Program Gives Prostitutes Skills for Everyday Life

VAN NUYS —  For Irene, what’s lightly called the world’s oldest profession is a deadly serious trap.

“People don’t understand how really difficult it is” to escape, said the former prostitute.

Advocates agree. Among the disadvantaged, street prostitutes are in a class of their own. They often cannot tell time, read a calendar or find a number in the telephone book. For such women, leaving the streets is not just a matter of willpower. There are few reform efforts beyond jail.

“I didn’t know anything” after leaving prostitution, said Irene. “I didn’t know how not to dress like a prostitute. I didn’t know how not to walk and talk like a prostitute.”

The 32-year-old mother says she would still be working the streets if not for the Mary Magdalene Project, one of a handful of groups in the country that teach prostitutes the basics of everyday living. The nonprofit group bought a 12-unit apartment building earlier this year that is now home to Irene and eight other women who are making the slow journey into the mainstream.

The Van Nuys apartment is only the second such long-term facility in the U.S. Both opened within the past two years. The Magdalene Transitional Living Center is being considered as a model for future reform efforts in Los Angeles County.

Candy D’Amato, a member of a Los Angeles County commission on women, says the center is at the forefront of badly needed changes to the conventional view that selling sex is a nuisance and petty crime rather than an intractable social problem.

Prostitution “is something that is always laughed at . . . like, ‘Haha, she’s just oversexed,’ ” said D’Amato, co-chair of the prostitution issues committee of the county commission.

On the streets, an age-old cat-and-mouse game persists. Street prostitutes get arrested, get released, then get arrested again.

“It is so sad after a while,” said Officer Esther Kunz of the Los Angeles Police Department. “You pull up to them and it’s like, ‘How are you doing? How are your kids? Don’t be doing anything stupid today.’

“You arrest them over and over again. You ask, ‘What can I do for them?’ And there’s nothing. No referral. Nothing. . . . It is so hopeless. You start thinking, ‘I don’t know why I do this.’ ”

D’Amato agrees that change is needed. Her committee is preparing a report to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors calling for alternatives to jailing prostitutes, based partly on Magdalene’s example.

“It may be the world’s oldest profession, but someone has to say, ‘I think we can do something,’ ” she said.

The Mary Magdalene Project takes on the complex job of teaching prostitutes what they missed growing up on society’s fringes.

For the women at the home and their 12 children, living at the apartment complex is a big step toward self-sufficiency. Learning to lead so-called normal lives begins with such basics as table manners, how to boil noodles, how to clean a bathroom, how to dress appropriately and how to keep from spending a week’s pay in an hour of impulse shopping.

“I have to tell them, ‘Noon is when we eat lunch,’ ” said the Rev. Ann Hayman, program director of the Mary Magdalene Project.

The transformation needed to reform prostitutes is so dramatic, one advocate calls it “personality restructuring.”

Prostitutes learn “a street ethic and a street mentality. It helps out there, but it doesn’t help in social situations,” said Gayle McCoy, executive director of the Genesis House in Chicago, which operates the nation’s only other permanent housing for former prostitutes.

Similar to the Mary Magdalene Project, the Chicago program instructs women in makeup, relationships, and even hires masseuses to teach them that not all touching is sexual.

“It’s not like they got something and they lost it. They never got a lot of this,” said Norma Hotaling, a San Francisco advocate who operates a court-referral program there.

The women who live at the Magdalene-owned apartment are among 150 who have completed a strictly supervised, two-year residential program operated by the agency out of a single-family home in Reseda. That program, which serves six women at a time, has been operating for more than 10 years.

At the new Van Nuys apartment, the women come and go as they please. Although prostitutes are often stereotyped, the women living there fit no pattern. They are white, African American and Latina. Some are heavy. Some are thin. They are pretty and plain, from poor families and the middle class.

Their daily lives often include someone “in crisis” as well as arguments that give way to long evenings chatting on the patio.

Typical of residents here, Irene was recruited for the program from jail. A heavy drug user at 12, she was a Hollywood streetwalker and drug addict with 23 arrests by her early 20s.

She was raped, kidnapped and shot at while working.

Today, Irene’s life is a testament to both the success and limitations of the Magdalene program.

