CHRISTA MARIE SACCO
Current discourse around prostitution forces people who work in the sex industries to identify as either passive victims of sexual slavery, or as happy and empowered sex workers. The following stories are intended to envision sex worker self-determination for the purposes of building new social identities that honor our embodied and experiential ways of knowing. They challenge the victimized/empowered binary.
The three vignettes that follow are partially fictionalized accounts of real people in real situations, each of which, according to current definitions in a US context, could be considered “human trafficking victims.” They consist of my own narrative of sex work and critical feminist ethnographies of others. They are partially fictionalized to protect those involved; there could be consequences for survival if street workers come forward for a standard interview. Character vignettes illustrate the issues faced by these populations while also protecting research participants who have little to gain and much to lose from openly and directly telling their stories. I collected these stories as a peer member in various support circles of people with experience in the sex industries, as well as various annual and one-time events for current and former sex workers, including dinners, summits, and vigils. I also collected stories through my professional role as an outreach worker, group facilitator, advocate, and peer counselor for women with experiences in the sex industries at a local rape crisis center, as well as participation on Los Angeles’s human trafficking task forces. These stories are meant to provide a counternarrative to mainstream accounts of human trafficking.
These sketches are the stories of at least three real people whom the media, social service providers, or legal professionals might label as human trafficking victims or survivors. However, when we hear their stories, they present complex identities and define themselves very differently than the media hysteria surrounding them does. They identify as a singer, a ho, a student, an entertainer, a hustler, a condom lady, and more. Each person I have met in the sex industries has their own worldview, their own world, their own ethics and imagination, and we who wish to learn from them have to take time to appreciate the nuance and the wisdom in their different perspectives. After the sketches, I have included a conclusion to this essay that puts the narratives into a framework for understanding why mainstream narratives about human trafficking “victim-defendants” harm women of color like those whose voices can be heard here.
SMOKE BREAK, 2017
I’m just here in the park smoking. Haven’t seen a trick in the park since the early morning. I think the last tipo was from Guatemala or somewhere like that. Not that that matters anymore. All that matters is he came quick. I want to go take a break but I can’t leave the park right now. Even though it’s not really safe in the park anymore. I haven’t felt the same since Lucy died. I feel fucked up now. I have this repeat dream now, like there’s some urgent crisis that I am forgetting about and sometimes I’m in the back seat of a car that has no driver. Lucy got stabbed to death by a rapist in the park. I think I was in a car with someone when it happened. She probably thought he was a trick. He slit her throat wide open. The day we all found out, the cops came and questioned us about it. We tried to hold a little vigil for her in the park a couple nights later. The condom lady came. She was the only one. We’re not really safe to talk to anyone else. Now, when I don’t feel safe at night, I talk to Lucy.
I glance over toward the bus stop and there she is, the condom lady sitting on the bench like a fuckin’ mirage or something. I learned that in eighth grade. We had this science teacher who told us about mirages and shit. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a mirage and I’m just gonna wisp away like vapor if people come too close. Fuck if I don’t need some condoms right now, but I don’t want to approach her. My folks is watchin’. Then I see the end of my cigarette getting small and I think, Might be worth it to see if she has a cigarette. So I throw my eyes over at her and catch her attention and lean toward the bus station. She doesn’t nod back or anything, but I know that she understood and sure enough after a few minutes, she starts to shuffle off to the bus station. She gets there and leans up against a bench and lights up a cigarette. As I watch her smoke, she kind of reminds me of some of those cholas on my old block. After I approach and ask for a cigarette, I stand a little away from her and we face away from the park so no one can see that we are talking. Just sharing a smoke, waiting on the bus.
I saw her get stopped by the cops the other week. They fucked wit her and asked for her ID and work badge and questioned her like she was breaking the law. Then she said they told her some shit about how she has to keep those condoms hidden away, and if she gives them out, only one or two at a time and the person who receives them has to put it away immediately, otherwise it’s solicitation. Fucked up that this little piece of latex that saves lives could become such a deadly weapon in the hands of the puercos.
I can’t afford to get stopped. I’m not eighteen yet and for us underage girls what we get is worse than jail sometimes. At least in jail you eventually get out. I don’t ever want to go back to another placement again. By the time I got out of the last one and was able to come back to the neighborhood, I had to pay dues before they let me back in. I had to swear I never told those motherfuckers anything. They made me do things, I had to prove to them, you know. If the cops get me again, they will drag me back to one of those child-molester homes. They call it “AWOLing.” Like I’m a soldier who left the battlefield, but I’m not. I’m just a ho. I got a fake ID now but some of ’em know who I am. They want to rescue me and shit and have me snitch, but they can’t protect me from the people who would come for me. They don’t even have a decent place for me to live to get me off the streets. They’re bullshit.
