Hello, my name is Sylvia.
I stand for the liberation of women, men, children, transgender, and trafficking victims from porn and prostitution. The following is why I take this stand.
Thirteen years ago, for a period of twelve years, I was an exotic dancer, a sensual masseuse, and a prostitute. These experiences were so damaging that at the end of that time I thought about killing myself every day. Getting out was a struggle, but when I finally got out I asked myself, “How did I get there in the first place?”
It began at home. I had an adverse childhood experience. I was a scared, neglected, abused child growing up in dysfunctional households. I was abused by the people who were supposed to protect me. Though I knew it was wrong, the abuse sexualized me in ways that I did not understand until I was much older. From my earliest memory, I was rewarded for dressing and acting sexy. This became my way to impress and manipulate people. The problem was, it worked and I received enormous positive reinforcement. This became my way of interacting with the world and the people in it.
Here is a bit of my story. I had a mother, a father, two stepmothers, and a stepfather. It was confusing, corrupting, and chaotic.
My mother is Jewish and my father is Catholic. Dad had us secretly baptized behind my mother's back. They decided to start me in Kindergarten at a Catholic school. I did not fit in and came home crying to my mother. In the middle of the school year, they put me in public school.
My parents divorced by the time I was six. Then they both remarried, and my mother and stepfather moved us down to San Jose. For years every other weekend, my dad would pick us up for the weekend; the problem was he was stoned the whole time. It was really scary. When I was eleven I started getting high, stealing from my father's stash. When my father’s second wife left him, he had an affair with the next-door neighbor, who left her husband for him. Now I had two stepsisters thrown in the mix.
I remember the neglect started after my mother left my father. They used to tell me to take care of my sister, who was thirteen months younger than me, but it was overwhelming to take care of my sister when I was only six years old. My mother had not worked in fourteen years when my dad left. We had to go on welfare.
I tested gifted in school, but I was so stressed out all the time. Even so, my grades were okay until high school. At fourteen, I started sleeping around with anyone who would give me any crumb of attention; that was the first time I experienced major depression. Even my mother and stepfather noticed and sent me to counseling, and I started to feel better. Then they cut it off because they said it was too much money.
I started drinking and smoking at fifteen. I felt so much shame about my family. There was a lot of weirdness around money. We had nice houses, but my sister and I were dressed in rags with holes in them. My father's sex addiction ran rampant - he would hit on everyone in the room, women, men, children, everyone was fair game to him. I would tell my girlfriends to not get too close to him physically because he might grab them or kiss them, and then I would laugh really loud like that was funny. He also would collage pornographic images on the refrigerator.
I ended up going to three different high schools. The first high school I went to was mostly Spanish in San Jose. I thought my name was “White Bitch.” “What are you doing in the bathroom White Bitch?." When my sister made friends with this girl across town, her parents let us use their address, and we were able to go to a mostly white high school. I even got on the Academic Decathlon. But we had to get up at 5 AM and take two buses to school, and on top of that, I was working fast food on the weekends. I was exhausted all the time.
One night my stepfather beat me up, so I packed up my stuff and went to live with my father and stepmother, and my stepsisters. But it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. At least at my mother's, the adults were sober with drugs and alcohol. At my father’s house, they put me in the living room, and everyone in that house was drinking or smoking pot. It was really stressful. They really were not equipped emotionally or financially to give me any type of support. It was so painful for me to realize that they really did not want me there.
That same year my sister had an aneurism and had to have brain surgery. It sent the family into a spasm. I dropped out of high school in the 11th grade and moved back to San Jose with my mother and stepfather. After a while, I finally earned my GED. At that time, I went into another depression.
I went to three junior colleges, and sometimes my grades were good, but sometimes I could not complete a class.
When I had to start paying rent at eighteen, I quickly moved in with a really nice boyfriend whom I stayed with for five years. I even followed him down to San Diego. He took really good care of me, but I did not appreciate him and was so resentful at how functional he was. I wanted to be him. I left him, and it was back to financial struggle, including trying to put myself through college.