She is raising a 13-year-old daughter who, she says with amazement, “does these little-girl things. She talks on the telephone, rides her bike to the store.” By that age, said Irene, she had been gang-raped.

Irene now earns her living as a maintenance worker and was recently promoted to supervisor. Like her neighbors, she measures progress in small but significant increments: caring for a puppy, buying a truck, decorating her apartment. Residents pay rent of $336 a month.

Recently, she threw a formal dinner party. She planned for weeks, pored over etiquette guides, set out linen napkins, fretted over the Cornish game hens.

Just a few years back, “I could pretty much just boil water,” said Irene. “I didn’t know how to set a table.”

But Irene’s life also illustrates there is no miracle cure, said program director Hayman.

Although it has been more than eight years since she turned her last trick, prostitution remains “an obsessive thing,” Irene said. She avoids certain streets. She keeps her past a secret from all but her most intimate friends.

The slow income of hourly wages is a stark contrast to the fast money of prostitution. “Just my car payment alone is like, ‘Man, I could have had this much [money] a few times over in less than two days,” she said.

With no road map to follow, the Mary Magdalene program developed through trial and error, said Jerri Rodewald, the executive director.

Started in 1980 by a Presbyterian minister in Hollywood, it began with the primary care home in Reseda.

At first, organizers focused on training former prostitutes for jobs and returning them to their families, “smoothing off the rough edges and sending them home,” said Hayman. But they quickly found most of the women were struggling with severe emotional problems that required therapy and patience.

At an age when most adolescents were learning crucial social skills, these women were learning to hide switchblades in their clothes. While other teenagers worked fast-food jobs and learned how to drive, the former prostitutes were earning and spending hundreds of dollars a week and taking taxis. While other teenagers learned about dating, these women were learning to keep a pant leg on during sex, in case they had to make a run for it.

So Magdalene organizers began to shift their efforts to rebuilding identities. They planned daily routines for the women, hour by hour. They found six months was not enough time for the changes to take root, so they extended the women’s stays again and again.

Over the years, women dropped out and returned to drugs and prostitution. But some made amazing changes.

Early on it became clear that most of the women had suffered severe childhood abuse, often sexual.

“For them it’s more liberating to be involved in prostitution than to be involved in incest,” said Hayman.

Abused teen runaways who turn to prostitution are common in Los Angeles, said Lois Lee, executive director of Children of the Night, an agency that works chiefly with young prostitutes.

“To other kids, [prostitution] would never occur to them,” Lee said. “They would sooner knock over an old lady and get her purse. But the sexually abused ones, it would never occur to them to knock over an old lady.”

More than charity is at stake in the effort to reform prostitutes. A study of nearly 2,000 New York streetwalkers by Adele Weiner, associate dean of the Wurzweiler School of Social Work at Yeshiva University, found that 35% were HIV-positive. The same study found that street prostitutes, on average, have two or more children.

Experts say that despite the obviously disadvantaged status of prostitutes, there remains a deep national ambivalence about providing help for them.

Jill Simons of the Council for Prostitution Alternatives in Portland, Ore., said her program addresses this predicament by calling clients battered women so people will see them as deserving.

“Domestic violence is a language people get. The language for [prostitution] is just not here,” she said.

Nonetheless, there are small signs of change.

Some cities are starting to establish agencies that offer counseling and referrals to prostitutes, though not room and board. And AIDS vans, which offer testing and condoms, are also increasing in number. But mostly, prostitution remains a petty crime rather than a social concern.

Neighborhood organizations in Hollywood and Van Nuys successfully lobbied for legislation allowing courts to bar convicted prostitutes from particularly troublesome streets. One problem, said Hayman, is some prostitutes don’t know how to read the maps they are given by the courts, and so get confused about which places they are supposed to avoid.

Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson wants to publicize the names of prostitution customers arrested by police by broadcasting them over cable TV.

Officials of the Mary Magdalene Project, which is supported by about $400,000 a year in private donations, avoid disputes over the policing of prostitution. They say their job is simply to alleviate misery.

That is a tall order, said one former Magdalene resident, a red-haired, 24-year-old woman who disappeared a few weeks after being interviewed, presumably back to a life of drugs and run-down motel rooms.

“Most of the prostitutes I’ve ever known are miserable,” she said in the interview. “Miserable and sad and scared.”