Charity Run by Former Prostitutes Steers Girls Away From the Streets

It was Cynthia’s boyfriend who talked her into prostitution when she was 16. It was a group of women who had been there themselves who gave her back her life.

“I was going back and forth, in and out of the streets,” says Cynthia, who was a prostitute in San Francisco and nearby cities for six months. At first, she did it simply to win approval from her boyfriend, who turned out to be a pimp. But after Cynthia’s parents made her leave their middle-class, suburban home until her behavior changed, prostitution became a means of making a living, and of supporting her escalating drug and alcohol habits.

“Whenever I was broke, it was always a good way to get money,” she says.

But not for long. She found that she needed emotional support and started rethinking her life on the streets. Cynthia decided to check out a charity that her mother had heard about from a church friend, whose daughter had also become a prostitute. Former sex workers, Cynthia was pleased to learn, ran it.

The group, the SAGE Project, in San Francisco, provides more than 300 women and girls a week with counseling, vocational training, job placement, and even acupuncture and massages. In collaboration with the San Francisco district attorney’s office and the police, the charity also teaches “johns” — the men who hire prostitutes — about the negative consequences of prostitution.

In its program for girls, coordinated with the district attorney’s office to accommodate girls on probation and in jail, counselors at SAGE — which stands for standing against global exploitation — take their clients by the hands and guide them in a new direction. They go out to the girls’ homes and neighborhoods to assess whether they are at risk of being hurt, and to their schools to design plans with teachers and administrators to keep the girls safe and on track to graduate. They even check out whether the girls’ bus routes should be changed, because it is often at bus stops where young girls who have been prostitutes are assaulted by other kids or solicited for sex.

Because of SAGE’s work, many of the girls whom the charity works with end up qualifying for government-paid help through the district attorney’s office, including mental-health services.

Weekly Sessions

Cynthia was one of the older clients in SAGE’s girls’ program when she joined about a year ago at age 17. She says she quickly took to staff members and participated in the weekly group-counseling sessions, as well as what her mother describes as the “regular teenage activities that most of them had missed,” such as taking in a movie.

Says Cynthia: “It was good to be around girls my age that had been through similar things, and at the same time counselors who had been through it and lived through it.”

Started at Age 5

Norma J. Hotaling, the group’s founder and executive director, has definitely been through it. At age 5, in New York, she learned to get candy money in the playground from men who would pay her to look at pornography with them. That led to other, more physical acts for the next two years. As an adult, she was a prostitute in and around San Francisco for eight years, and nursed a heroin habit for 21.

Now age 50, and off the streets for 13 years, Ms. Hotaling (pronounced hoh-taal-ing) runs one of the most highly touted direct-services groups for people who want to escape prostitution. She also serves on the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, a new effort by 25 organizations to raise awareness about children in the sex trade and improve services for them.

The organization’s $1-million annual operating budget — an unusually large pot of money for groups that work in this field — is a testament to Ms. Hotaling’s perseverance, as is her recently announced $2.5-million capital campaign to buy and renovate the building that now houses SAGE.

Her efforts are getting more and more attention. In April, the entertainer Oprah Winfrey honored Ms. Hotaling with her “Use Your Life Award,” a $100,000 prize for those who use their lives to improve the lives of others.

And last year, the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, in New York, presented its annual award for nonprofit innovation to SAGE. The award recognized the group’s Peer Educator Training Program, which teaches former prostitutes the skills they need to help other women and girls leave prostitution.

“The customers who are walking in the door today are going to be the people who work behind the desks tomorrow,” says Joe E. Kruft, program director at the Drucker Foundation.

Many other groups rely on professional social workers, but to SAGE’s credit, he says, the group has found a way to provide the training former prostitutes need to be effective counselors themselves.

Of the group’s 18 employees, all but three have worked as prostitutes or strippers. Counselors, program coordinators, the administrative director, and the fiscal manager, for example, all share that experience, along with the executive director.

“We should be running our own programs,” Ms. Hotaling says of former commercial-sex workers. “It really does work well to have someone who has been through exactly what the girls have gone through, because then they have a model. They can see someone and they can watch them closely and say, ‘Oh, they have a healthy relationship’; ‘Oh, they have a job’; ‘Oh, they can buy clothes and they don’t have to prostitute.’”

Licensed clinical social workers, psychologists, health-care providers, and other professionals are also important parts of the SAGE formula, but the reliance on “peers” is central to the group’s philosophy. “We are not the be-all and end-all, but we are a very, very, very important part of their wraparound services,” says Ms. Hotaling.

Peer Approach Questioned

Not all charity leaders who work with former prostitutes are champions of peer education. Lois Lee, founder and president of Children of the Night, a Van Nuys, Calif., charity that houses up to 24 child prostitutes at a time, says she tried that approach and it did not work. Staff members, she says, got dragged back into the life they had tried so hard to escape, while her clients found themselves with counselors who used the manipulative skills they had acquired on the streets.

But a number of nonprofit leaders agree with Ms. Hotaling’s approach, saying that while it takes a great deal of work to train former prostitutes to help others achieve their goals, it is well worth the effort.

People involved in commercial sex usually feel isolated from the rest of society and are wary of those offering help, says Kelly A. Hill, a former prostitute who founded a Honolulu charity called Sisters Offering Support.

With a nonprofit organization offering peer counseling, she says, trust is more obtainable. “They know that we’ve been there, and we’re not talking about something that we read in a book,” Ms. Hill says.

Cynthia, who went through SAGE’s girls’ program, says she still finds tremendous solace in women who have made new lives for themselves, and she plans to start attending weekly support groups at SAGE to continue to get their help.

But, as she gets ready to turn 18 next week, Cynthia says she is no longer the person who let her boyfriend coerce her into prostitution. She is now able to focus on her high-school studies, hold down a part-time job, and make plans to enroll in college in the fall.

“I’m a lot stronger now,” she says. “I have a lot more options.”