Prostitution is a violent, disruptive business. Which is precisely why it needs to be legalized.

Working for the man

by Sarah McNaught

Patty stares blankly down the road as the red Mitsubishi GT3000 speeds away. Her wide green eyes and shoulder-length, curly brown hair give her an almost angelic appearance.

She's just worked a nine-hour shift during which she had sex with some 15 men, stole two car radios, and picked the pockets of four johns. What does she have to show for it? Twenty dollars, a bloody lip, and long red finger marks on her arms. The fat lip and bruises come courtesy of the driver of the sports car, a man named Harrad, who is her pimp.

"He thinks I'm not doing enough," she explains, shakily pulling out a small compact. "How am I supposed to attract anyone like this?"

Patty has been working for Harrad for six years. She says she ran away from an abusive father and alcoholic mother in Greensboro, North Carolina, when she was 17 years old. She came to Boston to find a life; instead, she found a man who offered her the world for "a few favors."

Now she is hooked on cocaine, and she justifies his brutality. "He's gotten me out of jail and given me clothes to wear. I owe him," she says.

Certainly drugs help pimps maintain their hold. According to Thomas Clark, a research associate at the Boston-based Health and Addictions Research, Inc., prostitution and drugs are virtually inseparable. Indeed, according to the San Francisco-based Delancey Street Foundation, more than 85 percent of the nation's prostitutes are addicted to crack, heroin, prescription drugs, or alcohol.

Pimps use drugs, money, or physical abuse -- or all three -- to bring young women under their control. They manipulate them with threats or promises in order to get the prostitutes to steal, sell drugs, and have sex for money. They abuse the women and then live off their earnings.

And pimps owe their existence to the law: if prostitution were not a criminal activity, they would wither away, but with a black market, they thrive.

"They have a quota," says Peter, a burly six-foot-seven-inch man with black wavy hair and an array of gold jewelry on his neck and fingers. "If [the prostitutes] don't meet that quota, they better make up for it by bringing me merchandise."

Of the more than 30 prostitutes interviewed by the Phoenix, almost every one of them said that she has been physically and verbally abused by her pimp. More than half the women said that their pimps got them hooked on drugs. And all of them said that their pimps order them to commit other crimes.

"We have the worst of all worlds right now," says Katharine Silbaugh, an associate professor of law at Boston University. "The current system victimizes prostitutes. For example, there are numerous rapes and beatings of prostitutes that are never prosecuted. Legalizing [prostitution] would mean enforcing and prosecuting crimes against victims. The criminals are the johns and the pimps -- not the prostitutes."

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Sarah McNaught can be reached at smcnaught[a]phx.com.