After I left Jim (the nice boyfriend), I got married to a guy in the Navy, and we moved seven times in three years. I left him in Chicago. I moved back in with my mother and sister - my stepfather had passed away. My sister had never left home. She was a cocktail waitress and an alcoholic.
Again, I went into a major depression, this time with anxiety attacks, and I started sleeping around again. I was working all these dead-end jobs: I sold cosmetics, was a portrait photographer, did sales, housecleaning, worked in a video store and as a waitress. Then I answered an advertisement that read, “Masseuses wanted. We will train you!” They talked to me for five minutes and said to come back tomorrow. That was the beginning of a very dark journey into prostitution.
From my childhood, I learned that I was disposable. If I wanted to have any attention at all I better look great and pretend everything was ponies and rainbows. Don’t feel.
For twelve years in prostitution, I drifted in a fog meeting my financial needs. I was really checked out emotionally. I was numb interspersed with hysterical crying jags. I dated and financially supported a drug addict/musician for three years. I had two walk-in closets full of expensive clothes. I would take nice vacations, but I was lying to everyone about how I was getting the money. It got to the point after every session I would go to the bathroom and chant, “I have to get out of this!” I would cruise Walgreens at 3 am wishing I had the guts to buy some pills and kill myself.
So, what helped me get out? Gosh, so many things and a combination of all really. While I was in prostitution, I tried to fix myself with talk therapy; it was a good start but my denial was so strong. I spent hours in the ceramics room trying to mold clay with my hands into a healthful living, and more hours on my yoga mat, my body spitting out sweat.
I was sometimes attending three 12-step meetings a day because I did not know how to be comfortable in the world. Although I was not an alcoholic or a drug addict, I was high on sugar, flour, and caffeine all the time. Later, I realized I was a food addict (30 pounds’ overweight, bulimic), and a sex addict (prostitution, dysfunctional relationships).
What helped with food the most was Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous, FA, foodaddicts.org. I got free from food addiction, and then started addressing sex addiction and sexual abuse (that took a minute). Relapse is also a big part of my story.
What helped me most to get out of prostitution was moving into SAFEHOUSE (sfsafehouse.org), a nurturing and empowering community for homeless women escaping sexual exploitation, prostitution, and sex trafficking. Reverend Glenda Hope (who ran Network Ministries out of the Tenderloin for thirty years) created SAFEHOUSE. Glenda was inspired to do this because one year eight street prostitutes were brutally murdered in the Tenderloin. I have never been in jail or done hard drugs, but everyone else in there was coming right from jail or the street.
When SAFEHOUSE encouraged me to go back and take some college courses, a lot of my housemates were just learning to read. I am a voice for the women who had it ten times tougher than me on the street, addicted to heroin and crack. I speak for Giselle who had been raped dozens of times by the time she was twelve and started walking the streets selling herself. I speak for Rosetta - her grandmother started selling her out of the house at age 15 for crack. I speak for myself. I was a scared, neglected, abused child who fell through the cracks.
SAFEHOUSE was my first parenting experience. I learned in SAFEHOUSE that I do matter! What I say and do matters! Nobody is disposable! I turned 40 in there. Lonette celebrated her 60th. Lonette had been in and out of institutions her whole life. Later, after I had graduated from SAFEHOUSE, I ran into her on Market street. She was still out there selling herself. She asked me for $5.00. I gave it to her along with a big hug. I felt so sad.
Please don’t solicit prostitutes anymore. You don’t know the pain that it takes (as a prerequisite) to prostitute yourself, to be pimped or trafficked.