One of the girls I work with is twenty and she got a ticket. She said they won’t help you unless you snitch your people out and they never offered her the classes. They said it was ’cause she had priors. She said she will probably never get her kids back by the time she gets out this life. There’s a trans girl who works with us too. I saw her get into it physically with some punk who tried to rob her in the park last night and I was thinkin’ like, Damn, I wish I was trans. But sometimes shit happens to her in that park that I’m like, Damn, at least I’m not trans. And then, no mames, when they are always throwing her in jail with all those big hairy mens. First thing they do is snatch the wig off. It’s like they see a Black woman or a trans woman walking and they just can’t wait to snatch her wig off, for whatever reason or no reason at all. Guess that’s why we started sewing ’em in. Weave, motherfuckers, what you know about that!
The condom lady’s bus came before my cigarette finished. She managed to slip me some condoms and cigarettes before she left. She is kind of slick with it in a way that lets me know she’s been on the streets before, and I’m left to finish smoking in silence and a little bit of peace washes over me.
MOVING ON PIZZA PARTY, 2019
Oh hey hun, thanks for coming. Did you get the soda? I don’t know if there’s any pizza left, but the cupcakes should be here any minute. I used to live off these fucking cupcakes. I would eat two of ’em every day. That was when I was homeless, I would just walk and walk and walk. Everywhere. Now I got ’em delivering these cupcakes to me, and I told ‘em, “You gotta call when they get here,” ’cause I live in a Catholic home for women now.
Okay ladies, thank you for coming to my pizza party. I’m René! I think most of yas I know—no wait maybe some of yas I don’t know yet—but anyways I’m René and I just wanted to do something nice for you ladies since Friday is my last day here.
Sing! Sing something!
What? Okay, I’ll sing something. What do you want me to sing? I’m really a singer.
Are you a celebrity, Miss René? You never know, she could be a celebrity.
No, I’m not a celebrity. I can sing though. I got a standing ovation at the Apollo on amateur night. That’s in Harlem. That was pretty much the highlight of my career. Then I went to Vegas. Yeah I’m from Vegas!
I heard you make a lot of money in Vegas!
Yeah, that’s about the only good thing about Vegas: the money! Everything’s different there, it sucks. The cops, the cops are different in Vegas too. I used to live in this building, you know, one day I was coming home and I saw this girl outside crying and her nose was all bloody. And the cops showed up and they found her boyfriend and they had him out in front of the building and they asked ‘em, “Did you do this to her?” He said yea and they beat the shit out of him. I mean they beat the shit out of him. As they’re leaving they asked me, “You okay sweetie?” I said I didn’t see nothin’. They said, “Yea we know you didn’t. You okay though?” I said yeah I’m okay.
Huh? Okay what do you want me to sing? I’ll sing some Mariah Carey.
Ooo. I love Mariah Carey!
“‘Hero,’” that’s my song. “There’s a hero … if you look inside your heart… you don’t have to be afraid of who you are …” Thank you. Thank you. What? No, I can’t chew it. I need to go to the dentist. I’m supposed to be in the studio on Saturday. I told ‘em, “My teeth hurt, you gotta wait till I can sing again.” They said, “I don’t care, you can really sing, I want you in the studio.”
Do you have a boyfriend?
No, you know, I’ve had a few husbands and I love love. I’ve always loved love. But I love me more now. You see these legs? I made a lotta fuckin money on these legs. I’m forty-six.
You look great!
Oh thank you. Yea, these legs made me a lot of money. I been every kinda dancer there is: jazz dancer, tap dancer, club dancer, showgirl, exotic dancer, nude dancer. The young girls used to come up to me in the strip clubs, the new ones, and try to tell me their name and I’d tell ‘em, “Sweetheart, please, don’t tell me your name, ’cause in a few days, you’ll be on coke and on your back. So just try to stay not dead!”
Oh, hold on, I think it’s the cupcakes! Hello? Hello? Yes. Okay thank you. They’re here ladies! They’re here! I’ll be right back!
Do you want chocolate or vanilla? Chocolate? The chocolate ones are more moist, but the vanilla ones are really good too! You still want chocolate? Okay, here take a vanilla one too! I want yas all to try both and we’ll leave the extras on the counter for the others, you can eat ’em all night. Do you want more soda?
Yeah I’ll take a hit!
