BREAK OF DAWN’S

Philly is one of a handful of places in the U.S. that offers safe haven to former prostitutes

by Tara Murtha

Mimi’s on the run. After five years of being whipped with burning wire, pummeled by bare fists and having her skull repeatedly smashed into concrete, the childlike 20-year-old—who’s had nearly 30 pimps since she was 15—is running as fast as she can from a life inside the teen-sex industry.

Two months into her escape, she remains in hiding in New Jersey. If a former pimp catches up with her, she could be killed. Mimi hopes to find salvation in Philadelphia, at a safe haven called Dawn’s Place.

Right now Dawn’s Place isn’t fully functional. The building is purchased and painted and permits are secured, but the board of directors is still seeking sustainable funding for its mission. But that mission is essential, because for girls like Mimi, the commercial sex industry is easy to fall into but notoriously hard to escape.

The vision is that Dawn’s Place will serve as an emergency hideout for girls on the run. Once it’s fully staffed, it’ll help women and girls like Mimi sort out the psychological, emotional and financial wreckage that are the obstacles to real recovery. Clients will commit to live for one full year at Dawn’s, which will hopefully be enough time to right the wrongs done to them. Under the direction of local expert Donna Sabella, the counseling program will be designed to dissolve the trauma that psychologically enslaves such women and girls long after they have their bodies back.

Dawn’s Place will be one of a handful of recovery programs of its kind in the country, and will bring Philadelphia to the progressive forefront of the global battle against human trafficking. The program is modeled after Dignity House in Phoenix, Az., a recovery program created by sex-industry survivor/activist Kathleen Mitchell, a mentor of Sabella’s.

If Mimi had been allowed to keep any of the money she made from all those men, she could finance Dawn’s Place herself. She estimates she earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit for her pimps.

“It sucked,” she says now. “Even though I got clothes, got whatever I wanted, I couldn’t be free. When you’re in the game, you’re a kid, always dependent on other people. You can’t depend on yourself. You have to go out, meet certain people and get money off them. You’re never in control. Never.”

Mimi escaped with a mere $30. And now money’s the reason she can’t move to Philly to start a new life. In the meantime, she keeps a low profile—her mom won’t let her back in the house—and waits for the next phase of her young life to begin.

The international pandemic of trafficking is gaining more attention in the U.S. thanks to the efforts of high-profile abolitionists like New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof and a rash of new books and documentaries. Organizational membership in Philadelphia’s Coalition Against Human Trafficking mushroomed in the last year.

Last week the United Nations issued a report, “Global Report on Trafficking in Persons,” that estimated 79 percent of human trafficking takes place within the commercial sex industry. But as awareness builds and legislation tries to catch up with the problem, girls like Mimi still have few places to go.

And stories like hers are becoming all too common. Often, young girls are kidnapped, gagged or drugged and then kept in brothels to “work” as sex slaves. It’s estimated that 60 percent of workers in the commercial sex industry are slaves. Only 2 percent of commercial sex workers do such work voluntarily. The remaining 38 percent fall into a gray area that’s further confused by the young age of the average victim, the inherent exploitation and the strategic recruitment employed by pimps.

The U.S. is primarily a destination for kids trafficked from abroad. In Philadelphia alone, there are roughly 70 sites under suspicion for housing sex slaves. Because these children are generally kept in brothels, have language barriers and fear for their lives—trafficked kids are frequently told their families back home will be killed if they escape—workers in the field say it’s very difficult to reach them.

But Mimi’s story is different. As an American citizen, she was trafficked domestically, and girls like her are on street corners everywhere. She’s part of the street-level commercial sex-for-sale system, or what insiders call “the game.”

The game preys on kids. The average age a prostitute in the U.S. starts working is 12 or 13. Some research skews the age even younger.

Sitting in a room in New Jersey, chaperoned by her caseworker, Mimi prepares to recount her story for Sabella, who was once a teenage go-go dancer in a club in Bucks County. She’s now a mental health nurse and a professor at three universities and she’s documenting Mimi’s story for her doctoral thesis. She’ll use the recording for insight as she develops the counseling program that will be used at Dawn’s Place.

Mimi takes a deep breath.

“Where do you want to begin?” she asks politely. “It depends where you want to begin.”

Mimi remembers little about her early years beyond playing in the ice and snow with the other kids, and that it was always freezing, and the one best friend she left behind was named Ana. She’s nagged by the feeling that “a lot of stuff” happened to her in Russia, though she adds that if she was sexually abused as a baby, she doesn’t remember it.

“I have scars on my butt, like deep indentation scars. It was a knife, and I don’t know what that’s from. My parents don’t know what that’s from [either],” she says. “The adoption people never said nothing about it. They just said, ‘She was born like that.’ But I don’t think so.”

As an adolescent, Mimi didn’t get along well with her parents.

“They’re older, so they were very strict when they raised me,” she explains. “I couldn’t do nothing. Like literally, nothing.”

