Last week activist Kathryn Griffin spoke out about the hard road that led to her commitment to helping others. Griffin’s experiences inspired her to found “We’ve Been There Done That” a program that supports former prostitutes and victims of sex trafficking as they transition “out of the life.” She also works in city politics in the office of councilman Peter Brown.
Her audience consisted of Houston area law enforcement and service providers attending a conference on Domestic Violence and Human Trafficking.
A polished and well-dressed woman with long hair pulled back in a sleek braid, Griffin deliberately chooses to pepper her presentations with shocking stories and phrases to keep her audiences’ attention and make it clear she knows the life of which she speaks. And her technique works—her audience remained riveted to her every word.
A sophisticated speaker, Griffin frankly discussed her own journey from call girl, to prostitute to “rockstitute” (a crack-addicted prostitute)—“I was high as a research monkey”– as well as the extensive abuse and physical injury she suffered during those years, including over 200 rapes, a broken arm, fractured hip, and the loss of her teeth. “The last trick I ever turned paid for these teeth,” she said, pointing to her pearly whites. “And that was somebody’s husband, y’all.”
With the threat of 25 years in prison for repeat prostitution and an additional 10 years for possession of a crack pipe, Griffin had the “good luck to be selected as a guinea pig” for the STAR (Success Through Addiction Recovery) Drug Court Program, an alternative program that required her to attend a 90 day rehab, followed by a two year transitional program, during which time she took daily drug tests. With the threat of long-term imprisonment hanging over her head, and the full support of the STAR program, Griffin said, “I got scared straight for real.”
If Griffin had not “had the blessing of being caught with the crack pipe,” she would not have been eligible for the STAR Drug Court Program, and would currently be serving her sentence. She’s quick to point out that if she had not had the opportunity to get clean, she would not now be able to be helping others. And helping others is something for which she has boundless energy and a natural talent.
Griffin has now been clean and sober for six years and her program, “We’ve Been There Done That,” seeks to help former prostitutes and victims of sex trafficking as they work through their trauma and begin living a life away from the sex trade. So far, Griffin has helped over a 1,000 women and her program has the “highest success rate of former prostitutes not going back to the life.”
When women first enter her program, she “shakes them up with frank language,” so that they understand she knows where they are coming from. “When I talk to people straight off the streets, I go back to the streets,” she explains. But by the time women make it through her program, she’s taught them etiquette, along with ways to speak and present themselves that allows them to navigate and fit into professional settings.
Griffin told her audience that, “Human trafficking is everybody else’s problem, until it happens to them.” According to Houston Rescue and Restore Coalition, a program working to end trafficking: “Sex trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act is under the age of 18 years.”
In the recent 81st Texas Legislative session, a bevy of bills to combat human trafficking were introduced and four passed into law, one of which requires the Attorney General to form a Task Force on Human Trafficking. Recent busts of large sex trafficking rings in the Houston area have brought media attention to the problem; non-profit agencies, law enforcement and prosecutors have been working together to deal with the problem, as well as with the large numbers of victims who enter the social service system after a bust.
Certainly not all women in the sex trade are trafficking victims, but, according to the Center for Problem Oriented Policing, “There is growing evidence that women who are trafficked into prostitution do not differ greatly from domestic prostitutes who have not been trafficked: neither group has chosen the profession voluntarily. Many report that they do not want to work as prostitutes, would leave the profession if they could, and that they were recruited into prostitution as girls or teenagers.”
And, because Federal law (18 U.S.C. Ch. 1591 (2008)) states that any person under 18 who is being prostituted is a victim of human trafficking, by definition, any woman who begins to be prostituted before she turns 18 is (or has been) a victim of sex trafficking. This further supports the firm argument that the focus of prosecution should be on prosecuting the pimps and traffickers, as well as the “johns” soliciting sex, instead of the prostitutes themselves.
The recent Houston-area training served to educate law enforcement about sex and labor trafficking, and to encourage further community collaboration to both aid prosecution and arrest, and help victims.
Houston Police Officer Robert Thomas, who frequently arrested Griffin when she was working as a prostitute, attended the training. Speaking of Officer Thomas, Griffin said, “Every time that man would arrest me, he would say, ‘I know you got something better in you than this.’ Every time he locked me up I could hear his voice echoing in my head. He talked to me, whether I thought I could hear him or not.”
Now Officer Robert Thomas regularly visits the 37-week “We’ve Been There Done That” program, sitting down and talking with the former prostitutes so that they can learn that “the cops, they aren’t the bad guy.”
Griffin went on to say: “My clients have learned that the police are not the enemy. Once the law has shown us some respect we think, ‘I can’t go back now. Now that the cops know I’m on a good path, I can’t let them down.’ That’s how they [former prostitutes] think until they learn to like themselves. I bring the Vice officers in and we sit down and we talk. And we got a bond now.”
When asked how she would describe her program, Griffin said, “Whatever happened to the women I work with—‘I slept with the dog, I slept with the preacher, I slept with my momma, I stole my teacher’s credit card’—whatever it is, I start out with them writing it down for themselves. I have to be very open. We talk the language… I chip away at all that hurt, pain and shame and all that stuff you don’t want God to know. Then you got some room for something else.
“I tell them, ‘Everybody in this room is the most unique special talented person on the face of this earth. Can’t nobody beat you at being you.’”
Griffin says it is her goal to make sure that women know, “There is hope after hoeing and dope.”
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing.
I just watched Kathryn on Steve Wilkos, she makes me want tot work for her so had to check her out. Thanks for the great report.