Lady who was a prostitute for 25 years shares her story!

Brenda Myers-Powell told BBC her three-decade harrowing experience in the world of prostitution. She said what led her to become one as a child in the 1970s, how she got out, and how she is making sure no one else gets in.

Born in 1962 on the West Side of Chicago, Brenda lost her mother, who was 16 at the time, when she was six months old. She never really knew the cause of death because her grandmother, ‘who drank more than most’, said she died of natural causes –something Brenda finds hard to believe.

“It was my grandmother who took care of me,” she said. According to Brenda, she did everything a sweet grandmother would do, but the problem was her drinking. When she brought her drinking partners home and passed out, the men would molest Brenda.

“It started when I was four or five years old and it became a regular occurrence”, she recounted. Although she believes her grandmother was unaware.
Because her grandmother wasn’t always at home because of work, she spent a significant part of the day at home, and the molesters too advantage of this.
The transition came one day, when she asked her grandmother about the women would stand on the street looking glamorous outside their house.



“Those women take their panties off and men give them money,” her grandmother had said, and since men were already doing that to her, it didn’t seem like a very bad idea.
Because of the psychological effects of molestation, it became hard for her to say ‘no’ and according to her, little boys could ‘basically have their way’ if they treated her nicely.

And so at 14, she had two baby girls from boys in the community. That was when her troubles began as grandmother began demanding money for the kids feeding.

One Good Friday evening, in front of the Mark Twain Hotel, wearing a $3.99 dress, cheap plastic shoes, and some orange lipstick to make her look older, she began the 25-year journey.
She cried through it all, but she had to do it.

“They knew I was young and it was almost as if they were excited about it,” she said about the five men who had her that night. She returned home with $400 and gave most of it to her grandmother who didn’t seem to care where it came from. It happened again the next weekend but the third weekend was not in any way rosy.
Some guys approached with a gun and kidnapped her in the trunk of car because according to her, she was ‘unrepresented on the street’. The rest of the night began with them taking turns to rape her on a cornfield and then taking her to a hotel room and locking her in a closet.

Leaving her in the closet, they starved her and agreed to only let her out if she worked for them. It was a spirit breaking tactic.
For the next six months, she worked for them, unable to go home, pimped to several men, and when she tried to escape, she paid the price. It came with loads of physical abuse, but that was the easy part, the mental abuse was the real thing.
“The things they would say that would just stick and which you could never get from under,” Brenda said.
Pimps according to her, are very good at torture and manipulation. They’d promise to treat her better if she behaved but then the good part they promise never really came.

There is nothing glamorous or elegant about prostitution, she explained.
“A prostitute might sleep with five strangers a day. Across a year, that's more than 1,800 men she's having sexual intercourse or oral sex with. These are not relationships, no-one's bringing me any flowers here, trust me on that. They're using my body like a toilet.”
“I've been shot five times, stabbed 13 times. I don't know why those men attacked me, all I know is that society made it comfortable for them to do so,” she said about violent customers who brought their anger and mental illnesses to prostitutes, knowing fully well they couldn’t go to the police.
 It was about 14 or 15 years before she did drugs.
“After you've turned as many tricks as you can, after you've been strangled, after someone's put a knife to