In The News

Slippery slope of bad choices leads to a life of prostitution

For a nice girl, athlete and good student from the South like Pam, the descent into prostitution was a slippery slope of one bad choice after another. Talking about what her life was like 20 years ago, she says, “It all seems like a book I read or a movie I’ve seen.” Indeed, her life, then, of constant beatings, exposure to street thugs who kidnapped her for purposes of gang rape and robbery, and intimidation by her pimp who took every cent of her daily $1,200 earnings, seems like some-one else’s nightmare.

And it’s worlds away from who Pam is now: a slim, polished, 40-year-old with a family, loving husband, mas-ter’s degree and job she absolutely loves.

What happened to Pam could happen to your daughter, granddaughter, neighbor, or your child’s best friend.

Pam says her dad was a good provider but an alcoholic and emotionally unavailable. He also was strict, cold, fault-finding and always criticizing her weight.

That left an emotional void that a deviant middle school coach was only too eager to fill when Pam was 13.

He lavished attention on her and Pam was overjoyed. When she turned 14 the relationship became sexual, but the confused and lonely adolescent saw it as love. She says she and a classmate who was two years older began spend-ing almost all their weekends with “coach.” One girl, Pam says, would look out the window to make sure the man’s wife wasn’t pulling into the driveway while the other had sex with him. Then they would switch places. He played the girls against one another, alternately telling one then the other that she was the one he loved best.

Pam was convinced the man was going to divorce his wife and marry her. “That was my life,” she says, “trapped in this adult life as a child.” This went on for a year and a half. Then one day Pam got the news that “coach” was leaving: he’d been fired.

Pam was devastated and went into a deep depression. She began having sex with countless partners and drinking. “It was like I was in a trance,” she says. “I had no moral compass.”

Still, she managed to pull down good grades throughout high school, was class valedictorian and earned a college scholarship.

But in college Pam’s addictions again spiraled out of control, with alco-hol and random sex. “I blew off classes and dropped out after the first semester,” she says.

Then an old high school boyfriend came calling. They went out and soon after he proposed. Convinced she would never find anyone else who would have her, Pam accepted. The two moved out to California, but her husband turned out to be a compulsive gambler and the couple divorced after a few months.

That left Pam, then 21, on her own in Southern California, far from family and friends. In the meantime, she had discovered a diet miracle: cocaine. “It made me lose weight, fast. I thought if I was thin enough then someone would want me. I had discovered my dad’s porn magazines when I was 12 and I thought I had to look like those girls [to be loved].”

To someone who was a chubby child and adolescent and whose father was unrelenting in his criticism of her appearance, anything that helped her lose weight that fast was to Pam a godsend.

Now divorced, slimmed down but needing drug money, Pam went look-ing for a well-paying job. A girlfriend convinced her she could earn good money as a stripper, and while she found it true that the money was good, she says “I was disgusted with myself.”

Through co-workers Pam was introduced to “crank,” sonamed because it was a money-maker for motorcycle gangs who smuggled the addictive me-thamphetamine in the crankcases of their motorcycles. “One night doing crank and I was hooked,” she says.

Then a self-described “business-man” introduced himself to Pam at the strip club where she worked, telling her he had a great business opportunity for her. At first she didn’t respond.

But he sent her a dozen roses, told her she could make scads of money and told her he would protect her and keep her “safe.”

First, though, she had to turn over her car to him and store all her belong-ings and agree to live with him in a hotel. “It was guised as him being protective of me,” she says. It was what she had dreamed of: wealth and being safe from the “coaches” of the world.

It was great for one day as the man lavished attention and gifts on her, opened doors for her and treated her like a queen. “Then all hell broke loose” the next day, she says, when her “training” began.

There were all sorts of rules and regulations she had to follow with the primary ones being no talking to other pimps and no drug use by the prostitutes. They could make more money and turn more tricks when not under the influence.

Pam says her pimp took every cent she and the other girls made to feed his own habit. Paranoid and high as a kite on crack he beat her to a pulp soon after she began hooking because he saw her talking to some other prostitutes in a liquor store.

Pam says a day didn’t go by without finding she had broken some rule or other and being beaten for it. And in addition to the violence, “the things he made me do with him were terrible and unbelievable.”

But there was no time to heal from the beatings; the girls were expected to work, regardless. The pimp intimidated Pam by telling her he would be watch-ing her all the time. In fact, he said he would hunt her down and kill her whe-rever she was if she ever tried to escape.

But after she was abducted by three men who raped her and stole her “john” earnings, Pam knew she had to get away. “My pain was greater than the fear of leaving,” she says.

Enter an unlikely rescuer: a security guard posing as a cop, who made Pam confess her pimp’s name in exchange for a safe place to live — with him.

At first, Pam was convinced the man was a police detective intent on routing out pimps. “He [the self-described cop] had actually stalked me, but he did help me get out” of the life-style, she says. “It seemed like a no brainer.”

After finding out he was only a se-curity guard, however, Pam called her mom for money to get home, called the police and reported her car stolen, and got it back when the cops arrested her former pimp.

Back home, Pam says she immediately started medicating herself, again, this time with marijuana, crystal meth, alcohol and later after a hysterectomy at age 23, pain medication. “If one [pill] was good 10 were better,” she says.

She also turned her back on men and began pursuing a lesbian lifestyle but became trapped in a gay relation-ship and was contemplating suicide.

Then she started reading the book “Purpose Driven Life,” by pastor and author Rick Warren.

Although a professing Christian in her childhood, “I had renounced Chris-tianity and hated God and Christians,” says Pam. But she had a job house sit-ting and one day had an impulse to go get a Bible that was sitting on a table.

She opened it and saw the scripture (1 Cor. 6:18) that says “flee sexual im-morality.” Pam says she knew God was calling her back to Him and was urging her to put her old lifestyles behind her.

She moved back in with her mom and began going to church and to Cele-brate Recovery, a 12-step, Christ-centered program for abusers of sex, drugs, alcohol, food, pornography and for anyone with “hurts and hang-ups.”

While there she met the man she would end up marrying. “He heard me give my testimony [about drugs and prostitution],” she says, adding that afterwards he came up to her and with tears in his eyes, “made amends” to her for all the prostitutes and strippers he had abused in his former lifestyle.

They both went on a mission trip to Asia, where Pam, with the aid of an interpreter, was able to give her testimony to a woman trapped in prostitution. “God took something shameful and used it across the world,” she says. 

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of articles about truck stop prostitution in hopes not to glorify the seediness or to cast blame, but hopefully to educate those who think it’s a victimless crime. In our research into this age-old problem we found it’s anything but vic-timless and rooted firmly in the criminal underworld. Dorothy Cox of The Trucker staff may be reached to comment at [email protected].