In the movie “Pretty Woman,” a good looking guy (Richard Gere) falls in love with a sexy, beautiful prostitute (Julia Roberts). It’s a sweet story with a happy ending.
It also has nothing to do with real life on the streets, said Gayle McCoy, executive director of Genesis House, a residential recovery program for prostitutes on Chicago’s North Side.
“Prostitution is not a victimless crime,” McCoy said. “Women are the victims. You have to understand: Prostitution is extremely ugly and nasty. Women are defecated on, urinated on, beaten, raped, threatened, killed.”
To emphasize her point, McCoy, who has run Genesis House since 1996, then rattles off some of the more startling statistics about prostitution and its effect on women. But she is no utopian dreamer.
“I don’t think we can eliminate prostitution, but we can have less and less of it,” she said. “Let’s help as many women as we can get out of it.”
Founded 20 years ago, Genesis House, the nation’s largest prostitute rehabilitation program, is dedicated to that goal. It now boasts four sites, a van, 40 employes and a $1.8 million annual budget. In 2001 the organization made 20,000 contacts with sex workers. It has served as a model for similar programs within the United States and around the world, from Florida to Thailand.
Most of the women who enter Genesis House are referred by one of the 29 Chicago-area judges who work with the agency. Others are contacted by outreach workers aboard the program’s mobile vans, which roam Chicago’s streets at night. But not all are streetwalkers. Many work out of the city’s more expensive bars and hotels and the city’s convention halls, McCoy said.
“The women who come to us are usually starting to hit bottom,” she said.
According to Genesis House, 60 percent are struggling with both substance abuse and psychiatric disorders. Almost all have experienced incest or were sexually abused as children, or have seen a family member assaulted or killed. Almost all have had children, though many no longer have custody of them.
Women typically stay at Genesis House for a year to 14 months. About 80 percent who leave the program don’t return to prostitution, McCoy said.
“A lot of our women go on to have healthy relationships and families and kids,” she said. “They have homes in the suburbs.”
But the journey away from Genesis House into a life that is law-abiding and free of drugs and alcohol is not an easy one, according to McCoy’s executive assistant, Cathie Hyland, a former resident of Genesis House. Hyland had supported herself as a prostitute and was serving a prison sentence in Texas on felony drug charges when her sister heard about Genesis House. After Hyland completed her prison term, her sister flew with her to Chicago and escorted her directly to Genesis House in June 1999.
“I was a convicted felon. I had lost custody of my son. I had lost my credit, my employability, my credibility, I had no car, no home and no friends,” Hyland recalled. “I could no longer support my lifestyle and I was ready to try to change.”
Hyland successfully completed a behavior modification program for substance abusers. She slowly began reconstructing her work resume. Her first job following drug rehab paid $8 an hour.
“I made 35 contacts–phone calls, faxed resumes, interviews–before I got that job,” she said. “I was desperate to work. I was ready to go out and flip burgers.”
Key to her successful rehabilitation, she said, was getting away from her old friends in Texas.
“I came here knowing no one. If I had to buy drugs now, I wouldn’t know where to find them. All my friends are in recovery,” Hyland said.
Hyland, now 46, works at Genesis House and attends classes at DePaul University, where she maintains a 3.75 grade-point average. Hyland says she hopes to earn a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and eventually find a job writing grant applications.
She rents a condo in Wicker Park, where she supplements her income by dog-sitting, baby-sitting and other part-time jobs. She was thrilled when a friend gave her a PlayStation for Christmas.
“It says a lot that someone trusts me enough to give me an expensive gift that they know I’m not going to go out and pawn,” she said.
When her son, now 14 and enrolled in a private school in Texas, arrives for a visit someday, he will find her sober, she vowed.
Most prostitutes are struggling with alcohol or drug addiction, Hyland said.
“If you’re addicted to something and you can’t live without it, you’ll do whatever you have to to get it,” she said. “If we could address drug addiction early on, before women turn to prostitution to support their drug habits, we wouldn’t need places like Genesis House.”
Hyland added that many women who become prostitutes come from “a family belief system that hinders their progress in life. We have to undo that. A lot has to do with self-esteem; our families either make us or break us.”
McCoy concurred. “How many little girls will say, `I want to grow up to be a prostitute’? For each of the women here, something went wrong, horribly wrong, during childhood.”
She also pointed to the large percentage of women–virtually 100 percent who come to Genesis House–who say they don’t want their daughters to work as prostitutes. Also, McCoy said, 87 percent of the women who enter Genesis House say they would get out of prostitution if they could find a program that would help them.
Genesis House boasts a higher success rate than prisons, McCoy pointed out, and it is also cheaper. McCoy says it costs $32,000 a year to incarcerate a woman in Illinois; if she has children, foster care usually adds another $25,000. Meanwhile, Genesis House can house and treat a recovering prostitute for $16,000 to $18,000 a year.
“When they first come here, we look at all their needs,” she said. “We talk about diet, therapy, free health care, HIV education, dental care.”
To people who dismiss prostitution as “the world’s oldest profession,” McCoy said, “It’s not a profession. It’s not work. It’s exploitation.”
McCoy said she hopes money from Chicago’s newly doubled fines against prostitutes, brothels and their customers, can be used to expand Genesis House. Under an ordinance approved by the city last summer, solicitation is now punishable by a fine of up to $3,000 after a second offense. Prostitutes themselves can face fines up to $1,500.
Genesis House also enjoys support at the county and state level.
Mike Quigley, a member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, said Genesis House has helped change the public perception of prostitution.
“When a woman goes through her first arrest on a charge of prostitution, her life starts swirling downward. We need to stop that, and Genesis House is part of that,” Quigley said.
State Rep. Sara Feigenholtz (D-Chicago) said she’s proud to have Genesis House in her district.
“The old throw-`em-in-jail concept is so clearly not the answer,” said Feigenholtz, who chairs the Illinois House Human Services Committee. “Genesis House essentially carries these women around on pillows until they can be self-sufficient.”
A few facts about prostitution:
– Most prostitutes start sex work between the ages of 14 to 18.
-The death rate for prostitutes is 40 percent higher than for other women.
– A child runaway will be approached for prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home.
– An estimated 50,000 women prostitutes work the streets of Chicago.
– Prostitution is a $14 billion business in the United States.
Source: Genesis House