While I was living at SAFEHOUSE, they asked me to start attending 12-step meetings to get help for my issues. I was the only one living there at the time that had not done hard drugs, heroin or crack. I wanted to go back to my food program, but they encouraged me to look for something that would help figure out and process why I had been prostituting myself for twelve years. I Googled incest survivors, and five groups popped up. I started attending Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse, ASCA, ascasupport.org. From their website:
"Adult Survivors of Child Abuse is an international self-help support group program designed specifically for adult survivors of neglect, physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse. The ASCA program offers:
• Community based self help support groups
• Provider self help support groups
• Web-based self help support groups
• Survivor to Thriver workbooks."
I will never forget my first ACSA meeting. It was so powerful. I came back to SAFEHOUSE and cried like a baby for an hour. Sharon (SAFEHOUSE staff) listened to every whimper. She held my hand and gave me a big hug. Thank you, women of SAFEHOUSE. Thank you, Reverend Glenda Hope.
I also attended SAGE during the day. Norma Hotelling created SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation), a day program for women leaving prostitution. Another really great support for me was going to Sex and Love Addicts in Recovery, SLAA (slaa-sfeb.org). I have made lifelong friends in this program. There is also Sex Addicts Anonymous (bayareasaa.org) for sex addiction issues. Reverend Glenda Hope really emphasized being accountable for your finances. I really recommend Debtors Anonymous (debtorsanonymous.org) to get a handle on your finances. I am so grateful for the 12-step recovery programs. They saved me from destroying myself.
During the last thirteen years I have been a public speaker for the City of San Francisco's First Offender Prostitution Project (FOPP). I help educate men that have been arrested for soliciting prostitutes. MSNBC did a show on FOPP, part of a three-part series called, “Sex Slaves in America”. I was so proud to participate in that show. When I speak at FOPP, I educate in a non-shaming way why I think prostitution is not the best way to get your needs met, and why “Criminalizing Demand” is the way to go in ridding the world of prostitution.
What is criminalizing demand? That means to really come down hard on the people buying the prostitutes with bigger fines and jail time, advertising their arrests for everyone to see, and not arresting the prostitutes. Sweden is the only country to put this in effect, and as a result, they have the lowest rates of prostitution in the world.
In closing, remember we all have choices to make. I hope the above will inform your future choices.
Thirteen years ago, for a period of twelve years, I was an exotic dancer, a sensual masseuse, and a prostitute. These experiences were so damaging that at the end of that time I thought about killing myself every day. Getting out was a struggle, but when I finally got out I asked myself, “How did I get there in the first place?”
It began at home. I had an adverse childhood experience. I was a scared, neglected, abused child growing up in dysfunctional households. I was abused by the people who were supposed to protect me. Though I knew it was wrong, the abuse sexualized me in ways that I did not understand until I was much older. From my earliest memory, I was rewarded for dressing and acting sexy. This became my way to impress and manipulate people. The problem was, it worked and I received enormous positive reinforcement. This became my way of interacting with the world and the people in it.
Here is a bit of my story. I had a mother, a father, two stepmothers, and a stepfather. It was confusing, corrupting, and chaotic.
My mother is Jewish and my father is Catholic. Dad had us secretly baptized behind my mother's back. They decided to start me in Kindergarten at a Catholic school. I did not fit in and came home crying to my mother. In the middle of the school year, they put me in public school.
My parents divorced by the time I was six. Then they both remarried, and my mother and stepfather moved us down to San Jose. For years every other weekend, my dad would pick us up for the weekend; the problem was he was stoned the whole time. It was really scary. When I was eleven I started getting high, stealing from my father's stash. When my father’s second wife left him, he had an affair with the next-door neighbor, who left her husband for him. Now I had two stepsisters thrown in the mix.
I remember the neglect started after my mother left my father. They used to tell me to take care of my sister, who was thirteen months younger than me, but it was overwhelming to take care of my sister when I was only six years old. My mother had not worked in fourteen years when my dad left. We had to go on welfare.
I tested gifted in school, but I was so stressed out all the time. Even so, my grades were okay until high school. At fourteen, I started sleeping around with anyone who would give me any crumb of attention; that was the first time I experienced major depression. Even my mother and stepfather noticed and sent me to counseling, and I started to feel better. Then they cut it off because they said it was too much money.