Here you go. Have a little more soda. Do you want more soda?
Yeah, René, pass that Courvoisier!
How about you, do you want more soda?
PUTTING ON MY FACE IN THE MORNING, 2008
Oh good, I still have a little time to finish getting ready before I’m late for class. I split the Xanax in half before I take it ’cause it’s still morning and I’m already fucked up. But I need that little half though, things are getting too heavy. When I go to pick up, I will need the shit just so I will be able to tolerate Keni’s ass and put on the face. I’m not sure how I got this deep in, I was just trying to make enough to pay rent and stay in school, now I’m flippin SIM cards on the reg and moving fluidly through the city from the flea market on Northwest Seventy-Ninth to the high-rises on Brickell. Shit is complicated. I kind of wish I could go back or slow it down some, but everything is already in motion. Everything is leading up to tonight, then I hopefully won’t have to work for a while. I wasn’t even gonna do this one. I didn’t even tell them I got hired to work that after-hours party to the Bacardi gala, but they found out. Or maybe I got hired because of them. Anyways, I’m committed now. The goal is to get to the pad on Brickell by ten p.m. to pick up and get dressed. I just have one stop to make after class. I want the white sunflowers. That’s my spiritual side hustle. It’s like my gift to Miami, giving back to all the travelers on the sexual underground. Purest X you’ll ever find.
I remember how I got involved like this with Keni. I had gone on a tear after getting paid for my last gig and ended up robbed and bleeding on the curb in the middle of the night in a bad part of town with no memory of how I had arrived there or with who. Knowing myself, I probably split from whoever I was with in a hostile way and came by myself trying to score. There are only a few people who will come far to pick you up in questionable places in the middle of the night, no questions asked. I definitely wasn’t gonna call anyone from school, not that I had that many friends from school to call anyway. So I called Keni. I met him a while back with my friend at a weekly amateur striptease contest that she liked to be a contender in. We had spent a lot of time late nights, so I knew he wouldn’t be asleep. When I got in the car, he saw I was upset and I explained that I had blown all my rent money. He quickly presented a solution, said if I come work for him, I will never have to worry about rent again. He said all I have to do is bring his product into “all those crazy sex parties I hustle at.” I told him I wasn’t sure about if I was gonna get another gig like that any time soon because networks had changed. The last time I worked with those folks, I left in a bad way and Nico is back in the Dominican right now. He said, “You never know, baby, you could get another gig tomorrow. We do all kinds of things.”
Holy shit, that phrase, that simple phrase: “We do all kinds of things.” That changed my life in so many ways. Now, when I freestyle by myself on South Beach, I use that phrase and it unlocks so many doors for me. “What do you do?” “I do all kinds of things. Que te interesa?”
The next day, after he spoke that prophecy over my life, a man in a suit approached me while I was having a square lunch with a square friend. Of course, I know now that Keni sent him, but at the time I was caught off guard. I thought it was divine intervention. He gave me his card and what do you know? When I called he had a gig for me. And after that gigs were steady, and I made so many contacts that I felt I almost didn’t even need Keni anymore, but always I was able to slide his coke like a credit card to gain entry wherever I wanted. With Keni, I make money just by being on the scene. The party host or production company would hire us to be there or be available or perform, not to mention extras. There’s real value in being involved in that way and the key is relationships. It is all connected. Not that everyone is nice to each other all the time, there’s plenty of smaller power struggles. But in terms of economics, everyone works together. If you make money, they make money. If you do well, they do even better.
I still do feel the pull of my DNA to follow my ancestral purpose and find love, but that shit just has very little to do with my survival right now. It keeps going. It has to keep going. In order for me to stay in it, everything has to just keep going. It’s out of my hands now. My only escape, besides when I have to be on campus doing data entry, is when I’m rolling or when I’m lost in time. ’Cause I black out for days at a time sometimes on that Xanax, but they give me the three-for-fives so I feel special. There’s always another trick, there’s always another cash deal, there’s always another gig, another pound to move, another filthy rich foreign businessman, another score, another party. More … more … more, more, more! It’s exhausting. Sometimes I cry a lot. Sometimes I just sleep for days. Maybe I’ll have time to sleep a little before I pull this last job.
CONCLUSIONS
People with experiences in the sex industries are a lot like other everyday people, only more fabulous. We are just doing the best we can with fucked-up circumstances. This is especially true for the more marginalized realms of the sex industries that live deep in the shadows, which some people might think of as trafficking. Due to the legacies of white supremacy, cisgenderism, and heteropatriarchy, society is unable to recognize the dignity of those people who are experienced in the sex industries.
