Chris

Christine literally never had a choice – she was born into prostitution. She was used in a familial prostitution ring during her childhood, teen years, and as a young adult. Her abuse included several systems of prostitution, including live sex shows, pornography, domestic trafficking, and brothels. Stripping was part of the training she endured as a girl to season her to a lifetime of abuse. Reprinted by permission.

I was born into a family-run prostitution ring, which amounted to being delivered as a baby into a life of sexual slavery. The sexual abuse I suffered began when I was a toddler and extended into my early twenties. The men who used me - my father, his father, my father’s uncles and various friends of theirs - were extremely well-organized and knew exactly how to sexually torture women and girls into submission. The men who prostituted me, known as pimps and handlers in everyday parlance, used brainwashing techniques along with sexual torture to create and maintain control over women and girls whom they then sold in systems of prostitution, especially pornography.

The unspeakable injustice I and others like me suffered in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, when pornography was more covert and men needed to have Mafia and other fraternal connections to access this “underground world”, can now be found in a matter of minutes on the Internet. When I pull up pornographic websites on my computer I find the first twenty-odd years of my life on display: splayed, trussed, raped, bruised, and chained. I see myself in the faces and poses of the women and girls for sale on my computer screen, I see myself when I was a sex slave, a girl child bred to be a prostitute, bred to make money for men.

Prostitution ring pimps and handlers season young girls for prostitution by teaching them to associate their bodies, and thus their self-worth with sexual objectification. This includes stripping clothes off the girls’ bodies, teaching the girls how to move their bodies in sexually suggestive ways, dancing, pouting and other characteristics associated with striptease. These men also teach girls to pose for pornography shots in typical pornographic poses, which often overlap with stripping postures.

My father and other men involved with the prostitution ring taught me to this at a young age. They weaned me from stripping in front of one man to a slightly larger audience of three or four and then to an audience of ten or so in a bar. I stripped in a tavern on the bar top in front of a group of men who cheered and clapped and laughed and drank their beers. When I passed this “test” the pimps felt I was prepared to strip in front of a camera or to a larger audience of men, which turned out to be live sex shows with other women and girls.

When they taught me to strip I felt humiliated and confused and afraid. I thought I did something wrong and felt like I was bad inside.  I was constantly afraid that I would accidentally expose “the secret” of the prostitution ring and that my mother or my animals or I would be hurt or killed. And I thought that people could see how bad I was, that I was a whore, which is what the men laughing and training me beforehand called me: little whore.

As my childhood progressed and the men continued to rape and sell me, I created personas that carried out and endured certain aspects of the abuse. My father and other men dressed me up in wigs, costumes, and gave me different names. For instance, I was Candy when I was used in pornography and Chrissy when they made me strip in a show. Prostitution ring pimps and handlers encourage dissociation by giving girls and women stage names, costumes, wigs and heavy makeup. Changing the names and appearances of prostituted women and girls is a widespread pimp tactic, which also helps to protect the pimps from prosecution if the pornography were to be found. The creation of multiple identities is also a response to objectification and sexual violence by the girls and women who take on different names and costumes in order to function as a different person when up on stage. 

In an attempt to get me to participate in the making of pornography the men involved in the prostitution ring, and especially my father, told me I was a star and an actress like the girls and women in the movies. My father compared me to girl actresses in Hollywood. For instance, he would compare my physical features to Brooke Shields. His comments and constant objectification of my body frightened me. My father clearly saw himself as the owner of me, his whore daughter, and his pimp mentality and obsession with my weight and appearance negatively affected me even when he was not using me in prostitution. My father was obsessed with me, with making me into a product that he could sell to other men. Because my father raped me in the house, there was a thin line between incest, prostitution, pornography, and being made to strip and pose for his entertainment in the home and other men’s entertainment outside of the house. As a girl I so closely related doing something “bad” with being watched or filmed that I felt as if I were on camera nearly all the time.

The prostitution ring men told me I was better than the other women and girls used in the ring. When I did things the right way I was praised, and when I cried and refused to comply I was punished. They seasoned me to the rapes by presenting the sexual abuse as if it were consensual, when in fact I lived in a nearly constant state of terror and shame. They told me what a good “sexer” I was when I was little and what a good fucker I was when I became a pre-adolescent. Older girls and women under their control showed me how to arch my back and “perform” sexually while being assaulted and made into pornography.  I was a sexual commodity, groomed, seasoned and taught how to be raped and how to be a sexy plaything for men. This was my childhood. It was my life, and because I cannot escape the memories of it now, it is still my life.