At 15, she met an older guy on a Nextel push-to-talk phone line, hopped on a bus and headed west. It was a decision that put her life in a tailspin.

Her 25-year-old boyfriend’s dope-dealing mother and grandmother pressured Mimi into prostitution. The duo told the young girl that if she wanted to continue living in their house, she had to pay their rent.

“I was like, ‘What do you mean?’” says Mimi. “It was weird. I was like, ‘What do you want me to do?’ I didn’t know what they wanted me to do.”

Thousands of miles from home and with nowhere to go, Mimi turned her first trick.

But things didn’t work out—Mimi’s boyfriend got another 15-year-old girl pregnant—so she returned to her family in Jersey, earned a GED and generally stayed out of trouble. But, Mimi says, “Things didn’t work out.” Soon enough, she ran away again.

“I left again and just kept going back to the streets,” she says. “At the time, I just wanted—I felt comfort in the streets. Like I was protected.”

That feeling disappeared. Soon, Mimi met pimps who said they wanted to protect her, but instead hurt her badly.

There was the guy who favored punishment by the classic “pimpstick”—he untangled a wire hanger, heated it with fire until it glowed red, and then whipped Mimi with it. Mimi still has the scars.

“Over a Social Security card, too,” she says, remembering her surprise. “That was so dumb.”

What she didn’t realize was that to pimps and traffickers, securing an ID isn’t dumb at all. It’s a standard practice to take all forms of identification from their underage victims and either hold them or sell them on the black market. Mimi’s Social Security card, birth certificate and passport were taken. Her birth certificate was sold for $500.

When Mimi starts talking about a puppy that was in the room while her ex-pimp was whipping her with the burning wire, she gets a goofy smile on her face.

“I thought it was cute, the little puppy. He was barking at him, trying to bite him,” she says. “That little puppy, trying to save me!”

After the beating, Mimi tried to escape by running through the woods. But there was a fence, and she didn’t get over it in time. A rival girl from the stable grabbed her and beat her up. She was dragged back to the pimp.

Looking at Mimi, it’s disturbingly obvious why pimps repeatedly recruited her.

Mimi’s got a child’s frame and a very pretty baby-face—she looks barely 13 in her blonde ponytail and dangly silver heart earrings. About 5 feet tall, she has the polite demeanor of the baby-sitter next door. The thin strokes of black liner that rim her eyes and white frosty eye shadow smudged across her brow bone make her eyes look as big as a Japanimation character.

How long can a girl like Mimi walk down a city street before a car pulls over and a pimp tries to get her in? “Fifteen, 20 minutes,” she says.

It’s hard to imagine Mimi working 20 hours a day turning tricks in cars and hotel rooms with strange and sometimes violent men—never mind at 15 when she must have looked even younger.

As Mimi tells her story, the need for Dawn’s Place becomes more clear. Getting away from a pimp is only the first part in a long journey of recovery. Studies show that the persistent lack of autonomy, violence and fear leads to post-traumatic stress disorder for 68 percent of prostitutes. Sometimes Mimi will see a guy who looks like the man who broke her nose then tried to force his penis into her bloody mouth and she panics, and once again feels the urge to run.

In 2000, the Victims of Violence and Traffic Act (PDF) finally made the human trafficking of people born in foreign countries on American soil illegal. Under this law, when foreign-born girls are discovered being abused in the commercial sex industry, they’re recognized as victims and protected by the Department of Health and Human Services. If they meet the requirements, are willing to assist in the investigation of traffickers and have applied for a temporary visa (or are approved by the Department of Homeland Security), they’re extended the same benefits as refugees.

A couple months ago, five young Liberian sex slaves were discovered living in a house in Upper Darby. After they were found, four of the five girls were placed in protective care. The fifth girl disappeared.

But when sexually exploited American children are discovered, they don’t get certified; they get arrested and branded as willing participants of the sex trade. A criminal record piled on top systemized physical and psychological trauma makes it highly unlikely for domestic sex slaves to lead a normal life.

So far, one state has taken a first stride toward helping American-born children who are exploited in the sex trade. Last June New York State passed the Safe Harbor Act, which will “create a presumption that a person under 16 years of age who is charged as a juvenile delinquent for a prostitution offense is a severely trafficked person.” It’s currently waiting to be signed by the governor and is scheduled to take effect by April 2010. According to Gov. Rendell’s office, Pennsylvania doesn’t have any such law in the works.

In the eyes of the law, girls like Mimi are seen as criminals. Yet the traffickers’ and street pimps’ methods of recruitment and retention—targeting the youngest kids with the least resources, stealing and withholding ID documents, and the ancient slave-keeping strategy of debt bondage—are often identical, whether the girls are foreign-born or American.

According to one study, 62 percent of “prostitutes” report having been raped, 73 percent report getting beat up and 72 percent being otherwise homeless. Forty-eight percent confess to being raped at least five times. Research shows 90 to 92 percent of people selling their bodies on the street want to get out.

