street they could at least refuse customers that appeared either dangerous or intoxicated. Raphael and Shapiro (2002) found that women in Chicago reported the same frequency of rape in escort and in street prostitution. Also reported there was no difference in the incidence of PTSD in the two types of prostitution, suggesting that the trauma that results in prostitution is the same for ALL who are in it.

What are we to do, as citizens of the United States and the world?

There are no accidents; the harm of the sex industry outweighs the good. The institution of prostitution is carefully constructed and promoted. Those of us that are concerned with global human rights MUST ADDRESS the social invisibility, the MASSIVE denial regarding its harms.

If you think that prostitution is not affecting you or your life, then maybe you haven’t been in Las Vegas lately to see all the girls being pimped at the bars. Maybe you haven’t noticed all the ads in magazines, newspapers, and on billboards. Maybe you haven’t noticed the “pop ups” of pornography on your computer. Maybe you haven’t noticed that it is considered “cool” to be a porn star. Maybe you haven’t noticed our little girls dressing sexier at younger ages. Maybe you haven’t noticed that the media throws the term “pimping” out there like it is acceptable and cool. Maybe you haven’t noticed that our music is filled with themes that degrade women. And if you have, what are you going to do about it? It will continue to grow into a larger MONSTER if we continue to “accept” this social behavior.

• “I feel like I imagine people who were in concentration camps feel when they get out….It’s a real deep pain, an assault to my mind, my body, my dignity as a human being. I feel like what was taken away from me in prostitution is irretrievable.” (Giobbe, 1991, cited by Jeffreys, 1997 w/permission of Melissa Farley)

• “I felt lied to, cheated, and violated. I felt that sex was an evil act of domination, not real love. There were times that I wanted to really hurt my customers, because if I could give them back with the abuse that they were forcing on me and my friends, then I could at least appease my pain and insanity, and justify revenge for all the girls that have been hurt or killed.” (Annie Lobért, former prostitute and stripper, 2006)

• “I felt like I couldn’t go anywhere, I couldn’t function socially as a human being, and when I did go somewhere, I felt everyone knew what I used to do for a living. I felt like a dirty, cheated, disrespected, violated, and worthless individual to society. I didn’t know who “Annie” was anymore. I often wanted to end my very own life. This is a battlefield of the mind—and if you don’t get out and get help, you will lose your very own soul and go completely insane.” (Annie Lobért , former prostitute and stripper, 2006)
There is one thing that I ask of all of you. Please do not judge these girls or men any longer that are in the sex industry. Know that most of them are being “forced” to do it physically or mentally by manipulation of people around them. Please open your eyes and see that we are ALL being lied to—that most of these girls do not like what they are doing, and that it is all “acting.”

Every time you pick up a dirty magazine, watch a dirty video, click onto that website, or listen to music that degrades women (most hip hop). Every time you go to that bachelor party or strip club, know that it could be your sister, your mother, or your best friend’s girl. And then think, is it all really worth the “thrill” of self gratification that is only a couple minutes of pleasure? You are destroying lives of countless women while you do it—feeding the monster the sex industry has become. And now YOU are part of it too….for their must be victims as well as enablers. 

Annie Lobert, founder of Hookers For Jesus

Statistical information used with permission by Melissa Farley, from “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” www.prostitutionresearch.com

Also “Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Overview”: www.healthyplace.com

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for definitions of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, prostitution, john, pimping.