I started drinking and smoking at fifteen. I felt so much shame about my family. There was a lot of weirdness around money. We had nice houses, but my sister and I were dressed in rags with holes in them. My father's sex addiction ran rampant - he would hit on everyone in the room, women, men, children, everyone was fair game to him. I would tell my girlfriends to not get too close to him physically because he might grab them or kiss them, and then I would laugh really loud like that was funny. He also would collage pornographic images on the refrigerator.
I ended up going to three different high schools. The first high school I went to was mostly Spanish in San Jose. I thought my name was “White Bitch.” “What are you doing in the bathroom White Bitch?." When my sister made friends with this girl across town, her parents let us use their address, and we were able to go to a mostly white high school. I even got on the Academic Decathlon. But we had to get up at 5 AM and take two buses to school, and on top of that, I was working fast food on the weekends. I was exhausted all the time.
One night my stepfather beat me up, so I packed up my stuff and went to live with my father and stepmother, and my stepsisters. But it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. At least at my mother's, the adults were sober with drugs and alcohol. At my father’s house, they put me in the living room, and everyone in that house was drinking or smoking pot. It was really stressful. They really were not equipped emotionally or financially to give me any type of support. It was so painful for me to realize that they really did not want me there.
That same year my sister had an aneurism and had to have brain surgery. It sent the family into a spasm. I dropped out of high school in the 11th grade and moved back to San Jose with my mother and stepfather. After a while, I finally earned my GED. At that time, I went into another depression.
I went to three junior colleges, and sometimes my grades were good, but sometimes I could not complete a class.
When I had to start paying rent at eighteen, I quickly moved in with a really nice boyfriend whom I stayed with for five years. I even followed him down to San Diego. He took really good care of me, but I did not appreciate him and was so resentful at how functional he was. I wanted to be him. I left him, and it was back to financial struggle, including trying to put myself through college.
After I left Jim (the nice boyfriend), I got married to a guy in the Navy, and we moved seven times in three years. I left him in Chicago. I moved back in with my mother and sister - my stepfather had passed away. My sister had never left home. She was a cocktail waitress and an alcoholic.
Again, I went into a major depression, this time with anxiety attacks, and I started sleeping around again. I was working all these dead-end jobs: I sold cosmetics, was a portrait photographer, did sales, housecleaning, worked in a video store and as a waitress. Then I answered an advertisement that read, “Masseuses wanted. We will train you!” They talked to me for five minutes and said to come back tomorrow. That was the beginning of a very dark journey into prostitution.
From my childhood, I learned that I was disposable. If I wanted to have any attention at all I better look great and pretend everything was ponies and rainbows. Don’t feel.
For twelve years in prostitution, I drifted in a fog meeting my financial needs. I was really checked out emotionally. I was numb interspersed with hysterical crying jags. I dated and financially supported a drug addict/musician for three years. I had two walk-in closets full of expensive clothes. I would take nice vacations, but I was lying to everyone about how I was getting the money. It got to the point after every session I would go to the bathroom and chant, “I have to get out of this!” I would cruise Walgreens at 3 am wishing I had the guts to buy some pills and kill myself.
So, what helped me get out? Gosh, so many things and a combination of all really. While I was in prostitution, I tried to fix myself with talk therapy; it was a good start but my denial was so strong. I spent hours in the ceramics room trying to mold clay with my hands into a healthful living, and more hours on my yoga mat, my body spitting out sweat.
I was sometimes attending three 12-step meetings a day because I did not know how to be comfortable in the world. Although I was not an alcoholic or a drug addict, I was high on sugar, flour, and caffeine all the time. Later, I realized I was a food addict (30 pounds’ overweight, bulimic), and a sex addict (prostitution, dysfunctional relationships).
