Michigan woman creates program to help women escape prostitution, drug abuse

Michigan woman creates program to help women escape prostitution, drug abuse
by Associated Press, Stephanie Esters Kalamazoo Gazette
Monday March 24, 2008, 8:29 AM
Courtesy of Anneshia Freeman

Anneshia Freeman is a Grand Rapids resident who created a program called "The Lies That Bind," to help women escape prostitution and drug abuse.

NEW YORK -- The call girl in the Eliot Spitzer scandal appeared to be leading a glamorous life -- staying in an upscale Manhattan high-rise, traveling to seduce powerful men in swanky hotel rooms, making more than $4,000 in one night.

But the reality for most prostitutes is far different.

Many come from broken homes, were homeless at some point, were abused as children and suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, said Mary Anne Layden, director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program in the Center for Cognitive Therapy at the University of Pennsyvania. She said many are not making any money because of a drug habit and a pimp or madam who takes half their earnings.

"The idea of 'Pretty Woman' is a huge lie," said Layden, referring to the hit movie about a man (played by Richard Gere) who hires a prostitute (Julia Roberts) and falls in love with her. "Most prostitutes spiral downward." Former prostitute and drug addict Anneshia Freeman, 43, from the Grand Rapids suburb of Wyoming, echoed Layden's opinion.

"'Pretty Woman' is a lie," said Freeman, who now tries to help other women leave prostitution and make different choices through a program she created called The Lies That Bind -- The Legacy of the Locks.

"I believe that (the Spitzer Ashley Alexandra Dupre) story, and stories like that, can contribute to the illusion that prostitution is some sort of classy, glamorous career," she said. "It's dehumanizing, demoralizing, degrading and debilitating."

About three years ago, Freeman worked with the Prostitution Alternatives Coalition of Kalamazoo -- which included representatives from the Kalamazoo County Prosecutor's Office, the county's Health and Community Services Department and the -- to help prostitutes get out of the profession.

'Horrible re-enactment'

Of her own 15 years as a prostitute, Freeman said: "It was a horrible adult re-enactment of my childhood script. I was abused as a child. I was trained to be a prostitute by my molester."
Freeman grew up in Detroit, where she lived with her mother, whom she described as an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, and a male family member, who she says sexually abused her.

She started using marijuana and drinking when she was 11 years old and left home when she was 12 to live with an older brother and his family. She became pregnant at age 15 by a guy she was seeing, and her mother sent her to a girls' school in Pennsylvania. She then gave birth to a daughter and over the years has had three other children.

It was while Freeman was working in Chicago in 1985 as a 21-year-old executive secretary that she was introduced to cocaine. She developed a $300- to $400-a-day habit and started working as a prostitute.

Freeman said she saw drug dealers and pimps trying to "enslave" women by wrecking their self-esteem and by withholding or bestowing affection.

She said she later realized that through prostitution she was trying to make emotionally unavailable people respond to her or like her. "I was trying to find some way to fix that script," Freeman said, referring to the dysfunctional life patterns she kept repeating. "There was nothing glamorous about it."

What made her decide to change her life? "I was sick and tired of being broke, homeless, beaten, raped, ridiculed and mocked all day," said Freeman, who had already gone through about 15 tries at rehabilitation. "I was almost beaten to death several times. The last time I was beaten by a drug dealer that I spent hundreds of dollars a day with. I still have a bone that sticks up in my shoulder from when he stomped me into the floor.

"I was running down the street covered in blood with my clothes half torn off me, screaming at the top of my lungs, ducking in and out of traffic ducking bullets. After beating me, he went across the street to his house and got a gun. He was shooting at me as I ran down the street. I surrendered that day."

She said she got high a few more times and worked the street again in a different neighborhood, but she knew that kind of life was over for her. "I walked away from the dope house and prostitution for the last time on Aug. 7, 2000," she said. Freeman said she has been able to stay away from drugs and prostitution with the help of God and a 12-step program.

She has since earned an associate's degree in computer-application technology and a bachelor's degree in business. She is currently pursuing a master's degree in business administration.
90 percent want out

Melissa Farley, a research psychologist who has been studying prostitution for the past 14 years, has interviewed 900 prostitutes in 10 countries. She said about 90 percent say they want to get out.

University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, of "Freakonomics" fame, recently studied street-level prostitution in Chicago, and estimated there were about 4,400 prostitutes active there in an average week. They made an average of about $25 an hour, a far cry from the thousands of dollars charged by the Emperor's Club VIP, whose sexual services former New York Gov. Spitzer is said to have used.

Former prostitute Norma Hotaling, who walked the streets and worked for an escort service, said it felt glamorous at first. "I felt an incredible sense of power," she said. "'Here's a way I can make money. I can work any hours that I want to work. I can call my own shots. I don't have to take the dates I don't want. It's like, 'I have my own business. Isn't this amazing?'"

But those feelings didn't last long. She was addicted to heroin; she was homeless at times; she was beaten and raped. She began to be horrified that her livelihood depended on sex with strangers on a regular basis.

"It makes it so appealing to think that it's an easy life, and it's not," Hotaling said. "You don't find a whole lot of women speaking out about how glamorous it was."
Dupre's strugglesDupre -- the 22-year-old identified as "Kristen" in court documents accusing Spitzer of paying thousands for prostitutes' services -- doesn't seem to be "Pretty Woman" either. Her MySpace page portrays her as a New Jersey native who left a broken home to pursue a music career in New York.
"I have been alone," she wrote. "I have abused drugs. I have been broke and homeless. But, I survived, on my own."

Dupre has not commented about her life as a prostitute, except to tell The New York Times she does not want to be thought of as a monster.
Madeleine Dash, a sex worker and co-founder of the Sex Workers Action New York, said "Kristen" proves that not all prostitutes are forced into this line of work out of desperation.

But Farley says prostitution is a dead-end -- literally. Homicide, she says, is the most frequent cause of death for women in prostitution. Gazette staff writer Stephanie Esters contributed to this report.

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