Why Do We Turn Victims Into Criminals

Before interning at Restore NYC, prostitution was a world I wasn’t familiar with outside of pop culture and academia. Songs like Ludacris’s “Area Code” glorify the life of a pimp, while Julia Roberts portrays in “Pretty Woman” how a prostitute can find herself in a sweet love story. In middle school, when we sang along with 50 Cents’s “P.I.M.P.” our ears only caught the chorus, and we missed the underlying violent truth embedded in, “Now Niki my bottom b*tch, she always come up with my bread/ The last n*gga she was with put stitches in her head.”

At my university, I learned in my Gender and Sexuality class about the idea of heteronormative, Puritanical statures being set on American society. In class we were taught how sex work can be an empowering decision for women. But I failed to realize the women we studied often served an elite, wealthy clientele (politicians, corporate tycoons) and the women themselves came from different socio-economic backgrounds than the women and cases I encountered while interning at Restore (college-educated Americans versus women from post-war countries enticed by jobs in America). When our class framed our discussions about the legalization of prostitution, I pictured how a well-off group of women would benefit from being able to work in an open and monitored work place, all the while ignorant to the reality of human sex-trafficking.

But to every empowered woman there is a girl emotionally-manipulated and abused by her pimp. Instead of sexual progression there is human regression as women and girls are brought into America as slaves.

During my internship I was forced to confront an ugly truth about myself: somewhere along the line I had internalized the idea that prostitutes deserved to take complete responsibility for their decisions. I had traded my intelligence for simple answers fed to me by academia, and exchanged my compassion for the ubiquitous attitude towards “hoes.”

At Restore I learned more about the reality that pimps and human traffickers seek to keep secret in order to profit from human exploitation. A pimp is not a smooth-talking womanizer who should be admired, but rather he is a master of manipulating girls, as young as 13-years-old, who often come from abusive homes, into a life of sexual exploitation and emotional abuse that a lifetime may not heal.

In the eyes of her pimp or her trafficker, a prostitute is a monetary number. A human life can be bought for a few hundred dollars, and later capitalized to thousands of dollars each week as prostitutes are forced to service multiple Johns. Prostitution suddenly becomes a business less about sex and more about dehumanization.

One of the most revealing experiences was going to court with Kara. There we were able to see the women who were brought in for prostitution. Rather than seeing them as victims of a broken system, these women were tried as criminals.