A significant number of people who become human trafficking survivors do not initially consider themselves as such. Many only learn about the definition of human trafficking after they have initial contact with law enforcement. Many of the major human trafficking or commercial sexual exploitation service organizations in Los Angeles get referrals solely from police and obtain or recruit clients by doing police ride-alongs and collaborating with law enforcement and district attorneys on prosecutions. The receipt of coercive services, like an emergency shelter to get you “off the streets,” depends upon your cooperation with law enforcement and prosecution—including sometimes testifying in court. Testimony is negotiated in exchange for “diversion,” i.e., removal of the ticket and the permanent criminal charge. Thus, it is law enforcement who plays the central role in deciding who are victims and who are criminals, and how emergency services are distributed.
The 2017 revision to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act stipulates that the only way to gain federal funding through the Office of Emergency Services for the provision of holistic services to trafficking victims is to convene a local human trafficking task force led by law enforcement agencies. It also bars any organization using the language of sex work or decriminalization from receiving said funding for “holistic services.” This means that in order to access services, an individual or organization must come into contact with the police. Law enforcement agencies have placed themselves on the forefront of human trafficking interventions, using this cause to police the sexual, political, economic, and migration choices of women and other vulnerable groups, like gender non-conforming people, youth, and immigrants. Both the FBI and Homeland Security have offices within the Human Trafficking Bureau of the LA Sherriff’s Office. In addition, “victims” are subject to a filmed police interview, in most cases before they have access to an advocate. In comparison, sexual assault victims are protected by penal codes which give them the right to have an advocate present when they report the crimes against them.
It becomes crucial that the authorities verify potential survivors as legitimate victims before they can access any official services related to trauma recovery or victim compensation. The authorities have solidified their place in the victim-defendant-survivor pipeline, which they themselves created. It is not impossible, but very unlikely for anyone to get services or victim compensation unless they have documented police cooperation. For example, I am familiar with two stories of older women who later discovered they had been victims of human trafficking and were turned away from case management by several diversion services because they did not have police referrals. Their response was to start their own alternative and culturally-authentic programs to mentor survivors. Furthermore, the belief that law enforcement deploying state-sanctioned violence is the only legitimate response to the complex problen of human trafficking—a problem rooted in centuries of racism, colonization, and financial exclusion—is an extremely problematic and deadly stance for many groups vulnerable to criminalization and mass incarceration.
The consequences of being on record as a human trafficking victim-defendant, even if testifying to obtain services or expungement, range between mandated classes, years of surveillance by the court system, an arrest record that follows you forever, child welfare or custody issues, immigration issues and detention, and additional charges for related crimes such as drug possession—which can further damage employment opportunities, family unification, or the ability to participate in government funding for college through FASFA.1 Other crime victims or crime witnesses are not systematically coerced and bullied in this way. This is all in addition to the danger of being forced to testify against your trafficker in court, likely without witness protection. The nature of sex work in coercive environments that can be mediated by criminal networks makes it dangerous if not deadly for a person to disclose that they want out, who their traffickers are, or that they are being exploited—even once legal or criminal justice repercussions are removed for that person. But the current discourse only transitions that person from criminal to victim if they make that life-endangering “choice.”
For economic, relational, and survival reasons, it often doesn’t make sense to testify against a trafficker, since emergency homeless shelters hardly seem like a viable alternative for many. Not to mention that police have a track record of being abusive, racist, homophobic, and transphobic with sex workers and are not seen as an authentic source of relief or escape from the sex industries. So, if you are waiting for someone “in need of help” to tell you that they are a human trafficking survivor, or to go looking for a police referral for “services,” it is possible that you are missing the boat completely.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to trafficking. But we can stop trying to place people involved in the sex industries in categories of “guilty” or “innocent,” leaving all of us prey to intersecting categories like “victim-defendant” that force us to cooperate with law enforcement despite great collateral consequences. Sex workers’ life histories offer voices of resistance to these very structures that seek to control and define them. Sex workers construct their occupational fields as sites of resistance to stigma and criminalization. We need to listen to them and support their existence, rather than trying to define them out of existence.
NOTES
1. Meredith Dank, Jennifer Yahner, and Lilly Yu, Consequences of Policing Prostitution: An Analysis of Individuals Arrested and Prosecuted for Commercial Sex in New York City, Urban Institute, April 2017, https://www. urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/89451/legal_aid_final_0.pdf.
The author has developed these characters into a full-length solo theater performance called Don’t Tell Me Your Name, which is performed live for social justice and training purposes.