In Philly, the average prostitute is dead by 40. (PDF) But by opening Dawn’s Place and creating a counseling model that deals with the reverberations of the trauma of prostitution, Sabella is determined to help refugees of the game escape and heal. These girls will learn how to survive outside of the sex trade and even examine where age and circumstance blurs the concept of choice.

For Mimi, the urgency of getting into Dawn’s Place is palpable. “I know if he ever found me, I would die,” she says, referring to one of her ex-pimps. “He would kill me.”

Once she realized what their common experiences were, she says, it didn’t make any sense, from a psychological standpoint, to continue counseling them without directly addressing the trauma experienced during prostitution.

“This one woman in particular, she was beaten up and she said something about her ‘Daddy,’ and I was like, ‘Daddy?’ Then the light bulb went off.”

The abusive relationship between pimp and prostitute—or trafficker and victim—can be one of the biggest retention tools. The dynamic between very young girls like Mimi and older predator pimps is especially problematic. To them, the thinly veiled abuse can feel a lot like love.

Allegiance to a long-term pimp is part of the psychological phenomenon that makes kids so susceptible to predators in the game.

“You’re with a certain guy and you’re with him a long time, like two or three years. And you want to get out of the game but you can’t, because you’re in love. At the end of the day, you are in love with this guy,” she says. “You’re strong, you’ve got a strong will about yourself to go out every night, sell your pussy and then come home and give all the money you made to that guy.”

It’s called trauma bonds, a severe attachment disorder most common among abused and neglected children. It results in a tendency to avoid or resist their mothers and to show loyalty to abusers. It’s one of the psychological concepts that counselors at Dawn’s Place plan to address.

When Mimi finally got on the bus back to New Jersey two months ago, she wasn’t just leaving the streets or the game or prostitution behind. It’s hard for people—squares, as she calls outsiders—to understand, but in her mind she was leaving a boyfriend behind, too.

The last couple of years she was on the street she worked for a guy she calls S. He started out acting like a boyfriend. This is a common strategy that older male pimps employ to recruit younger girls. It’s called “the loverboy phenomenon.”

When Mimi talks about S., her voice softens and she looks at the ground and plays with her fingers. She looks and sounds like any other heartbroken teenager having a hard time believing her boyfriend is such an asshole.

“He was so great. He was so cute. I found him so attractive and he was so caring. That’s how I felt,” she says, about their courtship.

Then reality set in, and he made her work with a fever until she collapsed, hit her a few times and started getting “jealous and weird.”

When she was almost murdered by a crazy trick, and was hurt so badly it looked like she wouldn’t be able to earn for a little while, S. stopped even pretending to care.

Mimi says she sensed something was wrong when she went with that trick, but she got in the car anyway. The guy started to drive and refused to “handle business,” which means to pay. Then he broke her nose with his fist, yanked his penis out and tried to force it into her bloody mouth by pulling her hair. All while the car was going 40, 45 miles per hour.

“He started reaching to the side. I didn’t know if he was going to pull out a knife, a gun, whatever. He could’ve pulled out anything. I thought, ‘Either I’m going to live or I’m going to die,’” she says. “I opened the car door while he was driving and jumped out.”

Two girls about her age saw her body tumble across the road and ran over to help her. Her nose was broken, her arm fractured and her skin road-rashed and cut up. There was blood everywhere. She remembers feeling the convulsions of a seizure beginning. She woke up in the hospital with her arm in a sling and bandaged all over.

S. allowed her one week off of work then pushed her back onto the strip.

“I was frightened but I did it,” she says. “I had no choice. I wanted to stay with him and if I stayed with him, I would have to continue getting money.”

The last night Mimi actually saw S., she was sitting in the passenger seat in his car in Vegas. They were arguing. He pulled over, kicked her out of the car, threw a few bills at her and left her on the side of the freeway. Even though she wanted to escape—that’s why they were arguing—she says she cried for a half-hour straight. A few hours later, she hopped on a Greyhound bus. She spent the next two days watching the world slide by the window.

In the last five years, Mimi’s spent a lot of time on buses shuttling from one city to another, one pimp after another. She’s spent the majority of her time in buses, hotels and pimp’s houses. Now more than anything she wants to get to Dawn’s Place and learn how to be independent.

With luck (and funding), Sabella may be able to bring Mimi to Philadelphia and begin working on her year-long psychological, legal, emotional, physical and financial recovery. Mimi needs to get her many hospital bills sorted. She’s already got a new passport, new Social Security card and a new birth certificate, which she proudly carries around with her. After Dawn’s Place, she’s dying to go to school. Years ago, she wanted to be a nurse and take care of sick people. Now she wants to become a lawyer. She says lawyers get to handle business, get to dress up and speak their minds; you get to win.

At one time, this pretty little girl was beaten to a bloody pulp by a trick who stole the shoes right off her feet. She ran back to her pimp bloody and barefoot. Now she’s tired and needs a rest. But she’s still running.

“I don’t want to do this no more. I want to go back home. I want to be with my family. I’m tired of these tricks beating me up,” she says. “Everything.”