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By Joseph Parker, Clinical Director
The Lola Greene Baldwin Foundation
 - Anyone can come to the Baldwin Foundation for care, with the single condition that they have actually been used in prostitution some time in their lives. We work with females, males and juveniles. We charge no fees.
- Clients need not be completely clean and sober so long as we have a functioning brain to communicate with. They may be at times engaged in "survival prostitution", because access to social services, especially housing, has been greatly reduced. If they stop prostitution altogether, they are completely destitute and homeless. One of our primary objectives is to help them get out of that situation.
- In our early contacts with clients we make careful inquiry about whether they are sick, injured, have gone without food for a long time, immediately need clothing or have a stalker or pimp threatening their survival. These must be managed before counseling can be effective.
- We look for the presence of brain damage, primarily the result of assaults, which impair their memory, attention, and ability to use and comprehend language. These handicaps, when not provided due accommodation, play a large role in repeated program failures, chiefly when the programs make heavy use of group treatment, lecture formats and extensive reading which may be beyond the client's ability to process or process fast enough.
- About 85% of people in prostitution have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We try to delineate their symptoms exactly and teach tactics to manage them. Some of this is teaching and support, but many of them will also need medication. This may be extremely hard to obtain for a destitute but not dangerous person.
- What we regard as central to the harm prostitution does is the socially well supported change of identity from a human being with rights and an expectation of respect, to that of a subhuman "whore" unworthy of such rights and respect. The sex industry preaches "Once a whore, always a whore", but this view is very widely shared by the so called normal population as well.
A focus of our counseling is to identify surviving shreds of any positive identity they may have had, and to help them build on these. If no signs of a previous positive identity can be found, we try to help build one with them by extensive discussion of their sense of values, history of making decisions and whatever interests they may have been able to develop.
- Prostituted people go through an extremely wide range of experiences, and their responses to these experiences can vary greatly. Because of such diversity, we find group treatment problematic, and chiefly do individual work. We manage our resources on "the straw that broke the camel's back" model. Whether or not we can do much to solve their presenting problem, we go searching through their lives seeking problems, even small ones, that we can help with. We hope to take enough of the "straws" off to allow them to survive.
- We are very aware that some of our clients are too damaged to recover or even survive, but we consider psychological hospice care to be a legitimate use of our energy.
Copyright 2005, Joe Parker
Permission is hereby granted to reproduce this paper in its entirety, in any form or quantity needed, for any purpose except for sale, on condition that this copyright information is included |
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