What helped with food the most was Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous, FA, foodaddicts.org. I got free from food addiction, and then started addressing sex addiction and sexual abuse (that took a minute). Relapse is also a big part of my story.
What helped me most to get out of prostitution was moving into SAFEHOUSE (sfsafehouse.org), a nurturing and empowering community for homeless women escaping sexual exploitation, prostitution, and sex trafficking. Reverend Glenda Hope (who ran Network Ministries out of the Tenderloin for thirty years) created SAFEHOUSE. Glenda was inspired to do this because one year eight street prostitutes were brutally murdered in the Tenderloin. I have never been in jail or done hard drugs, but everyone else in there was coming right from jail or the street.
When SAFEHOUSE encouraged me to go back and take some college courses, a lot of my housemates were just learning to read. I am a voice for the women who had it ten times tougher than me on the street, addicted to heroin and crack. I speak for Giselle who had been raped dozens of times by the time she was twelve and started walking the streets selling herself. I speak for Rosetta - her grandmother started selling her out of the house at age 15 for crack. I speak for myself. I was a scared, neglected, abused child who fell through the cracks.
SAFEHOUSE was my first parenting experience. I learned in SAFEHOUSE that I do matter! What I say and do matters! Nobody is disposable! I turned 40 in there. Lonette celebrated her 60th. Lonette had been in and out of institutions her whole life. Later, after I had graduated from SAFEHOUSE, I ran into her on Market street. She was still out there selling herself. She asked me for $5.00. I gave it to her along with a big hug. I felt so sad.
Please don’t solicit prostitutes anymore. You don’t know the pain that it takes (as a prerequisite) to prostitute yourself, to be pimped or trafficked.
While I was living at SAFEHOUSE, they asked me to start attending 12-step meetings to get help for my issues. I was the only one living there at the time that had not done hard drugs, heroin or crack. I wanted to go back to my food program, but they encouraged me to look for something that would help figure out and process why I had been prostituting myself for twelve years. I Googled incest survivors, and five groups popped up. I started attending Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse, ASCA, ascasupport.org. From their website:
"Adult Survivors of Child Abuse is an international self-help support group program designed specifically for adult survivors of neglect, physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse. The ASCA program offers:
• Community based self help support groups
• Provider self help support groups
• Web-based self help support groups
• Survivor to Thriver workbooks."
I will never forget my first ACSA meeting. It was so powerful. I came back to SAFEHOUSE and cried like a baby for an hour. Sharon (SAFEHOUSE staff) listened to every whimper. She held my hand and gave me a big hug. Thank you, women of SAFEHOUSE. Thank you, Reverend Glenda Hope.
I also attended SAGE during the day. Norma Hotelling created SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation), a day program for women leaving prostitution. Another really great support for me was going to Sex and Love Addicts in Recovery, SLAA (slaa-sfeb.org). I have made lifelong friends in this program. There is also Sex Addicts Anonymous (bayareasaa.org) for sex addiction issues. Reverend Glenda Hope really emphasized being accountable for your finances. I really recommend Debtors Anonymous (debtorsanonymous.org) to get a handle on your finances. I am so grateful for the 12-step recovery programs. They saved me from destroying myself.
During the last thirteen years I have been a public speaker for the City of San Francisco's First Offender Prostitution Project (FOPP). I help educate men that have been arrested for soliciting prostitutes. MSNBC did a show on FOPP, part of a three-part series called, “Sex Slaves in America”. I was so proud to participate in that show. When I speak at FOPP, I educate in a non-shaming way why I think prostitution is not the best way to get your needs met, and why “Criminalizing Demand” is the way to go in ridding the world of prostitution.
What is criminalizing demand? That means to really come down hard on the people buying the prostitutes with bigger fines and jail time, advertising their arrests for everyone to see, and not arresting the prostitutes. Sweden is the only country to put this in effect, and as a result, they have the lowest rates of prostitution in the world.
In closing, remember we all have choices to make. I hope the above will inform your future choices.
